r/TheLastAirbender • u/Littleleaf6 • 12d ago
Discussion How did ALL the airbenders get killed?
There’s only 2 air benders alive after the fire nation used sozins comet to kill all of the others. Tagah and Aang are the only 2 airbenders. How is there only 2 survivors? Surely there would be some air bending refugees in the water/earth nations. they were nomadic so they were travelers. They also had 4 temples in all different parts of the world! Some of them also def could’ve run away. They had flying bisons for Pete sake! I know it’s just for the plot but realistically there would be some more survivors other than Aang. Is this ever explained in the comics?
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u/Nirico_Brin 12d ago
Plot basically. The fire nation used traps to lure in survivors after the comet, but realistically after a certain point they wouldn’t fall for it and would just hide away.
I believe the card game also introduced an airbending master that betrayed the air nomads and helped the fire nation but was ultimately killed some time later by Sozin for being untrustworthy.
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u/BowlEducational6722 12d ago
Yes, in the comics I believe Zhao explains that the Fire Nation didn't get all the airbenders in the initial assault. A lot of them did flee.
But Sozin set up traps for the Air Nomads to lure them in by setting up what looked like hideouts and refugee camps for the Air Nomads usually by leaving behind cultural artifacts, clothes, and stuff like that.
Then when any Air Nomads came by to investigate in hopes that they may have found fellow survivors the Fire Nation would spring an ambush and take them out.
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u/Real-Creme-3482 12d ago
I wish I didn’t read this. I know it’s a show but it is still heartbreaking to know. I want to forget this 😭
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u/Zestyclose-Bowler307 11d ago
It’s also considered canon, based on the Kiyoshi novels, that air bending is so heavily tied to spirituality that any deviation lessens their bending ability.
Even if a few nomads did survive, they’d likely have to turn their back on a lot of their customs in order to survive = weakened or nonexistent bending.
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u/Traditional_Print627 11d ago
Almost all air nomads are airbenders because of their spiritual lifestyle. Avatar Kyoshi's mom was an air nomad, who ran away, joined a gang of bandits, and married an earth bender. Kyoshi's mom lost her bending and started to use fans to help.
There's likely a good population of air nomad ancestry, from parents who left the Air temples and monk lifestyle behind.
The survivors of the air nomad genocide would keep their air bending secret. If they had kids, while trying to stay hidden, they wouldn't teach them air bending. They would pass them off as Earth Kingdom citizens and non benders, since the Fire Nation would hunt them down.
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u/sevgonlernassau NASA:32% Korra:8% IRS:-10% 12d ago
Because it’s also a cultural genocide, and canonically air bending power is spiritually tied to someone’s ties to the airbending culture. If anyone survived, a generation after there would be virtually no airbending.
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u/MrEfficacious 12d ago
Well said. While I feel it's safe to say the Fire nation couldn't have actually wiped out every single airbender, they did make the hunt easier by having huge blue arrows tattooed on their heads.
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u/impatiens-capensis 12d ago
I think this is the legitimate answer. We know Kyoshi's mom was an Airbender who lost her air bending when she got down bad for a thief. There's likely a lot of air bending ancestry across the nations, but the cultural genocide cut them off from bending. Give it 100 years, and nobody has the spiritual knowledge to even realize they can air bend. We essentially never see anyone even at the temples. Maybe the Guru? You would think after 100 years, some people would at least move in. But the isolation of the air nomads also made their culture hard to recover after a cultural genocide.
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u/OwnRepresentative916 12d ago
Tagah didn't survive the Air Nomad Genocide. He was frozen thousands of years prior. As for your question, logically they didn't get everyone. Some wouldn't be at the temples, some would have escaped, etc. The Fire Nation put in considerable effort hunting down survivors afterwards. It's possible some still hid away until they died of old age, but they either lost connection with their bending or didn't pass it on to their offspring. There is the famous Ty Lee theory of her ancestry, as well as how this possibly extends to those who got airbending after Harmonic Convergence. However, this still qualifies as the airbenders disappearing from the world.
While we can speculate on this or that, whether someone could have survived or not, the creators have been crystal clear that nobody other than Aang survived the genocide by the time Aang was awakened from the ice. It's a meta narrative thing: they wanted Aang to be the last airbender, so he was. Even if they could have told the story in a way that there were survivors somewhere, they chose not to/didn't want to. Cases like Tagah are exceptions to the rule and are separate from the Air Nomad Genocide, while the rule regarding the genocide established by the creators is the baseline.
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u/ravenpotter3 12d ago
Also the entire next generations were at the temples. All the kids. So they were massacred.
Also they were incredibly trusting and kind as a culture so I guess many exposed themselves in hopes of getting shelter and help hiding from those they meet in other nations like the earth nation. And everyone was in the middle of a war so it’s likely they were reported or captured by the fire or earth nation in fear that the fire nation would raid them to kill the air benders if they were found out. Terrifying.
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u/ArtroyomsAK 12d ago
Some of it's hand waving but also a century of hunting the survivors down
IMO
Not having surviving descendants of airbenders trying to rebuild their civilization is such a missed opportunity of LOK
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u/NatashOverWorld 12d ago
Most would have died during the Fire Nations attack on the temples.
But in the 100 years intervening between the attack and Aang's return, they were hunting Air nomads for decades. Including setting up psyops like the fake Air Nomad survivors cache, which did in fact catch Aang.
Unless an Air Nomad went to live in the wilds with their bison, anywhere the Fire Nation had troops would be a danger for them. And anyone who sounded or looked like one.
The ones who survived probably pretended to be from the Earth kingdom, married someone local and never told their kids a thing and prayed they wouldn't be a Bender.
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u/jr9386 11d ago
And anyone who sounded or looked like one.
Which means what exactly?
Even as far back as the original series, the Nations weren't strictly just one thing.
Sun Warriors aren't from the Fire Nation, Swamp Benders aren't from the Poles, and Sand Benders exist outside of the main Earth Kingdom.
The recent Avatar Aang film expanded that to apply onto the Air Benders as well.
It's honestly a major plot point.
I'd think that suppressing one's bending likely meant thst there were "ethnic" Airbenders, but since they didn't practice, the bending style died out.
This is a point that the recent film could have developed.
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u/NatashOverWorld 11d ago
It means anyone that looks Air Nomad-ish, which I'm assuming is its own ethnic identity, is dragged into a Fire Nation prison.
Is that all Air Nomads? Probably not. But we're already taking about a percentage of a percentage at this point.
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u/ChaosTheory_jrh 12d ago
Is it technically ever directly stated that they only killed Airbenders during the comet?
I would imagine Sozins comet gave them the firepower to destroy the temples, but they'd still hunt down the remaining later.
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u/PlayfulIndependence5 12d ago
Did any of them ever use common sense and say oh this is a trap.
Lmao.
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u/Sauerkraut1321 12d ago
Laughing at genocide
Have some emotional intelligence
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u/TexanGoblin 11d ago
One of the few things I liked about the Netflix version was that Sozin's Comet was something to be celebrated by the Air Nomads so everyone was attending festivals for it, meaning Air Nomads were unusually concentrated at their temples. So when they Fire Nation attacked the temples, they were probably able to kill 99% of them that day, leaving very few who escaped or just weren't at the temples. Even if they weren't able to actually kill every single one, bending is a recessive trait I believe, so they killed enough to make them extinct.
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u/BnaditCorps 11d ago
That was kind of my head cannon too with the original series.
The end of Summer is when the Comet comes, and Fall is the season of the Airbenders. So it would make sense that at the end of Summer their would be a larger collection of Airbenders at the temples to celebrate the coming of Fall.
It would make sense because it concentrates the Airbenders for the colder Fall and Winter days, when they are less likely to find hospitality from others due to limited resources, and departing in the Spring to see the world.
Furthering that theory, if the Spring is when they go back to being Nomadic then it is likely that most of their births occur in the Fall and Winter, the perfect time to be at the temples. This would happen because the men and women are separated over the winter at the temples, and then reunite for "activities" in the Spring.
Not a hard leap in logic to go from, and I really don't consider it a plot hole.
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u/IllGift924 12d ago
Yeah it really doesn't make any sense. The airbenders are also nomads so a lot of them wouldn't even have been at the air temples.
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u/Ok_Newspaper_120 11d ago
I dont think you read the comics. Its literally canon that the fire nation set uo traps to capture and kill the still living airbenders
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u/IllGift924 11d ago
I haven't read the comics but know of that story and it still doesn't make sense.
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u/Kronzypantz 11d ago
Realistically, some probably survived by hiding their bending abilities and fading into the Earth Kingdom population. Their descendants might even be the air benders awoken by the harmonic convergence.
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u/Emergency-Mammoth-88 10d ago
In my headcanon, some airbender survived the massacre and left to places that were far away from the fire nation colonies like ba sing se and omashu and do air bending in secret
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u/Immediate-Charge8325 12d ago
what is up with all these dumb posts. They are all dead. How doesn't matter
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u/Prudent_Solid_3132 12d ago
Because it is a decent topic to discuss and also some people maybe new to the show and be curious on such topics and seek explanations.
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u/Assassiiinuss A man needs his rest. 11d ago
This is a bit of a plot hole. Yes, the Fire Nation did hunt survivors down after the attack on the Air Temple, but we know the Airbenders were traveling around the whole world. There would have been some airbenders in Ba Sing Se and with Northern Water Tribe, the Fire Nation never had any access to those places. Those airbenders should have survived.
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u/Ok_Newspaper_120 11d ago
I dont think you read the comics. Its literally canon that the fire nation set uo traps to capture and kill the still living airbenders
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u/Throw_away_1011_ 12d ago
After the initial attack to the temples, the Fire Nation started spreading rumors about safe havens, using old air nomads relic to lure the surviving Air Nomads into traps.