Headscratchers / Avatar: The Last Airbender - Failure of Science Forever

Aang not freezing at the South Pole

• The very first episode. Aang is sleeping bare-chested on the ground over solid ice at the South Pole with nothing more than a pair of thin blankets, in a small tent. In fact for the whole time he's at the poles, he never wears anything other than his regular clothes. How about that? The Avatar gets special exemption from hypothermia!
  • Airbenders can control air temperatures. It's mentioned in the manual somewhere that Aang knows a special airbending trick to regulate his own body temperature, which is why you never see him bundled up against the cold. Heck, there's Real Life monks who've perfected a breathing method to regulate body heat in a manner to let them survive really cold environments with little-to-no ill effects.

Schizo Tech and gunpowder, but no guns?

• You have steamships, airships, and tanks, placing the tech level equivalent to our World War I. Their artillery, on the other hand, is arrows, catapults, and spears from The Dung Ages. What's weirder is that there's evidence of gunpowder in the show. You can see fireworks in "The Deserter" and explosives in "Siege of the North". So what reason would these people have not to be using cannons and muskets and bayonets?
  • With people that can shoot fire out of their hands at will and control it at a distance, would you bother trying to invent something as clumsy and random as a musket?
    • Weapons (even the more advanced ones) are not necessarily superior to bending. Also, bending is typically only used for close combat; firearms are long-range weapons so the strengths and weaknesses of the two don't really overlap. Plus, it still doesn't cover the non-bender soldiers, the archers, or why the ships have catapults mounted on them as opposed to smaller, more efficient cannons.
  • Bending is seen as a gift and a privilege so the elite aren't going to fund or encourage things that would let "ordinary" people pull off the same kinds of feats they can.
    • True, but this war has been dragging on for a century now. At this point, would they still put personal pride in bending over utilizing the military potential of physical weapons?
    • Given how stubborn people can be, as well as the fact the Fire Nation isn't losing (i.e. no external pressure to)? Probably yes.
  • Would you really want to keep copious amounts of gunpowder anywhere close to the guys that fling fire around like it's no big deal? Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.
    • It would be for the benders, but not for the non-bender soldiers who would be needing the firearms in the first place. Also, if "Siege of the North" and "The Deserter" are any indication, they already do that in the show.

Day/Night cycle at the poles

• In 1x19 and 1x20 "The Siege of the North", set on the north pole, why do day and night pass normally? On the poles, day and night last several months. This would have serious implications for the Water Tribes defense, as the Fire Nation could simply wait until summer and attack, denying the water tribe any advantage from the moon.
  • Day and night are only long periods during the Summer and Winter months of each pole. They are pretty average otherwise. If Book 1 began in Winter then by the time 1x19 and 1x20 occurred it was probably mid to early spring: still close enough to winter for the nights to be unusually long, but close enough to the solstice for the roughly 1 month period of constant night to occur. Also, 'North Pole' probably isn't literal, as the canal city wouldn't work there seeing as its totally covered in land on the world map.
  • The Avatar world might just be flat, so the days would be the same. After all, the solar eclipse seems to have happened over the entire planet at once.
    • In the commentary track, the creators handwave this by saying that the events in Omashu must have occurred several hours before or after the other events of Day of Black Sun. They don't flat out say that the world is round, but they seem to reject the flat world interpretation, even if it does simplify things.

Is Aang's staff actually delicate?

• How is Aang's staff a "delicate instrument"? It's survived shattering steel (in at least one case, good steel), which was weakened only by being suddenly made cold. And he mostly used it by striking with its side, and sometimes by its end. How is it being used as a nutcracker (striking the nuts with the end like a press or chisel) such a concern?
  • He had to have replaced it at least once—it was rendered useless after his battle with Jet, for example.
  • Plus, Toph was the one using it as a nutcracker, and would you really want Toph cracking nuts with your primary weapon, especially when she could just punch the ground and get her own nutcracker? Plus, people tend to show much more concern for their possessions when somebody's handling it.
  • Aang has plenty of experience with using the staff, and he might use

Nyla's scent-tracking is magical

• June and her scent-tracking beast Nyla. In her first appearance Nyla's tracking skills are reasonable, but when they return in Book 3, Nyla's nose is now strong enough that she can determine Aang no longer physically exists in the world just by sniffing his glider a few seconds, and is immediately able to hone in on Iroh's current location, and set a direct course for him, without having to find and follow the actual trail Iroh took to get there himself. Scent does not work that way.
  • It's distantly possible Nyla located Iroh's scent so quickly because Iroh had conveniently passed through the area on his way to Ba Sing Se; if that were the case, then Nyla would naturally pick up the fresher trail rather than having to track Zuko and the sandal all the way back to the Fire Nation and starting from there. We could also suppose that Jun was exaggerating out of hubris rather than acknowledge that Nyla couldn't find Aang because he hadn't been through their area recently enough to lay a traceable scent trail (although this doesn't explain why Nyla didn't follow the scent left by the glider).
  • Or, the simple explanation: yeah, it is magical.
  • There are plenty of animals with ties to the spirit world that give them special abilities. Shirshus might have something that lets them catch and track the spiritual "scent" of someone. That could also explain how Nyla can somehow tell that Aang isn't in the physical world anymore; since he's outside the physical world, there's no "scent" for her to track on that plane of existence.

More Nyla tracking questions

• Another question: while tracking Katara's scent via the necklace they went to a location Katara had never been. While it lead to an amusing scene with Miyuki, Only Aang had been there. Katara was back with Sokka.
  • They could have gone back to thank her for assisting in saving their lives, and having an amusing offscreen scene with Miyuki, especially after learning the value of taking breaks when needed. Or that Properly Paranoid, Crazy-Prepared Zuko wanted to confirm with the locals periodically, in case Jun eventually started leading him on a wild goose chase and he had to go back to the last time someone saw a bald kid with an arrow on his head.
  • If you're talking about the Herbalist institute, they didn't go there. They were in the ruins of Taku, where Katara and Sokka were recovering from sickness. The woman and Miyuki happened to be just be around there at the time.

Convection Schmonvection

• How are characters are able to stand so close to lava?! The most egregious example is in the 3rd season premiere when Aang sticks his glider and within seconds in bursts into flame. If the lava was that hot, then how was he able to do that while barefoot?
  • For the same reason that they're able to take direct hits from balls of blue-hot fire and barely get singed, leap fifty feet in the air, get boulders hurled at them and get thrown dozens or hundreds of feet without getting worse than bruised. Avatar is Wuxia - the laws of physics are bent as a result.
  • Refer also to above Headscratcher on how Aang is not freezing at the South Pole. If airbenders can regulate their body temperature for extreme cold, it's likely they can do the same for extreme heat.

Scientific and technological advancements

• How come no advancements in science or technology are made other than what we see in either show?
  • You'd ask the same thing if the outcome had turned out any other way.
  • A better question would be why they have science at all. This is a world full of magic and spirits. Quite a few basic assumptions required for science to actually BE science occurred in Medieval Europe, for which this world has no analogue nor the ability to have one since there's no logical reason to a logical or truly understandable world. It's hard to understand now that the world being discoverable and logical (in terms of chemistry and physics, if nothing else) is an assumption so basic that we barely even register it, but if you look at historical writings, particularly philosophy, you'll see that that was usually considered a poor assumption to make, and understandably so with how unpredictable life itself is. How much less should things be considered physically predictable when there are spirits everywhere and people using chi powers to break the laws of gravity, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, and probably all of physics at one point or another?

Just how much does Toph "see"?

• Toph's blindness and vibration sensing has always been portrayed very inconsistently. Sometimes she appears able to "sense" airborne missles (rocks, fire, Mai's pointy daggers), Other times she is relatively helpless in certain situations because of her blindness: she has no idea where the sea serpent is when it attacks, cannot cope with (extremely noisy) giant flying insects, and of course in her first appearance is foiled by Aang's air bending that she cannot see to dodge or block.
  • Toph can sense earth (even if it's in the air, or in tiny impurities like metal) and anything touching earth. Anything that isn't touching the earth, she is unable to see. When she's blocking non-Earth items (eg. fire), she's not as much blocking fire as she's reacting to the person making a firebending motion at her (In most cases, she's blocking earthbending stances, which she knows enough about), who happen to be standing on the ground when they do so.

As for the bugs, she can certainly hear where they are, but by the time she chucks a rock, it moves, and in any possible direction, which she can't predict because it's not touching the ground. This is explicitly shown while fighting the wasp-vulture critters in "The Desert". Katara gestures at a target, and Toph lifts and launches a rock with extreme precision at the direction Katara points.

• So why, in Tales of Ba Sing Se, does Toph claim to have no idea what Katara looks like?
• Because blind people don't know what anything looks like.

• The Gaang were also running away at that moment and Toph was using her earthbending to launch herself onto Appa, so it's entirely possible avoidng Mai's darts was a lucky coincidence.

• On that note, how does Toph "see" on wood? In "The Painted Lady" and "The Runaway", she's thrown through a loop because she is forced to stand on wood and she can't see as a result. Then, by "The Puppetmaster", she's able to see in Hama's house just fine.
  • The problem was that Toph can't bend wood; it was never indicated that she couldn't see on it. Wood doesn't make her blind so much as it doesn't give her anything to work with.

Ember Island Players' special effects

• How did The Ember Island Players manage to get black lights for the avatar state effects? Normal light seems plausible enough (fire in a dish, presumably), but black lights seem out of place.
  • They were not black lights: The lights were off. The paint glowed in the dark.
    • Where did they get glow-in-the-dark paint, then? Is the actress who played Aang now slowly dying of radiation poisoning?
    • The association between radiation^note will slowly kill you and phosphorescence^note glows in the dark is pure fiction. There are plenty of radioactive elements that don't glow, and glow-in-the-dark substances that aren't radioactive. (In the 1920's through the 1950's, a lot of watches and clocks were painted with a mixture of radium and zinc sulfide. The radium was radioactive, and the zinc sulfide was radioluminescent.^note glows when exposed to radiation This mixture thus glowed all the time, making it possible to read your watch in the dark. When the danger of radium was discovered, and people found that their clocks were painted with radium, they thought that it was the radium itself that was glowing. Thus, the pop culture notion of "glowing green radiation" was born.)
    • Glow-in-the-dark rocks exist. Failing that, fireflies in a jar.

Bender lifespans

• Why do benders live longer than Muggles?
  • Technically, they don't (not in the sense they live shorter; there's just no major discrepancy). Look at Guru Pathik - he has to be older then Aang's 112 years, if he was "a close personal friend of Monk Gyatso's". Word of God states that longevity in the Avatar world is a result of high chi levels and a connection to nature. Benders are naturally going to be more likely to have a great deal of chi, since that's the source of their abilities, but it's clearly not impossible for a spiritual normal to achieve the same results.

Fire Nation blockade

• In one episode, there was a massive Fire Nation naval blockade around a "whole continent". Given the number of ships we see at a random spot around the perimeter, the Fire Nation must have more battleships than people. Also in that episode, one of these ships put on the brakes and audibly ground to a halt to avoid hitting Zuko's ship. Eh?
  • It's called "All Back Emergency". Probably wouldn't stop you as quickly as depicted, but hey, maybe the fire nation has some sort of quick-reverse clutch/gearing arrangement for their propeller shafts? Also, no one said their blockade was perfect; there's probably some people (like the pirates) who make a living running it.
  • If this is referring to the blockade from Book 1, that was specifically ordered by Zhao to keep the Avatar from getting to the Fire Nation uncaptured. Not only was it temporary, it most likely only blocked off a portion of Fire Nation waters - a just large-enough area to ensure that going around would take up far too much time.

Cutting with waterbending

• Some of the things waterbenders can do with their water just makes no sense. Shaping it into a whip to lash or lasso someone/something, fine. But how the hell do they use water like a blade to cut things? Even metal? Water can cut things by enormous velocity/pressure, but these guys just slice it around like a blade and it somehow cuts clean through things.
  • Given how our intuition of physics breaks down at extremely un-Earthlike conditions, water at ultra-high pressure and velocity might very well be able to cut all manner of things. After all, if you force two substances together something's got to give way, and if it isn't the water it's going to be the metal. Plus, do remember that their metals are known to be impure, which means they're weaker than what we're used to.

How does jennamite grow?

• In episode five(5), The King of Omashu, the king forces Sokka and Katara to wear rings made of genemite, also known as creeping crystal, because it grows ridiculously fast. The problem is, it grows without consuming anything, and apparently just creates more matter to make more of itself.
  • Perhaps it's just really dense and is spreading out.
  • Sugar is a combination of water and Carbon Dioxide; both can be found in the air. For the energy source, perhaps photosynthesis (which allows you to store them by keeping it in the dark) or chi (which explains why it works by putting it on people).
  • The problem I have with it is that it, if it actually behaved as shown, it would long ago have covered the world. Just a tiny sliver in somebody's luggage, taken to another country, would be too large to stop by the time they realized what it was and got an earthbender there to stop it. Personally, I have a headcanon that genemite doesn't actually grow by itself, and there were actually earthbenders that were sneakily adding more candy to the mass around Katara and Sokka from off-screen. (That means that the part where Sokka fell over was some earthbender being a dick.)

Teo's medical problems

• Teo(the kid with the glider chair). His chair lacks padding, and realistically, he would need some kind of soft padding to prevent pressure sores. He's even shown sleeping on his back - when you spend most of your day in a hard chair, sleeping on your back is not a good idea. Also, there's the risk of renal failure depending on how low the injury was, and without daily physical therapy sessions, there's a danger of serious problems like thrombosis and possibly gangrene due to poor blood circulation.

How do firebenders make lightning?

• How exactly can firebenders create lightning? Lightning is just electricity—there's no fire in it. Are firebenders also electricity benders?
  • The show uses classical physics laws. Firebenders can bend lightning either because under classical laws lightning is a combination of fire+air (though it does bring Fridge Logic that airbenders should also be able to lightningbend).
  • Iroh developed lightning redirection from watching waterbenders, so while lightningbending doesn't use firebending + waterbending, it does involve skillsets from both. Other substances probably work the same way: lavabending probably uses some combination of skills from earthbending and firebending, for example.
  • The Sun Warriors and the Dragons highlight that firebending is mainly about manipulation of energy. That it takes the form of heat and light, fire, is simply a matter that this is the most common form a human would know and the method the dragons mastered before teaching it to the firebenders. Iroh describes generating lightning as separating positive and negative energies within one's self not unlike a magnet or battery. This creates an imbalance then allowing them to come back together creates a very specific flow of energy, directed outward this becomes lightning.

Wooden cage for firebenders

• In the episode where Katara and Toph were locked in a wooden cage, why were they locked in a wooden cage? This takes place in the Fire Nation where the likely prisoners would be Fire Nation citizens.
  • Combustion Man arranging it (probably after seeing and recognizing the face of 'The Runaway' on the wanted poster) is the implication here.
  • Maybe it was just built out of wood because they couldn't get any metal to built the bars from. They probably used all of it to build that Ozai statue outside.
  • Immigration is possible, and some tourism would occur even in the middle of a war. It would make sense for law enforcement to keep at least a few cages around that could hold other types of benders, especially in a big city.