Basically have Aang wake up the same as in the cartoon.The attempted full scale genocide still happened like in the official canon but this time was not fully successful besides the avatar.
Somebody in the water tribe might say there are rumours with sokka probably blowing it off. Iroh and Zuko might be aware of them but Zuko's has never dealt with any of them and probably only Iroh has dealt with any airbenders in combat if anyone on the ship did. And until they basically meet one or encounter them it is mostly the same as in the cartoon .
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Just give Sozin a secret airbender breeding compound
Realistically a genetic-level genocide wouldn't succeed because they have flying bison they can ride into other nations like Aang tried to. How would the fire nation stop them from escaping?
Air nomads would wind up integrating into other cultures and they'd be found here and there everywhere. Probably even in the Fire Nation except they'd have to hide it or be protected by influential families. There'd no longer be an "Air Nation" but there'd still be air benders.
So just write the fanfic to be a tad more realistic than the children's cartoon? Establish as the premise it's an AU where the benders mingle and they use different kinds of bending everywhere.
this
anyone who displayed any air bending abilities would be made to hide it by their families, for fear of being killed by the fire nation. there would likely be no skilled or trained airbenders left in the world, just people forced to conceal their nature their whole lives.
would make for a good plot point for Aangs return, finding and teaching the air nomad's techniques and history to these aribenders.
kinda like what they did in LoK, but without the weird deus ex machina to bring the benders back.
Worst part about this is that this hide the special from the empire plot was wasted on Haru.
Y'know Haru, everyone's 6th favorite Earthbender.
I think aside from "Not all the nomads were home" the shortest pitch would be
>They're Sandbenders
Seriously they use bending to make wind so they can travel and maintain a nomadic lifestyle.
Beat me to it here. But other than a questionable interaction with Appa and Aang to leave without mentioning that and leave Aang in his funk: it'd probably slide seamlessly into the series.
You could have little hidden groups of airbenders who survived the Fire Nation's attempt at genocide. Since a lot of airbenders seemed to live in out-of-the-way, difficult-to-reach places anyway, it wouldn't seem out of place lore-wise. Some of them might be hiding out in the Spirit Realm (you could have the spirit of Avatar Yangchen or one of the other previous Avatars looking after them) waiting for a safe time to return.
Unknown continent based on various European cultures that have them, though they’re not as spiritual and more like gypsies or thieves.
What would a European style Airbender be like?
Another Asian Airbender style group could be the mongol themed. With open plains and an eternal blue sky.
For me mongols are either earth or fire, but for euro Air benders gypsies seem a good fit, both are nomadic and have a weird spiritual shit to them. Only in the euro continent they won’t be chill and zen but actively disliked by most people. Though I’ve seen people make them like Christian monks but I never really cared for that.
Secret society living on top of a random mountain. A place where there would be zero point for the Fire Nation to bother to look.
>Keep last airbender the same.
>Pretend everything post season 1 Korra didn't happen.
>New villains are revealed to be a secret underground organization of airbenders.
>Similar to the flying bison, it's revealed that not all the air nomads were killed in Sozin's attack.
>They originally hid secretly on the uninhabited islands north of the fire nation. But eventually integrated into society once all the tattooed elder's died off.
>As generations pass, their hatred for the world grows. The latest generation are the most extreme, planning to violently enact revenge against the fire nation
>Zaheer is rewritten to be the leader of this extremist group, retconning his anarchist philosophy.
Honestly sounds good. The thought of bloodthirsty airbenders is really interesting. Zaheer was dangerous but he wasn't really brutal the way this version of him would be.
This the first idea that comes to my head. Airbenders were mostly wiped out due to the fire nation's coordinated attack, but some do escape. Those that do escape end up having to hide from the fire nation meaning they can't openly show themselves as air benders anymore. The community that forms ends up having to give up their air bender culture for the most part in order to hide, and over the 100 years most of the current air benders in this small community don't have memory of what their culture was like, especially the younger ones. Instead, this group of surviving air nomads can't truly adapt to simply living and fully blending in to the surrounding culture, so instead retain their travelling nomadic lifestyle but this time as circus performers and entertainers. They only ever use their airbending in the most subtle of ways to help them when performing stunts or hiding from fire nation troops. (If you really want you can connect them to Ty Lee and the whole meme about her looking like she's part air nomad).
Aang would be interested in seeing the show unaware of them being air benders, but would immediately be suspicious after he sees one of the young performers do some stunt that he notices air bending was used for. He then tries to convince the rest of the Gang who are sceptical but willing to hear him out. Eventually Aang manages to confront the young acrobat, they find out they are both air benders but the acrobat all this time was very hesitant to reveal this as their culture is built around keeping these subtle abilities a secret. Aang is so happy there are still air benders out there but is devastated that his culture has pretty much entirely disappeared in place of this circus one, and that their air bending abilities have become so limited that he feels like he's still the last air bender because of this. (1/2)
Then, Aang decides he wants to teach some of the kids within his age range some aspects of air nomad culture as well as sick advanced air bending techniques which impresses a lot of the kids, but pisses off the elders who want nothing to do with all this as it'd risk revealing their 100 year secret to the fire nation and getting themselves detained. That's where the main conflict would be, maybe one of the kids tries some of the air bending stuff Aang showed them during a performance and it gets super risky when fire nation soldiers are watching. Then, maybe some time towards the end of the series we see some of the hidden air benders embrace their culture and remove their circus costumes to reveal they've applied the air bending tattoos in a big moment when they join the fight against the fire nation. At the end of the series when the fire nation is defeated they'd begin to slowly start accepting their original culture more with Aang teaching them, but not getting rid of their current travelling performer culture either, instead combining aspects of both of them into a new air bending culture going forward. (2/2)
Make a comment about how airbenders get around. Then maybe have Ty Lee's plot be about how she and her family are airbenders in hiding and how she rejects air nomad culture so she can be juxtaposed with Aang. Like, how would Aang feel of he discovered he wasn't the last airbender after all but the remaining airbenders think air nomad culture is both silly and stifling.
Basically just do what a lot of anons here are saying, with Air Benders just melding into other societies. You'd probably find most in the Earth Kingdom due to its sheer size and maybe a couple in the Water Tribes. Rarely there could even be a couple in the Fire Nation who decided laying low wouldn't be as risky as fleeing in the night.
You could even do something neat with traditions mixing with the local cultures. Sandbender tribes showing a love for tattoos, winged lemurs being sold as exotic pets, Northern Water Tribe traders who spend almost their entire life on the move.
I think they would probably go straight to one of those three big cities the water City gets stood by itself for a hundred years King booby City or the one with the Great Walls. How were Airbender culture change the paradise which one of their cities they choose?
Aang being the last airbender doesn't actually make any sense even in the context of the original series.
The Air Nomads are the most difficult people to actually hunt down if you actually want to catch them. Even if you destroy the temples, they have god-tier mobility (they can fly with basic tools and have flying animals) and nomadic knowledge which gives them exclusive geographical knowledge. They probably have lots of secret hidden abodes in high places even during peace. Even if they didn't, they can live in entirely hidden and inaccessible mountain locations, or just blend easily into Earth Kingdom society.
It's actually moronic that a pocket of survivors didn't obviously survive for the course of a century.
Moreover this fact could have been the resolution for the final season. Rather than learning Spirit Bending at the last moment from a turtle, he could learn it from an Air Bender (Spirit Bending then being the "advanced" bending for airbenders, as they are the least earthly of the four elements), possibly even from an old school friend who is now ancient but spent his entire life honing Spirit Bending in the believe Aang would return and need it.
This ALSO solves the issue of Aang knowing he's the last of his kind but deciding to have a tiny family in a monogamous family, which considering the era, neither of those things would happen. He would be a stud repopulating the Air Nomad tribe through multiple women, or at least have fricktons of kids with Katara as large families are not exactly unusual. If there are other airbenders, the air nomads can simply come out of hiding and repopulate. If it's just Aang, and only his children can genetically be airbenders, and you need balance, he's morally and contractually obligated to frick air nomads back into existence.
You'd be willing to overlook these problems of ATLA, except Korra chooses to make this all stuff now something the audience has to now consider, making it retroactively stupid writing.
>If you insert all this moronic headcanon of mine into the original series, then it makes Korra's writing stupid
Idiot. Korra's writing was already stupid, but not for your homosexualy made-up reasons.
The world simply begins to balance itself by causing new airbenders to be born.
More air benders somehow incased in ice by various and contrived means?
make trans-bending possible.
bending is just a social construct anyways.
just go with the original ending lol
What?