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seyaryminamoto · 4 years

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Benders not of the 4 elements

Hey, I found your fic a few days ago, and I just wanted to say that I’m really surprised at the quality (in a good way lol.) There’s a few things I disagree with (for example, Iroh’s portrayal - he comes off much more as bumbling to me rather than someone hiding something, as well as the personalities of a few characters, but I won’t go into it here) but generally it’s actually very well written! I do have a question, though: what’s with the mentions to benders that aren’t from the 4 elements? That’s the biggest contradiction to canon I’ve found, and it honestly seems rather confusing, considering that’s it’s not a very significant detail at all to change, but still feels ‘off’ to me, I guess. I’m at chapter 107, so maybe there’s something I’m missing from the later chapters, but I still find it weird especially since I’ve always found the natural symmetry of the four elements rather satisfying.

Thanks for the submission! It’s good to know you’ve enjoyed the story and you consider it’s of good quality :D

We could probably spend a very long time talking about why I portray Iroh as I do, but I could probably just summarize it and then direct you to many analyses of Iroh’s less flattering canon traits, which compelled me to portray him as a much murkier character than canon did...

I can understand why you perceived him that way, but Iroh wasn’t merely bumbling in the show, especially considering he becomes Zuko’s moral spine and acts far more seriously throughout the final season of the show than he did beforehand. He has canonical ties with the White Lotus which, as you have already seen, isn’t portrayed at their most flattering either in my story, since I’m hinting at separate factions and corruption within their very group… and of course, once you pay close attention to Iroh’s actions when you watch the show, you might notice Iroh is not only full of contradictions and several displays of highly hypocritical behavior, but he’s also a complicated character who committed terrible deeds in the past, deeds that the show is happy to gloss over and excuse him for at every opportunity. I’ve turned him into more of a mastermind with his own agenda to give the character a more serious tone, as well as to acknowledge his constant rivalry with Azula in the show, where they were outright portrayed as the two forces battling over Zuko’s soul (a rivalry that, to my utter confusion, seems to go ignored by the majority of the fanbase despite it was a major theme for two whole seasons).

Alright, so, for further analysis of the character: Ursa vs. Iroh in how they handled the sibling relationship between Zuko and Azula, sexist behavior displayed by Iroh during the show that he’s not called out for, Iroh’s not-so-humorous reaction at Zuko’s entitled behavior (a display of his serious side as early as the first episode), analysis on Iroh’s three different “faces” and how they play into viewer’s perception of the character. I figure there’s more... but I’d rather not spend all day digging into my blog’s archives for it xD

In short, my portrayal of Iroh really isn’t gratuitous, or just an attempt to make him more problematic than necessary. Sure, it is a much darker Iroh than seen in canon, or in most other fics... but even in a recently released book, Legacy of the Fire Nation, Iroh is portrayed speaking of Ozai far more sympathetically than he speaks of Azula. He outright blames her, rather than Ozai, for the misfortunes Zuko suffers during his younger years, when it’s plain as day Ozai is the main culprit for most of Zuko’s problems, if not all of them. So, if recently released canon material presents an Iroh that behaves so mercilessly towards his niece, I’d think I’m not that far-off in how I portray him...

Anyways! Closing that point, since that’s not really why you’re here...

The thing with elements is that, despite what you may have thought while watching ATLA, it’s absolutely feasible and possible for there to be more than four. Many cultures have five elements rather than four (Ancient Greece had aether as well as the typical four, I believe Hinduism featured the void, there was Heaven in Japanese culture...), to say one thing.

And then there’s China, they also have five... but they don’t even have air in their five mythological elements.

Those five elements are the ones featured in the Chinese Zodiac’s cycles, for instance. Curiously, the Avatar world’s calendar features the years named after the animals of the Chinese Zodiac (can be seen in the Library episode, specifically): yet, while borrowing their calendar, their four classic elements are different from the five elements Chinese Mythology relies on. Curious, isn’t it? :’)

Avatar wasn’t the first big story I got invested in that featured the elements as the setting’s magic system. I started off by being a huge fan of a particular show where there were no less than TEN elements: Fire, Water, Air, Earth, Metal, Wood, Thunder, Ice, Light and Darkness. In Avatar, some of the elements I’ve described here have turned out to be subsets of other bending skills: Thunder (in Avatar, Lightning) a subset of Fire, Ice and Wood of Water, Metal of Earth. With the background I had, as a fan of that other show, I was quite amused to see elements that other cultures and stories have separated and distinguished from each other tucked into umbrellas of each major bending art of the Avatar world...

In ATLA’s finale, the lion-turtles that are both loved and hated in the fandom showed up with a huge sudden twist: energybending. This has been loved and hated too, and it can be interpreted as though energybending is the superior form of bending, sure... but what the lion-turtle says is:

“In the era before the Avatar, we bent not the elements but the energy within ourselves.”

It virtually proposes that energybending itself created each bending art. Who’s to say, then, that even within LOK’s concept, there couldn’t have been more than four lion-turtles granting bending powers? Or that, if there were more, they might have been able to grant even more powers than the known ones? I’d even go so far as to say that the lion-turtle, by saying “we”, could have even been referring to humans with abilities to energybend, and that this skill wouldn’t have to be relegated to lion-turtles alone. Seeing as, before LOK arrived, the understanding of the matter was that firebenders had learned to bend from dragons, waterbenders from the ocean and moon, earthbenders from badgermoles and airbenders from sky bison, why not assume these lion turtles taught people how to ENERGYBEND, just as all those other animals had taught them how to bend the elements? :’D it was, before LOK, a perfectly acceptable interpretation of this big, last minute revelation. And the implication that the Avatar’s arrival happened AFTER the energybending era was over, could even be read as a hint at another erradicated culture: energybenders themselves.

At any rate, I’m pretty sure that I wrote the early chapters of Gladiator, where I first brought up the topic of various other bending skills, long before LOK’s big “Beginnings” episodes had aired, based mostly on that lion-turtle quote and my own previous experiences with other magical-element-based settings. This, paired with the implication that energybending used to be the main bending form of the past, and that it was lost to time, felt like fair basis to suppose that perhaps there could be even more bending arts that could have been lost to time in the Avatar World. I mean, if you think about it, had Aang been killed irremediably somehow in Sozin’s time, an entire bending race would have been gone. Why would it be impossible for previous bending groups before the Avatar’s time, the period the lion-turtle referred to, to be erradicated too?

It was all, of course, conjectures, theories and guesses. But, at that point in time, said conjectures and guesses were perfectly plausible, as, like I said, LOK’s lion-turtle based mythology hadn’t been established properly yet.

There will be some exploration into a certain kind of bending I referred to (namely, lightbending, which will have a different basis than what Azula has heard or read about so far). Still, my idea was basically to propose that a world that has been a victim to so many wars, where there are strange skills that only a few people practice (like combustion bending, or blood bending, or plant bending), it was possible that entire groups who practiced unusual subsets of bending could have been victims of other kinds of wars, just as airbenders were. And that, if the connections of those subsets with their parent elements were lost to time, in contemporary times it could look like those subsets were whole elements of their own that were decimated through warfare.

Soundbending, also mentioned early on in Gladiator, was often debated in the fandom as a possible subset for airbending before LOK was finished airing (there were huge theories on the subject). I featured Azula talking about it once because I thought it might become a thing in the franchise’s future (and then it didn’t :’D). Plantbending seems pretty instinctive to the waterbenders we see using it, yet, as most waterbenders seem to spend their whole lives in the poles, it’s natural that they wouldn’t think to bend plants since they wouldn’t really need to... hence, it’s another perfectly plausible bending skill that could have been practiced in the past, when, presumably, waterbenders fought earthbenders for territory in the large continent. Once the waterbenders settled in the poles, the skill could have been lost easily enough. The bending possibility itself isn’t gone, for it’s a subset of water, but if there were whole tribes (like the Foggy Swamp one) with a culture based around plantbending, wars could have easily seeen them destroyed and their bending art “lost”.

So, in the end, Gladiator won’t end up warping the whole four-element concept, despite canon itself kind of lends for warping by adding the fifth, energy, but I do explore these other possibilities of bending largely inspired by my other experiences in certain stories with more than four elements. I’ll stick to working within the parameters of bending subsets, and I do explore certain strange bending things that have absolutely no connection with anything that happened within the show... yet, while I didn’t start out with a set-plan on how I’d work with these bending possibilities, by now I can safely say the idea is to perceive them as subsets that resulted in small clusters of cultures of their own, cultures that were lost to time and warfare, just as airbending nearly was.

I hope this is a satisfactory and clear enough answer, if you don’t like it that’s fine too, but four elements, while they may sound very instinctive to us in modern times due to how popular it has become to split things in those four (the western zodiac, for instance, divides the zodiac signs in the ATLA four elements, as you probably know), it’s not a given, absolute thing that, when speaking of elemental magic, it has to be those four elements and nothing else. The number of elements can vary in different cultures, the types of elements can vary too, and testing a few bending possibilities beyond canon’s boundaries sounded like a fun enough idea to hint at, as long as I didn’t pull off something completely OP like VOIDBENDING... just imagine that, someone with the ability to create black holes xD sucks their whole world into it and that’s that, story over (?)

#randomguy #as that's what you called yourself in your submission xD #gladiator #sorta complicated worldbuilding questions #... or is it the answer that's complicated?#aaaanyways #as always #if you guys want a read more let me know #this got pretty long #submission

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