For much of Avatar: The Last Airbender, waterbending seems like the most limited of the four elements for one practical reason: Its wielders need access to water. Firebenders generate their own flames. Earth is everywhere, and air is even more readily accessible. On her adventure with Aang, Katara is almost never separated from her water skin for this very reason. A waterbender in the desert is about as useful as a badgermole cub in a swimming pool.
Partway through The Last Airbender’s final season, however, that limitation becomes the basis for one of the show’s most horrifying revelations. Water is everywhere. You just have to do something terrible to access it.
Nineteen years ago today, on Nov. 9, 2007, “The Puppetmaster” introduced bloodbending, which allows a waterbender to manipulate the water inside another person’s body. Along with that extreme version of waterbending, we also learned that it’s possible to draw the water out of living things, or even the air itself.
These implications would eventually supply some of The Legend of Korra’s most frightening villains with their signature bending abilities. But its most disturbing achievement is what it does to Katara. In many ways, she’s the most virtuous of Team Avatar’s members, yet under the light of the full moon, she’s forced to learn arguably the most evil form of bending in existence.
“The Puppetmaster” turns Avatar into a horror story
“The Puppetmaster” opens with the gang telling horror stories around a campfire at night somewhere in the Fire Nation, immediately establishing a decidedly spooky vibe. An older innkeeper named Hama soon shows up and tells them that locals have been disappearing during the full moon. She offers them a safe place to stay. The story quickly evolves into something of a smalltown murder mystery where Toph is the hardnosed detective with Aang and Sokka as her hapless sidekicks.
Despite appearing a bit creepy and suspicious, Hama reveals that, just like Katara, she’s a waterbender from the Southern Water Tribe. Given the fact that the Fire Nation hunted and imprisoned most of the waterbenders from the south, leaving Katara as the only one left, Hama suddenly becomes the mentor Katara wanted for most of her life.
Hama teaches Katara that it’s possible to draw moisture from the air and extract water from plants, but doing so kills the fire lilies she demonstrates with. It’s an unsettling but practical answer to a waterbender’s most glaring struggle. Suddenly, a resourceful waterbender with no qualms about where their water comes from becomes the most potentially dangerous among the four bending styles.
By this point, Avatar had long since established that bending’s boundaries were negotiable. Lightning offered an advanced application of firebending that few could perform. Late in Book 2, Toph escaped captivity by discovering that metal wasn’t as separate from earth as everyone assumed. These breakthroughs rewarded exceptional skill and a willingness to question conventional wisdom.
Season 1 also established that certain cosmic events can influence bending. Sozin’s Comet dramatically strengthens firebending once every 100 years. Much like the tides, the waterbenders strength also stems from the moon. (It’s a little surprising that earth and air don’t get their own cosmic power boost in the same way.) That’s important because the full moon allows Hama to employ this base concept of manipulating water inside living things to its darkest potential.
On the night of the full moon, Hama reveals that she had been imprisoned by the Fire Nation for years with virtually no water. Over time, she developed bloodbending and practiced controlling the rats in her cell like puppets before applying the technique to her captors. She’s been abducting members of the Fire Nation as a form of revenge for the years of torture. The Fire Nation nearly wiped out the Water Nation’s culture, so Hama sees it as their shared responsibility to return the favor. Katara refuses, which prompts an epic fight between the two where they both have to draw the water out of their surroundings to keep going.
Katara is able to resist Hama’s use of bloodbending on her, but after Aang and Sokka show up and are put in grave danger, Katara has to use it herself on Hama out of desperation. Even with the power boost from a full moon, bloodbending requires a tremendous amount of skill. A feat like this solidifies Katara’s place as one of her generation’s greatest waterbenders and is parallel to Toph discovering metalbending. The episode ends on a downer, however, with Katara bursting into tears out of regret as Hama cackles with delight that her legacy lives on.
The Legend of Korra makes bloodbending everyone’s problem
Decades later, during the era presented in The Legend of Korra, various advanced forms of bending become far more prevalent than they were previously. Republic City’s police force is composed of master metalbenders. Firebenders generate lightning to provide electricity to the city. And one particularly frightening crime family masters bloodbending in ways that are far beyond what even Hama could have dreamed.
Book 1’s primary villain is a masked revolutionary called Amon who has the power to strip a person of their bending abilities. At first it appears to be a feat similar to the energy bending technique that Aang uses on Ozai, but it’s eventually revealed that Amon is actually a Northern Water Tribe waterbender named Noatak who, like his brother, inherited the ability to use psychic bloodbending. That meant they could bend a person’s blood without the full moon and without the use of hand gestures. Noatak took it even further and developed a way to sever a person’s internal energy paths, thereby stripping them of their bending altogether.
Toward the end of the season, we learn that Noatak’s father, Yakone, was a deadly crime boss who hid his powers for years. After he was sentenced to life imprisonment, he used bloodbending to subdue Sokka, Toph, and even Aang. But in the ensuing confrontation, Aang used the Avatar state to overpower Yakone and strip him of his bending.
Yakone later had sons, Noatak and Tarrlok, and forced them to practice bloodbending on animals and eventually each other. Like Hama, he treats the younger generation’s potential as instruments of revenge. As adults, Noatak assumes the alias of Amon to lead an insurrection while Tarrlok secretly infiltrates Republic City leadership to eventually become the chairman of the United Republic Council. While they weren’t working together (Amon even went on to take Tarrlok’s bending away), they both used bloodbending to enact their father’s vengeance in very different ways.
Interestingly, after Amon succeeds in taking away Korra’s water, earth, and firebending, it’s Katara that attempts to restore them through healing. Decades after Hama forced the power of bloodbending upon her, she comes face to face with the worst damage it can cause. Of course, season 1 ends with one of the franchise’s most uplifting scenes as Korra finally connects with her past selves and Aang is able to restore her bending fully. But seeing the Avatar nearly powerless because of an obscure extension of bloodbending is one of the scariest and boldest narrative choices the series has ever made.
All of this stems from one observation a tortured old woman made: Water exists inside living things. That made the element typically associated with healing become a means of domination. Nineteen years later, Katara’s reaction still unsettles me more than the technique itself. We’re used to cheering when heroes level up and discover a new power. But when that power is as frightening as bloodbending, it’s enough to make you want to cry.
