Avatar: A Study in Worldbuilding — The Air Nomads | Avatar: The Last Airbender

we have discussed the earth kingdom and fire nation before but now we turn to the most mysterious and unknown of the four the ear nomads and thanks to today's sponsor me i'm the sponsor you decided on what the cover for unwriting and word building volume 2 should be and now we get to see what you pick isn't she gorgeous just look at those curves not even kidding 35 000 copies have been sold to volume 1 so far and volume 2 is here at last this book is a codified version of all of the writing and we're building stuff that we've been talking about you know redemption arcs fight scenes hard and soft were building but this is way easier to study and reference than a bunch of videos and it's been edited and rewritten basically from the ground up with 12 000 words worth of exclusive extra succulent detail it just feels so good to have it in my hands and you can have it in yours on november 26th but you can pre-order it now ebook or paperback the paperback is going to drop on amazon on november 26th link's down below what do you mean this would be a great christmas present i hadn't thought of that or explicitly planned for that to be the case part one the nation state the air nomads are one of the four peoples of the avatar world they travel around without necessarily having a single home but characters understanding of what the nomads were like is full of myths and lies and misconceptions in the series and so i think that ours might be too one being that they are a nation-state like the fire national earth kingdom are that they have a strict hierarchy of monks with a leader laws with them all living in these temples you know you might get that impression nation states are generally defined as one a clear territory largely populated by two a dominant ethnic group three ruled by that ethnic group i mean there are a lot of other things you could almost say that nation states are complicated but not only did the nomads not govern a clear territory with the northern air temple being found in the earth kingdom itself but they don't have a ruling state body that all of the nomads come under especially not one with the executive judicial and law making powers that traditionally make up a state there are influential monks and nuns with leadership roles in each temple but each of the four temples were it seems mostly independent more akin to how the north and south are sister tribes and that's by the way a key difference between a state and a nation a state is kind of like a political entity with power and a nation is a group of people with a common identity a nation state is when you have both of those things together in reality the air nomads were a disconnected community with a common culture but mostly they didn't live in the temples there wasn't a president monk out there going ask not what your temple can do for you but what you can do for your temple the temples were places for raising new monks and holding festivals but the adults just moved out and away and lived a lot more independently the reason that people seem to think that they all lived there is because that's all that is really left of their culture it's hard to find many of their relics elsewhere it looks like they were connected but not the tightly knit community that we and the characters in the series seem to imagine them as and part of this is because we're building a culture isn't just figuring out what a culture is like but it's how other cultures imagined them and there are two good reasons for why the air nomads were so widely misunderstood in this world rarity and genocide first the nomads were so rarely seen and reclusive and had such a low population that they were surrounded by an heir you might say of mystery so much so that it's noted in shadow of kiyoshi that people sought out their blessing for their children and simply seeing one was a sign of good fortune or a good harvest it was a rare thing for them to return and in greater numbers they took on this pseudo-mythical identity because people could not easily study or access their culture it just wasn't brought to them as regularly as earth fire and water culture was through things like trade and naturally people tried to fit the nomads into their understanding of how a nation worked so they took this loose monk hierarchy that they knew was out there and applied it to a state hierarchy imagining an ecclesiocracy which is why characters in the series seem to not really understand nomad culture but there's also that more sinister second element genocide this idea that the nomads were a defined nation-state pretty clearly comes from the fire nation's propaganda genocide isn't just something that comes out of nowhere there are lots of cultural and political forces that lead up to it and make it happen and the creators kept those in mind when world building the air no mad genocide it seems we see in the episode the headband that children are taught that the nomads were a formal state with a military and hierarchy like the fire nation's own and that's because this is something that we see in basically every genocide in nazi germany the jewish people were portrayed as a formal collective working together to undermine the german people rather than the reality of a disconnected community with a common culture it's a parallel that we can draw there are accounts of auschwitz workers talking about how the line between civilian and militant became so blurred for them that the systemic murder just seemed okay it turns them into enemy combatants which is something that turkey continues to do in denying the armenian genocide insisting that it was a conflict between two parties to be clear it wasn't but it becomes easier to justify systemic genocide when victims are painted this way and it seems the anomads were too at the height of the fire nation's power we could guess that they controlled maybe a third of the world's population through the colonies and they did this for nearly a century they taught people this idea for decades and even when the nomads returned after the hundred year war it's not surprising that this myth of them as a single organized hierarchical state seemed to carry on but why didn't the nomads develop a formal centralized government it might have something to do with their part two nomadic lifestyle agriculture and the marketplace are both closely tied to the development of centralized power structures like the state early stationary settlements developed in part to maintain irrigation for crops to clear land for food to manage waterways that sort of thing and with that there was a clear territory to protect giving rise to the state this is something that we see both with the fire nation capital and basing say but not the air nomads while we do see some limited agriculture during chorus time we mostly see that nomads forage for fruit vegetables berries that sort of thing nomadism is more common in harsher environments like tundra or desert or mountains where agriculture is a lot harder and what do you know the temples were mostly built around mountain climates that are not great for growing rice all of this meant that it was possibly more efficient for them especially with lower disconnected populations to move around and forage following where the food grows nomadism becomes a survival method in these harsher climates and because of that without agriculture creating that need to organize resources there isn't that same demand for the state and i think it's really cool that we can see how their environment really informs the way they live in a way that you probably don't think about that much likewise the state is also associated with the marketplace settled towns allowing nomadic groups to trade goods but trade doesn't really seem that important to the air nomads you know with the whole don't get too attached to earthly things gig but either way that role was already filled by the other nations that they traveled to and that's not to mention that the four temples are just too far away for any central administration to be making efficient decisions it'd just be slow and unproductive these factors together meant that a centralized power structure was unlikely to form an ear no man's society and the temples were basically all independent even if they share a common culture part 3 sky bison these creatures are the cornerstone of air nomad society so like this video if opera is the bestest boy god i'm awful at this youtube thing i mean they're responsible for the ear part of the ear nomad but what's more interesting is that the sky bison clearly live in a symbiotic relationship with the air nomads which if you haven't completed year 9 signs yet welcome don't do drugs and it means that there are creatures that benefit from living around one another in some way science geeks please don't hurt me in the case of the nomads and sky bison the nomads protect and help the bison find food while the sky bison taught the nomads to airbend and carry them across the world in exchange nomadic societies are usually closely tied to a particular animal for food and clothing and resources you know buffalo reindeer or horses either following their migratory patterns or herding them to better sources of food as the seasons change now i don't think it is any coincidence that the sky bison are long distance migratory creatures by nature who move with the seasons like buffalo are in our world and that the airbenders adapted a nomadic lifestyle when looking at how to create a real nomadic society with this symbiotic relationship we can pretty safely guess that the airbenders logically began following the migratory patterns of the sky bison migration is tied to mating in a lot of species which may be why we're shown that the bison have mating grounds next to the northern and eastern air temples as they followed these migratory patterns the nomads probably built their temples at these spots that the sky bison naturally stopped at in the spring and summer to mate then they migrated to warmer climates on the opposite side of the world to avoid the harshest part of winter finding a similar mountain environment this might even explain the positioning of the four temples which i've always found to be a little bit weird because they only vaguely match up with north south east and west i mean look i get the geography is not ever on strong point but this is the worst compass i've ever seen but if the migratory patterns of the different sky bison herds look something like this then it makes perfect sense doesn't it then naturally over time people would just start attaching those names to them north south east and west in other words the sky bison aren't just responsible for the air part of air nomad but the nomad part as well part 4 airbending like each of the cultures in the last airbender bending deeply informs the world building of nomad life the games they play how they move how they build their homes you can actually look at the temples and you'll see that they don't build many pathways around their temples because they can just fly and they especially don't have railings because they assume people aren't going to fall but of course the most notable influence airbending has seems to be in their philosophy non-violence respect for the sanctity of all kinds of life with an emphasis on spiritual enlightenment and not becoming attached to the pleasures and pains of the earth as much culture as it is philosophy it's why aang is vegetarian it's why they wear minimalist clothes it's why they accept same-sex relationships because understanding these tenets makes you a better airbender for a while i questioned how realistic it was that this large community of thousands of people were so rigidly dedicated to this very restrictive lifestyle because communities like this are typically quite small and then i learned that there were 300 000 amish people you know i'd say good on you but i know you won't see this video and then i realized something else as well they didn't just have a symbiotic relationship with the sky bison but probably with the spirits as well i will admit this is getting closer to speculation but the animates are the only civilization where all of their children are born as benders bending is of course a huge advantage it makes it easier to travel to gather food to survive but the reason that they were always born as benders was because of their spiritual lifestyle and if that's the case then i could very easily see how nomad culture developed this intense religious devotion to the natural world and non-violence because it attracted the spirits that gave them air bending and we see that the spirits do hang around the temples spirits also make the natural world flourish which may have made foraging and nomadism even easier good worldbuilding sees all of these things working together and here the nomadic lifestyle is the result of their hostile environment their relationship with the sky bison and their relationship with the spirits it may seem however i also think this is one of those misconceptions that we talked about before think about the mythologized or romanticized ideas we have about ancient civilizations or indigenous groups that have long been wiped out or evolved we over emphasize cultural elements that distinguish them from us especially idealistic or violent ones when these people were nearly always more complicated than that this has pretty clearly happened to the air nomads people imagined them as these paragons of spirituality who were always perfect and always wise and always at one with nature and while they were a lot like that they were not as rigid and restrictive and perfect as people think shadow of kyoshi has an air nomad bless some earth kingdom people by just blowing air in their direction and he goes you know i have no idea if that works but it seems to make them happy they literally often made up blessings in exchange for food and lodging as they traveled we also see that the monks are petty and bureaucratic and they weren't all detached and above violence while vegetarianism was common it wasn't universal much of it is exaggerated even if it has a kernel of truth and i mean that's quite a realistic portrayal of how we mythologize cultures from the past remember on writing word building volume 2 november 26th but available for pre-order the links down below stay nerdy by getting this book and i will see you in the future on november 26th so you

Channel: Hello Future Me

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Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2021