Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino created Aang as a twelve-year-old monk who is told he is the Avatar, runs away from the responsibility, gets frozen in an iceberg for a hundred years, wakes up, and discovers that his failure to accept the role resulted in a genocide. The Air Nomads are gone. His people were killed while he was hiding in ice. The guilt of this is the foundation of everything Aang does for the rest of the series: he did not save them, so he must save everyone else.

The show's central moral question arrives in the finale: must Aang kill Fire Lord Ozai? Every advisor, every past life, every practical consideration says yes. Aang says no, because he is an Air Nomad and Air Nomads do not kill. Dr. Michael Jerryson of Youngstown State University, in his studies of Buddhist nonviolence, has documented how pacifist traditions grapple with the problem of the tyrant, the question of whether refusing to kill becomes complicity in the suffering the tyrant causes. Aang answers this question by finding a third option: energybending, a technique that removes Ozai's ability to firebend without taking his life.

The Boy in the Iceberg

Aang is playful, silly, and desperately trying to remain a child in a situation that demands adulthood. He rides penguins. He makes jokes during training. He avoids his responsibilities with the creativity of someone who knows exactly how heavy those responsibilities are and is not yet ready to carry them. This is not immaturity. It is the last defense of a childhood that the war is systematically stripping away.

Katara and Sokka provide what the Air Nomads cannot: a family. Aang lost everyone. The Southern Water Tribe siblings lost their mother. The three of them form a unit built on mutual loss and mutual recovery, and the warmth of that unit is what gives Aang the emotional resources to face a war.

The Lion Turtle

Aang's solution to the Ozai problem comes from a lion turtle, an ancient creature that teaches him a technique no Avatar has used in thousands of years. Critics have debated whether this resolution is earned or convenient. The argument for convenience is that Aang receives the answer from an external source. The argument for earned is that Aang's entire journey has been a refusal to accept the obvious answer, and the lion turtle's teaching is the universe rewarding his moral stubbornness with a path that does not require him to betray his principles.