“How old is Aang?” is a question that has plagued shippers, fan fiction writers, and fan artist in the Avatar: The Last Airbender fandom for years. So naturally, now that Aang and his pals are adults in the new movie, Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender—which will begin streaming on Paramount+ tomorrow—fans have the same query.
The Avatar Aang movie is directed by Lauren Montgomery, and written by Tim Hedrick and Christopher Yost, from a story by ATLA co-creators Bryan Konietzko, Michael Dante DiMartino, as well as Hedrick, and Kenneth Lin. The story follows a now-adult Aang (voiced by Eric Nam), who discovers a new-new Airbender frozen in ice named Tagah (voiced by Dave Bautista). Tagah reveals there is a way to bring back all the Air Nomads, if Aang can just track down a magic staff.
So, Aang gathers Team Avatar: Katara (voiced by Jessica Matten), Sokka (Román Zaragoza), Toph (Dionne Quan), and Fire Lord Zuko (Steven Yeun). They hop on Appa, and go flying into their next epic adventure.
This new animated movie is a sequel to the original Avatar series, which ended with Aang as a 13-year-old kid, but a prequel to The Legend of Korra series, which followed the next Avatar after Aang’s death. So how old is Aang, exactly, in the Avatar Aang movie?
How old is Aang in the Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender movie?
Aang is somewhere around 23 to 25 years old in the movie, according Konietzko, who spoke to Entertainment Weekly earlier this month for a feature on the movie. The article states that the movie takes place “a decade after the end of the 100-year war.”
As fans know, Aang was 13 at the end of the original series, which concludes with the end of the 100-year war. So if this movie takes place exactly 10 years after that, Aang would be 23 years old.
However, also according to EW, Konietzko said that Aang is around 25 years old “at this precipice between adolescence and adulthood. He’s hot, he’s tall and ripped, broad shouldered, and he looks great, but he’s not quite the adult Avatar that he needs to be yet. So this film is really trying to dive into that.”
Maybe the official end of the war didn’t happen until Aang was 14, or maybe EW was using the term “decade” in a looser, “around 10 years” type of way. Or maybe “around 25” really means 23. Whatever the case, it’s safe to assume Aang is in his early-to-mid-twenties in the Avatar Aang movie.
Based on this, we can also assume that Sokka and Zuko (now the Fire Lord) are around 27 to 29, and that Katara is around 25 to 27.
When do Aang and Katara have kids?
One thing that fans who watched The Legend of Korra might wonder is when, exactly, Aang and Katara had their three children: Bumi, the eldest; Kya, the middle child; and Tenzin, the youngest and also an airbender. This feels especially relevant given how much Aang is worried about the airbenders dying out in the Avatar Aang movie. Wouldn’t one natural solution to that be children? And wouldn’t Aang, by the ripe age of 25, at least consider that option?
While we don’t know how old Bumi is in Korra, we do know that Tenzin, Aang’s youngest child, is 51 in Korra Season 1. Thanks to some savvy Avatar fans, we know Katara was 34 when she had Tenzin.
Spoiler alert: I’ve seen the new Avatar: Aang movie. Absolutely no one, at any point, mentions Katara being pregnant, or the possibility of she and Aang having kids. (Again, this is weird! Aang risks everyone’s lives to get a staff to bring back the Air Nomads, when he has… other options!)
So, apparently, by the age of 25 to 27, Katara isn’t even pregnant with her first. (Unless her pregnancy just goes unmentioned in the movie, and we’re supposed to assume it happened off screen.) She’s not even thinking about having children—at least, not out loud, to Aang, when he’s sharing his fears of being the last air-bender. And yet Katara, is, canonically, just a few years—possibly just a few months—away from giving birth to her oldest, Bumi.
Most likely, no one involved in the Avatar Aang movie wanted these characters from a beloved children’s show to acknowledge that sex exists. But this is a movie where characters are fretting about being “the last of their kind,” in a franchise where, canonically, those same characters do have sex. (How else could Aang and Katara’s kids exist?) It’s all just a little weird. Personally, I think the entire Avatar Aang movie would have made a lot more sense if Aang was around 17 in the movie, instead of around 25. But maybe that’s just me.