Personal InformationName: Bing
Age: Mid 30s
Personal Journal: agoodmusekickin
Email / AIM / Plurk: agoodshinkickin[at]gmail / agoodshinkickin / agoodshinkickin
Character InformationCharacter Name: Aang
Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Source:
http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Avatar_Wikihttp://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/AangCharacter History:
Like all Air Nomads, Aang was born at the Western Air Temple, and as a male toddler would be dedicated to either the Northern or Southern Air Temples, where he would remain until such time as he reached the age of majority. The hope being that in those sixteen years he would study, learn, and master the art of airbending.
Unlike the vast majority of Air Nomads, prior to his dedication Aang was presented with a selection of thousand toys and asked to pick his four favorites. His choice of the four Avatar relics, items once belonging to the previous incarnations of the Spirit of the World made flesh,, hidden among the toys confirmed the suspicions held by the Council of Elders: the boy was the reincarnation of the recently deceased Avatar Roku.
In a world where some have the ability to bend one of the four elements to their will, the Avatar has the ability to bend them all, and is tasked with using that ability to maintain balance between not only the nations of the world, but also the material world itself and that of the spirit.
As traditionally the Avatar is not told of their status until they’ve reached the age of majority, Aang spent the first twelve years of his life believing he was nothing more than a normal Air Nomad kid, living a normal Air Nomad childhood. He was member of the Air Scouts, bonded with his skybison Appa, travelled alongside his guardian Monk Gyatso on the older man’s many journey’s around the world, making friends with other children from all four nations.
And then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked...
War was on the horizon, Fire Lord Sozin was on the move against the Earth Kingdoms, and Council of Elders decided that the world could not wait the four years it would take for Aang to reach the age of majority. The Monks felt they had no choice but to inform Aang that he was the Avatar reborn mere months after his twelfth birthday.
This revelation changed Aang’s life forever.
The news had spread so quickly throughout the Temple that by the time Aang emerged from the Council chamber every monk on the mountain knew. They whispered when they thought he couldn’t hear them, and bowed to him when they knew he could. Even those among his peer group began to treat him differently. They stopped inviting him to play, citing how unfair it would be for one team to have the Avatar on their side. The Council demanded more of him, and expected him to train night and day to make up for the time the world no longer had. After all, the boy still had three other elements and the Avatar State to master after he’d completed his airbending training.
The only constants in Aangs life, the only ones who never stopped seeing Aang for Aang, were Appa the skybison and Monk Gyatso. When the latter held firm to the notion that Aang deserved a childhood, and defied the Council by allowing the boy time to play, the Council retaliated by setting into motion plans to relocate Aang to the all-female Eastern Air Temple to complete his education.
This was the last straw as far as Aang was concerned. The Council had taken his friends, his freedom, had taken his future, there was no way that Aang was going to allow them to take away Gyatso as well. And so the night before he was slated to leave for the Eastern Temple Aang wrote an apology letter to Gyatso, and ran away with Appa.
Trouble followed close behind. While both Aang and Appa had travelled from the Air Temple before, they’d never done so alone, and certainly never at night. They quickly found themselves turned around and in the midst of a great storm that plunged both boy and bison into the freezing waters of the Southern sea. Just as Aang was beginning to succumb to hypothermia the Avatar State took over and surrounded them both with a protective ball of air, which then froze the surrounding water solid.
Safely frozen beneath the waves of the southern sea, Aang was protected from the war that raged above. The war that took the lives of his entire culture, decimated the Southern Water Tribe, and was slowly nearing the full conquest of the Earth Kingdoms. A war that continued for three generations.
In addition to having no knowledge of his Avatar status, Aang was also unaware that from the moment of his birth he was being hunted. The Fire Nation’s expansion was ever only held at bay by the authority and might of the Avatar. Fire Lord Sozin attempted to persuade Avatar Roku, Aang’s predecessor, to aid him in his quest, but was shot down time and time again. It was this denial of glory that lead Sozin to watch idly by as Roku died battling an erupting volcano that threatened lives on his island home. Sozin, knowing the next Avatar in the cycle would be born an Air Nomad, made plans to annihilate the four Air Temples in an effort to destroy the Avatar before he or she could come to power. The previous Air Nomad Avatar, a woman named Yang Chen, had been so formidable that the peace and balance she fostered during her reign continued long after her death, and so Sozin would take no chances. There was a comet due twelve years after the death of Roku that would grant firebenders unlimited power, and Sozin carefully prepared to use that power to rid the world of the Air Nomads and destroy the Avatar cycle forever.
Some say it was destiny that brought Sokka and Katara of the Southern Water Tribe out hunting to that part of the ice flow that day, others...mostly Sokka, chalk it up to pure dumb luck. Either way it was the wild unhoned waterbending talent of Katara that inadvertently raised iceberg, and woke Aang from his 100 year long nap.
Book One of
Avatar: The Last Airbender focuses on Aang, Sokka, and Katara and the adventures they have traveling from the Southern Water Tribe to the Northern Water Tribe in search of a waterbending master for both Aang and Katara. Along the way there are the requisite adventures, lessons learned, and evil plots foiled.
Aang is forced to come to grips with the genocide of his people, and begins the long process of unpacking the seemingly endless amounts of survivor’s guilt he feels from having not been there to defend his home against the Fire Nation attack. Not to mention face the people of the world who’ve been left unprotected for generations and have known nothing but war ever since.
The main antagonists of this season are Fire Prince Zuko and Admiral Zhao, both of whom endeavor to capture Aang so as to present him to Fire Lord Ozai. For Zuko the capture means regaining not only his lost honor, but the love of his father. Zhao seeks glory.
Book Two focuses on the group traveling through the Earth Kingdoms searching for a teacher to train Aang in earthbending, all the while trying to stay one step ahead of the forces that seek to capture Aang, again to bring him before the Fire Lord. Zuko and Zhao have been replaced by Fire Princess Azula and her friends Tai Lee and Mai, a group Sokka as dubbed “The Dangerous Ladies.”
The season ends with the various plotlines of power and deception converging on the Earth Kingdom City of Ba Sing Se, the one place in the world still left untouched by the last hundred years of war.
It’s in Ba Sing Se that Azula and her friends manage to sneak inside the city’s famed Impenetrable Walls, and overthrow the Earth King by means of staging a coup d'etat. Azula waits until only member of Team Avatar is left in the city: Katara.
The Avatar had left the city in order to study under a Guru who claims he can help Aang control the Avatar State. Toph, Aang’s earthbending master, is tricked into believing her parents have arrived to reconcile, only to discover too late that it’s really kidnappers waiting to take her home. Sokka rejoins the warriors of his Tribe and is asked to assist in their plans to thwart the Fire Nation.
Azula even manages to succeed in convincing her brother Zuko, who by this point had come to terms with never returning home, to help her in her quest to capture the Avatar.
Aang is working on clearing his final chakra, the one at the crown of the head which deals with attachment, when he felt that Katara was in danger. He returns to Ba Sing Se, picking up Sokka and Toph on the way, in time to rescue Katara from Azula’s prison, only to find now both he and Katara are trapped between the Fire Prince, Princess, and an entire Earth Kingdom army now dedicated to the Fire Nation. Knowing the battle can only be won by utilizing the Avatar State, Aang sequesters himself from the battle and successfully clears his final chakra. As he floats to into the air in the grips of the Avatar State, Azula strikes him down with a well timed bolt of lightning.
Katara unleashes a powerful display of waterbending, catches Aang, and with the help of a distraction made by Uncle Iroh, manages to escape with Aang. Using special water she obtained at the beginning of the season, Katara manages to heal Aang enough to keep him from dying, but not enough to keep him conscious very long.
He falls into a coma, and wakes to find himself in the Nautilus.
Character Personality:
Were it not for the fact that he’s also the reincarnation of the centuries’ old spirit of the world incarnate, one could easily say that Aang is just your run of the mill twelve year old boy. He’s kind, affectionate, with more than a bit of a mischievous streak. Some might even go so far as to call him an incurable prankster.
The sad truth of it is that no matter how average he may seem at first glance, once you hear of his title, or see the great power that comes part and parcel with it, it’s kind of hard to forget his status as The Avatar. Were it within his abilities to do so, forgetting is exactly what he’d encourage you to do, because he’s actually not overly fond of his title. In fact, in many ways Aang sees it as more of a curse than the blessing people keep insisting it is.
It’s not that he minds helping people, and fostering peace and harmony wherever he goes...he quite likes that part, loves it really. What he doesn’t like is that he can’t just be Aang when he does it. He was raised by humble monks to be a humble monk, and because of that he knows fancy words and titles don’t solve problems, actions do. Aang is at his best when he’s not encumbered by the trappings of his position. When he’s free to live the life he’s always dreamed of, just wandering the world in search of adventure and helping those he can along the way all the while surrounded by friends and family. It’s the threat of the loss of this style of living, of this sense of autonomy, that ultimately forces Aang to run away in the first place.
This desire to retain his freedom through adventure is often side-eyed and questioned by those he meets along the way. A sane person doesn’t just try to ride Hopping-Hogmonkeys for fun. Especially when everyone knows that they don’t
like to be ridden in the first place. But for Aang...that just makes it all the tantalizing a task. Not everyone wakes from one hundred years of frozen sleep beneath Antarctic waves and immediately asks to go Penguin Sledding, but Aang did. He’s just that kind of kid. The combination of his airbending mastery and his questionable attention span only serve to encourage him further along this path. There’s far less to fear when one has the ability to laugh in the very face of gravity. An activity he partakes of often.
Which isn’t to say that Aang is 100% sweetness and good intentioned light, because...he’s not. He has quite a fierce jealous streak, and will resort to seemingly very un-Aang like behavior, like lying or other forms of deception, in an effort to retain things he believes to be his. It’s a side effect not only being 12, but of also having lost everyone and everything dear to him. Though usually kept in check by his affable nature, Aang does have a temper that he will unleash upon those who threaten his friends, or succeed in causing them harm.
Prior to the locking of his chakra, Aang had the ability to tap into the wisdom and power of all of his past lives at once. This ability, called The Avatar State, was meant to be a resource for him to draw from should he require help bringing balance to the world. Unfortunately the hundred year war happened before he could learn to control it effectively and for a time any traumatic emotional episode ran the risk of triggering that State which effectively reduced Aang to nothing more than an angry force of nature. While Aang cannot access this state at this point in canon, the memories of being able to do so, and the damage that inevitably followed in the State’s wake serve as a constant reminder to Aang to mind his temper.
Aang is also very proud, and doesn’t always weather defeat/failure well in the slightest. He’s one of those kids who will actively avoid challenges in favor of partaking in activities that he already knows he excels at just to avoid the chance at failure. While it’s likely that he’ll outgrow some of these tendencies naturally, it will take more than the passage of time to get Aang to face his problems head on, especially when considering his upbringing favors the path of least resistance as strongly as it does.
Considering what he’s lived through, and the sheer weight to the destiny that lay before him, Aang is surprisingly well adjusted and rather unflappable. He’s a happy kid who lives to laugh, and inspire laughter in others.
Powers and Abilities:
Airbending: The ability to manipulate, and in some cases generate, the element of air.
Mostly defensive in its application, airbending uses circular motions to conduct the air in discrete directions allowing for a variety of effects depending on the strength of the motions used and the skill of the Airbender performing them. Airbenders can create walls of air strong enough to repel people and weapons, whirlwinds and small vacuums that can be used to snatch things from people’s hands as well as tornadoes for locomotion. A strong enough air blast can even be used to erode rock.
Using airbending, Airbenders are naturally light on their feet, can jump tens of feet into the air, and run at an accelerated pace. With the aid of a glider Airbenders can fly for long bursts.
Aang invented an airbending form that he calls the Air Scooter. It’s a small focused ball of air that one can ride like a top.
Waterbending: The ability to direct and manipulate water in its various states.
Along with being able to push and pull water through the air as tendrils of many sizes, a Waterbender is capable of shifting their element from its frozen, liquid, and gaseous forms at will. Water can be moved as a large wave, or refined to an edge sharp enough to cut through metal.
Earthbending: The ability to direct and manipulate earth, stone, and sand.
In the right hands earthbending is more than merely moving a rock, though learning how to do so is usually the first step. A powerful, and well trained, earthbender is capable of achieving a seismic sense of his surroundings merely by feeling the vibrations in the earth around themselves.
SamplesNetwork:
[The feed springs to life on a pensive Aang perched precariously atop the central spire of the Nautilus. He looks down over the surrounding area and sighs wistfully.]From up here the Nautilus kind of reminds me of Omashu.
Not the way I left it though,covered in Fire Nation Red and its people fleeing to refugee camps, but the way I found it the very first time Monk Gyatso brought me there.
I think I was...six? Yeah, I’d have to have been six. Because it was my first big trip with Gyatso, and we were making a rest stop in Omashu on our way to the Eastern Air Temple so that I could finally meet my bison.
[Aang smiles fondly at the memory of Appa, but the smile turns bittersweet towards the end.]Anyway, I remember being amazed and scared and excited all at the same time. Omashu was the biggest city I’d ever seen and had more people in it than I knew existed. The Air Nomads weren’t exactly a huge nation as nations go.
Anyway, it was everything I’d been taught by the Monks about order coming from chaos, but you know...with actual living breathing people, and not just words. And once I got over being scared of all the noise, and intimidated by all the people, I loved it.
I loved it even more after I became friends with Bumi. He was just a little kid like me at the time, and wouldn’t become king for years later. This place reminds me a lot of him too. I think he’d like it here on the Nautilus. This is the kind of place a Mad Genius dreams of going when he dreams of going anywhere other than where he is. Who knows, maybe he was already here and this was the model for all his crazy schemes.
[It’s here that he pauses, his expression loses focus, and rather than peer out onto the horizon, Aang looks as if he’s keeping a watchful eye on the middle ground.]I miss them all so much.
It...it almost seems like everytime I close my eyes I’m in one place, but when I open them I’m somewhere else. And the people from before, I never get to see again. I never get to say goodbye. Or to tell them how much I love them. I know that the Monks taught me that all is suffering, and I understand that nothing can last forever, but...would it really be that hard to get a heads up before I’m pulled away from my friends? Is that really asking too much?
Third Person:
He strips off his boots, and walks barefoot to the edge of the city, towards where the world goes white. The wind doesn’t sing to him here, nor does the water babble. The ground beneath his feet doesn’t thrum as it used to, back when he could control it. For the first time ever he doesn’t hear the world around him. The elements still, and his mind is quiet. Even the warmth of the sun begins to fade as he closes his eyes and just exists.
While he was willing to sacrifice his attachment to Katara in order to achieve control over the Avatar State, it wasn’t until he came to the Nautilus that Aang truly understood what it meant to completely forgo attachment to the world. For the first time he feels the true freedom that comes from completely severing oneself from..well, everything.. It’s like no meditation session he’s ever experienced, and no trip to the spirit world could possibly compare. He sees why his people strove so hard for such transcendence. Why some gave everything they had for the ability to open themselves up to the universe and feel no connection. It’s...heady and intoxicating. To reach out in all directions and touch nothing.
Here in this space Aang isn’t running, neither towards nor away. He is feeling everything and nothing at the same time. Here in this moment, in this imponderable place, he knows a peace he’d long since forgotten he’d ever tasted at all. Aang is nothing more than a stray thought. A speck of happiness in a void of indifference.
But like all things it doesn’t last. Around the edges of his mind guilt begins to seep. Aang becomes aware of just how selfish this kind of bliss is. He belongs to the world; has a duty to the world and the people that live in it. His resolve begins cracks and through these cracks love floods his mind and empowers his will. Aang thinks of all the people he’s met in his life and cannot help but smile.
It’s this memory of love, and the feeling of warmth that comes with it, that prompts him to take a step back. To move away from the bliss, away from the white void. He feels himself return to his body, and is pleased to find a smile on his lips as he does so. His hands come together in a ceremonial gesture of gratitude as he bows towards the void.
He needed this moment of pure clarity, and now that it’s over he feels lighter than the air itself, unburdened. Aang turns on a dime and sprints back towards his shoes, then he whips up an air-scooter and and makes his way back towards the city.
It’s time for adventure.
