LogFAQs > #973769000

Tenlaar posted...

I dont know if you can really say thats an advantage of fire bending given that, if earth benders hadnt been decimated and oppressed for that period of time, there could have been metal bending advances that could put earth on par or beyond fire in that regard.

hmmm. I have some thoughts about this. I guess it depends on how necessary it is that the development of technology in-universe parallels the development of technology in actual human history. steam power was a main driver of industrial production for quite a long time. firebenders can also just make electricity themselves. the potential advancements in technology due to earthbending may very well have been impossible without the advancements due to firebending -- certainly they didn't really come about until after the war, at which point they advanced very quickly

but also: your point is quite similar to taking real-world examples of colonized nations abundant in natural resources and saying "if Britain (or France/Spain/the US/whatever colonial power) wasn't oppressing them, they could have surpassed them in technology" which would be ignoring how the colonizing nation got the resources for further advancing that technology in the first place.

but also also: you could feasibly make any number of hypotheticals about what might have happened if x, y, z happened differently. ultimately, yes, anything could have happened if they completely changed the story