Toph Beifong is obviously one of the best characters in Avatar: The Last Airbender.
She’s a 12-year-old blind girl with incredible earthbending skill who makes the show more
lively and fun with every episode she’s in, all while beating up countless villains.
But, on top of that, she also plays a huge role in saving the world, so much so that
I think Ozai may have won the war if it hadn’t been for Toph.
So in this video, I’m going to explain why that is.
This is how Toph’s earthbending saved the world.
Toph is Aang’s earthbending teacher, and so without her, Aang wouldn’t know *any* earthbending.
Everything that Aang knows how to do in regards to earthbending was taught to him by Toph,
and it was a *very* difficult process.
In the world of Avatar, air and earth are kind of opposites.
Air is the element of freedom, of spirituality, of evasiveness, of letting go of earthly attachments,
whereas earthbending is literally about being grounded, being persistent, being strong,
and facing your problems head on.
Airbenders are taught to avoid conflict, to use their abilities to dodge attacks and keep
their distance from their opponent.
Earthbenders, on the other hand, are taught to stand their ground and fight their opponent directly.
Learning earthbending meant that Aang had to completely change his way of thinking and
his way of approaching conflict.
That’s not an easy thing to do, meaning that from the get-go, Toph had an incredibly hard job.
And, she didn’t have anyone to help her, not like how Katara had Master Pakku or Zuko had the dragons.
So Toph was the youngest of Aang’s bending teachers, didn’t have any help, and had
to teach Aang the element that was the most difficult for him to learn.
I mean, Aang did have that mental block when it came to firebending in Books 2 and 3, but
in the first Book, before he hurt Katara, Aang had no problem producing fire.
He was full of passion and drive, the things that fuel firebending.
Earthbending on the other hand was just antithetical to everything he was taught growing up.
Toph didn’t just have to get him to move past one mental block to access the ability
he already had, she basically had to completely rewire his brain to think about approaching
problems in a different way, which is no small task.
Despite all of that, Toph put in the work and succeeded in teaching Aang to become a very skilled earthbender.
I’d even say that because Aang had such a difficult time learning earthbending, it’s
likely that without Toph, Aang never would’ve learned that element at all, because who else
could’ve possibly gotten him to change his way of thinking so drastically?
So, with all of that in mind, I want to talk about rock armor.
This is one of the earthbending moves that Aang learned from Toph.
In the episode Bitter Work in season 2, Toph makes an armor suit out of rocks and leaves
an eyehole despite the fact that she’s blind.
I’ve heard that the art book for The Last Airbender explains this, and the real reason
is apparently just that it was a mistake by the animators and it wasn’t caught in time,
but I like to believe that Toph did it intentionally because she was trying to teach Aang about
the rock armor, and he would need an eyehole if he were to try it for himself.
And in fact, he does later do this when facing off against Azula in the crystal catacombs beneath Ba Sing Se.
Not that it helps very much.
Azula kinda knocks him right out of it pretty quickly, but the rock armor does make a return
in a couple different forms in Book 3 when Aang’s facing off against Ozai, and in that
fight, it is a lot more important.
That’s because Aang’s battle against Ozai basically determines the fate of the world.
If Aang wins, the war is over.
But if Aang loses, Ozai will wipe out the entire Earth Kingdom.
And in this fight save the world, Aang’s earthbending skill is by far the most useful.
When Ozai blasts him with fire from close range, Aang quickly makes a layer of rock
armor to protect himself from the flames.
This time, he doesn’t make the eyehole, which was definitely a smart move that prevented
his face from getting burned to a crisp.
But if he hadn’t known how to make the rock armor at that moment, Ozai would’ve annihilated
him, or at the very least severely burned him, even if he had managed to put up a little
air shield at the last second.
Ozai was just way too close to him, and we’ve seen that there’s limits to how much fire
he can deflect with airbending.
The even more important form of the rock armor, though, comes soon after that, when Aang retreats
into an earth-ball-armor-shield-thing, a skill which he must have learned from Toph, and
this part is crucial because it doesn’t only *protect* Aang, it also allows him to
unlock the Avatar state when Ozai breaks the rock armor ball and hits Aang’s back against a protruding rock.
I’m still a little unclear on how or why exactly this unlocks the Avatar state.
Like, his chakras were locked, right?
Because he was shot with lightning when in the Avatar state?
If your chakras are locked through injury, can you just unlock chakras with a sharp hit
to site of the injury?
Why did no one tell him that earlier?
And didn’t he have to let go of Katara to activate the Avatar state?
But now he can be in the Avatar state *and* be with Katara? How? Why?
I love this show but I’m still pretty confused about that.
It seems kinda just like a convenient plot thing.
But anyway, that rock hitting his back is crucial for Aang.
It allows him to unlock the Avatar state, which allows him to turn the tide of the battle against Ozai.
Without the Avatar state, let’s be real, Aang probably would’ve been killed by Ozai.
He was on the defensive the entire time before that.
Things were not looking up for him.
And Aang was only able to unlock the Avatar state because he put himself in that earth ball.
I can’t think of a way he could’ve used another element to do that.
The closest I could think of would be if he protected himself with an air bubble, which
he kind of does for a split second right at the end after Ozai has blasted away his rock
ball, but the impression I got from this scene was that the rock behind him only started
to erode, revealing the little back-pointy-bit because Ozai was blasting it with fire for so long.
Like the whole thing is that Ozai kind of doomed himself by causing the thing that unlocked
Aang’s Avatar state and ultimately led to Aang being able to defeat him.
So for Aang, being in the earth ball allowed him to take the hit for long enough that the
wall could be eroded, exposing the part that hit him in the back.
If he had just made an air bubble shield and then been blasted back into the rock, he would’ve
just hit a flat rock wall since the fire hadn’t destroyed large chunks of the wall yet, since
it seems like his air bubble can’t hold up for very long against that level of fire.
Maybe I’m interpreting that scene wrong, but that’s at least what it seemed like
to me, which would mean that without earthbending, and without Toph’s very skilled instruction,
Aang would never have been able to access the Avatar state.
From then on out in the fight, Aang is in the Avatar state, so he’s able to bend all
four elements masterfully thanks to his past lives, so there’s no real influence here from Toph.
But, when he refuses to kill Ozai, that’s when another key part of Toph’s teachings come into play.
The first part of this is that Ozai tries to attack Aang from behind, which he senses
by using the same earthbending ability that Toph uses to see.
We even see the black and white earthbending-sensing animation that we’ve only seen Toph use before.
As far as we know, Toph was the only earthbender in the world at the time who had this skill,
so she must’ve taught it to Aang, and then it saved his life.
If Aang didn’t know earthbending, or had learned earthbending from literally anyone
else, he probably would’ve died here.
Who knows, maybe if he hadn’t learned that skill, he wouldn’t have turned his back
on Ozai in the first place.
But at least with how the scene plays out here, Toph’s earthbending instruction really saved Aang’s life.
And that’s not even the only time Toph’s earthbending saved Aang.
Earlier in Book 2, Toph very literally saved Aang’s life single-handedly by holding up
an entire massive underground library while it was sinking with Aang still inside of it.
And then he got mad at her when Appa was kidnapped at the same time that she was saving his life,
even though she did everything she could!
And I understand his frustration but I don’t remember him ever apologizing to her for that,
which is pretty messed up.
But anyways, that’s a bit of a tangent, let’s get back to the fight with Ozai.
So after Aang senses Ozai’s attack, he uses earthbending to subdue Ozai in a way that
would not be possible with any of the other elements.
With his arms pinned out to the sides like this, he’s unable to effectively fight off
Aang, which allows Aang to do the little forehead-touchy thing that takes away Ozai’s bending.
If Aang didn’t have that earthbending arm-pinning move, I’m doubtful he would’ve been able
to get close enough to Ozai to be able to take his bending away.
Because fire and air certainly don’t pin down arms very well, and if there was conveniently
water nearby, which there wasn’t on the top of this rocky mountain thing, and Aang
had frozen Ozai’s hands to his sides, Ozai probably could’ve just melted through them.
So not only did the earthbending that Aang learned from Toph allow him to unlock the
Avatar state and save his life, it also gave him the opportunity to be able to take Ozai’s bending away.
Without that earthbending, he probably would’ve been back on the defensive again, running
away from Ozai, unable to get close enough to do the forehead-energybending thing.
So without Toph’s instruction, or with instruction from someone else, Aang might have lost against Ozai.
He might not have unlocked the Avatar state or avoided Ozai’s attack or been able to
take his bending away.
He might not have even been able to learn earthbending from anyone else, since it was
so difficult for him to learn in the first place, and it was only through Toph’s unique
teaching style that he was able to master it.
Without Toph’s earthbending skill or her skill at teaching earthbending, Aang very
well could have lost against Ozai, which would’ve allowed Ozai to continue his war, to continue
burning down the Earth Kingdom.
And on top of all that, while Aang is fighting Ozai, Toph is busy dismantling the entire
fleet of Fire Nation airships using metalbending, a type of bending that she invented.
Sokka and Suki definitely do their part as well, and they’re great, but without Toph,
they wouldn’t have even been able to get on the ship in the first place.
And even if they somehow had managed to get on the ship, they definitely wouldn’t have
been able to take out all of these firebenders by themselves.
I mean, just look at how Toph wipes the floor with these firebenders who are super-powered-up by Sozin’s comet.
They don’t have any idea how to react against her metalbending, and she takes them all out in seconds.
It’s incredible. And then she just straight-up bends the rudder
of the one ship so that it destroys a bunch of others.
That’s just so cool.
Toph’s skill in taking down these airships is amazing, and probably saved a ton of lives,
since the airships were on their way to torch a bunch of Earth Kingdom villages and cities.
So not only did Toph teach Aang the earthbending he needed to save the world, but she also
used her earthbending and metalbending to save countless lives while Aang was doing the big fight.
Toph undoubtedly played a massive role in saving the world, even if she wasn’t the
one directly fighting Ozai.
So that is how Toph’s earthbending saved the world, and why Toph is one the best characters in the series.
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