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Legend Of Korra: Everything is going South
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possibly the darkest/most tragic thing I've seen in a western cartoon ever
Isn't bending more than spirituality? Don't they also need some genetic trait for bending as well? Have we ever seen a bending child have a different bending ability from their parents? I can't remember any examples.
Twins where one is a bender and one isn't
Non-benders of bender parents
The rules are fuzzy but I feel like we can say for sure that genetics play a role in being able to bend, though how strong a role is never defined, and we can also say for sure that spirituality plays a role in bending as well.
Korra being unable to air bend was correlated strongly with her lack of spiritual connection, and apparently the writers have stated that the people hanging out at that repurposed air temple might have eventually rediscovered air bending because they lived "in the spirit of the air nomads" (or something close to that)
That's slightly different from a bender child getting a completely different type from their bending parents. We don't see numerous cases where this occurs in various nations at all. You'd think that'd crop up every once & a while.
Maybe they need a bending gene to bend and their spirituality dictates what bending type they get. Though this pure speculation, IIRC the showrunners prefer to keep it mysterious for some reason rather than establish a clear explanation.
Interesting.
Firebenders learned it from the dragons.
Earthbenders learned it from badgermoles.
Waterbenders learned it from the moon.
Airbenders learned it from the sky bison.
In theory if every current bender in the world lost their bending, non-benders could spend enough time (probably over a few generations) with these origin animals/things and re-learn it. With the exception of the dragons, I guess, though we saw in the first book that it IS possible but not as easy as the other bending types.
Doesn't mean it can't work with the right execution. I think benders have a similar template to mutants in the Marvel universe, only with some spirituality thrown in. Besides, Avatar is halfway there already.
Sokka a water bender? That's terrifying.
Being hereditary and being genetic aren't necessarily the same thing.
And, well, we have seen that: every Avatar, ever.
Guru Pathik would suggest that every person is capable of bending, and that the baility to bend any element is equivalent to any other element - Pathik himself was an energybender a season and a half before it was made explicit that such bending was actually a thing.
The creators have confirmed that people would rediscover bending naturally by living in similar circumstances as the original discoverers of bending.
Aang established the Air Acolytes to preserve his culture; this isn't like Earth Nation squatters doping around in the Air Temple. These are actual ascetics holding to the principles of the Air Nomads, raising and bonding with the true originators of airbending - that is, the sky bison - and growing progressively closer and closer to being true Air Nomads with every passing year.
The creators have acknowledged that it's possible that even the very old could unlock bending powers that didn't exist before. It's genetic, yes, but only in the sense that having chakra is genetic.
maybe I can find it I don't wanna type it up again
I mean, obviously
I think a lot of people tend to view this series in too grounded a way, given how it's all magic and spiritual and shit
here is the post I was thinking of
the time when there were no benders and people had to learn from animals was an unknown amount of time ago but my personal guess is that at one point the people in the avatar world were much more homogeneous and it wasn't the water bending gene or the earth bending gene, just a gene that gave people the capacity to bend should someone teach them
and as people spread out they encountered various bending animals and learned from them, and overtime the bending gene selected more and more strongly for an affinity to that nation's element
So in that way the reason people from different nations can only bend that element is the same reason they look different because they're from different parts of the world
It should be noted I have an incredibly rudimentary understanding of genetics (high school bio yo) and this is really just a lot of head-canon fan wank bullshit
Mostly because I like rules and limitations for powers, but the avatar world has a whole bunch of spiritual stuff like you said so you can't really pin anything down too firmly
what makes you think the Guru was an energybender
It's only natural for a popular series. Just because a commercial property has magic & spirituality in it doesn't mean it can't be subjected to severe scrutiny over how its mythology works.
Avatar's are something beyond average bending. It's a divine entity that is the literal soul of the planet, not a common bender.
Despite all that we have seen it isn't strong enough to be a common thing for bending to change depending on the wielders spirituality. Otherwise we'd have seen some characters have bending closer to their spiritualities like Jeong Jeong or Iroh the first. Nor do we see any benders that switch types when their personalities change, like Zuko. Genetics make more sense for benders to keep their bending form when they were young when the gene gets activated yet not altered when their personalities switch to another bending style.
Even if it's true that the Air Acolytes grow closer spiritually to the Air Nomads every year I doubt we'd ever see them turn into airbenders form adjusting their spirituality alone. There are no precedents for that in either series. Even their children being born airbenders remains a mystery that it can happen, and assuming it does that only raises more questions for why other bending types don't appear from different bending parents on any scale. We haven't got a single example that it's possible at all.
That's kind of the whole point, I thought
The avatar is perfectly enlightened, basically the Buddha, and thereby can bend anything
And the creators have very specifically said that living as Air Nomads would eventually produce Airbenders because it's such an intensely spiritual culture.
There's a reason Tenzin's kids are all airbenders and Aang's kids were mixed, and it very likely has something to do with the fact that Tenzin's parenting is much more structured than Aang's was. He raises his kids to be airbenders; so they are.
He actually does smooth over the turmoil in Appa's heart while Appa is sleeping. It's subtle, but it's real.
Takes fear and replaces it with trust, and peace. Boom. Literally bends Appa's spirit. Bended the shit out of it.
And Pathik doing the "track down Aang" thing is exactly what Aang did in the swamp to find Appa, which Sokka dubbed "crazy Avatar stuff' which didn't count when it came to discussions of an inherently rational universe
Attached to this theory is how I believe energybending and Amon's bending removal worked. Energybending can lengthen and shorten those threads such that theoretically someone Energybending can grant any elemental bending style to someone (but only one at a time since they only have one receptor). What Amon was doing was basically reaching into people and tearing out the thread that was connected to the receptor. Since his brute-force style wasn't accurate enough to grasp at the unconnected threads, that left Korra's Air thread sitting there for her to connect after the fact.
Any element of heredity would, by definition, be genetics.
It just so probably happens to be non-Mendelian as fuck.
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He totally qualified his statement.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
I can actually hear "You're coming with me, dead or alive." in her voice.
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Bolin's expression in the final panel there is perfect with that edit.
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Resolution: Highly satisfying, if you read it this one particular way
At first, I had “not so much” written down for resolution on both of these, as there isn’t a ton of obvious cause-and-effect in why Aang showed up like a god from the machine to restore Korra’s bending—other than the lame excuse of “You looked sad.”
But watching the end again, this way of reading the last five minutes popped into my head, and it makes more and more sense the more I think about it. Korra’s lack of identity and her block were actually the same thing, and they’re both resolved in a kind of great under-the-censor’s-radar way.
Korra’s just found out the best healer in the world can’t do anything for her. Her last hope to hang onto the identity she’s had since childhood is gone. Mako tells her he loves her; she tells him to go away, that she’s “not the Avatar anymore.” Her misery calls back to the dream she had in “The Voice In The Night,” where her own subconscious—dressed as scary Amon—tells her “Once I take your bending away, you will be nothing.” Korra goes out to a cliff, and walks up to the very, very edge—she’s close enough that from her looking-down POV we see a tear actually falling all the way down the side of the cliff, which means her head is leaning out over the drop.
I can’t think of a reason to use that specific shot unless it’s to imply that she went up there to throw herself off the cliff.
Supporting this theory: When she pulls back, sits down, decides to keep living as a person who isn’t inherently special, and starts thinking for real about what that means—that’s the instant Aang finally shows up to declare “You have finally connected with your spiritual self!” This all feels like fan-wanking, but the alternate explanation seems to be “He showed up then because she was… continuing to be sad? And that continuing sadness somehow resolved her spiritual block?” That’s unsatisfying, unearned, and also doesn’t really make a lot of sense. The more I think about the oddness of that POV shot, Aang’s timing, and, most importantly, how not okay Nickelodeon would be with showing a hero contemplating suicide, the more sense it makes to consider the final-final battle of the season as completely internal—and pretty damn dark.