Talk:Bloodbending/@comment-24.61.65.126-20120819162120/@comment-3068994-20120820040802

Hah, really? You want to ask about the unknowns when you're arguing unknowns? You should've expected that to come up. :) But if that were the case then, only certain 'genes' would be capable of metalbending/etc, so Toph possibly could not have had students of her own due to that genetic mutation that would have been in her own bloodstream not being in others.

I use the word possibly, which irritated you there ^^", because of the very fact that both what you and I say cannot be proven. But if you step back to look at the applications of how others learned and see there was not a genetic barrier hindering, say, Katara from learning something that Hama did, or from students to learning something Toph did, etc - then there is no reason to believe that it is impossible to learn. Just that it's simply a very difficult thing to master, since we can see having the full moon is what empowers waterbenders thus making it that much easier to perform.

But again I re-iterate that Bryke said it is not just genes that are at play with allowing people to bend. They never solidified that, the answer is not a concrete one that can be defined as an absolute for why one person is able to bend one element, and one other person is able to bend another. Logically speaking, we can we can of course assume genes are involved with choosing whether a person can bend one of the four elements, but past that, we see no evidence for genes withholding bending capability for sub-types of that element. Merely access to the element itself.