Ok minor detail but ...
So I noticed in A:TLA, and itâs carried over in LoK, that Airbenders always seem to have an advantage in a fight. And at first, it felt like plot armour, particularly in A:TLA.
But when Aang fought Bumi, he lost most of that advantage. And I realised that this wasnât just plot armour. Someone had sat and worked it out: nobody has had to fight Airbenders for generations.Â
None of the other nations have had to train to face them, or practised sparring with them, or anything. Apart from Bumi, no bender in the show has ever even met an airbender before Aang comes along. And in LoK, for the most part people still havenât. We never see fights between those who have (for e.g. we never see Tenzin and Lin fight); when Korra and Tenzin use airbending, its a unique fighting style that people arenât trained to manage.
Itâs a really small detail, and it fundamentally works to give the heroes an advantage (and make up for Aangâs young age and lack of combat experience), but I love how itâs an advantage in combat for completely logical reasons.
The detail in these shows is amazing.Â
You can see the same principle in play whenever somebody fights somebody who uses a completely unfamiliar style. Combustion benders and lavabenders arenât straight up more powerful, but theyâre pretty much always something you havenât 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 itâs 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.
itâs also a detail from the second ever episode
aang straight up says to the fire nation guards on zukoâs ship âyouâve probably never fought an airbender beforeâ, 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 anyoneâs calculations
this has been brought up before but itâs 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 opponentâs 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 itâs 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). itâs an indication not only of kataraâs skill and power, but also how sheâs learned from her travels, and from toph
one of my favorite details of atla is how the main charactersâ 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, thereâs 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.
