this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
32 points (84.8% liked)

No Stupid Questions

38711 readers
835 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

It's a common elemental theme we see across stories, fantasies, etc. It seems like it is an element that should be part of that pantheon but maybe there is a scientific explanation of why it isn't? Or is it simply, they did not have enough understanding of it at the time those 4 were suggested.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

The cloud was absolutely water bending. Aang used airbending to fly up, but collecting the water means you're condensing the water vapor that is mixed with air and specifically moving the water into katara's waterskin.

Also to respond to a couple other comments at the same time:

@[email protected] Yes, waterbenders can bend steam, and change it's phase. In The Drill, Sokka breaks a pipe, filling the room with steam, to get an engineer with schematics to come. When he shows up, Katara flash freezes him in place, using the steam the had filled up that room.

As for air controlling any gaseous substance, I don't think we have any idea if other gasses could be controlled by an airbender, but since "air" is a mix of a bunch of different gasses to begin with it stands to reason they could bend a number of different gaseous substances. And for waterbenders, probably just depends how much water is in that liquid. We know blood and perfume can be bent by waterbenders, at the very least.

@[email protected] Lavabenders belonging to earth bending makes perfect sense, as lava is literally molten rock. You yourself said "water can do ice and stuff since that's just a phase change", and that's exactly what rock into lava is. The ability is pretty rare though, as I imagine it takes a lot more "power" to phase change earth than it does water, as it's melting point is so much higher. Also, as Toph says, earth is a stubborn element, so it takes a very powerful bender to produce, or more often, an avatar. Metalbending is actually much easier for most earthbenders to learn, as lavabending was used by Kyoshi at least if not discovered earlier, but metalbending became much more widespread even though it was discovered hundreds of years later.

As for what does air get? Spiritual projection mumbo jumbo. Also vacuum creation.

There are other sub bending specialties too. Combustion (fire), sand (earth), healing (water), sound (air). So they all get a buncha extra stuff than just the base "bend your element".

And now I have gone on waaaay too long about this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

How exactly 'power' of a bender is calculated? Like is it just training or you need to also have some kind of 'understanding' of the world and be spiritual enough?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

Always appreciate someone who needs out about ATLA. I enjoyed the read and I guess I agree with you on the lava thing. Putting in context of the water benders being able to change the phases of water it makes more sense.

Man I wish I could rewatch ATLA for the first time again.