Thoughts on the characters with mixed heritage in The Legend of Korra.
Ever since I started this blog, there has been one popular complaint that always confused me a little, and it is that some people have issues with the way the multicultural families were written in the show, especially Bumi II, Kya, Tenzin and the airbabies not displaying a more diverse sense of identity considering their different origins.
I want to talk about this as someone of mixed heritage, living in a country where it’s very hard to find people who know with certainty where their ancestors came from. Keep this in mind before you get too mad at me for what I am about to say. I’m not saying I am right, or that having issues with this is wrong, I am simply explaining why I don’t consider this a flaw of the show.
First of all, the worldbuilding of Legend of Korra isn’t supposed to mirror the real world and how we understand identity and nationality, and it really can’t, even if we tried.
Both ATLA and TLOK are loosely inspired fantasy. None of the Four Nations correspond to only one real culture. Just from this standpoint, you can’t expect the relations between people from these nations to be like the ones of the real world, and if you add the in-universe concept of bending, one that carries not only hereditary but also philosophical significance, then the waters muddy even more.
Second, there’s the issue that most if not all the characters of mixed heritage that we see in LOK live in Republic City, apart from that, each nation is still pretty ethnically homogeneous.
Republic City is an anomaly, an one of a kind situation in both technological and cultural aspects, as it is the only major city in which people from all four nations coexist and mingle. It's a new-ish city, and there hasn’t been enough time for people to effectively combine many aspects of their cultures like we do in the real world.
The first people to interact and live together in what is now Republic City were Fire Nation colonials and Earth Kingdom citizens, this is a huge issue in the comics, I'll come back to this.
Considering all of that, we can now ask ourselves,“if Republic City was meant to be an unifying estate, why didn’t Aang and Katara raise Tenzin to have more than Air Nomad values?”
Well, I don’t think I have to remind you what happened to the Air Nomads.
I don’t think I have to explain why making an airbender, the only one born after the war, abandon air nomad values in favor of a life in the Southern Water tribe is a bad narrative decision. The Air Nation was on the brink of extinction, I don’t really think raising an airbender with Air Nomad values is bad parenting, or bad writing, for that matter.
When the whole situation of the colony of Yu Dao is discussed in the comics, it’s pretty obvious that modernization poses a great danger to traditional ways of life. Katara even makes a point of saying that she saw herself and Aang in a family of Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation parents, that the existence of such a place is necessary if Aang and Katara have any hopes of sustaining their relationship without any of them giving up a huge part of their identities. They have to maintain those traditions, in their own ways, and still be together.
We don't know the life the kids had before we see them in Republic City, and the anecdotes Bumi, Kya and Tenzin share are biased accounts, based on their own inner insecurities and how they interpret their upbringing. Kids tend to do that, especially children destined to fill big shoes.
The situation is vastly different than the one of the mixed family of Yu Dao, this is an union of an Air Nomad and a waterbender from the Southern Water Tribe, two cultures who have been heavily affected by war and imperialism, and two people who feel a duty to preserve their distinct culture and traditions.
That's my biggest issue with the arguments and nitpicks people come up with regarding this. Not only does this world only have a handful of nationalities and cultures, thus making the combination of two cultures much more difficult without one of them overshadowing the other, but these cultures are also heavily linked with, and influenced by, bending. I.e a waterbender will always be more drawn to the Water Tribes, their traditions and way of life are literally designed to be parts of their self concepts. Stripping them of those attributes diminishes the struggle of the Water Tribes IN UNIVERSE, but I’ll talk about Kya in a second.
Right now, let’s talk about the eldest son of Katara and Aang.
Bumi is the one that displays the most interesting development regarding his identity as a mixed kid, choosing to integrate in the culture of this new place, to find his own way, only to reclaim his heritage as an Air Nomad after he gets bending.
And that’s okay, because the Air Nation is the most spiritual and isolated of all, a fact that the new airbenders that reject Tenzin were aware of.
Bumi had other wants in life, maybe being an Air Acolyte would’ve been hard for him, being the only non bender kid of Avatar Aang. Can’t you see the complexity? It makes sense. The way in which he went about finding his identity makes sense.
Then there’s Kya. Why doesn’t Kya live on Air Temple island with Tenzin and Bumi? Why wasn’t she, along with Bumi, also tasked with preserving Air Nomad traditions?
Well, if you listen to what the text actually says, she chose to live in the SWT with Katara after Aang died. We learn that Kya didn’t stop traveling the world until her mother needed her. Which, I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty nomadic of her. She was born after bumi, which means she already saw him not involve himself much in Air Nomad business, so she was free to do her own thing.
Again, think of the implications. We can draw a few conclusions from this:
Katara and Aang didn’t live in just one place prior to the foundation of Republic City, suggesting that Bumi, Tenzin and Kya were most likely born IN Republic City.
Bumi was the first born, a non bender, he chose to integrate to the city life, only reconnecting with his Air Nomad heritage later in life. This is valid.
Kya was born a waterbender, we don’t know how much time she spent in the SWT prior to the death of Aang, but she did spend some time travelling, much like an Air Nomad does, while still wearing traditional water tribe clothing. This is valid.
Tenzin, the only airbender, had the weight of continuing his fathers work of preserving the Air Nation on his own, in a way that, sadly, no Air Acolyte can. There was just not space for him to explore anything else, and that’s valid.
Finally, there’s the air babies, which fall in the same category as Tenzin. They are the only airbenders prior to Harmonic Convergence, they have a duty to preserve Air Nomad traditions.
This world does not work like our own, people don’t mention they are a certain percentage of Water Tribe, Air Nomad, Fire Nation, or Earth Kingdom to make points. Just because they don’t wear clothes of more than one nation, doesn’t mean they don’t hold their heritage in great esteem. The story is just not about them, so we don’t see enough to really explore these characters, and if the history of the show was meant to reflect that, we would’ve seen it, but this isn’t the Grown Up ATLA show, it’s Legend of Korra. Color coding is just an asset in visual storytelling, you have to dig a little deeper than that to make judgements.
The reality is that all these characters are in a very special situation, in a very special time, and the natural evolution of cultures and traditions is slower than you think. If we get a new show or book series in a different avatar cycle, I think we’d see a much more balanced combination of each nation, from traditional wear to customs, but at the time we see them in Legend of Korra? It makes sense they’re still figuring things out, and are much more in tune with their element.
Kyoshi is an example of this idea, and she was born much before the Air Nomad genocide. She’s half air nomad, she knew this all her life, but as an earthbender, she’s much more connected to that side of her heritage, and her only connection to that was severed after she lost her guardian figure. Being half something didn’t make her more drawn to that on its own. It takes more than being a child of an airbender to consider yourself an Air Nomad.
Some of these characters are diaspora, like Mako and Bolin. They, too, live in Republic City, and they embody their roots in their own special way. Asami was designed to look like Fire Nation folk, but she doesn’t display any sentimental connection to the Fire Nation. There are many ways to write identity, and all of the depictions we see in Legend of Korra make sense if you think about it for more than two seconds.
There are much more elements to consider, and it is much harder to work around identity when there’s literal elemental magic involved. So, I think we have to go much further than just “lok is bad because kataang’s kids don’t wear yellow and blue clothes.”
