Throughout his life and for decades after his death, Avatar Aang was called by many names: "The Peacemaker!" cheered the crowds. "The Balanced One!" His detractors often called him "Aang the Tenderhearted" with a sneer on their lips.
But none of his epithets were as widely recognized as "Avatar Aang: the Last Airbender." It was whispered with reverence and awe, and Jinora understood the poetry and romance of it, but it always made her want to scream, I'm right here!
"Well, he wasthe last airbender," Meelo would say. "It honors him. Our entire culture is preserved through his personal legacy, and I think we have to recognize that. It acknowledges what Grandfather went through."
It was an old, old argument that seemed to take place whenever their travels brought the siblings back together, especially if they met up in Republic City, in the shadow of their grandfather's statue.
"You and me and Ikki and the kids... We build and re-create and share Air Nomad culture every day, and we've been doing it for our entire lives. It's our legacy, too. Avatar Aang won. Calling him 'the last airbender' halts his accomplishments. The world is still stuck two hundred years in the past."
"Look around you, Jinora," was Ikki's usual teasing response. "The world couldn't be more different from Aang's day. Your head is buried in those history books like it's always been."
It wasn't mean-spirited, but Jinora usually let the conversations drop at this point, because even she wasn't sure exactly what she was really arguing about. She felt called to respect her ancestors' ways, and she also wanted to be present and active in the world on its current terms. Her siblings' points made sense, but every day she lived the paradox of an Air Nomad struggling to re-root herself and her people into the world.
Mostly she just wanted to shout at the top of her lungs, We are not dead!
And it wasn't that her siblings didn't also work tirelessly to train their own children in airbending. It wasn't that they didn't also travel constantly to make sure the other nations couldn't ignore them. Jinora just never quite trusted the intentions of anyone outside her family as much as the others did; she could never shake the feeling that she lived her life mourning for what was and what might have been.