What determines a bender's element?

Question

At first glance, it seems that bending is genetic/racial. In the original series, each nation has its own element and there is no crossover (the Avatar being the obvious exception). The upcoming series mixes things up by introducing two brothers, Mako and Bolin. Mako is a firebender and Bolin is an earthbender. This lends itself to genetics pretty easily as one could assume they came from mixed parents.

Then I remembered that humans did not always posses the ability to bend. Each nation was originally taught their respective art by an external force.

• Earthbenders were taught by the badgermoles.
• Firebenders were taught by the dragons.
• Airbenders were taught by the skybison.
• Waterbenders learned by watching the moon push/pull the tides.

We know that at least one of these methods still works at the time of the original series as Toph learned eathbending directly from the badgermoles. So then one could assume that bending in itself is not so much genetic as is the aptitude for bending.

So is there anything other than tradition that determines a bender's element? Could someone other than the Avatar learn to bend multiple elements if they had the means to seek out these animals and the willpower?

Answer 1

First, bending is not given to everyone. Someone like Sokka won't be able to bend water no matter how hard he tries or how long he watches the moon push/pull the tides. One could draw a parallel between Bending arts and Force sensitivity in StarWars, without the Midi-chlorian.

Secondly, Avatar: The Last Airbender is all about spirit, karma, and chi and thus bending arts are more a spiritual matter than a genetic one. There is a lineage link, as child from a tribe that is linked to a element are only able to bend that element. But I think it's more caused by the spiritual link between a bender and his ancestor. Since the whole series is from oriental inspiration, this might be inspired by traditions like Filial piety.

We also know that an bender's element is not linked to birthplace, as the Foggy Swamp Tribe lived on Earth Kingdom.

Thirdly, it's explicitly stated many times that the Avatar is the only physical being with the ability to practice all four bending disciplines. Whether someone else could not master more than one element, there is no canon information that confirm that statement. But I would say it's unlikely.

Finally, here an excerpt from Bending arts avatar.wikia

It is unclear how the ability to bend is distributed amongst the population or how closely it is linked to heredity; even among identical twins it is possible for one to be a bender and the other not. In the case of mixed marriages, the children may be benders of either element if they are benders at all; for example, Firebender Mako and Earthbender Bolin are brothers with parents from the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom. The only case of any one person being able to bend multiple elements, or an element not associated to their nation of birth, is the Avatar him- or herself, the spirit of the world incarnate, who has the ability to practice all five bending arts.

Answer 2

There are multiple factors that determine what element, their aptitude with that element and ultimately what level of progress a person may develop as an element bender of the Four Nations.

Elemental bending is linked to:

• An as yet undisclosed genetic disposition linked to the various kingdoms. Each of the kingdoms has a predisposition for each element. Each claims to have been taught or influenced by a natural phenomenon or animal patron; fire by the dragons, Earth by the badgermoles, Air by the skybison and Water by the moon. No one may bend an element not native to a land of one of their parents.
• Cultural technique even within an element may take precedence and influence how an element is controlled. An Earthbender of Ba Sing Se and an sandbender of the Earth Kingdom deserts are both Earthbenders but each deals with their element based on the training of their respective cultures.

• Consistency and training; a bender may have the aptitude for bending but without training and discipline may never develop any significant ability. Consider Kitara before she left the Water Tribe. She was able to bend but it was uncontrolled and the results unpredictable.
• A personality profile does seem to affect how easily or difficult it is for a bender to master their element. If their personality runs contrary to their element's nature, they may have greater affinity or difficulty mastering it. Consider Aang and Earthbending, it was completely foreign to his personality.
• With discipline, subsets of that element can be controlled as well; fire can bend lightning, Earth could bend metal, Water could bend blood or perform healing. Air does not appear to have a subset skill.
• There is the lost art of energybending of which there are no living beings capable of performing it. The last known energybender was Aang who was taught by the lion-turtle.
• Aside from the Avatar, who is the living spirit of the world, no one has displayed a propensity or capability to bend more than one element at a time. Indeed this is the hallmark of the Avatar and the indicator of their reincarnation after death.

Each type of bending is also linked to a martial art technique. It is possible for a bender of one type of element to learn the martial style of another bending type, but they still will not be able to bend that element whose style they are imitating.

• Airbending is linked to Ba Gua Kung Fu; whose techniques are focused on circular motions and redirecting the energy of the opponent back upon themselves.
• Waterbending is linked to Tai Chi Chuan and is focused on feeling the flow of an enemy's fighting style and redirect that energy away from the martial artist.
• Earthbending is linked to Hung Gar (though there are others), Earth fighters focus on strength, power and resistance in their fighting technique. They are durable and strong fighters physically overpowering their enemies. They are also known for their ability to cause collateral damage to the environment.
• Firebenders are linked to Northern Style Kung Fu, which offers strong aggressive and defensive capabilities and is one of the most well balanced in terms of offense and defensive techniques.

The power to bend the five elements (air, earth, fire, water, and energy) is linked specifically to the nations (and people) of the Avatar World by an as yet unknown mechanism. With the exception of the Air Nomads, mixing of bending types does not necessarily ensure what bending abilities will manifest, or whether ANY bending ability will be inherited at all. Nor is it clear how the power moves between family members. Even twins of parents from two different lands can possess different bending abilities.

Since there are variant powers such as metal-bending (a variant of earth-bending, or explosion bending (variant of fire-bending), this might also denote why there is such a study of lineage among the people of their world, to attempt to predict what bending abilities and strengths might manifest in a family line.

From the Avatar Wikia article on Bending Arts:

Though each nation is affiliated to a specific bending art, not all from any nation, with the exception of the Air Nomads, are born with the ability to bend. It is unclear how the ability to bend is distributed amongst the population or how closely it is linked to heredity; even among identical twins it is possible for one to be a bender and the other not. In the case of mixed marriages, the children may be benders of either element if they are benders at all; for example, firebender Mako and earthbender Bolin are brothers with parents from the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom.

---

With the release of the Avatar the Last Airbender IP Bible, (kudos to Keen for finding it) several of the suppositions I made have been released and confirmed. I am copying them here in the event the source document link is later lost. Rationales are not always listed but some things are clearly defined:

From page one of the Rules:

1. A bender's powers cannot extend beyond his native element.
2. Only the Avatar can master all four elements
3. Bending is the physicial manipulation of the elements and is defined by the skill, strength and stamina of the practitioner.
4. The ability to bend is something you are born with. And not everyone in a nation is a bender. Only a small percentage of each population is a bender.
5. Benders represent only small percentage of all people in the world. They may be born to parents of benders or they may be born to parents with no powers.
6. A Bender's skill level determines the range of his attack
7. A Bender's elemental powers never extend beyond their immediate area.

This document qualitatively proves no one but the Avatar can master the four elements and no one can ever bend more than a single element.

Answer 3

As I've mentioned before the main aspect of a bending is their personality of the way they think. In the first series, you see Aang struggling to learn earth bending, because he's still thinking like an airbender. This has some bearing on which element you can learn. Though ultimately I think it it is down to genetics, even the open minded Iroh is only seen adapting fire bending, using water techniques to bend lightning. Though it's never covered if he could have learnt another element.

Mako and Bolin are stated to be from 'a multiracial family', which is possibly why they have different bending talents.

I don't believe anyone other than the current Avatar could possibly learn more than one style of bending though, even if you sought out the animals/satalites that could teach them. I'm basing this on there being no examples of anyone succeeding at this in canon.

Answer 4

The ability to bend is inborn, genetic. An earthbender, no matter if he were born in the earth kingdom or on a tiny tropical island of waterbenders, would only ever be able to learn to bend earth.

Their ancestors learned how to utilize the power they already possessed by watching their element/creatures, but it is not something that just anyone can up and learn; if you weren't born a firebender, you'll never be able to bend fire.

Same with multiple elements; even if you had all four nations in your ancestry, one element would be dominant, and that's the element you'd be able to train in/learn.

Answer 5

I believe that at the end of the era of Raava, the people who still contained the power of their element passed on the power to their children, making it a genetic thing. But since there are non-benders in the place there is still the possibility that they might bear non-bending kids.

The stories, i.e. bison etc., might have come from the people who didn't realise that they had the power.

Answer 6

ATLA was pretty clear cut. Little to no mixing of races (arguably due to the 100 year war, but likely to be from distance and cultural differences), and the only bending you can use comes from the nation you come from. This makes it pretty obvious to be genetic with a splash of mysticism. Otherwise identical (monozygotic) twins would both have to be or not be benders.(Poi and Ping in the Fortuneteller Episode). Only some Water Tribe, Fire Nation, Earth Kingdom residents are born benders, and their parents are always seen as from the same nation. Air Nomads were all born airbenders, an indication of their very spiritual nature.

Then LOK messed everything up. Aang and Katara had a mix of kids, one non-bender, one waterbender, one airbender. AFAIK Tenzin's fourth child is still unknown to be a bender. So the "all air nomads are airbenders" rule has to do more with Air Nomads likely only procreating with other Air Nomads over centuries until genetics left them with a supposedly 100% bending rate. The mixing of the nations with settlements like Republic City has also caused unpredictable results. From what we have seen, neither Mako or Bolin's parents have been called benders, and their Paternal Grandmother and extended family, all non-bending Earth Nation.

The biggest change is that with the opening of the Spirit Portals, and the Harmonic Convergence, some mystical source caused balance to return, turning a bunch of random, seemingly only earth nation citizens into Air Benders. Aside from Bumi who we know to be son of an Air Bender, the rest have undetermined genealogy, but its heavily implied to be at random/magic.

Answer 7

From what I understand, the birthday doesn't matter. Someone born in January and someone born in April may be born under a different sign but could have the similar placements in other planets. I know the theory is a bit far fetched, but all the benders I see all show traits of the signs their bending element is in. Of course same element benders won't have the same placements, but when I hear people say their bending is somewhat based on personality then I don't think it just happens to be luck of the draw. Plus, the theory makes more sense for the era that Korra was in.

Answer 8

What determines a bender's element? According to the show, it depends on two things. One is the environment your born into. If you're born around other Waterbenders or in a specific tribe of people, that will determine your element. The second thing is your mentality. An Earthbender will not be born in the Water tribes because the characteristics of an Earthbender do not thrive in those environments. The same applies to all of the elements.

So in short, your bending element is determined by the environment in which you're born, and your mentality (which grows in the shape of your environment anyway).

Its obviously not based on genetics, because Katara had two nonbending parents, but she WAS born in a Water tribe and had the mentality of a Waterbender.

Until the show states otherwise, this is the safest answer to assume.

Answer 9

I would say that the ability to bend as well as what kind of element you bend is Genetic. If you have even a basic knowledge of punnet squares and how genes work, then it makes sense from a genetic standpoint that the ability to bend is simply a recessive trait.

What element a person is able to bend is a little less clear, although I think that it is also Genetically based.

For the sake of argument, I will designate non-bending as a dominate trait and bending as a recessive trait, and for the sake of argument, I will designate the letter N to represent the Non-bending gene and the lowercase letter w to indicate the water bending gene.

Sokka and Katara are a good example of this: Hakota is a Heterozygous non-bender (Nw), While his wife Kya is also a Heterozygous non-bender (Nw). This provides a 25% chance of any offspring they have as being a waterbender. (3 combinations: 25% chance of NN, 50% chance of Nw, and 25% chance ww; only ww is a waterbender.) Sokka is a non-bender so his genes are either going to be NN or Nw, while Katara is a waterbender, meaning that she has the genes ww, making her a waterbender.

Things get a little more complicated when you deal with Mako and Bolin's parents, or try determining what the heck happened with Aang's eldest son, Bumi (Who is a non-bender).

Answer 10

Now we know that humans did not get bending from each respective animal. They were given their power by the lion turtles at the end of the Era of Raava.

Answer 11

Well, the spirit Ravaa is the main cause for the existence of the Avatar. Before in the first Avatar's days there were turtlelions that gave the humans the ability to bend the elements and only with Ravaa's help a human being could use the four elements at the same time, that is when Ravaa (the Light spirit) merged with Wan (the first Avatar) so that she could stay in Wan for a longer time so that he could fight her opposite Vatuu (the spirit of Darkness). The only way a human being could use a different element is by using Ravaa's help, there is no possibility that a bender with two different bending parents could use both their parents bending, in that was possible Bolin could be both a fire bender and an earth bender, the same with Mako and Tenzin and Kya.

Answer 12

I think any answer that claims that heredity isn't involved is likely to be wrong. If it were due to environmental factors alone, it would be almost certain that some exceptions would be known, for the simple reason that there's always a small percentage of the members of a society that have a radically different personality from the rest of the society. One can easily think of numerous real-life examples of this. Therefore, one would expect some people from one nation to have the ability to learn to bend other elements. In the "modern" era of LoK there is enough technology and contact between the nations so that it would be surprising if there never existed a single person who had the right frame of mind to bend an element other than their native one and managed to learn to do so. Also, if they were successful, it seems to me that the news of this occurrence would be widely known, especially as more people would flock to try it. There seems to be no evidence that this is the case.

So I think there is some genetic mutation that makes it possible for a person to learn to bend an element, and without this, it's simply impossible to bend that element. Furthermore, it seems that this mutation was once common but has become rarer over time. There's no evidence in canon that energybending can be used to give a non-bender the ability to bend or to give someone the "wrong" element. Wan only acquired the ability to airbend after Raava passed through his body; the lion turtle couldn't give it to him directly. (So perhaps energybending establishes or severs your connection with an element but can't affect whether or not you have the ability to form such a connection in the first place.) And since it seems like everyone from Wan's city has the ability to be given firebending by the lion turtle, it must have been the case that (almost) everyone in that city possessed the appropriate genotype for firebending. Presumably, there was some selective pressure involved (e.g., a coming-of-age ritual that required males to go out and hunt with fire or else be shamed and unable to get married and reproduce). As the structure of society changed, this selective pressure disappeared, and in the modern era bending only confers a small advantage in fitness so the genes involved have become rare in modern populations.

The only remaining question is how the nations became so homogeneous in their bending genes in the first place. In other words, how did it come to be that the only people with firebending genes are the ones with ancestors from the fire kingdom, and so on? After all, in humans, we see a strong connection between skin colour and national origin only because skin colours evolved in response to selective pressures that differed by geographical location; for other genetic traits the correlation with geographical origin tends to be much weaker, which is not surprising.

It's hard to say exactly but I imagine it has something to do with the lion turtles, since each lion turtle appears to only have knowledge of one element, so, in the times long before even Wan, if you were in a city with a firebending lion turtle but you had a waterbending genotype, you would be at a distinct disadvantage relative to your compatriots, so those genes probably just disappeared. Given the importance of bending especially in the times after people left the cities and went out into the spirit wilds, relying on bending to survive, it seems plausible that the element you could bend eventually became part of a national identity so tribes with the same element tended to congregate and to be distrustful and aggressive towards others, eventually leading to the present set of distinct nation-states whose populations only have one bending ability.

Answer 13

It is also entirely possible given the reincarnation cycle of the avatar and the spirits, with the fact that keeping the spirit gates open awakened air bending, they have a connection to it. Meaning there are a rather set amount of benders in the world given they are not to an age where every one is tracked it would be hard to tell who does and who doesn't and what numbers there are.

It doesn't really answer a lot but it is a thought.

My brother suggested another too what if the reason bolin can lava bend is his parents are fire and earth benders affording him a partial control with fire. Where as things like metal bending, blood bending, explosive bending, and flight would all fall under two of the same type of bender. Where as you get sand bender nomads who live like air benders but are earth benders. So they would have control over earth and a slight amount of air. You also have the swamp people who are water benders in the earth kingdom who can control plants and water possibly suggesting a link to earth bending.

With the small amount of benders the reason why this everyone doesn't have the chance is you have to have two bender parents of a decent degree of control or specific amount of natural ability. Toph probably wasn't the first to find they could metal bend but as metal for them probably wasn't as prevalent as it was for toph they both wouldn't master it and wouldn't need it. After all if you pay attention during Aang's time as avatar from the first point to when he defeats them they are phasing out line up style combat. Which probably means that was a big thing for awhile just like here. So benders needing their mobility for countless generations probably didn't use armor much. And with all the war it is hard to develop tech.

Given how hostile spirits were at the start it is really no wonder that people were insular. What is more the reason why they are so homogenous would be the lack of training for their abilities in different lands. An easy citation would be how hard it was for katara to learn water bending outside a water tribe. It is very likely that if you DID develop it in another place you go to where the training was already. Further exasperating all of the same type of bender being in one place. Another good example of it how the earth kingdom who rules so much land thanks to a certain conqueror still has a water bending tribe inside it. They only stay because they can perfect their bending right where they are and as such are little known. Were they known better that might be a different story. It is unlikely that water benders started in the poles regardless of how perfect it is now. It is likely a retreated to place much like the air nomads, and the fire nation originally who has only the one continent. With the huge earth kingdom taking the lion share of the land.

Answer 14

Friend of mine thought it could be zodiac placement. I don't know much about the zodiac but he thought if someone was given the gift to bend an element then it could be based off there placement in the Mars house. Mars is your motivation, and physical energy. Some examples: Zuko is a fire bender so maybe is Mars placement is in Aries, Leo, or Sagitarrius*. Just a theory but I thought it was interesting since since bending is partially based on personality and everyone is born under a sign and has their own ways of thinking.