sigh... yk if you can't get my asks so be it... idc i'm still gonna send em. i don't know how i feel about aangs parenting... like on the one hand no, he didn't have a formal father but like, gyatso was still very much a father figure to him. the concept of a father figure is not unknown to aang. and i get he wants to keep the air nomad culture alive but think of all the cute family excursions they could've had!! overall i guess i think aang did a so-so job of parenting, which isn't me attacking
him (i don't think) i feel like people pretend to forget that these are complex, FLAWED characters. one of aangs flaws was that he was he tended to neglect kya and bumi.
sorry it took me so long to answer this, but i had so much to say!! ❤️
why do you assume that they didn’t have cute family excursions together? The only canon thing mentioned in LOK about the Cloud-babies upbringing was that Bumi told Tenzin that “Dad always spent more time with you” (roughly). We don’t know anything about how they were raised, we don’t know anything about how their training went. We don’t know anything about how their parents treated them other than very small snippets and conversations that are mentioned offhandedly. We only have a glance of a tiny bit of their lives when Aang was alive and to take that and make assumptions is so harmful to Aang’s character.
But what we do know is THIS: Aang actively passed down the Air Nomad lifestyle to all of his children.
- Kya meditates a lot. She is very spiritual and lived a nomadic life for a majority of it–something that she likely learned from Aang.
- Bumi plays the flute, something that he literally had to have learned from Aang as well bc there are parallels of it between the shows.
The amazing thing about fandom is that we can literally rewrite the story however we want. But even then, I don’t think Aang could be considered a so-so father. Was Hakoda a so-so father? He left his two children in the care of his mother-in-law for years. Iroh was a literally war criminal and he's revered in the a:tla fandom.
Aang was the best father that he could be to those kids. He was a victim of a genocide and the only living member of the Air Nomad culture. Of course, he doted on Tenzin!!! That was his life line to his culture. That was the first Airbender born in 100+ years. But that does not mean he “tended to neglect Kya and Bumi” just because he might have spent “extra time” training with him. He was also the Avatar. I think we can see that it’s a pretty demanding job.
Because Kya is a waterbender, did that mean that Bumi and Tenzin were neglected by Katara?
You said it right, Aang is a complex and flawed character, and to just whittle him down to being neglectful of two of his children just because they weren’t airbenders is possibly the worst characterization anyone could have given him.
Canonly Aang was kind, he was inclusive and he was smart and he was extremely emotionally intelligent. If you don’t think that he carried those traits into adulthood, I am so sorry. But the Aang that I see and hc is a wonderful father to all of his children.
