Thunder sings her name across the battle field.

Instead of sending a fleet, the initial raids and abductions aim to learn how to wage war against waterbenders who are surrounded by water, ice, and snow at any given moment. Fire is quite vulnerable to water, after all, because water extinguishes fire.

So, the Fire Nation collects data from every raid, documents and analyzes exploitable weaknesses, and tests different strategies and timing to tailor warfare and training in iterations accordingly. The abducted waterbenders become vital because they are turned into living training material for the soldiers. In the version canon gives us through Hama's testimony, waterbenders are held in cages and kept from bending under all circumstances. The question is why? Why go to such lengths? The construction, maintenance, and staffing of these prisons (which apparently hold the entire waterbender population of the South Pole) must be expensive. The Fire Nation isn't shy about eliminating an entire nation in one campaign, as they demonstrated with the Air Nomads. So, why keep waterbenders alive?

For my Hama AU, I decided to integrate the prison into the compounds of military academies. Hama and her comrades are held under conditions that prevent all waterbending, but the guards regularly transfer them in rotation to a training arena, where they have to waterbend to survive fighting soldiers in training.

In the Boiling Rock episode, we see that the Fire Nation controls firebending prisoners by literally cooling them down, strongly indicating that lower temperatures weaken firebenders. I think it's reasonable that this cooling technique is quite old because before the war, the only benders the Fire Nation would've needed to imprison were firebenders. The training arenas are equipped with the same mechanisms that allow instructors to adjust the temperature: at first, the temperatures are comfortable, even favorable for the firebenders, so they can focus on studying how waterbenders fight. The better the firebenders get, the more the instructors lower the temperatures to push their bodies to generate heat and mobilize energy under conditions that weaken them while strengthening their opponents, simulating combat conditions at the South Pole. The Fire Nation forces the abducted waterbenders to teach its soldiers how to fight them better. Analysts observe and record the sessions in detail to catalog waterbending forms, adjust training doctrines for the drills, update manuals, and design firebending techniques specifically to counter commonly observed waterbending forms, test those inventions in subsequent combat simulation sessions, and refine them through iterations. The arenas are a training ground and a highly methodical firebending military laboratory.

At first, the purpose of the abducted waterbenders from the South is limited to optimizing warfare against the Water Tribes. However, after a few years, the instructors notice that waterbenders make firebenders better firebenders. They are invaluable assets.

As Iroh explains, water is the element of change. Even after years, the analysts notice that these waterbender subjects never seem to run out of new ideas. Their capacity to improvise is genuinely admired among officers and relentlessly exploited: since the waterbenders keep adapting, they, too, can keep innovating. Their primary interests shift from optimizing waterbending specifically to advancing military firebending in general, as the war increasingly produces its own branch of firebending.

To train as many soldiers as fast and as efficiently as possible, masters started to radically standardize and simplify forms. The pro was reduced training time and higher accessibility; art and style were sacrificed in favor of aggression and speed. The con was far less flexibility and a narrower range of attacks; the more automated the muscle memory, the lower the responsiveness and capacity to improvise, because highly standardized training focused on repeating sequences rather than learning to combine isolated forms and figures.

Fighting waterbenders mitigates these downsides, and continuing to study their adaptations keeps firebending adaptive and flexible, which makes it harder for earthbenders to fight the Fire Nation soldiers because the repertoire keeps growing and becoming unpredictable.

Hama joins because she can use it. She does not become ideologically absorbed into it. She tolerates that because it buys routes, intelligence, safe houses, weapons, access, and connections. She's a menace, though, giving them lots of headaches because she's never shy about making demands or refusing concessions, and the commando of bloodbenders she leads are too valuable to alienate. 

In some ways, she burns even hotter with venom against the Fire Nation after decades of active resistance because that work keeps producing evidence against this state. She and her comrades free prisoners, so the Fire Nation starts executing them. They carve extraction routes, so prisons become more secretive. They win tactical victories, and she has to watch the machinery mutate.

She may indeed be tired of mothering because she's been doing that since her own mother died (and I think meta highly underconsiders that her struggle with her mother's death isn't only because she loved Kya so much/more than Sokka loved her, but also because Kya's death reorganized Katara's duties, obligations, responsibilities, etc. to fill the role Kya left. Sokka himself explicitly emphasizes that he sees Katara's face when he tries to remember their mother, which is so heartbreaking because he confirms that Katara, his little sister, became his caretaker. Sokka repeatedly insinuating that Katara grieves their mother too intensely after all this time, implicates an astonishing ignorance that he, the great and smart strategist, fails to connect the dots "I accepted my little sister as caregiver" and "that may contribute to her grieving in ways I wasn't subjected to because Katara filled the caregiver space of our mother for me but no one filled it for her." He doesn't even express any of that to Katara directly, but to Toph and Katara only overhears it by accident!), but both as wife of Zuko or Aang, motherhood is practically a non-negotiable expectation. 

I mean, if anyone really cared about Katara having a loving relationship and the option to have or not have children without all the pressure, Haru would be the obvious choice. Not that I'm super invested in that ship, but he's a compelling counterexample to examine how both Zuko and Aang absorb Katara as a person. "Avatar" (and "Last Airbender") and "Fire Lord" will always overshadow Katara in political significance. Haru has no title, no office, no political/religious function to fulfill; he's just a young man from the Earth Kingdom whose mother runs a shop and whose father is a veteran.

Haru isn't the Fire Lord who needs an heir, and the earthbending population is very stable by the end of the war. There's no structural pressure to make babies, so for them, starting can be a genuine choice they make together, relevant only to them and their immediate communities.

However, more importantly, Haru and Katara meet through occupation, prohibition, grief, fear, resistance, and family loss. Katara bonds with him through what suppressing earthbending is doing to him because bending is also deeply tied to her own identity and history. She sees his community suffering under domination, refuses resignation, deliberately creates conditions for resistance, fails once, adapts, and eventually helps ignite rebellion. Haru saw her doing it; Haru and his father Tyro credit her as the person who reunited and radicalized them into resistance fighters. They are the first men in the franchise who treat her as a political actor in her own right.

This nation would basically live through migration, taking in novices, adoption, or initiation into the monastic life, maybe not even necessarily as a baby. So far, the lore and worldbuilding are consistent. The disappearance of airbenders could be understood less as "everyone with the airbender gene was killed," and more as the culturing that cultivated airbending, inter alia but certainly not exclusively, stopped because practitioners were killed and no one could pass the knowledge on or keep cultivating the practices.

In other words, we don't even need the contrivance of "underground airbending society where the airbending gene pool survived." It would make the spiritual focus of the Air Nomads more than an aesthetic, because part of Air Nomad culturing would emerge from transcending the attachment to inherent categories like "bender" or "non-bender." So far, so great....

However, the post-War and LOK material nullifies all of that because it definitely commits to bio-essentialism with an intensity that erases all ambiguity. If airbending was truly a spiritual practice, at least some of the Air Acolytes should've been able to learn airbending to some degree. I think that had potential since the war likely made a lot of orphans, too, and one could've written the story that the orphaned culture and the orphaned children (independent of age) give each other a home and future reciprocally. Not in a quid pro quo economic-transactional way, but becoming-with/becoming-together. That would be MY IDEA to handle airbending post-war. I would not have locked in on making bending an absolute bio-essentialist binary where some people have the essence (for simplicity, you'll see me refer to "airbending gene" throughout the rest of this impromptu essay; that's a shorthand because the whole reproduction drama in Aang's family invites treating bending as genetically determined and strongly biologically because if it was truly determined by practice and spiritual dsicipline, at least one of the Air Acolytes should've been able to learn it; or maybe it means that they're all, including Bumi and Kya, spiritually deficient, I guess. But even if it's, like, a "spiritual" essence, if it can only be "transmitted" through biological lineage, it's quasi-/de facto biological)

Alas, no. Aang's sperm is apparently some magical elixir that can preserve airbending. Bending is inherently hereditary. Therefore, selective breeding is the only way to mitigate the bottleneck.... Under these conditions, it gets so dark and so disturbing so fast.... Like, is it even ethical for Aang to expect Katara (or any singular woman, really) to carry so much reproductive pressure? Think about it. They have three children; only one of them has the airbender gene, and it's the youngest son. It's not ever really addressed, I think, but if Katara had wanted only two children or if one of the pregnancies was already demanding or a health risk, could they have stopped? What if the third one hadn't been an airbender? Would they have continued until their sex produced the correct heir? After all, IF the worldbuilding insists on bio-essentialism not as confused ideology, but an ontological fact, Katara herself is under immense reproductive pressure as the last person of the Southern Waterbender lineage (sort of, after all, her paternal grandmother is already Northern, which shouldn't matter at all, but in a bio-essentialist ontology, it would: as I said, it gets dark and disturbing very, very fast). Or should Aang make babies with as many mothers as possible? I'm not advocating for that, but if Aang is the only way to preserve airbending through genetics, the stakes are civilizational and potentially spiritual if the distribution of benders across all four nations is indeed essential for the metaphysical balance; this question would arise, along with a lot of legal, political, and social questions: would Aang be considered the Father or Head of State? Do only the aribending children matter? What happens with those who didn't inherit whatever trait makes them airbenders? What status do the mothers "have?" Do they sign a waiver: if the baby is an airbender, Aang has all the custody rights; if they aren't, the mother does? Are the children themselves already partly airbender breeding stock? Will they have to contribute one child when they're adults?

LOK sort of "solves" this bottleneck with a pretty much literal deus ex machina, but I don't think that solves the actual problems bio-essentialism conditions. Okay, now you have a miraculously broadened gene pool, I guess. But at this point it's already established that bending is hereditary. So, I guess, the cosmos rewrote the genetics of a random set of populations....? And if not, so if airbending isn't a biological trait now programmed into the DNA, the "solution" is temporary, because even if there were now millions of airbenders, they all die eventually. The situation for these airbenders, if their airbending gene can sexually reproduce, seems alright because they can arrange their culture accordingly.

However, if airbending is a biological gene-essence, the logistics for the pre-war airbenders become retrospectively very disturbing. As I outlined in detail, if airbending didn't rely on biological reproduction, the organizing of the Air Nomads as a nation is perfectly fine and coherent, even logical. BUT if, and the idea that Aang's sperm is the only way to preserve the genes, as well as the cosmic intervention to solve the bottleneck, couldn't commit harder to it, airbending is a bio-essentialist trait, a lot of Air Nomad lore comes with caveats.

First, every Air Nomad is an airbender. There are no non-benders among the Air Nomads. However, in this bio-essentialist worldbuilding, passing on a certain bending gene (or any bending gene at all) is probabilistic: Only one of Aang's and Katara's three children was born as an airbender. Does this mean that children born without the airbending trait are categorically not recognized as citizens/members of the Air Nomads? Exiled by biology? To where? Where do the non-airbending children grow up? Who takes care of them? Was there a caste system?

Would two airbending parents increase the probability that the child inherits the trait? Maybe, probably. But, you see, this is eugenics!!!!! That is selective breeding!!!! If you start to organize reproduction around certain outcomes like "100% airbender rate." Especially if the granting of nationality/citizenship would depend on a certain hereditary "airbending" trait.

Remember, Air Nomads live monastically and are separated by gender from childhood on. They don't seem to know who their biological parents are. Again, think logistics. If airbending bio-essentialism is as severe as canon insists through Aang's reproductive history, nuns and monks still have to make babies to sustain their people (a problem that wouldn't arise if the lore just committed to the spirituality explanation, but, I guess, then you wouldn't have had the reproductive drama and bottleneck and how can you tell a good story without some eugenics, am I right?/SAR!!!!) Of course, that might mean there are fertility festivals where the usually separated male and female members of the Air Nomads do the deed and nine months later, all the babies are distributed among the four temples. However, some registry would need to keep track of genealogy, of who made a baby with whom, to avoid accidental incest because the Air Nomad community seems to be quite small, and when the children are raised communally, but also separated by gender, they may not know who's their brother, their sister, their cousins, their parents, their grandparents, their uncle, their aunts, etc. Which means the pairings cannot purely rely on chemistry or who you would want to have sex with. You'd first have to check if you are related and how closely. Do you see how unsustainable the Air Nomads would be as a society if you make airbending as bio-essentialist as TOK did?

And don't get me started on how unequal the reproductive labor of the Air Nomads would've been! Monks show up for the conception, then everyone returns to their gender-isolated home Temple. Air Nomad boys would be entirely sheltered from witnessing pregnancy, childbirth, recovery, nursing, etc. Once in a while, new baby novices arrive, I guess, while Air Nomad girls would grow up in an entirely different reality where they see older sisters pregnant, giving birth, recovering, miscarrying, nursing (because without some form of baby formula, keeping newborns and infants alive is very hard) and eventually parting with the babies they carried, birthed and nursed because boys grow up in other temples and even girls might be transported to the South/North sister temple under circumstances. Every younger novice/brother Aang ever witnessed being welcomed in his home temple is a baby: an Air Nomad girl bid farewell to and witnessed how the woman who birthed and nursed the boy had to let him go and perform all the emotional labor of that separation. A monk would just not be subjected to any of that emotional and physical labor.

Individual claims about the Air Nomads and airbending remain underdetermined enough, but if they are all true simultaneously, they form a network of constraints that logically exclude alternatives because those alternatives violate another stated fact. If “all Air Nomads are airbenders” stood alone, we can explain airbending as a cultural or spiritual practice. If “Air Nomads live communally in gender-separated temples” stands next to "all Air Nomads are airbenders," these two statements reinforce each other. All good. If “bending is hereditary and a bio-essentialist binary like an on/off switch, so there are ontologically separate categories of human-beings" stands next to the first two statements, and the setting insists on all of them simultaneously, the remaining demographic possibilities become increasingly ugly. If bending wasn't a bio-essentialist binary inside the world, none of the plotlines in LOK make any sense.

The earlier unwanted advances establish his sexual interest and her lack of reciprocation. The intimate touch (this is a kid’s show; cradling June’s body on top of him is about as explicit as the show can get. So, I wouldn’t brush it away as harmless contact, just because it isn’t more sexually explicit because it physically can’t depict more) is a deliberate escalation and violation of June’s boundaries and consent.

Considering how much condemnation Ozai’s domestic abuse is drawing, I think the show shouldn’t give Iroh a pass just because he’s the nice uncle. Mind you, this happens years after his alleged moral awakening!

I mean, sure, the presence and comedic treatment of non-consensual sexualized body contact can be explained historically. A lot of media a few decades ago was much more comfortable with misogyny and disciplining, borderline punishing, abrasive, confident, conventionally attractive but inconveniently uninterested women as a punchline, but that doesn’t change what occurs diegetically. The joke is that he’s getting away with touching/holding a woman who’s not consenting and would stop him if she could move. The joke is that he knows she doesn’t want it but does it anyway with a smirk. Her humiliation is part of the joke!