## Rational Bending * Author: u/None * * URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/1uch5j/rational_bending/ * Score: 8 * Created: 2014-01-03T22:44:23 ### Post: So for my attempt at a non-shit take on LoK, I want to consider how a real society would exploit bending rationally. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show, basically, some people are born with the power to "bend" one of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Some earthbenders can also bend metal as long as it has earth mixed into it. We don't know what proportion of the population are benders, and while it's sort of genetic in that two earthbenders will have earthbender children or nonbender children but definitely not firebender children, the genetics really don't make any sense at all. E.g. an airbender and a waterbender have an airbender child, a waterbender child, and a nonbender child. wtf. By moving their bodies, benders can cause the element that they bend to follow a similar motion. Bending larger amounts of the element is harder, although there doesn't seem to be any very clear rules about what kind of motion causes what sort of reaction in the element and how much of it can be bent, and it's probably all in their heads anyway. Which is perhaps how a little girl can be one of the world's best earthbenders even in terms of raw power. How would a real society exploit these powers? Economically and militarily, how would these powers be put to use, and what would the consequences be? Would waterbenders power the city? Would earthbenders make the roads, or, if they're rare enough, would they *not* make the roads because it's actually cheaper to buy non-bender labor? Would buildings be constructed out of stone, or would the raw materials be more costly even though the construction cost is low, unless, again, the supply of/demand for earthbenders is high/low. What kind of cool things could you do if you could create fire as long as you had air to breathe? It's fun to speculate about, but I am looking for inspiration for a fic I'm writing about this, and I do reserve the right to steal any and all ideas posted here. I'm looking for both ratfic-style exploits and normal economic reactions to the facts of bending, such as they are or might be. For that matter, what are the facts of bending? Why are some people benders and others aren't (my planned take is that it's a mental attribute and that most people can't bend because they don't think they can, but maybe that's stupid and you have something better)? What are the different consequences of different bender:nonbender ratios? How does a bender become stronger, how do vague motions produce such specific intended reactions from the elements? I'm less interested in how to rationally use bending to fight, mainly because I'm not planning on having too many fair bender-on-bender battles, but it'd also be interesting to hear how smart people would actually fight with the various elements, and maybe I'll find something I can use in those ideas as well. Thanks for anything you can think of. ### Comments: > **u/alexanderwales** [+6] *Time flies like an arrow* (39 minutes later) > > Benders are strictly superior to nonbenders. There is nothing that a nonbender can do that a bender could not, and that implies quite a bit. A waterbender who can use the healing subschool will make a better doctor than a nonbender. Benders are better soldiers, because they have all the abilities of a normal soldier in addition to their bending. Unless there's a big social focus on equality, the average bender is going to make more than the average nonbender, and will likely make a *lot* more. Benders will hold a higher social position, and they'll get more promotions. > > Bending will also tend to push people towards certain career paths. Earthbenders are best at construction and manufacturing (especially in the post-metalbending era), and make for superior miners. Firebenders will involve themselves in power generation (especially in the post-lightningbending era), cooking (they get the heat for free), and smelting. Waterbenders are the best healers and firefighters, and likely the best farmers as well since they can easily irrigate their crops. Airbenders ... are sort of a nonissue, given that they're all dead, but if they were still around their ability to move quickly (with or without gliders) makes them perfect as messengers, scouts, or fast response teams. So as long as there are benders, certain industries will be dominated by them. > > And given the domination of bending over certain domains, that means that nonbenders should start to gravitate towards areas where the playing field is level - service and information, mostly. This somewhat depends on the ratio of benders to nonbenders; firebenders make better cooks (since they need no fuel) but if there are few enough of them, it might be possible to maintain a business even when your competition can undercut you. > > As far as the question of the *source* of bending goes, I'd keep it genetic, with the actual form that bending takes being heavily influenced by the society around you. It's definitely mental as well, but that doesn't mean that there's not a genetic component. Of course, it's not really that important to get to the actual root cause of where bending comes from, so long as you lay out rules and stick to them. >> **u/None** [+6] (57 minutes later) >> >> And yet the source of bending isn't quite genetic, not even in the real series. The fact that Aang could [energybend](http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Energybending) away his enemy's powers... Do I even need to mention the consequences of that? A highly desirable service for non-benders. (But shh it's secret, though how Aang managed to pass off that I dunno) And, as I said earlier, it suggests that bending isn't entirely genetic. Because then how would energy-bending work? Removing someone's genes? Might... Might chi actually be the best explanation for the data we have? >> >> Aaand just to toss out something else about the Avatar-verse that I love, but completely unrelated to the discussion at hand: Raava and Vaatu are awesome! I hope that somehow Vaatu either merges his spirit into the Avatar flow, or gets the Dark Avatar back as a long-term baddie. >> >> Or it could be *even more* epic, and... Nah, this is a good place to stop. >>> **u/alexanderwales** [+2] *Time flies like an arrow* (2 hours later) >>> >>> I was sort of under the impression that chi was necessary for bending, but that it wasn't the source of bending. So by analogy, when Aang does chi blocking it's like he's blinding someone - but there's a difference between someone who's congenitally blind and someone who was blinded from birth. >>> >>> It probably makes more sense to just model bending as being of the spirits, but I'm not sure about the best way to express that to a viewer/reader. I'm sure that the scholars of that world have a multitude of theories to explain why some people can bend and others can't, even if they share ancestry. >>> **u/LordSwedish** [+2] *Q Continuum* (17 hours later) >>> >>> My understanding is that everyone has chi and that it is the source of life and spiritualism but only those with the right genes can release their chi into an elemental form. This is supported by the fact that the guru was an expert in chi matters and spirits without being a bender himself. By this logic Aang sealed the chi "openings" in Ozai's spirit just as chi blockers temporarily seal the physical ones. >> **u/None** [+3] (an hour later) >> >> While benders would have an absolute advantage at pretty much everything physical, they won't have a comparative advantage. In other words, while earthbenders might be better at construction that non-benders, they might be even *more* better at some other thing, and non-benders will end up doing the construction. >> >> There's also construction made out of wood and other non-stone building materials, although perhaps benders would lobby for legal impediments to such competition (this is something I'm trying to explore in my fic). >> >> As a social scientist, I suppose what I'm curious about is the physical possibilities of bending. Once I know those, it's easy enough to decide what the bender:nonbender ratio is and let the economics rip. What I can't figure out on my own is what kind of physical possibilities would be discovered through trial-and-error in a world that had been populated by benders for a very long time. For example, there's got to be some very interesting things you could do with firebending, but for the life of me I don't know what. Turning calories to fire without the need of a combustible material or a spark as long as you have sunlight and oxygen...well, *I'm* not going to figure this out. >>> **u/alexanderwales** [+7] *Time flies like an arrow* (3 hours later) >>> >>> **Firebending** >>> >>> * Cooking >>> * Powering batteries >>> * Melting sand into glass >>> * Heating water and make steam (to power engines, for bathhouses, cleaning) >>> * Heating metal to forge (need to determine max temps possible) >>> * Use lightningbending with loops of conductive metal to make a magnet or magnetic field >>> * Firefighting (using lots of fire to burn up available oxygen and put the fire out, or simple redirection) >>> * Home heating >>> * Cauterizing (wounds or otherwise) >>> * Welding >>> * Fast travel via flames >>> >>> **Waterbending** >>> >>> * Build near-instant ice houses >>> * Bend the water to catch fish >>> * Healing the wounded >>> * Providing river crossings >>> * Irrigating crops >>> * Sailing (calming the swells, acting as a bilge pump) >>> * Dowsing out water >>> * Plumbing >>> * Any of the steam related capabilities of the firebenders (powering engines, cooking) >>> * Washing >>> * Water purification >>> * Fast travel across the oceans >>> * Rapid dehydration/mummification (preservation of foods, industrial refinements, etc.) >>> >>> **Earthbending** >>> >>> * Rapid construction >>> * Rapid demolition >>> * Water filtration/purification >>> * Tunneling >>> * Mining >>> * Refining metals >>> * Rapid travel across sand >>> * Search/rescue via seismic sensing >>> * Creating (crude) machine parts >>> >>> That's mostly what's in (or heavily implied by) canon. I left off airbending because there are only a small handful of benders and so they shouldn't have an impact on what happens socially/economically. If you want more speculative stuff ... it depends on what framework you want to go with, and how much control you decide a person can have. If you can lightningbend, then in theory you can ionize the air to purify the air, for example. Or you could use bloodbending in order to do a transfusion without needles (if that weren't taboo), or use the desiccation ability of waterbending in order to destroy a tumor that you saw with the waterbending equivalent of earthbending's seismic vision. >>>> **u/None** [+1] (5 hours later) >>>> >>>> So the total lack of interest the canon narrative takes in exploring the possibilities and rules of bending makes speculation difficult. In which case it's up to me to make up as I please, and a list like this is very useful. >>>>> **u/lehyde** [+1] *Nudist Beach* (19 hours later) >>>>> >>>>> Another thing to consider is how exhausting bending actually is. It's never really addressed in canon (as far as I can remember) but there has to be a limit on what a bender can sustain. Otherwise Toph would be walking around in rock armor all the time. And considering lightbending is a very difficult (and probably straining) technique I don't think it's feasible to use it as a source of electricity on an industrial scale, as is shown in LoK. Not to mention the difficulty of taming the lightning bolt to do something useful. >>>>> >>>>> I think it's more realistic if benders used their power on a smaller scale. Here are some things I would consider useful in an early industrial setting >>>>> >>>>> Water >>>>> >>>>> * making things that contain water explode by freezing the water to ice (water expands when it freezes); many things contain a bit of water, even rocks >>>>> >>>>> * healing is incredibly useful; every water bender should master it, other people would pay good money to get it >>>>> >>>>> Earth >>>>> >>>>> * using metal bending to build precision instruments like clockworks >>>>> >>>>> * making beautiful sculptures >>>>> >>>>> Fire >>>>> >>>>> * welding (to build anything out of metal) > **u/MadScientist14159** [+3] *WIP: Sodium Hypochlorite (Rational Bleach) Eventually. Maybe.* (an hour later) > > [I made a post discussing how bending works on r/thelastairbender a year ago. It was a comment on that thread that introduced me to hpmor. Feel free to use my ideas.](http://www.reddit.com/r/TheLastAirbender/comments/r74u2/the_mechanics_of_bending/) >> **u/None** [+1] (5 hours later) >> >> I really don't get why body temperature would be key or how tradition would keep people from bending certain materials. I mean, no one tried to bend wood, ever? How did that get started? >> >> However, the stuff about firebending and ions is useful. Electricity is going to play an important role in my plot, both theories about how it works and the actual use of it. >>> **u/MadScientist14159** [+1] *WIP: Sodium Hypochlorite (Rational Bleach) Eventually. Maybe.* (13 hours later) >>> >>> Body temp was pretty arbitrary. >>> >>> It was just a convenient temperature where air was gas, water was liquid and rock was solid. >>> >>> And there could be better explanations for lack of woodbending, tradition mixed with confirmation bias, it was just an explanation I thought would work well enough. It's not that no one ever tried to woodbend it's that it's common knowledge that woodbending is "impossible" so it takes a special sort of mindset to try anyway. A mindset which is very rare, so very few people try. Considering how different wood is to earth, the people to *do* try will inevitably fail as badly as Aang did when he tried to earthbend. Realising that they're "wasting their time" trying to woodbend they give up before the point at which they would start seeing actual results. When people wonder if woodbending is possible these people say "No. I tried it. It doesn't work." and thus the myth is perpetuated. > **u/winz3r** [+1] (a month later) > > I think I got an idea on the genetics of bending. Real genetics is not as simple as the Mendelian rules suggest it. There is an aspect of inheritance which is not purely based on the DNA you got from your parents. It's called epigenetics. > As far as I understood it, environmental conditions of the parents can cause certain genes in the gametes (don't know if it's the right word, I mean these cells like sperms and egg-cells) to be activated or deactivated. The deactivation for example happens through methyl-molecules getting attached to the gene. So the deactivated gene can be inherited by the child, who now has a gene which is not active. > > As far as bending goes it would be reasonable to say that certain conditions must be met for a human to be a bender. > a) A parent has to have passed on a bending-gene > and b) this gene has to be an activated gene (maybe because the parent didn't have an easy life and his body "thinks" that the chance for the child to survive is higher if the bending-gene is activated) > > So you could use epigenetics to avoid some spiritual explanation of the mendelian rules not applying to bending. > **u/lehyde** [+0] *Nudist Beach* (4 hours later) > > Ok, I thought a bit about how bending could work. One problem is that what bending can achieve differs wildly among the elements. > > * Air and Earth bending is just moving things. > > * Water bending is moving things plus changing the state of matter (water to ice and vice versa). > > * Fire bending is something completely different. It could be just streams of [very hot air](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame) (not completely sure if that's enough to produce something like a flame). Lightning is something different still. > > This is not really possible to explain with our physics. So somewhere in the Avatar world things are different from ours. > > You could put this point outside of the people into the spirits. We know that spirits exist so we might as well use them to explain things. The humans there would then be just like us. > > Proposal: > So these spirits are everywhere and are somewhat intelligent, like rabbits maybe. For these spirits the normal physical laws don't hold (at some point we have to assume something like this), they are invisible and they just love doing the things that benders want them to do; like moving a rock or heating something. But they are not that smart so you have to show them what you want by pointing at things and waving your arms. Smoother movements mean less confusion among the spirits and better results. This at least solves the question why 12-year-olds can be strong benders. > > A water bender is then simply a person whom the water spirits are obeying. What method the spirits use to make ice from water, etc... is irrelevant. At first at least. If you really wanted to understand bending you'd have to study the spirits. Then you might wonder why there are only four kinds of spirits. And why some people get them to move metal and others don't. Maybe the spirits are really just reading your thoughts and the movements are unnecessary. > > So I'm not really sure if this 'spirit bending' is a good idea. I thought I'd share my thoughts. Maybe it's creating unnecessary complexity. >> **u/None** [+2] (5 hours later) >> >> That fits pretty well with what I had planned, actually, with the Vietnamese/Malaysian animistic religion that I'm planning on exploring, and plot stuff as well. Definitely stealing this idea in some form. >> **u/Wiki_FirstPara_bot** [+0] (4 hours later) >> >> *First para from linked [Wikipedia article](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame):* >> >> --- >> >> A **flame** (from Latin flamma) is the visible (light-emitting), gaseous part of a fire. It is caused by a highly exothermic reaction (for example, combustion, a self-sustaining oxidation reaction) taking place in a thin zone. If a fire is hot enough to ionize the gaseous components, it can become a plasma. >> >> --- >> >> ^[(?)](http://www.reddit.com/r/autowikibot/wiki/index) ^| ^[(CC)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) >>> **u/None** [+0] (23 hours later) >>> >>> Hey, this is pretty cool. Thanks, WFP_Bot! > **u/None** [+0] (a day later) > > I just wanted to add that bending was a present given by the great turtles to humans, who were the original energy benders. Furthermore, there was no genetic condition for the turtles to give humans their bending, so the genetic component, if any, happened after the turtles stopped being actively in the picture. I expect this bending power to be purely spiritual or whatever. > **u/eaglejarl** [+0] (3 days later) > > You can have it be genetic if you like (it's supported by canon), but I think it's a weaker narrative. If you only get to be a wizard because your parents were wizards....well, that's nice. But it's much cooler if anyone can learn it. It changes the social dynamics a lot -- instead of having a master race that the normals are justified in envying / hating, you have highly trained experts who will be respected by some and (unfairly) hated by others. Some benders will have more talent and skill; if it's a genetic thing, this is just "oh well, he just got lucky." If it's a training thing, this is "I must work harder to equal him!" > > I would make the training harsh enough that most people can't hack it, which is why not everyone is a bender. > > And speaking of "not everyone": I would make the benders a noticeable but still small proportion of the population -- 5-15% feels about right. This way they are common enough that everyone knows a few, common enough that they can form meaningful political lobbies if they get organized, but not so common that they render nonbenders completely irrelevant, and not common enough that the normals can still oppress them if they really want to. It opens you up to more storylines if the nonbenders can outpower the benders in at least some areas. ---