Toph Beifong from Avatar: The Last Airbender is an inspiration to young girls everywhere. She’s incredibly strong, and, while her parents see her blindness as a weakness and try to shield their daughter from the outside world, Toph finds ways to use her blindness to become an even more formidable fighter. She becomes the world’s best earthbender, and tea🎶ches not one, but two Avatars during her lifetime. Not to mention, in the case of Avatar Aang, she teaches the Avatar while being just a young girl herself.
Toph is also an Earth Rumble champion and beats formidable opponents while she fights as “The Blind Bandit.” She’s one of several Avatar characters to use an alias, but hers is definitely one of the cooler ones. Toph’s personal🎶ity also brings a lot of life to the show and to Team Avatar. Unlike Katara, who has a reputation for being gentle (until she starts fighting, that is,) Toph is all rough edges and devastating one-liners. Her time in the Earth Rumble tournaments taught her to properly taunt 🀅people!
Unsurprisingly for an earthbender, Toph is… down to earth. She’s very rational, although she can sometimes let her headstrong personality get the best of her, which leads her to charge into sometimes dangerous situations. She also has a sense of humor, although she makes it clear when she doesn’t appreciate someone messing with her. Toph is many people’s favorite character in the Avatar series, and she is more powerful than most imagine. Here are 10 powers Toph has— and 10 weakn𒐪esses only super-fans know about!
20 Power: A Unique A𓆏nd Unpredictable Style
Toph didn’t learn earthbending the traditional way: rather than being taught by a human instructor, she learned all she knows from the blind badgermoles, the original earthbenders. As a result, her sಞtyle is noticeably different from other earthbenders.
She has unique moves that most benders never learned, and, as a result, she’s very unpredictable in combat, which is only one of many things that give her a decisive edge in earthbending battles. The animators who worked on Avatar: The Last Airbender showcased the uniqueness of her style by basing it on the Chu Gar Southern Praying Mantis style, rather than the Hung Gar style of kung fu𝓀 they used for the other earthbenders.
19 ꧋ Weakness: Being On Ice 🦋
Toph doesn’t let her blindness slow her down: by feeling even the tiniest of vibrations, she can “see” thanks to h🌞er connection to the earth. From a friend’s footsteps to a row of ants walking by, Toph can sense the world around her with exceptional accuracy… a⛦s long as she’s on firm ground.
Her bare feet need to touch the eart𓄧h for her to be able to “see” things, and this ability doesn’t seem to work on ice. It makes sense, of course: even though her senses are generally heightened, as an earthbender, Toph has no connection to ice. Not to mention, the cold might damage her sensitive soles.
18 Power: Sanﷺd Bending
Sand bending is hard work for most earthbenders who didn’t grow up in the desert. Toph herself struggles to master this difficult technique at first, as sand is much looser than the earth she’s used to bending. However, there’s no particle of earth this bender can’t control, and, with practice, Toph eventually becomes quite good at s💙and bending.
This gives her a distinct advantage in dry, desert environment, where other benders would struggle to find materialꦏs to bend. However, it seems that walking on send does hinder her🐷 seismic sense and limit her ability to sense vibrations in her surroundings.
17 Weakness: Flying ꦕ 🌠
As I’ve mentioned earlier, Toph needs to have both feet firmly planted on the ground to be able to sense vibrations and “see” what’s going on around her. Like most earthbenders, she definitely feels more at ea𝓡se on firm land— after all, there’s not much an earthbender can do in the sky. Unfortunately for Toph, she happens to be traveling with an airbender, which means she has to spend more time than she’d probably like on the back of a flying bison. However, even in the air, Toph can always carry some form of earth with her— like her meteorite bracelet.
16 ꦺ Power: A Human L🍃ie Detector
Toph’s seismic sense can do much more than “simply” detect vibrations and alert her to movement. In fact, her🍸 ability is so precise, she can feel a person shꦇaking, and can sense a heart beating. This means that she is literally able to sense fear— and also detect lies.
In most cases, even the most experimented of liars will feel a bit of a rush while telling a fib, and thei🌊r heart will beat faster. Toph can sense this, which effectively makes her a human detector. However, some people, like Azula, are able to lie without getting nervous at all, which means they’re immune to Toph’s lie-detecting.
15 ﷺ Wဣeakness: Being In A Submarine
Sure, Toph can bend metal, but it seems that her connection to the material is not strong enough to overpower her discomfort when she’s under⭕ water. For an earthbender, that’s perfectly understandable— just like in the sky, there’s probably not much to bend aboard a submarine. However, since Toph relies on vibrations to sense the world around her, it would make sense that she’d struggle more than other earthbenders underwater.
The water would distort the vibrations and ke⛦ep her from feeling things like she normally does. In fact, Toph seems to get nauseous aboard submarines. Thankfully for the young earthbender, 🎃submarines aren’t exactly a common mode of transportation.
14 ൲ Power: Mud Bending
When people think of earthbending, they u🦹sually imagine hea𓃲vy rocks being hurled at opponents, and hard bits of earth being raised or overturned. In short, earthbending is powerful, but it isn’t something most people would call “fluid.” Toph, as usual, ends up defying everyone’s expectations.
She eventually masters mud bending, which, since it involves water, is evidently more fluiꦕd than traditional earthbending. In short, Toph learns to bend an extraordinary variety of materials, which is one of the reasons she’s an amazing bender: she never stops learning. Combine that with her already unique fighting style, and there’s no denying she makes a formidable opponent.
13 We⛦akness: Sensitive Feet ♛
Toph’s sensitive feet are, in many ways, one of her greatest advantages. Many make the mistake of u🥀nderestimating her bec𓂃ause of her blindness, not realizing that her feet and her earthbending powers allow her to sense things sometimes better than they can. However, because she relies so much on her feet to “see,” they’re also her greatest vulnerability.
If her feet get injured (like the time Zuko burnt them,) Toph is considerably weakened. She can use her hands to sense vibrations as well, but of course that’s hardly efficient in combat. This🥂𒆙 means Toph has to be very protective of her feet.
12 𒊎 Power: Her Meteor Bracelet
As I’ve mentioned a few times, most eartbenders find themselves at a loss in environments that contain little or no earth for them to𒁃 bend— like the sky or the sea. However, as it is often the case when it comes to bending, there are ways around that. For instance, Katara learns to bend water found in the unlikeliest of sources.
Toph manages to bring “earth” with her everywhere in the form of her meteor bracelet. Indeed, after his meteor sword was꧒ forged, Sokka gave Toph a bit of leftover meteor, which she fashioned into a bunch of different shapes (including, briefly, the Nickelodeon logo) before settling on a bracelet she can discreetly wear and then bend to her will.
11 ✅ Weakness: Her Temper
As a contestant in the Earth Rumble tournaments, Toph was forced to grow up fast, and become a fierce fighter. “Fierce” accurately describes her temper as well: Toph is brutally honest, and she’s never afraid to say what she thinks or fight for what she wants. Though her parents, who were Earth Kingdom nobles, tried to shelter her, Toph rebelled every time she got a chance, eventually leaving her family to travel with Team Avatar. Her fierceness and her intrepid character are assets in battle, but they’ve put her and her friends in danger a few times. After all, it’s important to remember that though she’s one of the land’s greatest benders, during the events of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Toph is only a child.