#benders

Naruto: OBVIOUSLY an airbender

Sasuke: firebender, no doubt

Kakashi: firebender too, but a prodigy who can control lightning like Azula. he def doesn’t use regular fire

ROBINS AS BENDERS

Rachel - Water

Jessica - Fire

Tiffany - Air

"Earth is the element of substance."

-Iroh

It's season is spring.

It's polar opposite is airbending.

HOW DOES NO ONE TALK ABOUT THIS!?!?

I mean, it’s not exactly a niche idea. It’s only natural as the technology in the Avatar-verse advances to wonder about their upcoming Space Age.

And OH BOY is it interesting to wonder about.

What happens when waterbenders, who draw power from the moon and see a significant difference in power dependent on the phase of the moon, actually physically land on the literal moon?

What happens when there’s no atmosphere and a fair bit less distance between firebenders and the sun?

What about when Fire/waterbenders get too far away from our sun/moon?

Can fire/waterbenders draw power from OTHER stars/moons?

What happens when you put them on a planet with MULTIPLE suns/moons?

Can firebenders even bend out in space-space without oxygen?

Do you know how weird it would be as an airbender in space? The other 3 can be separated from/have a limited amount of their element on earth. Waterbenders in the desert, Earthbenders on the ocean, firebenders kept too cold to bend. But you can’t take the air from an airbender without killing them, so it would probably be SO FREAKY to get on a spaceship and NOT feel any air outside.

Imagine metalbenders wrecking spaceships. Airbenders buying time when the hull is breached and keeping the air in.

Please imagine a bender on an alien crew. They’re new to spaceships, where resources are limited and if anything breaks the entire crew could die. The ship feels too fragile for them to be comfortable doing more than minuscule-scale bending in.

So maybe the metalbending engineer smooths out the dented wall panel by hand instead of using power tools, or maybe the waterbender in hydroponics uses bending to water the plants. But once the crew gets used to it, it’s not THAT crazy. It’s not like a little spray of water droplets in your face is SCARY.

Then the crew makes a stop on a planet (with all necessary celestial bodies/elements whatever), and the bender is given a chance to really cut loose with their bending (maybe in a fight, or survival purposes, or just stretching their bending like someone who’s been stuck in a car for hours and needs to stretch their legs). And the crew. Is. DUMBSTRUCK. “You mean you could do THAT this whole time?!?!?”

Sprinkling water onto plants turns into creating massive waves and an ice surfboard to surf them. Fixing a crewmate’s broken mug turns into yanking an entire rock fort out of the ground. Playing space heater for a cold blooded species turns into katas that produce plumes of flame twice the size of the bender in question. Fanning overheated engineers turns into racing the wind itself.

Elemental deprivation though. Can you imagine;

Firebenders who shiver when going too long between stars, no matter how high they set the heat in their quarters.

Waterbenders who get dehydrated no matter how much they drink when they get too far from moon and ocean.

Earthbenders who become anemic without earth beneath their feet.

Airbenders who get asthma attacks from breathing the same recycled air over and over.

Y’all there is SO MUCH to explore in this idea! In how bending interacts on spaceships, and other planets. In how alien species react to bending. In how atla cultures might clash with other worlds. Aliens reacting to spirits! I haven’t even hardly thought about spirits in space!

I imagine that when Atlas (the name I have assigned the atla world) joins the intergalactic community, they agree to make the Avatar their planetary representative because who else could be trusted to represent all (4? 5? 7?) nations? Which would obviously require a substitute ambassador for the 20ish years between one Avatar dying and the next being fully trained. And most aliens would NOT understand the difference between their “Avatar” and a regular ambassador. And, and, and,…