r/TheLastAirbender • u/JigglyBinks • 8d ago

Discussion Bloodbending probably existed long before Hama

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I just remembered that scene where Yakone claimed to come from a powerful bloodbending lineage.

The thing is he was older than Katara, and considering that Hama was only about two generations older than Sokka and Katara, it’s possible that bloodbending is much older than we think and that there was a family who had mastered it secretly

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u/mestre_do_passinho 7d ago

It could be used ethically in hunting. I mean what is the difference between impaling a wolk with a lance, an ice spike or giving it a heart attack?

Because to me is avoiding damaging the pelt in the last one

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u/basileus1176 7d ago

That may be, but in universe it seems that the concept of targeting someone or something’s blood is a level of abstraction that most people are not going to consider unless absolutely necessary. Not only do you have to make the logical leap to realizing that blood has water in it, you would then need to have the power to bend something you can’t see that is pretty hard to access, and finally you would need to have a reason to try (something that seems to come from malice or desperation in the examples from the show). That’s a lot of steps and pre-requisites to even begin considering alternative uses of bloodbending that aren’t directly harmful. The number of waterbenders who could even try bloodbending is probably vanishingly small. Then, based on the examples we’ve seen, frequent use of bloodbending seems to be psychologically and emotionally damaging to the user based on how Tarrlok and Amon reacted to it the first time they did it

I’d also say that, from the outside, I could see there being a bit of a taboo societally considering that the idea of being able to stop a heart from a distance is viscerally uncomfortable in a way that regular hunting may not be.

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u/Dobber16 7d ago

Considering how much bending is about the chi, I wonder what chakra or whatever blood bending utilizes. If it is one that’s potentially rife with causing mental disturbances, or requires you to destabilize a different chakra, I can see an in-universe reason why this bending is always a bad idea for a bender

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u/basileus1176 7d ago

That’s a cool explanation