The Other Elements

Elemental magic is often part of fantasy literature, movies, and books.  Avatar: the Last Airbender and it's sequel series, Legend of Korra, both center around people with the power to manipulate the elements using various Eastern martial arts.  Warriors of Virtue tries to do the same thing, but badly.  Very badly... and hilariously...  Yup.  Someday I'm going to reveiw all three of those.  Though Warriors of Virtue does do something interesting.  They use the Chinese elements rather than the Western elements.

Look! Rock! Paper! Scissor!

As you can see, it's very different...

I'm more for the western elemental system mostly because I grew up with it and the elements correspond to the four states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. It doesn't help that it's usually the most used and there are so many variations on the old theme that's available.

For example, Avatar: the Last Airbender vs. Charmed.  Now, a lot of people will argue that The Power of Three is not elementally based in any way.  Let me put it this way: Piper is fire, Prue is Air and Pheobe is water.  Think about it a moment.  Piper controls things on the molecular level either stopping them in place or speeding them up so you get KABOOM.  Prue/Paige moves objects through the air with her mind.  Pheobe has a way of scrying without water AND she later gets empathy which is usually associated with water.  The only thing that doesn't fit is Phoebe's flying and that was a lameass power anyhow, but you could say she was controling the position of her body  (which is mostly water when Alyssa Milano isn't skeletal) in space. 

Avatar: the Last Airbender, as stated before, had elemental bending where certain forms of Eastern Martial Arts were used to "bend" elements to the wielder's will.  In addition to the typical elements of earth, air, fire, and water, with more study fire-benders could control lightning, water-benders could control plants and blood, earth-benders could control metal, and you never really learned what else air-benders could do.  Oh, and water-benders could also heal. It was a pretty interesting take on the whole elemental powers thing.

Instead of the usually elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors, no single element was significantly more powerful than any other element.  Water-benders learned their art from the Moon so they were more powerful not only at night, but when the moon was full.  Fire-benders, on the other hand, learned their art from the Sun and from dragons so they were more powerful during the day, and lost their powers completely during a solar eclipse while their powers were boosted when a comet appeared in the sky.  Earth-bender and Air-benders learned their art from two separate creatures: badgermoles and sky bison respectively.  Each elemental doesn't just come with martial arts and cool powers, but a philosophy behind each act.  It actually creates a problem for the Avatar, who must learn all four elements because whichever element opposes his or her philosophy most is the most difficult to learn.  It makes for some very interesting problems within the show.

Other shows do similar things in other interesting way.  I find it interesting that there's two ways to take the "earth" aspect too.  Either a person with the power of "earth" has power over plants and "earthly" things or they have control over genuine earth... as in rock.  The translation of the other elements is pretty straight-forward most of the time with fire sometimes translating into control of lightning and other times requiring an ignition source and at other times being the ability to heat up moleculs and atoms and controling the energy.

All-in-all I really like the way books sometimes utilize elemental powers, but at the same time, I think it's under-utilized at certain times.  For example, certain cartoons try to make a person's character based on their element and it just doesn't always work for me.  I mean, how many times does fire have to get characterized as a hothead before it gets old?  Why can't fire be a certain exuberance for life rather than the bloody hothead all the time?  And why is water or air always the intellectual?  And the other always seems to be "the chick".  That was another thing I liked about Avatar:The Last Airbender.  Toph, was the earth-bender and she was this tiny little girl from a noble family who knew all the rules of the noble class even though she largely chose to ignore them.  Actually, I'm pretty sure the same thing happened with W.I.T.C.H, but I didn't watch that show or read the original comics.  I probably should though just to see.  It's so rare to see Earth in it's incarnation of mud-slinging being a girl's power because "girls don't like to get dirty".  Even Toph is a tomboy.  I'd just like to see things taken from a different angle and there are so many angles to choose from.

I mean, most magical lore can't decide just which element is which direction and which season.  Half the time winter is water the other half, winter is earth.  I prefer when winter is water because then fire can be summer and they are opposite eachother on the calender.  Autumn always struck mean as an airy season with the way the wind blows leaving spring for earth.  However, if you look above, it switches Earth and Air around from the way I like to see things.  Not that it matters, but with that much open to interpretation, a person could do a lot.

So, I'm going to just leave you to ponder those possibilities and all the wiggle room created by thinking, what would happen if a group of people got elemental powers, but not in the way everyone always expects it or plans it?  Just exise the movies and TV shows you've seen and think about what each element would mean to you.  Then, think about character traits you'd place with each character given what you think about the element.  For example, Piper Halliwell was the one with the ability most closely classified as fire.  She was the mother of the group.  She was the care giver.  Yeah, she had a temper; they all did, but look at that.  Thing of Uncle Iroh from Avatar: The Last Airbender: old, wise, and hard as nails.  Have fun with it! I do all the time.

Sweet Dreams!