You can see the same principle in play whenever somebody fights somebody who uses a completely unfamiliar style. Combustion benders and lavabenders aren’t straight up more powerful, but they’re pretty much always something you haven’t dealt with which presents unique challenges. That red lotus lady with no arms is just a perfectly ordinary waterbender, but using forms and styles nobody else has seen before. Jet routinely smacks around benders and soldiers, but loses hard to the first person he met who had actually studied diverse styles of swordplay. When Toph invents metalbending, nobody can deal with that, but seventy years later the counters are pretty well known among people who might have to fight the cops.

And it’s why Azula, a genius prodigy who has thought long and hard about how to counter every kind of magic and martial arts out there, keeps getting messed up by a kid with a boomerang.

it’s also a detail from the second ever episode

aang straight up says to the fire nation guards on zuko’s ship “you’ve probably never fought an airbender before”, because he in-universe figures out that, if what everyone around him is saying is true, and airbenders have been extinct for a century (or at least have gone to ground enough to make people think that) then he is a totally unknown figure in anyone’s calculations

this has been brought up before but it’s also one of the reasons why hama is so thrown in her fight with katara - waterbending is about energy exchange, keeping things flowing, throwing your opponent’s power back at them and we see katara and hama do this in their fight. however, when katara is faced with a powerful blast from hama, she stands her ground and blows it apart:

[image ID: a gif of katara in the puppetmaster. she is a teenage girl with dark skin and hair and blue eyes, wearing a red outfit. she turns and throws her hand out, stopping a blast of water and turning it into a huge shield. the background is a dark forest. end image ID]

why do i bring this up?

because it’s a move - and a mindset - influenced by earthbending, which hama has never faced (she went from the south pole, to prison, to the fire nation). it’s an indication not only of katara’s skill and power, but also how she’s learned from her travels, and from toph

one of my favorite details of atla is how the main characters’ fighting styles adapt as they take on new enemies and make new friends with other bending styles. iroh straight up tells zuko about how he developed a technique for redirecting lightning by studying waterbenders, but if you watch closely especially in the last season, there’s a lot of this sort of thing happening unspoken with the gaang, using the bending forms of other elements like katara does above. it really shows the strength in differences and diversity coming up against a fascist regime that wants everyone to conform.

Look at Korra metal bending here

It’s completely different than anything we’ve seen from other metal benders, who bend metal with sharp movements like the derivative of earth bending that it is

But Korra is fluid. She is bending metal like it’s water. Because she is a water bender. And she is the first person in history to be able to bend both metal and water and so she is able to combine these styles into one and move seamlessly between them. This shows so beautifully how the Avatar is the embodiment of all bending

Every time I think this show has shown me all it can….it gives me more.

The fight between Tenzin and the Red Lotus reinforces this. Zaheer is pretty skilled for someone who’s only been Airbending for a few months, and he has the advantage against a lot of people because there still aren’t really enough airbenders for people to know how to fight them.

But against an Airbending MASTER like Tenzin? He only wins because he has backup

Like I think there’s definitely something to be said still for airbenders being a bit OP, but I’ll put that under the cut because it’s kinda veering off topic. Anyway I love the way the gaang learn from each other and strengthen their own skills like that. I love how the show incorporates the idea of how this separation generates weakness and combining skills brings strength.

And just as Katara and Korra show their having learnt from different styles and applying those to other forms of bending, I want people to watch how Toph fights Korra in the swamp. She is still her “face it head on” earthbender self but at the same time…you see hints of it in the later bits of ATLA, but here? Toph learnt from waterbending and airbending. In that first five seconds of the fight (~5-10 seconds in the video), watch how she moves. She dodges attacks with what looks quite a bit like airbending’s baguazhang based footwork, then surfs a wave of mud around to attack from the back in a move taken straight out of Katara and Aang’s playbooks. Watch the way she manipulates the liquid metal poison in Korra and when Korra finally pulls it from herself, that’s all classic waterbending movements. Even the bit where she rolls the earth around her family saving them from Kuvira reminds me of the way Katara liked to pull waves up and around her.

Originally posted by fangirlauthor

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• Construction wizards to turn back time to root out wood worm and strengthen old buildings.
• A wizard tailors who transmutes cloth into fully made clothes without seems and leaving behind no scraps
• A wizard who works in public transit, timing out teleports with detailed schedules, time magic, and enchanted communications, sending dozens of people to far away cities for a day or work or leisure
• A team of wizard gardeners tend to trees grown far outside their native range, and ideal climate, encircled with runes and fed potions to grow none the less
• A wizard sits in their office in the aqueduct, re-casting the spells that allow its precious water to flow to the city uphill
• A wizard fisher casts water repelling spells on the sailors and the stairs, keeps the hoist on the anchor from rusting, casts balls of heat that keep everyone warm below decks. Their real job is to herd fish together so they can be caught in single huge nets, and keep them cold as the boat returns to land.

• Wizards who come out and ward your home for you, like the magical equivalent of a home security system.
  

You kinda get this in the Avatar series, large numbers of people have what is essentially specialised forms of magic and it’s a skill that must be learnt with discipline and study but it’s also used for like, the most mundane shit.

Building? Check. Mass transit? Move your freight and people. Running power-plants? Sure just have people spend eight hours lightning-bending into the system.

Everyone saying “but it wasn’t a full moon” like yeah it sure wasn’t…but here’s the thing: do you think Katara definitely told Zuko about that limitation? Might be that, as far as he was aware she could do that any time but chooses not to. After all, she doesn’t like talking about it and she still didn’t fully trust him at the time he saw her do it so…it wouldn’t be totally out of character for her to withhold that info just to keep him on his toes.

Or he knows and just wanted to fuck with Azula, the best lies have a grain of truth after all. “Oh yeah she could totally have blood bent you” he tells her, casually omitting the whole “if it was the full moon” part of the sentence.

But imagine the first scenario, middle aged Zuko hearing about the trial of Yakone and the shocking reveal that he could blood bend when it wasn’t the full moon! Totally unheard of! Zuko thinking back to all the times Katara implied she could blood bend him if he didn’t do the dishes or whatever like mother fucker.

The funniest part of this is that in most of the fire nation, every building heated by a million fires, volcanoes and general equatorial position makes the traditional, ceremonial water tribe clothing about 12 literal layers of impractical for the climate. They spend the entire time with Katara subtly using water bending to re-freezer the 8 water skins each of them has strapped under their clothing so they don’t quietly roast to death. Sokka probably designs a cooling system with the Mechanist at a later date for when Katara isn’t around. 

#he’s piloting zuko like in ratatouille (via @azulapropaganda)

To me this too, is enshittification

no war in Ba Sing Se...

There is no war in Ba Sing se??? 😢😢😢

It’s no wonder the original creators walked away from this remake

So, basically, we already had the Ember Island Players live action version and now we’re getting the official Dai Li approved live action.

Phenomenal.

Wasn’t there a whole thing in the comics about aang getting offended over some air nomad super fans using the arrow since you have to be a master to get your arrow tattoos? And basically the super fan group was doing a cultural appropriation by having arrow tats? I feel like that was a whole ass thing in the comics.

well i have great news that will ease your mind. air benders aren’t real

He just won Olympic gold at windsurfing, methinks Aang would have been cool with it because there was also a bit in the series where he met some non airbender who he recognised as being definitely airbenders in spirit. And also it’s a fictional culture in a cartoon.

This is an act of violence