Why I Feel Airbending Should Beat Firebending

I was watching Netflix’s live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender when something occurred to me during the Fire Nation’s attack on the Air Nomads. I don't know why this hasn't ocurred to me before while watching the original show.

The Fire Nation is presented as this overwhelmingly powerful military civilization. Firebenders descend upon the Air Nomads with the power of Sozin’s Comet behind them, throwing enormous amounts of fire and absolutely devastating their opponents.

But I kept thinking:

You guys are fighting people who control air. Fire needs the oxygen in the air. Why don't they just snuff out your fire by restricting the air?

And the more I thought about it, the worse the problem became.

The Fire Triangle

In real-world chemistry, ordinary combustion requires three basic components:

Fuel + heat + oxidizer

This is commonly called the fire triangle.

Remove the fuel and the fire stops.

Remove sufficient heat and the fire stops.

Remove the oxidizer, usually oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, and the fire stops.

Our atmosphere contains roughly 21% oxygen, and ordinary flames depend upon access to that oxygen. Reduce the oxygen concentration enough and many common materials can no longer sustain combustion.

This immediately raises an interesting possibility for airbenders.

Why fight a firebender's flame directly?

If an airbender possesses sufficiently precise control over the atmosphere, he could theoretically manipulate the environment in which that flame is trying to exist.

Instead of throwing a wall of air against incoming fire, create a region around the firebender's hands in which there isn't enough oxygen to sustain ordinary combustion.

Or rapidly redirect the surrounding atmosphere.

Or create pressure differences that disrupt the flame.

Or continually strip oxygen-rich air away from the combustion zone.

If Avatar's fire behaved exactly like ordinary terrestrial fire, sufficiently sophisticated airbending should be an almost perfect countermeasure.

There is, however, a major problem with applying the fire triangle directly to Avatar.

Firebenders Aren't Carrying Fuel

When someone lights a campfire, the wood is the fuel.

When gasoline burns, gasoline is the fuel.

A propane torch burns propane.

A firebender?

He punches.

Fire comes out.

Where did the fuel come from?

There obviously isn't a stream of gasoline spraying from Zuko's knuckles.

Avatar therefore establishes from the beginning that firebending cannot simply be ordinary chemical combustion. Firebending is associated with chi, breath, internal energy and heat. The resulting phenomenon resembles ordinary flame, produces heat and ignites conventional materials, but its initial generation is supernatural.

That means removing oxygen might not necessarily prevent a firebender from creating fire.

The bending itself may be supplying whatever energy or supernatural mechanism is necessary to produce the flame.

But that doesn't actually solve the airbender problem.

But What About Sozin's Comet?

Then the show threw another wrinkle into my original thought.

The Fire Nation attacks while empowered by Sozin's Comet.

That initially made me reconsider the oxygen problem.

Comet.

Fire.

Huge flaming-looking object flying through space.

Except there's a problem.

Comets aren't actually on fire.

That familiar image of a glowing object with a gigantic tail streaking through space isn't a cosmic fireball.

A comet's nucleus contains frozen volatile materials mixed with dust and rocky material. As the comet approaches the Sun, solar heating causes frozen materials to sublimate, transitioning directly from solid into gas.

Escaping gas carries dust away from the nucleus and creates the enormous cloud surrounding it known as the coma.

Radiation pressure and the solar wind then interact with this material, producing the comet's characteristic tails. Ionized gas forms an ion tail influenced by the solar wind, while dust produces a separate dust tail.

None of this requires the comet to be "burning."

And that's fortunate because ordinary combustion doesn't work very well in the vacuum of space.

There's essentially no atmospheric oxygen available to sustain a conventional flame.

That's also why rockets don't depend upon atmospheric oxygen. A rocket intended to operate beyond the atmosphere carries both fuel and oxidizer.

So Sozin's Comet isn't some enormous celestial bonfire providing extra fire to the Fire Nation.

Its relationship to firebending is supernatural.

The Sun Isn't Fire Either

This actually makes Avatar's celestial relationship with firebending more interesting.

Firebenders draw strength from the Sun.

But the Sun isn't technically "burning" either.

There isn't a gigantic oxygen-fed campfire 93 million miles away.

The Sun consists primarily of plasma, and its enormous energy output ultimately comes from nuclear fusion in its core. Hydrogen nuclei ultimately combine through fusion processes that produce helium while releasing tremendous quantities of energy.

So we have two celestial phenomena associated with firebending:

The Sun: not chemically burning.

Sozin's Comet: not chemically burning.

Yet both are associated with dramatically increased firebending power.

That strongly suggests that the fundamental concept behind firebending isn't conventional combustion at all.

It's energy.

The visible flame is the manifestation.

This fits Avatar surprisingly well.

Firebenders aren't simply controlling an existing chemical reaction. They're channeling internal energy into heat and flame, with certain celestial phenomena capable of amplifying their bending.

So perhaps an airbender couldn't simply remove oxygen from the area around someone's fist and switch off firebending.

But we're still left with the original problem.

Bloodbending Makes This Question Even Harder to Ignore

The Avatar universe itself gives us precedent for taking an element's manipulation into disturbing biological territory.

Bloodbending.

Waterbenders normally manipulate external bodies of water. But the human body contains a tremendous amount of water.

Eventually somebody follows that fact to its horrifying conclusion:

If there's water inside a human body, why shouldn't an extraordinarily skilled waterbender be able to manipulate it?

And they can.

Bloodbending allows a waterbender to manipulate the water within another person's body and forcibly control that person's movements.

Once Avatar establishes that possibility, asking similar questions about airbending becomes completely reasonable.

If a waterbender can say:

"There's water inside you."

Why can't an airbender say:

"You have to breathe my element."

There is an important scientific distinction here, though.

Could an Airbender Bend the Oxygen in Your Blood?

Probably not, at least not according to anything Avatar has clearly established.

There's plenty of oxygen associated with our blood, but there aren't tiny bubbles of ordinary air racing through healthy blood vessels.

Most oxygen transported by the blood is bound to hemoglobin molecules inside red blood cells. Carbon dioxide is transported through several mechanisms, with much of it converted into bicarbonate ions in the blood.

So unless airbending works at the molecular level and allows someone to selectively manipulate oxygen atoms or chemically bound gases, an airbender probably couldn't "bend the air in your blood" in the same straightforward sense that a bloodbender manipulates the body's water.

And if airbenders could independently manipulate individual oxygen molecules regardless of their chemical state, the implications would become absurdly powerful very quickly.

But they don't need that ability.

The respiratory system already contains actual gas.

And more importantly, the respiratory system must continually interact with the atmosphere.

An airbender doesn't need to reach into your bloodstream.

He can control what reaches your lungs in the first place.

Forget the Fire. Attack the Firebender's Breathing.

Human beings don't breathe because our lungs actively suck air into themselves like pumps.

Breathing depends heavily upon pressure differentials.

During inhalation, the diaphragm contracts and the thoracic cavity expands. Pressure inside the lungs falls relative to atmospheric pressure, causing air to flow inward. During normal exhalation, those mechanics reverse and air flows outward.

Air moves from regions of relatively higher pressure toward regions of lower pressure.

An airbender controls the medium upon which this entire system depends.

That opens some frightening possibilities.

A sufficiently skilled airbender could theoretically prevent fresh atmospheric air from reaching someone's mouth and nose. He could continually move breathable air away from the person's face. He might create abnormal pressure conditions that interfere with inhalation or forcibly evacuate air from the respiratory tract.

And unlike throwing a giant tornado at someone, some of these techniques wouldn't necessarily require moving an enormous quantity of air.

The manipulation could potentially be localized to a very small region.

Your opponent can create a wall of supernatural fire?

Fine.

Don't fight the wall.

Prevent him from breathing properly.

This becomes especially interesting because Avatar repeatedly connects firebending itself with breathing.

So disrupting respiration potentially attacks two things simultaneously: the firebender's biological need for oxygen and one of the fundamental disciplines underlying his bending.

Even if removing oxygen doesn't extinguish bending-generated fire, an airbender doesn't actually need it to.

The fire isn't the vulnerability.

The person producing it is.

The Air Nomads May Be the Reason We Don't See This

Perhaps airbending isn't underpowered at all.

Perhaps the Air Nomads deliberately never developed its most horrifying applications.

Their civilization was deeply spiritual and strongly associated with nonviolence, avoidance, redirection and preservation of life.

Naturally, the techniques they developed and passed down would reflect those values.

We tend to think of a magical ability's limitations as being determined entirely by what the magic can physically accomplish.

But martial traditions are also cultural.

A civilization determines what techniques are studied, which ones are forbidden, what gets taught to children, what masters spend generations refining and what knowledge disappears because nobody considers it acceptable to pursue.

Imagine an entirely different civilization possessing airbending.

Not peaceful monks.

A militaristic empire.

Give that civilization a thousand years to investigate atmospheric pressure, respiration, shock waves, weather phenomena, fluid dynamics and the physiological effects of oxygen deprivation.

Their airbenders might be absolutely horrifying.

Instead of asking:

"How hard can I hit somebody with wind?"

Their scholars might ask:

"How little atmospheric manipulation is required to render an enemy unconscious?"

That produces a completely different martial art.

And interestingly, the larger Avatar universe does eventually demonstrate that airbending can be used in much darker ways than Aang's traditional fighting style suggests. So the basic concept isn't incompatible with the setting at all.

Airbenders Should Be Terrifying

And that's ultimately where this entire thought experiment leads me.

The Fire Nation's supernatural flame might not obey the fire triangle.

The Fire Nation soldier's respiratory system does.

Bloodbending already establishes that bending can become terrifying when someone stops thinking only about the element outside the human body and starts considering how that element interacts with the body itself.

Airbenders don't even need to go that far.

Their element is already everywhere.

It's around their opponent's body. It's entering and leaving their lungs. Atmospheric pressure makes breathing possible. Airflow affects flames, heat and movement. And every ordinary human opponent has to continuously interact with it simply to remain conscious.

Perhaps the reason airbending rarely looks this frightening isn't because the element lacks the capability. Perhaps it's because the people who mastered it were overwhelmingly peaceful and never spent generations developing techniques designed specifically to exploit human physiology.

Put that same element into the hands of someone willing to ask the questions the Air Nomads wouldn't, and suddenly airbending looks very different.

So if I were an airbender facing the Fire Nation during Sozin's Comet, I wouldn't stand there trying to overpower a comet-enhanced wall of fire with a bigger gust of wind.

Let the comet amplify their fire.

Let their supernatural bending ignore the normal requirements of combustion.

None of that changes the fundamental weakness standing directly in front of me.

Forget extinguishing the fire.

Extinguish his ability to fight.

Because apparently Sozin's Comet can give a firebender enough power to turn the battlefield into an inferno.

But unless that comet also gives him a new respiratory system, he's still got one major problem.

If I were an airbender, I would restrict his breathing... Problem solved. Nonviolent. Lives saved.