M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender is infamous for the changes it made to the setting of Avatar: The Last Airbender — like saying “Ahhng” instead of Aang, or “Eee-row” instead of Iroh, or like making everybody white.

But there’s one completely arbitrary and unnecessary change that’s actually kind of interesting: making it so that firebenders have to keep an open flame around at all times, because they can’t actually generate fire.

I can recall that fateful day almost 15 years ago that I sat down in a theater and subjected myself to Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender, with its sleep paralysis demon Appa, its ’90s Power Rangers-ass fight scenes, and its main character with a functionally different name. And maybe it was just the delusion of an overwhelmed mind, but I do recall thinking to myself: Wait... firebenders only being able to bend fire that exists in their environment is kind of interesting.

Firebending has always been the odd element out; it’s just that the Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon did a good job of making it seem interchangeable with water, earth, and air. But of the four, fire is the only one that doesn’t occur in nature in........

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