Thinking about Aang’s grief, and how it just keeps compounding onto itself for the whole show. In the very first episode, when Kanna tells him no one has seen an air bender in a century, and Sokka tells him they’re fighting an endless war with the Fire Nation, and Katara tells him he was trapped in an iceberg for 100 years, we assume that’s the worst news he could get, and now he just needs to sit with that and figure out what to do. But no, in the third episode it hits him that Fire Nation soldiers killed his people, his friends, his mentor. He realizes he really is the last airbender. But it doesn’t stop there! In the following episodes he sees what the rest of the world has lost, and he has to grieve for that as well, because he remembers what the world used to be. He has to grieve his relationship with the Fire Nation, and the friends he had there. In the first part of the Winter Solstice episode, he grieves what the war has done to nature, and to the balance of the Spirit World. In the second part, he grieves his freedom when he finds out there’s a time limit on mastering the elements and stopping the war before the Fire Nation destroys everything. In “Jet,” he has to let go of his willingness to trust people. In “The Great Divide” he has to take a stand and reevaluate his notion of peacekeeping (the one he learned as a young Air Nomad). In “The Deserter” he must deal with his fire bending, and grieve the power he holds that can be used for violence, and realize that he is capable of hurting people unintentionally, and he probably already has. In “The Northern Air Temple” he has to grieve the art and architecture of his people, and accept that the world is moving on and reusing the sacred spaces his people left behind. When they’re in the Northern Water Tribe, he is part of his first real battle, and he has to grieve for the people who died alongside him, and come to grips with his own involvement in the war, and how he has hurt people too. And that’s just in the first season.
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