The Last Airbender-Aang STILL Ain’t White

The Last Airbender is coming. My family and I see the ads, and at a trip to Barnes & Noble the other day, looked at a shelf of Last Airbender Mad Libs, Movie tie-ins of all sorts, and The Lost Scrolls, a collection from the original series. The last, of course, was the one that did not fit in. The rest featured the cast of the movie, a movie my husband and I have explained to our son, we will not be seeing.

As a family, we watched the original series avidly, somewhat obsessed and dictatorial about the fact that “no one watches Avatar without the family.” It was something we could share and enjoy, characters we grew fond of and could imitate at playtime, walking the dog together. “Mommy, who do you want to be?I’m going to be Aang.” (For some reason, I always chose Toph. Although I like her as a character, anyone who knows me knows that Katara would be a bit too girly for me.)

Now, the movie is here, and our entire Avatar experience grows complicated. On our dog walks, my husband and I explain to our son that we will not be seeing this movie. Here I am, a white woman telling my Korean-American son that we will not be seeing this movie because, well, the characters look like Mommy and Daddy, and not like him.

We talk about what they looked like in the show. “Honey, when we watch Avatar, do they look more like you or more like Mommy and Daddy?” He looks at me like I am idiot and says “More like me.” (The DUH is implied.)

But does he get it? Am I doing enough? Do I have to harp on this again and again until he feels like I am a broken record? How much is too much and how much is not enough? How do I, as a white woman, make sure that I am educating my child about racebending, while also teaching him to be a strong, proud ethnically-Asian man? And do I ruin the original story and our playtime fantasy life by mentioning the movie again and again?

At Barnes & Noble, he grabs the The Last Airbender Mad Libs and says, “Mommy, I wish we could get these just to make fun of the movie.” But what does he mean by that or really understand? Is this just his way of angling for some new Mad Libs?

Then, he points to an image of Aang from the movie and scoffs at it. “Look at his arrow, Mommy. It doesn’t even look real. It’s not even colored in all the way.”

Part of the joy of watching Avatar with him the first time was watching him see strong, ethnically-Asian characters he could admire, but not necessarily having it be just about that. In the backyard, he would wield his “staff” and play Aang. We debated which type of bending we would each choose and, in the same way that we play Star Wars, involved ourselves in the characters, playing our roles as he immersed himself in the world of the story. It was about fun and fantasy, and the great thing about it was the unlike so many of the stories he admires, it reflected him in a way that Star Wars or Ben 10 or Generator Rex do not.

As I write this, I just told my son what I was doing and asked him what he understood of why we would not be seeing the movie. He answer was “that none of the characters looked like anyone in the show because they only used white people.” So maybe he is getting it. And what’s important to me is that we continue having the conversation, despite how annoying he might think I am sometimes.

Today, as a family, we go off to see the new Karate Kid movie. I am not sure what we will find, or what conversations it will require, but at the very least, the Karate Kid ain’t white.