Created: 2024-08-08 16:54
Edited: 2024-11-10 18:07
Status: 🌿budding

Do I think that Aang was a bad father?

Short answer; no, no I don't.

Longer answer; I think Aang was a human being with a lot of things on his plate and that he struggled to balance being the Avatar the world needed with being a father. As anyone might expect him to do. And I think this is backed up by what Kya and Bumi say in S02E0? of LOK.

At no point do they say Aang was a bad father. I think that's important to get out of the way. And it tracks with what we see of younger Aang in ATLA. He's good with kids even as a kid himself. And I think it's worth pointing out that if he were actively a bad father Katara would have strung him up by his toenails.

What Kya actually says to Tenzin in S02E0? of LOK is that she's sick of him acting like they all had some perfect happy go lucky childhood. She and Bumi both want him to listen to their frustrations with Aang's parenting and acknowledge that, as the sole airbender among them, he had access to Aang in a way the other two didn't. They just want him to acknowledge his privilege and apologise for assuming that his siblings had identical memories of Aang.

(Tenzin is super bad at apologies though, but that's a separate topic.)

I think a lot of people who say that LOK made Aang out to be a bad father are dismissing the scene at the end of the episode, when the three Cloudkids are looking at the photograph of their family. Bumi says they're a good looking family but [Kya?] says they look happy. They acknowledge that their childhood was happy. Sure, they might have been frustrated at not having more of their father's time and attention, but they were happy overall. And I don't think there's any doubt they were loved.

So yeah, Aang wasn't a bad father. That's not what LOK is saying with this episode. He was a human being with flaws, and that extended to his parenting too. And I think that's where the sticking point is for the "LOK makes Aang a bad father" folks; I think for them, saying that Aang was only human is the same thing as him being a bad parent. It's almost like any criticism pf him, any evidence that he wasn't magically skilled and competent at everything he did is saying he was a bad person. And I kinda get that. I mean, wouldn't you assume that someone who did the kind of things that Aang did at twelve or thirteen would go on to be super great at everything for the res of their life?

But the Avatars aren't gods. They aren't perfect. Both shows make this abundantly clear time and time again. Avatars make mistakes, often big ones that affect the entire world. And many Avatars end up spending their lives making up for the mistakes of their predecessor. It makes no sense to assume Aang wouldn't be the same.

Both shows make it a point to paint the Avatars as perfectly imperfect human beings. It's just that LOK makes us sit with what that really means for longer than ATLA does. And i think that makes people uncomfortable. I think it makes people lash out at LOK for not letting them believe their childhood hero was perfect.

Kya, Bumi and Tenzin all grew up to be excellent people, the kind of people you can count on in a crisis and I think that's a testament both Aang and Katara's parenting. All three of them struggle with their parents' legacies in their own way, and all feel like they're living in Aang and Katara's shadows to some extent. But none of that means Aang was a bad father. It just means he was human.

And so are his children.

Source: =this.source
Links: ATLA & LOK