Written by: Veronica Borowski
Image from Reddit
With the recent new live action “Avatar: The Last Airbender” Netflix adaptation series, I
thought it would be a great idea to rank the four elements part of the Avatar universe based on a
mainly the different sub-elements and sub-skills and the development each element with actual
application in the tv series “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and “The Legend of Korra” or the
books/comics. I think it is important to make these distinctions first before I do go into how I
rank the four elements because there are a lot of hypotheticals when it comes to what potential
all the elements have and the results would be much more equally matched in different contexts.
One great thing about the Avatar series is how it showcases the four different nations all
with their different elements and how their morals and livelihoods affect the style of their
bending of their elements along with how potentially powerful each element can be. With the
water tribes bending water is through smooth movements, keeping with the idea of how water
can adapt to change. The people of the fire nation have a lot of passion, this is further proven
when we see that the fire nation are the aggressors in the war that is going on during the series,
and they bend with a lot of force and sharp movements. The earth kingdom is persistent and
enduring, which leads to their bending techniques to be a lot of grounded stances with rooted
movements. The air nomads are a bit different because of their lifestyle being that they are
pacifists and really don’t need to develop their fighting techniques but their techniques consist of
circular movements and lots of redirection which makes sense regarding their morals and beliefs.
Image from Reddit
For the element of Water it consists of ice bending, snow bending, steam bending,
bloodbending, healing and spirit bending. Bloodbending being arguably one of the most
powerful skills in the avatar universe which makes it the most powerful element, along with
there being a lot of sub-elements/sub-skills. The element of Earth include sandbending,
metalbending, lavabending and seismic sensing. In my opinion earth and fire bending are pretty
evenly matched but because there is a bit more diversity in the sub-elements/sub-skills in earth
bending I put it second and fire bending as third. The element of Fire consists of heat bending,
lighting bending, combustionbending. All very powerful but as I mentioned earlier not as diverse
compared to other elements. The least powerful element would be Air solely on the basis that
their culture has no real need to be powerful since they are peaceful people. The element Air
consists of soundbending, flight, and spiritual projection.
I do know that many people might not 100% agree with how I decided to rank them but I
once again was going off sub-elements/sub-skills that have been demonstrated to be used and
really am not playing with the ideas of the potential of each element because that would be a
different story.