[quote]As for “waterarms”, a thought occurred to me while spending countless paragraphs overanalyzing the series: ever heard of phantom-limb syndrome? When amputees still sort of “feel” a certain limb even though they don’t have it anymore? They’ve discovered that this is because the parts of your brain that control lost limbs still exist even if the limb itself is gone, and they’ve used this discovery to invent high-tech prostheses that connect to an amputees brain and allow them to control the fake limb the same way they would control a real one. It’s possible that waterarms (whose real name I honestly don’t remember, either) has learned to use waterbending in a similar way. Her arms don’t exist anymore, but the part of her brain that controls her arms still does, so maybe her bending ability allows her to use water as a substitute for her arms, controlled the same way that real people control those high-tech prostheses.[/quote]

But there is no place for the [b]chi[/b] to travel which is the central aspect of bending, if there is no place for chi to go and the movements aren’t available I personally think it shouldn’t be possible to [i]bend[/i] an element that needs certain movements of chi in the arms. Of course, this is still my opinion of the subject. I think it’s a bit different than “phantom limb syndrome” considering the fundamentals of waterbending still requires chi to be moved in a certain way that is simply impossible (or perhaps improbable?) to do so without limbs to guide them. I don’t know, maybe I’m thinking of this too one-dimensionally.

[quote]To be honest, I really only like Combustion Girl because she’s a callback to Combustion Man from the original series, and his bending was a really unique and interesting concept.[/quote]

One thing I especially dislike about “combustion bending” is that they can arc something that is entirely line-of-sight based. But yeah, I thought it was neat that they were going to expand on the style in Korra, but then we got like zero exposition about it which I think is Sloth’s problem with a lot of the antagonists and their bending in season three.

[quote]And this is why it hardly makes any sense to boil bending down to hard genetics. Like others said, bending is spiritual. I mean, non-benders all over the world turned magically turned into airbenders thanks to spirit nonsense, and no common ancestry or anything was ever really implied between the chosen non-benders. 

I think it makes sense for talent regarding a bending sub-type to be at least somewhat hereditary, if you subscribe to the whole natural talent idea, but not only has the canon in both series made it clear that the origins of the four main bending types are spiritual, it’s also been made fairly clear that gray areas don’t really exist between the four types, and there really never has been a canon “hybrid” bender, again with the obvious exception of the avatar, but even then, the avatar’s bending also exists for spiritual reasons, so… yeah.[/quote]

It’s certainly a tricky thing to involve genetic theory to the world of Avatar’s element bending, but I think in a way it should have a role as it’s become hereditary for many benders over time since the first lion turtles allowed humans the gift of one element. Some people honed it further in the ancient eras by studying respective “natural benders” but the majority of earthbenders get their earthbending from their genetics from the way I’ve looked at it. 

I don’t subscribe that there’s much to “hybrid” children, but perhaps there could be aspects we could use to explain certain things. But that’s a big basket to handle.