#avaterverse

-Life fucking hell every airbender was an air nomad.

-Everyone born to air nomads were benders? suuure and my name Ann Katan (And its not)

-Firebenders managed to get every single air nomad b/c missing stuff from their culture trumped common sense and they all fell for traps. riiiight

I find those statements very hard to believe. 

The first one b/c we know that nonbenders can be born to benders just as randomly that benders can be born to nonbenders in all of the other cultures. B/c just b/c someone is born to a spiritual/religious family/culture doesn’t mean that they will be a spiritual/religious person. 

Also I highly doubt that those monks and nuns living in separate temples separated by very good distances were doing enough procreation to be solely populating these temples.  And given the glimpses we saw they weren’t homogenous enough looking for all of the inbreeding that such a thing would imply.

SO yeah it’d make sense that the temples were getting airbending converts from somewhere and given that only airbenders got to live in the temples/go up in the ranks, then nonbenders would probably be given away. And that means that there are airbenders and potential future airbenders outside of the temples. There would be airbenders out there, likely scattered across the Earth Kingdom with their own bending styles and ideologies and cultures independent of the monks. And its very likely that the non-air nomad airbenders were very very hard to hunt down.

Airbending facilitates agility, speed, and crossing vast distances. Airbenders can fly, be very entertaining, climb and work at heights that are impossible for others, create tornadoes, kill by asphyxiation, fling folks great distances . Given what happened with the new air nation and the Earth Queen people would have wanted to use and abuse them for their own ends. To avoid such fates they’d probably have to be secretive and flighty and nomadic. To survive some would probably resort to criminal behavior or even go onto criminal career paths like Kai. They’d either be good at sneaking n dodging n running or they’d get caught, jailed, or killed.

Which would lead to a lot of negative stereotypes and prejudice and probably a good reason for parents trying to get their kids to join a monastery. The stability of the air nomads would probably also be a draw for some adults. But not all.

Like imagine  Aang running into non-air nomad airbenders. maybe he didn’t know they exist b/c the monks never talked about them. Maybe everyone thinks that airbenders are extinct b/c they’re just that good at hiding and decided to stay hidden b/c they don't want to be captured or killed.