sholio: sun on winter trees (Avatar-Mai)
Sholio ([personal profile] sholio) wrote2010-10-10 08:35 pm
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Avatar fanon that kind of puzzles me

Herbs that suppress prisoners' ability to bend their element. This one comes up in a lot of fic, and ... I don't know, the first time I ran across it I just thought, huh, interesting idea, but about the twentieth time, I started wondering if there's some bit of canon to support this that I'm forgetting. Because it strikes me as actively counter to what we saw in the show itself -- there were quite a lot of episodes in which we saw prisoners and prisons, and it was pretty well established how prisoners with *-bending ability are dealt with. Earth- and water-benders are isolated from their element; firebenders are imprisoned in metal cages surrounded by stone walls, so they have nothing to burn (or, in groups, they're guarded by enough firebenders to counter anything they might try to do). For prisoner transport, they bind someone's hands and feet so they can't make the moves required to bend their element.

If they have a chemical way of suppressing bending, shouldn't they have used it at some point rather than using various physical work-arounds?
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sholio: sun on winter trees (Avatar-Mai)

[personal profile] sholio 2010-10-11 05:45 am (UTC)(link)
Exactly! It doesn't make logical sense at all, which makes it really odd to me that it's such a persistent recurring element in fic -- unless there is some part of the show that suggested the existence of such a thing, but I don't remember anything of the sort. Actually one thing I found really interesting on the show was how much creativity the writers (and through them, the characters) used in finding ways to render extremely powerful magic-users temporarily harmless.
jalendavi_lady: Han Solo as The Thinker (Han as Thinker)

[personal profile] jalendavi_lady 2010-10-11 06:02 am (UTC)(link)
I haven't encountered it yet myself in the Avatar fandom, but there was a fad for a while in the Star Wars fandom of using Force-suppression devices as an easy way out of dealing with highly powerful Jedi.

I took part in that fad myself twice, and it really was most of the time just a way to remove the Force from the fictional equation, either by making a Jedi normal or by removing someone from being detectable by other Force-users (which was what my long fic playing with that concept did).
sholio: sun on winter trees (Avatar-Zuko fire)

[personal profile] sholio 2010-10-11 06:22 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah, there was a comparable situation in Dragonball Z fandom, with a handful of extremely powerful chi users who had to be somehow depowered or removed from the fighting in order to make the villains menacing at all (even canon started running into this problem, when it got to the point where the heroes were powerful enough to blow up planets).

I've been thinking about why it bugs me in ATLA, and I think it's something to do with the way that it's not used as a rare innovation or plot point, but just a background device to remove a sticky plot obstacle. It would be like if, say, Hama's blood bending had occurred at some point in season three as a common thing that waterbenders could do, and wasn't used thereafter. It would have left us going "... wait, why wasn't this mentioned before, and why wasn't it used in THIS dozen situations where it would have been useful?" And that's how the bending-blocking herbs make me feel -- I actually think you could make an interesting story out of someone actually discovering an herb that blocks bending (or an acupuncture technique, say, or another use for Ty Lee's chi-blocking) and make a story out of it. (Damn it. Now I want to write that story!)
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