Warning: Contains spoilers for The Dawn of Yangchen.
The latest Avatar: The Last Airbender novel, The Dawn of Yangchen, has been released, and it creates an even better foil for Aang than Korra. From the very first episode of The Legend of Korra, it was clear that Korra was meant to serve as a foil to Aang, and the show did an excellent job of developing her in that way, overall. That being said, the way Avatar Yangchen is written in The Dawn of Yangchen makes it clear that she works far better as Aang’s foil than Korra.
In long-running franchises, it’s common for the heroes and villains of each new installment to be written in a way that makes them foils to the ones who come before or after them. This allows for the traits of the new characters to become stronger than they normally would be on account of having someone wholly their opposite to be compared and contrasted with. Avatar: The Last Airbender has been no stranger to this, as The Legend of Korra makes it clear that Korra is supposed to be Aang’s opposite through factors such as her upbringing, powers, and overall fiery personality.
The Dawn of Yangchen also depicts its titular character as a foil to Aang, and it ends up working far better than it did with Janet Varney's Korra. Just like Korra, Yangchen is very much Aang’s foil in areas such as their upbringing, their powers, and their overall personality, but between Yangchen and Korra, Yangchen works as a better foil for Aang. That doesn’t make Korra a bad foil for Aang, of course, but The Dawn of Yangchen is simply able to establish a far better dichotomy between Aang and Yangchen’s characters than The Legend of Korra did for Aang and Korra’s.
How Aang And Yangchen Are Opposites
The Dawn of Yangchen does a lot to establish Yangchen as a foil for Aang. For starters, Yangchen is a young airbender woman who is a teenager approaching adulthood in the book - as opposed to Aang being largely shown as a young boy - and this difference is sold even further by Yangchen showing romantic interest in the male waterbender Kavik, thus creating a clear comparison to Aang and Katara. In regards to their upbringings, both of them found out that they were the Avatar before they were 16, but whereas Aang had to be told about it and didn’t like it, Yangchen figured it out on her own and accepted it as her new status quo, at least initially.
Aang and Yangchen’s powers and personalities also serve to make them foils to each other. With their personalities, Aang was constantly depicted as a happy, innocent, and overall wholesome - if occasionally naive - boy who always tried to see the good in everyone. By comparison, Yangchen is snarky, manipulative, and willing to blackmail to get what she wants, all of which is emphasized by self-deprecation over how she lives in a world where she’s forced to behave like that. As for powers, at the beginning of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Aang wasn’t particularly skilled in the spiritual aspect of the Avatar, but Yangchen was naturally gifted in that field to the point of hurting her; Yangchen’s strong spiritual gifts gave her an uncontrollable connection to her past lives, a direct contrast to Aang having to work to establish connections to them.
The way that each character handles their duties as the Avatar also serves as a major contrast between them. Both before and after the Hundred Year War, Aang was very reactive when it came to trouble and relied on his friends to help him, and while he initially hated being the Avatar, Zach Tyler Eisen's Aang eventually came to accept it as his duty and embraced it wholeheartedly. With Yangchen, however, the nature of the world during her era required her to be far more proactive by comparison, so instead of a team of close friends and allies, Yangchen had an extensive spy network, with most of her relationships being purely transactional. Not only that, but the stress of being the Avatar — both with what it forces her to do and how her connection to her past lives works — caused Yangchen to grow to hate it over time. Her last scene in The Dawn of Yangchen has her wanting to quit and run away, and her being reminded of her duty is treated as a curse from her perspective.
How Aang And Korra Are Opposites
Even with all of the ways that Aang and Yangchen are foils to one another, it doesn’t change how the same can be said about Aang and Korra. Just like with Yangchen, there’s the juxtaposition of Korra being a girl while Aang was a boy, and how Korra was somehow able to use three different types of bending from childhood, whereas Aang had to learn each style of bending one by one - although she was completely lacking in the spiritual aspect of the Avatar for a good portion of the show compared to Aang. There’s also a major difference in their upbringings, as while Aang was raised by monks with no blood relation to him, Korra was raised by her parents even after learning that she was the Avatar.
The biggest dichotomy between the two stems from their personalities and how they treat being the Avatar. While Aang was a largely gentle person who defaulted to trying to resolve problems as peacefully as possible, Korra was far more aggressive in The Legend of Korra, often being quick to anger and violence, and she was often incredibly blunt about the problems she had with someone. As for being the Avatar, the status was important to both characters, but for Aang, it was just one of many facets of his life that didn’t automatically get precedence over other ones. Korra, however, cared far more about being the Avatar due to dedicating her entire life to it, and because of that, she would have a breakdown whenever something happened that prevented her from being the only thing she knew how to be, such as when Amon stole her bending or when Zaheer of the Red Lotus put her in a wheelchair.
Why Yangchen Is Aang’s Real Opposite, Not Aang
Both Korra and Yangchen serve as excellent foils to Aang, but between the two of them, Yangchen ends up being the better foil. With Yangchen being another airbender, the differences between her and Aang are able to come out very well because it gives the sense that she’s what a "proper" airbender Avatar should be like, compared with Aang's unconventional early circumstances. Not only that, but a lot of the differences between Aang and Korra revolve around Korra being more aggressive than Aang, whereas the differences between Aang and Yangchen are often very subtle in both nature and execution. Granted, a lack of subtlety isn’t automatically a bad thing since messages can easily be effective by being blunt, but the understatement of Yangchen’s characteristics causes them to come across as even stronger in the long run. All in all, Korra served as an excellent foil to Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Aang, but The Dawn of Yangchen was simply able to do a far better job of it with Yangchen.