Does the show or any of the supplemental/expanded universe stuff ever explain how it is determined what element a bender will bend?
Bending seems either racial or geographical but there are problems with both, the fire nation is more diverse and has colonies and the air nomads are well nomads.
So how does the world maintain distinct populations of benders?
I saw that in the far future sequel series Aang(airbender) and Katara(waterbender) have several children all airbenders.:dubious:
Unless you’re the Avatar, it’s all what nation you’re born into.
Every Water Tribe bender is a water bender. Every Fire Nation bender works with fire. Every Earth Kingdom bender uses earth. Every Air Nomad bends air.
The existence of the Avatar makes it pretty clear that anyone with the potential to bend could learn any bending technique, but each nation specializes in one, so, barring being adopted into a nation other than the one you’re born into, you’re not going to get an opportunity to learn a different one, and very few people (ie: the Avatars) have the spiritual potential to learn more than one. (In fact, outside the Air Nomads, it’s not terribly common to be able to learn even one bending art.)
I don’t think there’s any kind of an official answer. I think that bending ability itself may be at least partially genetic. All the direct descendents of Firelord Sozin are powerful benders. On the other hand, Kitara is an extremely powerful water bender, but there appears to be no history of bending in her family before her.
As for what kind of bender you turn out to be, I think this must be largely cultural. Take an orphan with a natural inclination towards bending, and raise him in the Water Tribe, and he grows up to be a water bender. Take the same kid and put him with Air Nomads, and he grows up to be an air bender. It does seems that personality and temperment plays a role: someone might be a natural stone bender, but if raised among the Air Nomads, will never realize his potential, because there’s no one to teach him, and his personality is incompatible with the philosophy behind air bending.
I guess I was wondering about like say a colony of firebenders in a conquered part of the earth kingdom, how many generations will produce firebenders?
Or in Aang and Katara’s case two different element parents produce children who bend only their father’s element. (I realize in this case its so airbenders won’t be extinct as Aang is the last)
I never considered the cultural thing which makes the most sense.
You know, I wonder about that. I suspect that the whole “four elements” thing is actually a human construct, and not some sort of universal truth. In the series finale, we see Aang spirit-bend. My fanwank is that this is what all bending really is, but most people filter it through their human perceptions of how the world works. It’s not so much that the Avatar is the master of “all four” elements, it’s that he’s the master of the primordial energy that most humans interpret as four different elements.
We can already see that the demarcations between elements is not as rigid as it appears. Iroh has adopted water bending techniques to supplement his fire bending, to impressive effect, and those are two elements that are generally held to be in direct opposition. My theory is that these differences between the bending styles exist largely because, in the past, the different cultures of the Avatar world were largely isolated. As their world’s industrial revolution increases, the world becomes more connected, and these different ideas can flow between the different cultures at an unprecedented rate. Being able to learn more than one bending technique might be more common than most people suspect, but until the advent of steam travel, it was too difficult for most people to travel to other cultures and learn from them. I’ll be interested to see if, in the new series (which appears to have a quasi-modern setting) there will be more people whose bending powers aren’t as easily categorized as belonging to one element or the other.
I thought in the show (not the movie) Katara’s mother was a water bender?
I’m pretty sure she wasn’t. She was arrested (and, apparently, died in captivity) for being a water bender, but IIRC, the third season episode where we see the Fire Nation taking her away, its explained that they’d come to the Southern Water Tribe on the rumor that there was still a water bender there, and Katara’s mom took the fall for Katara by claiming it was her.
She claimed to be but wasn’t I think, see the episode Southern Raiders where she is murdered(maybe raped too but hey kids show) by a single soldier and she never waterbends. That soldier was pretty average too, we see him a decade later as a peasant.
As far as we know from preliminary details, Aang and Katara (who appears in the series) have 3 kids, and only the youngest of these, Tenzin, is an airbender. I don’t know if any of the others are benders, water or no.
Tenzin’s 3 living kids are all airbenders, though.
She wasn’t taken away she was killed in her home, Katara spots the soot from the firenation ship and runs home to find her mother inside and that fire nation soldier, her mother yells at her to go and so does the soldier. When Katara returns with her father they find her mothers dead body in the house.
The scene is set up kind of weird with Katara’s mother on the floor with the firenation soldier standing over her, either he was beating her or worse when Katara interrupted.
(I assumed the creators were implying something here YMMV).
Oh, as another point: Republic City, the setting for the sequel, features mixed Earth/Fire families, as it descends from a Fire Nation colony in the Earth Kingdom. As such, the new series has a set of brothers as protagonists, one of whom is a firebender and one of whom is an earthbender.
I had the impression that she had had other benders in her family, but that they had all been killed or abducted by the Fire Nation before the show started.
As for the re-emergence of the Air Nomads, I had wondered about that, too. Another possible source, though, is the inventor-guy’s people who have taken up residence in one of the old Air Temples. Aang seemed to think that the inventor’s son, in the wheelchair, had the right spiritual disposition to be an airbender, and there may be others.
It’s also possible that there are some airbenders left in some backwater somewhere that nobody knows about, separate from the main body of the Air Nomads. We’ve seen precedent for that, with the Swamp Benders unassociated with either of the polar Water Tribes.
This is what the lion-turtle said too.
http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Lion_Turtle#axzz1lA27vx4m
I really hope the lion-turtle comes back in the new season.
Is it true the new show has been delayed until 2013?