After Netflix’s Avatar show, Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender keeps its place as the worst version of Avatar. But it made one surprising change to firebending.
M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender is infamous for the changes it made to the setting of Avatar: The Last Airbender — like saying “Ahhng” instead of Aang, or “Eee-row” instead of Iroh, or like making everybody white.
But there’s one completely arbitrary and unnecessary change that’s actually kind of interesting: making it so that firebenders have to keep an open flame around at all times, because they can’t actually generate fire.
I can recall that fateful day almost 15 years ago that I sat down in a theater and subjected myself to Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender, with its sleep paralysis demon Appa, its ’90s Power Rangers-ass fight scenes, and its main character with a functionally different name. And maybe it was just the delusion of an overwhelmed mind, but I do recall thinking to myself: Wait… firebenders only being able to bend fire that exists in their environment is kind of interesting. Hear me out
Firebending has always been the odd element out; it’s just that the Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon did a good job of making it seem interchangeable with water, earth, and air. But of the four, fire is the only one that doesn’t occur in nature in a stable form. You can’t stick some fire in an oiled leather pouch and uncork it when the fighting starts, like Katara does with her waterskin. Even torches last only a couple hours. (Lava and magma are under the purview of earthbending, we know this.)
One of these things is not like the other. Fire is the only element in Avatar that’s non-material: Fire isn’t stuff, it’s a chemical reaction.
