my headcanon about the whole Aang and Tenzin thing is that Aang took him on fun vacations with elephant koi AFTER the harrowing depressing lessons at the empty air temples, to counter balance how upsetting it was. Especially if the lessons started when Tenzin was really young, Aang knows all about having heavy burderns and how to blow some steam to stay sane. And then Kya and Bumi latched on the latter part of the trips because as kids that's what they cared about I guess
hey anon, sorry i sat on this for a little while
i should say that since i made the post that spurred this line of conversation, i went back and read the transcript for the episodes that tenzin, kya, and bumi talk about their dad, and it turns out tenzin does specifically call out elephant koi riding with aang as one of the fun things they did together without his siblings, which i hadn’t remembered at all. my recollection had been that bumi pulled it out of nowhere to gripe about, which is definitely where most of my harsher judgment of him and kya came from, but anyway i can see now why they were upset especially if that was all they heard about these trips (which i do think is unrealistic, but w/e). when i first saw the episodes however-long-ago-it-was, my clear interpretation was that aang wanted private time with his only airbending son, but other people interpreted it as “the writers made aang clearly favor tenzin,” which wasn’t what i saw at all. i do see questionable writing choices in other areas. even though i understand a little more now why fans interpreted it the way they did since we never really hear specifics of these trips, i’m still not convinced we're seeing the same things, enough to support the claim that LOK made aang a bad father.
okay to your point: i’d buy your line of reasoning is probably a good theory. tenzin is a pretty serious guy but i think that trait came later in life, maybe after aang died and his responsibilities and the shadow he lived under started to weigh on him. he was still a kid at one point, so he probably remembers those lessons as a kid would, fondly, because he still misses and looks up to his dad. and aang of course would want to impart to tenzin that being an airbender isn’t all heavy history, that their ancestors played games and had good times and laughed a lot. maybe aang stressed too hard that tenzin would have to be the one to pass all of this down; knowing tenzin, he might have thought that the knowledge aang gave him was his burden to carry and decided not to share the heavier bits with his siblings, so he only shared the fun bits. (this goes back to the question of if aang was right to leave it all to one child, which is a good discussion to have imo.)
i go back to the fact that like, as adults, kya and bumi like, had to know that those trips to air temples weren’t all fun and games, though, right...? which still makes the entire interaction feel weird and unnatural imo. so i lean on the side of “this was poor writing because i think they forced a conflict that didn’t need to be there, didn’t think about how these kids would have grown up sharing knowledge with each other, and passing down generational trauma within a mixed-race family is way too big and heavy a topic to cover tangentially as a b-plot in a two-part episode,” not “this is bad writing because the writers made aang a bad dad.”
