Avatar: The Last Airbender

Is that established somewhere? The comics? Books?

eta: added quote for page topper.

Edited by dcutter2 on Aug 2nd 2022 at 11:40:30 AM

The comic “Relics”.

In that comic, Zhao pulls the same scheme in a bid to capture Aang. He even explains to Aang that this is how Sozin finished off the Air Nomads.

Zhao: The same tactic was used many years ago by Fire Lord Sozin. The few airbenders that escaped his first assault were too hard to hunt down. Instead, he laid traps for them. Places like these caves were made to look like they were inhabited by other airbender refugees. Sozin fooled them using their own everyday objects as bait, luring them far enough for our soldiers to close in. This old stratagem still works well enough to catch one last airbender. Your curiosity and lack of knowledge of our military history proved your downfall.

Aang escapes and reunites with his companions, but he's noticeably unhappy to have his hopes crushed.

Katara: This place reminds you of home, right? All these mountains...airbenders would have loved to stay here. They would have been attracted to the place.

Aang: Yeah. A few of them probably were.

This comic acknowledges that the initial attacks couldn't have wiped out all of the Air Nomads. It also acknowledges that the survivors would have been very hard to hunt down.

So the Fire Nation laid traps instead.

Edited by M84 on Aug 2nd 2022 at 7:58:51 PM

In terms of downsides of Air Nomad Culture, their enforced social structure is probably the biggest one we see. The implication that children can be shifted around to different guardians against their will is a little scary. We don't technically know if it was a common practice, but I think it's likely their philosophy would prioritize spiritual well-being over established family bonds.

Actually, while they were raised communally, they still maintained close relationships with their blood relatives.

Another point in favor of Air Nomad life was that they were cool with same-sex relationships. I think they might have been the only nation that was cool with them.

Edited by M84 on Aug 2nd 2022 at 10:16:59 PM

You say that as if it's not common in the actual world. That's not a comment on whether it's good or bad, but the idea that children don't get to decide who takes care of them is hardly unusual, I'd imagine in.... most cultures.

Yeah, but some cultures shuffle kids around, and some don't. Most Earth Kingdom towns and cities (with the exception of maybe Kyoshi island, I can't remember) show no precedent of relocating kids to different guardians.

Oh, I didn't know that. Is that info from the Yangchen novel or the Korra comics?

Korra comics, specifically Turf Wars part 1, where Kya(Aang and Katara's daughter, who's also lesbian) explained Korra and Asami the history of each nation's views about same-sex relationships.

Air Nomads were the most accepting, while Earth Kingdom was the most strict. Water Tribes and Fire Nation were both tolerating, though in former's case it was "keep it personal" and in latter's case when Sozin rose in power, he pretty quickly made same-sex relationships criminal.

Recent youtube "discussion" got me wondering about something, was there ever a big controverse over name-pronunciation? I the thing about people being upset about how they were pronounced in the movie (which, honestly, I never really cared much about) but I meant of people complaining about the show pronouncing the names "wrong", in certain circles? Was that ever a widespread thing?

I think a lot of the names for the show were made up, so there'd be no other "correct" pronunciation like Shyamalan insisted.

Some of the names that were "mispronounced" in the movie are common in other parts of the world. "Mai" is indeed pronounced "my" in Japanese and Vietnamese. (It's pronounced "may" in French, but the character is pretty clearly modelled on an East/Southeast Asian woman.)

Aang is probably the biggest exception. I can't find any sources confirming that the name is common anywhere in the real world. That said, the characters used for his name in the show spell out "an ang," with the first A pronounced like the a in "cat" and the second A pronounced like the a in "ball."

Is Aang not actually a (common) Asian/East Asian name? I wasn't aware of that. That makes the discussion even stupider then.

Something that I was thinking about and then was wondering about other people's opinions about it. How much do you think of the knowledge that we know about the Air Nomads is right and how much of it is wrong because our source isn't right? I mean our main (and maybe the only) source of information about the Air Nomads is Aang who is a child even if he is the Avatar Aang can't be aware to a dark side that the Air Nomads have. For example, I mean Aang did say that the Air Nomads hasn't had any army but it is not impossible that he just doesn't know or just denies facts that the Air Nomads have a dark side specifically I find it hard to believe that a nation can be created or even survived without army or police. Moreover, we do know that was at least one Air Nomad that kills for their or other survival.

P.S. Sorry for my bad English, English isn't my native language so I hope what I wrote here is understandable.

Hiding the fact they had a standing military would be strange. I'd also call into question calling simply having a military a "dark side". Also Aang being wrong about that, specifically, would be strange, because that example exists so how how the Fire Nation used false progaganda to keep the citizens on the side of the war.

Though, yes, it is logical that Aang, as a child, wouldn't necessarily know everything about his culture.

Edited by LSBK on Aug 10th 2022 at 2:21:12 PM

Your English came across fine to me. As for the answer of your question, it depends on what you mean by "we". If you mean "we" as in "present-day fans of the series", then there's lots of information that didn't just come from Aang:

• As Zaheer would point out, there are many surviving records and teachings, including those of the great Guru Laghima
• Avatar Yangchen just had a book about her come out that has provided a lot more information
• Out of series information from the creators of the show can generally be taken as accurate canon until proven otherwise.

If by "we" you mean "characters of ATLA during Aang's post-freeze lifetime", then yes, everything we know is influenced by the people who have directly interacted with Airbenders, namely Aang, Pathik, Bumi, Roku, and Yangchen. Most of that information has come from Aang's lived experience.

Having an army is more or less something that you find hard to explain to a child why it is a good thing that your nation has when the all nation is built of pacifists. I mean someone will question eventually "why do we have an army if we preach for peace?" don't you think? And I gave the army as an example for something that I find that doesn't fit in, in the story of Aang about the Air Nomads they could have an army under another name for example "The Big Peace Force" or something like that just to not create a connotation to a real army even if it's actually an army in another name. Something else that could make the culture of the Air Nomads shows less sympathy for living is what happens when you are different from the others. For example what if you don't want to give your child to the system can you rise the child by yourself? Did the system take the child by force? Do you get outcast because you go against the wave? All of that happens in a hard culture that exists in the real life.

You can't trust a record in this case because most of the recommendations that we have were written by people that were fans or even part of this culture and probably loved the way things were conducted there so they are not going to write something bad about this culture because they really believed that the way of things is, is a really a good way (or even the best way) of conduct even if it's not the real situation. Do you understand my point?

P.S. Sorry for my bad English, English isn't my native language.

If you're saying we can't trust people who are part of a culture to write about themselves, sorry to break it to you, but that's what all of known history is.

No, I say you can't use what they write as an indicator to judge if the culture was good or bad because they are not objective about things, for example, someone who is of high rank in culture will say the culture is good and just for everyone because he judges the situation from his own viewpoint. And about our history, it doesn't work like this, we have a lot of information that came from people that not was in first contact with the people that they were writing about or people who write things to make one side look bad or another side look good or just because they do not have enough knowledge they were writing wrong things even today we don't know how much of our history books are right about things that happen in the past, you need a lot and I mean a very lot of sources of information that came from others source that has no contact to each other to consider and say that a source of information about the something in history a reliable source.

P.S. Sorry for my bad English, English isn't my native language.

Pretty much no one can make an objective assessment on if a culture is "good" or not, as it depends on the values of that culture, the times in general, and people bring in their own biases and experiences.

You can speculate all you want about the Air nomads, but ultimately there is no answer, because they aren't real. We're clearly meant to view Aang's account of their culture as accurate, and nothing has ever contradicted it.

One thing I am curious about is that a lot of the later depictions of the Air Nomads really emphasize how free and egalitarian their society was, but how does that square with the fact that their entire society was completely segregated by gender, with men and women living almost completely apart from each other in the separate temples? Does the Yangchen book talk about why they do this and how it affects their view of gender?

Not really, no. We do get some info that humanizes them (sport rivalries were totally a thing, different temples had different views on eating meat and the like), but the story isn't really about Air Nomad culture.

It's a genuinely hard problem as anything which adds any significant depth and grey to the Air Nomads runs the risk of coming across as 'justifying' their eventual genocide. But that means that they basically get minimal depth at all, with none of the issue or internal strife/disagreements which the other nations get. The closest we get is the disagreement over the Avatar's treatment, which is transparently driven by reaction to the Fire Nation's actions.

So, we don't get to explore any of the darker aspects of the air nomads outside fanfic. I'm pretty sure I've seen a couple of those which take the 'all air nomads are benders' to a perfectly logical 'because they exile anyone who ends up being a nonbender' conclusion, which would have been interesting to explore. Given how we're told other groups treat the air nomads, how do they avoid what is basically tailormade to create cultural arrogance 'they're better, more holy, and just their presence is a blessing on others,' actually creating that arrogance?

The only issue we've seen with Air Nomad life is that it's a tough sell. Though maybe that's more because Tenzin's a lousy salesman.

I'm thinking abt the gender separation thing because (according to the avatar wiki) the tabletop game establishes that they're fine with non-binary people, which just boggles my mind. How could a society that rigidly segments itself by gender also be totally cool with having a fluid, non-binary view of gender?

This also leads to smaller questions like: did Air Nomads get married? We’re heterosexual couples allowed to live each other, or did they have to live on different continents and only see each other occasionally? Do siblings of different genders get split up? Air Temple Island in Korra is divided into a men's half and a women's half, but we do see that Tenzin and Pema share a bedroom, so what side of the island is it on, and are other married couples allowed to do that?

I guess the main thing about this is that the whole "separate temples by gender" thing was a bit of world building abt the Air Nomads that was introduced really early, and later installments depict their culture in a way that clashes with it, but can't outright retcon it.

Edited by TheMountainKing on Aug 10th 2022 at 10:58:17 AM

Generally, if something in earlier canon is contradicted by later material, the later material wins out.

Just chalk it up to a bit of Early-Installment Weirdness and move on with your life.

Edited by M84 on Aug 10th 2022 at 10:59:18 PM

But they don't contradict each other in terms of facts. The air temples are still separated by gender in later works. It's just that with everything we learn abt air nomad culture why they're like that makes less and less sense.