Avatar State

The Avatar State is the most powerful technique of the Avatar itself.

## Overall

As a reincarnation of the entity known as the Avatar, Aang possessed the power to bend all four elements, making him the most powerful bender of his time.

Though Avatar Roku said mastering the elements could take many years, Aang was able to learn all four with considerable skill in less then a year, though technically, he did not completely master all four as stated by Zuko and Toph.

As a result of his unconventional training, Aang never demonstrated most of the special subsets of the bending arts.

However, he did display the abilities of lightning redirection and seismic sense, making him the first Avatar known to have learned these abilities.

Most Avatars were not told of their status until they were sixteen years of age, but Aang had become a fully realized Avatar while he was still only biologically twelve years old.

Thus, he became the youngest known Avatar to do so.

As he was chronologically 112 years old, Aang also has the distinction of taking the longest to achieve this status.

## Air Bending

By the time of the Air Nomad Genocide, Aang was already an airbending master, the youngest in history at that time.

Aang achieved his mastery tattoos when he mastered thirty-five of the thirty-six tiers of airbending and invented a new airbending technique, the "air scooter", becoming the youngest known airbending master of his time at only twelve years old.

The element of air was the one he utilized the most in battle.

Once Aang began to learn the other elements, for tactical purposes, he relied less on airbending, though it continued to remain his signature element.

As a master, Aang's skill with airbending was exceptional; he was able to fight on-par with strong and powerful masters or against large numbers of opponents, despite not finishing his airbending training.

He was shown creating tornadoes and currents of air strong enough to lift or deflect extremely heavy objects. Aang's skill with air was great, even perilous, though his pacifistic Air Nomad nature halted the use of air like a deadly weapon unless he was enraged or in the Avatar State.

Instead, Aang used airbending for pure defense, evasion, or other round-about methods of combat other than aggression.

When not in battle, Aang used airbending in his everyday life, often for flying with his glider, or simply to augment his natural agility.

While in the Avatar State, Aang's airbending power was magnified to the point he could erode solid rock away with a powerful gust of air.

Aang's airbending skills, especially his skill with the air scooter, greatly improved over time, evolving from being able to ride one to creating multiple air scooters simultaneously without any difficulty.

## Water Bending

Although Aang was originally better at waterbending than his fourteen-year-old friend Katara, his lack of focus allowed Katara to surpass him as she was later deemed a waterbending master after rapidly developing her skills while training under Master Pakku.

Katara became Aang's teacher when they took their leave of the North Pole.

In the early stages of his training, Aang showed prodigious skill in waterbending, being able to easily create a huge wave on his first try.

Although he had great skill with waterbending, it was one of his least used elements in battle, instead favoring other readily-available elements such as earth or air.

He did not carry a water skin, preferring to bend from large sources of water such as rivers, lakes, or oceans.

His control over the element was monumental, capable of creating massive tidal waves, albeit with the help of the Moon Spirit, or bending entire streams of water.

He was even able to extinguish a powerful, comet-enhanced blast of fire from Ozai and use the water to briefly put the Fire Lord on the defensive.

While in the Avatar State, Aang could bend water from such remote distances a common waterbender could not reach, and he could raise the waters of an entire ocean, mimicking the moon pulling the tides to cover an entire forest.

He was also capable of compressing massive volumes of water into smaller streams, a normally incomprehensible skill, allowing an increase in force and pressure and making it easier to transport.

## Earth Bending

Because earthbending contrasted Aang's personality and his native element, air, he had great difficulty learning the bending art.

Airbenders relied on indirect methods of combat, while earthbending required a head-on approach.

When Aang was forced to protect Sokka from a saber-tooth moose lion, he stood his ground rather than avoiding conflict, showing an earthbender's attitude; he was able to earthbend soon thereafter.

His earthbending improved greatly, allowing him to utilize air, water, and earthbending in combat together effectively.

Earthbending even became Aang's second most used fighting style behind airbending due to its general availability and defensive capabilities.

Aang was capable of bending large boulders, sending massive columns of rock flying, or forming earthen armor around his body for protection.

He also eventually learned to fight and bend blindfolded by detecting things through the use of seismic sense, a skill that he learned directly from Toph.

Due to his pacifistic nature, Aang employed a more defensive style of earthbending, based on manipulating the earth to create walls, shelters, and restraints to neutralize his opponents rather than harm them.

While in the Avatar State, Aang could manipulate massive columns of rock, compress boulders into pebbles, or send rocks flying at high speeds in rapid succession while requiring no physical connection with the ground to earthbend.

Despite the proficiency with which Aang used earthbending in his fight with Ozai, Toph stated that he could still improve.

## Fire Bending

While normally, the Avatar must learn the four elements in the proper cycle, Aang was given the opportunity to learn firebending early from Master Jeong Jeong, instead of first mastering water and earth, in addition to his mastery of air.

While training, Aang's impatience to learn the basics of firebending resulted in him harming Katara, an accident that caused him great shame.

He swore from that point onward never to firebend again, out of fear of losing control.

It was not until after the invasion plan failed that Aang sought to learn firebending again.

After accepting Prince Zuko as his teacher and discovering the true meaning of firebending from the dragons Ran and Shaw, Aang no longer feared firebending and began his training in the bending art.

He was shown to be quite skilled yet initially reluctant to show the aggressive attitude required for firebending.

Aang was capable of performing the ancient Dancing Dragon form, the breath of fire while simultaneously firing a stream from both hands, as well as highly powerful kicks and blasts able to incapacitate a Fire Nation airship, albeit with the help of Sozin's Comet.

In preparation for his face-off with Fire Lord Ozai, Zuko taught Aang lightning redirection, a highly advanced and unique technique of firebending that Zuko's paternal uncle Iroh invented by observing waterbenders.

While in the Avatar State, Aang could create exceedingly strong and highly destructive streams of fire, as well as melt solid stone.

## Energy Bending

After being endowed with the knowledge from a lion turtle, Aang was able to use an ancient form of bending that precedes all other bending called energybending, which he used to strip Ozai of his natural firebending abilities, leaving the Fire Lord permanently drained and in a weakened state.

Aang later used it during the fight with the Tengu Shredder.

Aang enters the Avatar State to use it.

According to the lion turtle, before the Avatar existed, people did not bend the four elements, but the life force energy within themselves.

However, in order to bend another person's life force energy, the energybender's own life energy must be unbendable, or they could become corrupted or even destroyed.

It was confirmed that Aang was not the first Avatar to learn energybending; however, there were few who had learned this particular bending art and even fewer who had used it due to its dangers.

Energybending allows the bender to both strip and restore a person's bending abilities and transfer knowledge from one person to another.

## Avatar Spirit

As the Avatar, Aang was able to contact his past lives to seek advice and guidance.

Being the immediate predecessor of Aang, Roku most often came to the young airbender's aid.

For example, it was Roku who warned Aang about the impending return of Sozin's Comet and manifested through the young Air Nomad in order to defeat a group of firebenders awaiting the Avatar's appearance.

After receiving a letter from Guru Pathik, Aang journeyed to the Eastern Air Temple to learn to control the Avatar State.

Guru Pathik revealed that the secret is laid in the unlocking of seven chakras.

Aang had little trouble with the first six but struggled with the seventh – earthly attachments, mainly being Aang's attachment to Katara.

Aang initially abandoned his training after receiving a vision of Katara in dire need of help but later began to open the seventh and final chakra successfully and entered the Avatar State. However, moments after entering the Avatar State, the process was interrupted.

Nonetheless, Aang's connection to his previous lives was severely damaged by this and, while in a coma, he undertook a journey to the Spirit World, where he met and reconnected with the four Avatars preceding him.

While he succeeded in healing the Avatar Spirit, his physical injuries prevented him from accessing the Avatar State and connecting with his past lives.

As his body healed, he managed to reconnect with them, though it was only when Ozai violently shoved him against a protruding rock, which unleashed the energy block in his back, that the connection was fully restored.

Later, however, feeling that Roku's advice about the state of the world was no longer relevant, Aang deliberately severed his connection to his past self.

This caused an unintentional severing of his connection to all his past lives before Roku, except in certain situations, such as special rituals.

Later, Aang was able to restore his connection to Roku and all the past Avatars by recrafting the fire pendant on his meditation beads.