Talk:Firebending/@comment-110.55.5.110-20120315000404/@comment-4888161-20120321081733

Well I for one would love to see more abilities for regular heat instead of fire. However firebenders can't cool things down that much. That is waterbending. Firebending is heat, and waterbending is cold. When So Fire Lord Sozin did Heat Redirection, he didn't keep the absorbed heat he had to redirect it. And I quote from the article:

"Heat redirection: Only seen performed by Fire Lord Sozin, the technique may be unique to him or simply an advanced technique. Heat absorption allows for the absorption of heat from one hand and passing through one's body and out the other hand. It was used to cool down the lava during the eruption that destroyed Avatar Roku's town.[14] It appears to operate on a similar principle to Iroh's redirection of lightning technique.[4] "

Like lightning redirection, heat redirection only temporarily absorbs the heat in order to deflect it somewhere else. If the heat was kept then the bender would burn up, just like if the lightning was kept then the bender would be effected by the bolt as if he or she had just got struck by lightning. It is similar to putting your hand over a steaming grill. If you built up a resistance to it, it won't burn you if your hand is only there for an instance. But any longer, and your hand is gonna get cooked. It's the same for heat redirection. Firebenders have some heat resistance, but even they can't keep all the heat inside them for long. They have to redirect it somewhere. So there is a limit to how much heat can be absorbed in the first place.

Since there is a limit to how much heat can be absorbed, there's a limit to how cold a firebender could make it. They could cool only to a limited amount, because there is a limit to how much heat they can displace. Even if they could absorb it without deflecting it, there would still be a limit to how much heat they could absorb. Firebenders may be able to use the heat they absorb for a supercharged attack instead of deflecting it. But either way, it simply wouldn't be enough to make anything cold, let alone freeze it.

Now in theory, a waterbender could also do some heating up to a limited extent. They could likely learn to heat up water to boiling, or even to steam levels because they can change it back and forth. But there would be a limit, and it would stop at steam levels. Steam is hot, but no where near as hot as fire. The same goes for heat redirection. Firebenders could cool a bit, but no where near cold enough for ice or freezing. Rock is colder then lava, but no where near as cold as ice. Actually, rock has a much higher melting point to lava than ice does to water (or even water to steam), so that rock could be hotter than steam and still have been cooled from lava to solid rock.

In conclusion:

While firebenders can absorb heat, they can't keep it. Even if they could, there is still a limited amount of heat they can displace and therefore a limited effect. They could not freeze anything because they would not be able to displace enough heat.