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I’m arguing that Wan and Korra scale to peak Vaatu with some of the most blatant feats out there. Still not sure why the other Avatars’ AS aren’t scaling when it’s the same power and pretty much nobody scales to them anyway but downgrade the rest if you want, I’m only here for my boy Wan.
 
True true that should be fixed tbh but that just means I have to rep Korra in his place since she has practically identical feats.
 
So Raava and Vaatu would be "varies, up to 5-C at peak power"? Korra would also need a new key for her season 2 avatar state, with the current 5-c rating sticking for season 3 and 4.

Since there's been enough staff approval, I could apply the changes if you give the go-ahead.

Having reading this over, I do agree. But I need to go to work now. But I took the time to read as needed and cast a vote.
Does this look good to you, Medeus?
 
Regarding what the Avatars pre-Korra should be downgraded to, there's a part in one of the Yangchen novels where Yangchen is in the AS and she tears apart a building. The book describes it as "The hall was an architect's model. On an earthen plate, it could be swiveled to the side. The centerpiece of Taku (which is a city) shifted in accordance with Yangchen's will, following her body's command. A tectonic drift, localized to a single block." Would this mean she is affecting a tectonic plate, only choosing to localize it?
 
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Bumping. I’m very sorry for this very long overdue response, it has been a very busy time for me off site since making this thread. But I’ll give a response now to try and restart this.


Except it’s not “small holes”, which changes nothing since that is still > anything Raava and Vaatu do to each other.

If this is suggesting that the vessels can output more power then the spirits themselves to harm each other (which doesn’t make much sense when the AS is just using Raava/Vaatus power), that’s even more reason to consider this scaling inconsistent that rises to the level of outlier territory for Psuedo-Wan and tiny Raava.

What part of Korra vs Vaatu is small. Both that and Wan vs Vaatu involve damn well cutting Vaatu in half lmao and it’s only the last screen shot that is actual AS Wan, the rest are pseudo-AS.

See above please.

A lot of the shots we see Psuedo Wan and AS Korra take against Vaatu with bending are mostly minor punctured damage on their spiritual bodies. Even including what you pointed out, if theres fewer shots of them doing actual significant damage above that, you already know where that suggestion ends up on why it shouldn’t be accepted as legitimate.

On top of the fact that when Vaatu gets damaged like that in those shots, he isn’t on the offensive attacking them. Especially against Korra like I had mentioned. Right after she airbends “through him”, he blasts her away and then only restrains her in spirit vines, long enough to buy Unalaq time to come back to the spirit world for them to fuse together. That one quick spirit ray is the one and only time in that entire fight where you can consider that as Vaatu fighting back against her.

There are multiple other options here than to just abruptly scale a version of Raava who has no sensible justification to be tiered close to this version of Vaatu.

Vaatu, within reasons given, can be holding back and not fighting seriously against a weakened version of his counterpart.

Raava and Vaatu can be glass canons

This can be PIS,

Or it can also simply be an outlier for Psuedo Wan and Korra to be doing those things when given Raavas condition at that time in the series compared to Vaatus. Whichever reason you go with has more weight behind it than this scaling. I’ll raise the same question that I did before.

Raava and Vaatu when borderline equals spent 10,000 years struggling for supremacy over each other since the previous Harmonic convergence, until Wan inadvertently helped Vaatu by accidentally splitting them up. If they can struggle against each other for that long as equals

What sense does it make to claim that the power of an even massively weaker Raava is even comparable to that of an even massively strengthened Vaatu? When the scales are much in favor of one against the other? When the lore dictates Raava at that point was no longer able to contend with Vaatu for Harmonic Convergence without assistance?

The only conclusion that makes sense within the narrative and context is that Tiny Raava should not be comparable to Vaatu in those respective states, and it should otherwise be deemed faulty scaling, inconsistent and/or an outlier for her when not at her normal level of strength.

Great, so we agree that Vaatu doesn’t know what he is talking about half the time and has simply gotten stronger to an unquantifiable degree.

“Unquantifiable” is putting that quite mildly here when we clearly see in both of Wans episodes (clips that I put in this very post also, btw) how much the difference in strength gets between Raava and Vaatu.

Raava gets smaller & weaker as Vaatu gets bigger and stronger. As Raava herself confirmed, light fades as darkness grows.

Once Vaatu turned the spirits who killed Wans friends into dark spirits, Raava doesn’t even have the strength to move on her own anymore, requiring a tea pot to carry her in. Meanwhile, Vaatu wreaks havoc across the entire planet by the time Harmonic Convergence begins.

“Unquantifiable” doesn’t really counter the fact that Vaatu did significantly become much stronger and Raava significantly got much weaker and we visibly see for ourselves the strength difference and how it effects them.


Ah yes, he just chose to be cut in half, turned into Swiss cheese, and bend over backwards to fit his body to the ball of elements instead of breaking out. Truly, it was all part of his insidious plan …

Didn’t you claim in the previous response that Vaatu has regeneration? If that’s the case we’re going with, then it also stands for that to work the same in reverse. If Vaatu can regenerate injuries sustained to his spiritual body, then that gives another reason for him to not fight seriously against a weakened Raava when he would then be aware that neither she or Wan can permanently damage or destroy him, especially in the condition she at that point was in.

Because the AS isn’t Raava + her host??? Something it very clearly isn’t given every single feat from the people she merged with against Vaatu.

Unless I’m reading this and what you mean here the wrong way, this point here doesn’t do anything but add to and help my own prior point.

Nothing ever says that AS = Raava’s power + Avatar’s power, that weakened Raava possessing a bender is weaker than Prime Raava, or that Vaatu is holding back. Those are all things you are assuming or implying to be the case and have no basis for.

You are correct that the AS isn’t Raavas power + the Avatars, because it’s just her power (and Vaatu’s) getting used as a boost whenever the Avatar enters it. We know this for a fact and don’t have to speculate when 3 Avatars, who had no past lives added into the mix whatsoever, have managed to still use it. Wan, Korra (post Book 2) and Unalaq (the first and only Dark Avatar). If the Avatar State didn’t use either spirit as the primary power source, this wouldn’t be the case for these particular Avatars.

You’re only helping my prior point by saying and/or admitting to this. If the Avatar only uses the strength of a weakened Tiny Raava when in the Avatar State, then why in any way should that version of Raava scale to a version of Vaatu that is in fact stronger than he normally is? When normally, Raava and Vaatu struggle for supremacy over the other, even when they’re both borderline equals?

And we know Raava was weakened since…we see it for ourselves during the events of Wans backstory episodes.


Please present the scan or evidence for Vaatu holding back that isn’t “weakened Raava AS can’t scale to Vaatu”.

Please reread the OP, as I have given reasoning for why this would be the case from the in-canon details the show gives us.

Vaatu has no reason to be using full power against his counterpart who, by that point, could no longer offer any resistance against him by becoming incredibly weakened as a result of them being split apart by Wan, which gave Vaatu the opportunity to become more powerful than he has ever been before, and made him highly confident that he’d permanently destroy Raava (which is impossible to do).

If you’re asking for an outright scan or piece of evidence flat out specifying he held back, we of course don’t have evidence at that level. But we don’t need something 100% confirming this when facts and context from the show can point us in that direction as the more likely circumstances, which is part of what I’m arguing and what most here seem to agree with.

If you have details that would suggest Vaatu would, in fact, fight seriously against them, you could mention them and see where we are at.

… the fact that Vaatu is wary of Korra

I didn’t say this.

Not fighting or being on the offensive =/= being wary

literally proves she and Wan are stronger than or scale to him at the very least? Why in god’s name would he be wary of or play defensively against someone you are claiming is inferior to him to such an absurd degree?

Because for one, Vaatus immediate objective once getting free WASNT to even fight against Korra and Raava. It was to first fuse with Unalaq and turn him into his own Avatar. Which he and him had been planning long even before the events of the show (confirmed by Zaheer as we learn in Book 3).

As a matter of fact, we literally in fact see this. Once Vaatu got free from the Tree of Time, the VERY FIRST thing he and Unalaq immediately try doing is fusing together. Vaatu ONLY turns his attention to Korra AFTER she blasts Unalaq out of the spirit world to keep them separated. And tries having Mako and Bolin to prevent Unalaq from coming back in.

The only way Raava or Vaatu can permanently fuse with someone is to use the spirit energy given off by Harmonic Convergence and the co-joined spirit portals, something that happens only once every 10,000 years. So Vaatu and Unalaq literally have only ONE single opportunity, within that short timeframe, to pull their plan off. They would never get another chance to do that, so it makes sense that instead of focusing on fighting Korra, Vaatu would first instead stall for time so he and Unalaq could fuse as they had planned to do before doing anything else.

How can you say this after saying he was being defensive against her? If he is so much stronger as you are arguing, why was he about to be stuffed into the tree all over again?

See right above.

And an additional point I can add in here, Korra was attempting to seal Vaatu away again WHILE Harmonic Convergence was still happening. Since it was still on-going, and both portals were still joined together, there was nothing really stopping Vaatu from just using the spirit energy of the portals to break free from the tree again. Especially since Unalaq came back to also stop Korra from sealing him away.


The fact that he lost twice, with the second time involving him having knowledge of what the Avatar can do, completely contradicts your argument though.

Please see above for this also.

When Wan touches the Harmonic Convergence, Vaatu runs away from the light and Wan immediately slaps him with water, cuts him in half with fire, makes him do a backflip with rocks and then puts him in the ball. His caution was well deserved even if it didn’t do anything but prolong his L for another 3 seconds.

Him running away here really doesn’t mean much of anything. During Wans era, it was highly common knowledge that humans, who for the most part didn’t even have bending, didn’t stand a chance against spirits, which was part of the reason why humans lived independently from spirits, on the lion turtles who would protect them. Wan was the first ever human to become an outlier for this.

This fight with Vaatu was the first ever of its kind, a human fighting against him. A human fusing together with a spirit was the first time ever in their worlds history to ever become a thing, let alone merging permanently.

Vaatu running away is just him being cautious over a completely unknown, never before seen process, happening and taking him by surprise. It doesn’t necessarily equate to Wan becoming stronger or equal to him to force that.

The sphere isn’t a seal at all unless we are saying Toph sinking someone into the ground is “sealing” them … which, even if it does, still doesn’t change the fact that his bending is what is responsible for keeping Vaatu contained.

…..this is an incredibly big false equivalence.

Toph sinking someone into the ground isn’t a hax as she’s physically using earth bending to tear the earth open and cause that. As well as with the fact that earth bending is tied with one’s physical strength.

Wan literally created a barrier from his elemental sphere, the barrier itself is what the sphere becomes and is what seals and contains Vaatu as his prison inside the tree of time. A Barrier is akin to a forcefield, which IS an ability.

And we know for a fact it’s a barrier as shown here, the sphere glows as energy and turns into a barrier as it’s not in the form of any element after Vaatu is imprisoned.

One is completely different from the other.

And the Avatar does have barrier creation as an ability in the Avatar State, as we see Wan sealing the spirit portals up as barriers as well. What also proves this is the fact that ONLY the Avatar is capable of un-creating them. Unalaq tried piercing one of the sealed portals with waterbending and failed.

Both Korra and Wan contain him with just the air before applying the other elements, forcibly bending his body to fit inside.

I mean, this point doesn’t really change much. The sphere is first made from air and…it’s air. Being stuck in a spherical whirlwind of air has nothing to do with one’s tier.

That and bending in the avatarverse has the hax component of working on souls.

Exactly, it’s not just weakened Raava, it’s Raava inhabiting Wan and Korra. AS is what scales above, not weakened Raava.

The power of the Avatar State comes from Raava, however. This Avatar States power = Raavas strength. So a Tiny Raava means the Avatar State just gets power from that Tiny Raava in that condition.

And no, past lives don’t add any power to this that makes the Avatar State any stronger then it already would be. They ALL get power from the exact same spirit, Raava, otherwise they’re just normal tier 8 humans.

Past Avatars are connected because Raava herself acts as a connection between the current Avatar and past incarnations. Hence why the Avatar can reincarnate into later Avatars after dying, why the Avatar cycle ends when the Avatar Spirit (Raava) is destroyed, why the current Avatar can inherit their past lives abilities, and why Korra couldn’t enter the Avatar State after losing Raava herself.

He literally does. Pseudo-AS and AS are both shown to do more damage to Vaatu’s body than a weaker Vaatu or Raava could do to each other. Just because Raava is responsible for the AS doesn’t mean the AS is capped to weakened Raava or even Raava in general. Feats and showings directly contradict this stance.
And like I said above, these would be outliers then. Especially from an Avatar State powered by a weakened Raava

This stance also, as far as I’m aware, isn’t accepted on the site anyway. We don’t accept Avatar State being greater than the very spirits that… the said Avatar State uses as their source of power.

Anyway, I have made my response to this and we still seem to have enough staff members to make changes at this point, unless we can ask them to re-give opinions.
 
If this is suggesting that the vessels can output more power then the spirits themselves to harm each other (which doesn’t make much sense when the AS is just using Raava/Vaatus power), that’s even more reason to consider this scaling inconsistent that rises to the level of outlier territory for Psuedo-Wan and tiny Raava.



See above please.
Except that, once again, these are pseudo-AS and AS Wan’s only feats. They cannot be outliers.

AS is most certainly not just using Raava’s power. See Yangchen’s fight against General Old Iron. Her base form just after completing her Avatar training stalemates a stronger Old Iron in his armor than the one that stalemates a mastered AS Aang while her AS stomps him.
A lot of the shots we see Psuedo Wan and AS Korra take against Vaatu with bending are mostly minor punctured damage on their spiritual bodies. Even including what you pointed out, if theres fewer shots of them doing actual significant damage above that, you already know where that suggestion ends up on why it shouldn’t be accepted as legitimate.
Uh, no? That’s basically arguing AOE fallacy here. Even if there are more smaller wounds caused by attacks than bigger ones, the discrepancy in numbers between the two different sizes of wounds is by far and large, far closer than the difference between 5-C feats and statements vs the actual feats of said characters.

If we are to accept such reasoning for this, we would need to overhaul the entire site’s profiles to give them tiers appropriate for their “most consistent” tier of feats. To put it another way, ten 5-B feats wouldn’t make X character 5-B by your logic and they would instead be 10-B because they have twenty 10-B feats. That is what you are arguing for Wan while doing a 180 when it comes to your CRT.

Tui has one or two 5-C feats depending on how you take it and La has one statement of being equal to Tui. Koizilla? No 5-C feats or statements and a bunch of them showing it isn’t 5-C while bloodlusted. Vaatu? A bunch of not 5-C feats. Raava? Even more not 5-C feats. Kaiju Korra? More of the same. AS Korra post HC? You get the idea.
On top of the fact that when Vaatu gets damaged like that in those shots, he isn’t on the offensive attacking them. Especially against Korra like I had mentioned. Right after she airbends “through him”, he blasts her away and then only restrains her in spirit vines, long enough to buy Unalaq time to come back to the spirit world for them to fuse together. That one quick spirit ray is the one and only time in that entire fight where you can consider that as Vaatu fighting back against her.
What are you talking about? Vaatu’s entire fight with Wan is him actively chasing and attacking Wan.
There are multiple other options here than to just abruptly scale a version of Raava who has no sensible justification to be tiered close to this version of Vaatu.
“This version of Raava” =/= “Raava possessing/fused with an Avatar”. Please stop conflating the two. One is shown to be gutter trash to humans while the other beats up Vaatu. They are not the same.
Vaatu, within reasons given, can be holding back and not fighting seriously against a weakened version of his counterpart.
He could and it is technically possible. It just makes absolutely no sense given his stated and acted upon goals of, ya know, winning HC and requires us to completely ignore everything he does in his fights and his entire character to be anything more than incredibly improbable.
Raava and Vaatu can be glass canons
Not possible considering they never manage to harm each other when they are equal. This kind of argument is specifically why I brought up Raava vs Vaatu fighting and doing no damage in the first place.
This can be PIS,

Or it can also simply be an outlier for Psuedo Wan and Korra to be doing those things when given Raavas condition at that time in the series compared to Vaatus. Whichever reason you go with has more weight behind it than this scaling. I’ll raise the same question that I did before.
Once again, it is an impossibility for it to be an outlier for Wan when it is all he does. Korra replicating similar feats just goes to show that it is consistent.
Raava and Vaatu when borderline equals spent 10,000 years struggling for supremacy over each other since the previous Harmonic convergence, until Wan inadvertently helped Vaatu by accidentally splitting them up. If they can struggle against each other for that long as equals

What sense does it make to claim that the power of an even massively weaker Raava is even comparable to that of an even massively strengthened Vaatu? When the scales are much in favor of one against the other?
Once again, stop conflating weakened Raava with the AS. We literally see that they are not limited by her individual power and are clearly greater than the sum of their individual parts.
When the lore dictates Raava at that point was no longer able to contend with Vaatu for Harmonic Convergence without assistance?
This right here contradicts your whole argument. Weakened Raava very much cannot contend with a much stronger Vaatu without assistance. But guess what she has when fighting Vaatu? Assistance which lets them contend with and stomp him. Crazy.
The only conclusion that makes sense within the narrative and context is that Tiny Raava should not be comparable to Vaatu in those respective states, and it should otherwise be deemed faulty scaling, inconsistent and/or an outlier for her when not at her normal level of strength.
More of the same conflation.
“Unquantifiable” is putting that quite mildly here when we clearly see in both of Wans episodes (clips that I put in this very post also, btw) how much the difference in strength gets between Raava and Vaatu.

Raava gets smaller & weaker as Vaatu gets bigger and stronger. As Raava herself confirmed, light fades as darkness grows.

Once Vaatu turned the spirits who killed Wans friends into dark spirits, Raava doesn’t even have the strength to move on her own anymore, requiring a tea pot to carry her in. Meanwhile, Vaatu wreaks havoc across the entire planet by the time Harmonic Convergence begins.

“Unquantifiable” doesn’t really counter the fact that Vaatu did significantly become much stronger and Raava significantly got much weaker and we visibly see for ourselves the strength difference and how it effects them.
This is nice and all but it still isn’t Raava and her Avatar vs Vaatu which is what you’d need to actually present to say my stance is an outlier with any actual basis. However much stronger Vaatu’s unquantifiable amp was, it’s still weaker than the unquantifiable amp people get from being possessed by weakened Raava.
Didn’t you claim in the previous response that Vaatu has regeneration? If that’s the case we’re going with, then it also stands for that to work the same in reverse. If Vaatu can regenerate injuries sustained to his spiritual body, then that gives another reason for him to not fight seriously against a weakened Raava when he would then be aware that neither she or Wan can permanently damage or destroy him, especially in the condition she at that point was in.
Why does having regen suddenly make his durability fluctuate or allow him to manipulate it? This is a non-argument that doesn’t address anything I said.
Unless I’m reading this and what you mean here the wrong way, this point here doesn’t do anything but add to and help my own prior point.
Yeah, that’s on me. I should have phrased it better. Obviously the AS draws power from both Raava and the bender in question but what I’m saying is that it isn’t just the simple addition of their power. If we were to assign numerical values to the characters involved, AS is not Wan (10) + weakened Raava (1) = 11 because we see that AS > Vaatu (100).

Your own post talks about how by the time of HC, Raava was struggling to even fly and could only be active for brief periods of time before she was exhausted from the effort. Given how abysmally weak she was at that point, if AS just simply the addition of her power to her host’s, why does Wan or any Avatar become so much stronger to the point of people comparable or superior to their base forms get beat up like it’s Iron Mike vs 3 year old?
You are correct that the AS isn’t Raavas power + the Avatars, because it’s just her power (and Vaatu’s) getting used as a boost whenever the Avatar enters it. We know this for a fact and don’t have to speculate when 3 Avatars, who had no past lives added into the mix whatsoever, have managed to still use it. Wan, Korra (post Book 2) and Unalaq (the first and only Dark Avatar). If the Avatar State didn’t use either spirit as the primary power source, this wouldn’t be the case for these particular Avatars.

You’re only helping my prior point by saying and/or admitting to this. If the Avatar only uses the strength of a weakened Tiny Raava when in the Avatar State, then why in any way should that version of Raava scale to a version of Vaatu that is in fact stronger than he normally is? When normally, Raava and Vaatu struggle for supremacy over the other, even when they’re both borderline equals?

And we know Raava was weakened since…we see it for ourselves during the events of Wans backstory episodes.
As explained above, AS is not just the power of the spirit in question and I don't even know why you are bringing up past lives in a cycle when they are useless outside of a theoretical standpoint for learning the knowledge of past Avatars or taking over the body to protect inexperienced Avatars.

We know for a fact that past Avatars can and have been stronger than future Avatars because of Yangchen.

All that you’ve said in the above quote is a pointless tangent that requires you to ignore everything else I’ve said in favor of a clearly incorrect interpretation of my words.
Please reread the OP, as I have given reasoning for why this would be the case from the in-canon details the show gives us.
I did read the OP. It being wrong is why I am disagreeing.
Vaatu has no reason to be using full power against his counterpart who, by that point, could no longer offer any resistance against him by becoming incredibly weakened as a result of them being split apart by Wan, which gave Vaatu the opportunity to become more powerful than he has ever been before, and made him highly confident that he’d permanently destroy Raava (which is impossible to do).

If you’re asking for an outright scan or piece of evidence flat out specifying he held back, we of course don’t have evidence at that level. But we don’t need something 100% confirming this when facts and context from the show can point us in that direction as the more likely circumstances, which is part of what I’m arguing and what most here seem to agree with.

If you have details that would suggest Vaatu would, in fact, fight seriously against them, you could mention them and see where we are at.
Right, so Vaatu is simply able to hold back and alter his durability because Raava is weakened with absolutely no basis for such an ability being shown? Or he continues to hold back against Wan when parts of his body have been repeatedly ripped off wholesale? He was holding back when he sensed a huge burst of energy from his two enemies fusing to the point of backing off (implying he has reason to be wary of what’s happening and therefore not holding back like you claim) and just … kept holding back when Wan cut him in half and stuffed him in a ball? He was holding back against Korra when he prioritised making Unalaq his Avatar? He must’ve been holding back all those times he started spamming his laser beams at Wan and Korra too even though he clearly uses more energy in it than we see him use in his 10,000 year wrestling match with Raava too, huh?

I don’t know if you’ve realised but in every single scene where Vaatu is supposedly “holding back because Raava is so weak” for your argument to hold water, we must ignore that he clearly chooses to take precautions against facing Korra and has been planning such for years by your own admission, only fights her when he is forced to, and experience Wan’s ability to harm him yet be such a complete and utter moron as to keep holding back after reflexively backing off, which contradicts the fact that he is a duplicitous and decently intelligent SOB who is being a snake in the background for years on end or lies and paints himself as a victim just to get the slightest bit of an upper hand.
I didn’t say this.

Not fighting or being on the offensive =/= being wary
You don’t have to. Him planning for years to get his own Avatar cough the very thing that let the uber weakened Raava beat his supercharged self in the last HC cough and prioritising getting one before fighting Korra instead of just winning (as your entire argument implies he can if he just stops holding back) says more than enough on the topic.
Because for one, Vaatus immediate objective once getting free WASNT to even fight against Korra and Raava. It was to first fuse with Unalaq and turn him into his own Avatar. Which he and him had been planning long even before the events of the show (confirmed by Zaheer as we learn in Book 3).

As a matter of fact, we literally in fact see this. Once Vaatu got free from the Tree of Time, the VERY FIRST thing he and Unalaq immediately try doing is fusing together. Vaatu ONLY turns his attention to Korra AFTER she blasts Unalaq out of the spirit world to keep them separated. And tries having Mako and Bolin to prevent Unalaq from coming back in.

The only way Raava or Vaatu can permanently fuse with someone is to use the spirit energy given off by Harmonic Convergence and the co-joined spirit portals, something that happens only once every 10,000 years. So Vaatu and Unalaq literally have only ONE single opportunity, within that short timeframe, to pull their plan off. They would never get another chance to do that, so it makes sense that instead of focusing on fighting Korra, Vaatu would first instead stall for time so he and Unalaq could fuse as they had planned to do before doing anything else.
Insane, I actually agree with this. What’s more insane is that you still disagree with me even after saying this. If AS doesn’t scale to Vaatu or Raava’s “greatest spirits” or what have you level of power, why in the actual hell would he not just pimp slap her instantly and move on with his day to enjoy the next 10,000 years of darkness because he won HC? Why is his entire plan (according to you) to get an Avatar of his own to win HC if he. Doesn’t. Even. Need one?
See right above.

And an additional point I can add in here, Korra was attempting to seal Vaatu away again WHILE Harmonic Convergence was still happening. Since it was still on-going, and both portals were still joined together, there was nothing really stopping Vaatu from just using the spirit energy of the portals to break free from the tree again. Especially since Unalaq came back to also stop Korra from sealing him away.
This … is completely baseless. Like, actually baseless. Nothing says he can escape from the tree a second time just because of Harmonic Convergence. Last time he lost, Wan sealed him during HC and he didn’t escape.

Both times we see HC, we see it from the very start and we see it lasts for a long ass time. Korra has the time to fight Vaatu for a few minutes, fight Dark Avatar for a few minutes, be mopey after Raava was ripped out and destroyed for a few minutes, meditates to become a kaiju, has a fight with UnaVaatu for several minutes, rip out Raava and win, go back to the tree where HV is still going to have the two fuse and start a new cycle after a conversation. Shit lasts for half an hour or smth and yet Vaatu doesn’t escape against Wan even though it’s been 10 minutes since HC started. Why? Because Raava and Vaatu are supposed to fight during HC to determine whether the rest of us get 10,000 years of darkness. If Korra seals him away, he loses just like before. End of story.

And then we actually have even more evidence saying the opposite of what you are in the form of Unalaq, Eska and Desna needing to enter through the spirit portals to keep their bending so that they could use it to break the seal and free him. They failed, but there is a reason why he needs them to try in the first place … because it doesn’t work like what you said as we have already seen.

So Imma need you to … again … explain why Vaatu’s master plan to win this HC is entirely dependent on humans (who are trash to him) at every stage of the plan if he can just … do all the things you claim he can?
Please see above for this also.



Him running away here really doesn’t mean much of anything. During Wans era, it was highly common knowledge that humans, who for the most part didn’t even have bending, didn’t stand a chance against spirits, which was part of the reason why humans lived independently from spirits, on the lion turtles who would protect them. Wan was the first ever human to become an outlier for this.

This fight with Vaatu was the first ever of its kind, a human fighting against him. A human fusing together with a spirit was the first time ever in their worlds history to ever become a thing, let alone merging permanently.

Vaatu running away is just him being cautious over a completely unknown, never before seen process, happening and taking him by surprise. It doesn’t necessarily equate to Wan becoming stronger or equal to him to force that.
Ah! So he is being cautious but still restricting 99.99% of his power to give Wan the ability to beat him … interesting 🤔
…..this is an incredibly big false equivalence.
Is it though? Is it really?
Toph sinking someone into the ground isn’t a hax as she’s physically using earth bending to tear the earth open and cause that. As well as with the fact that earth bending is tied with one’s physical strength.
So sticking someone in an element to restrict them is, according to you, not sealing? I agree.

… buuuuuutttttt, at the same time, sticking someone inside an element to restrict them is … sealing? Do I got that right? Because I question if I do since, even though it matches up with your words perfectly, it makes. No. Sense.
Wan literally created a barrier from his elemental sphere, the barrier itself is what the sphere becomes and is what seals and contains Vaatu as his prison inside the tree of time. A Barrier is akin to a forcefield, which IS an ability.

And we know for a fact it’s a barrier as shown here, the sphere glows as energy and turns into a barrier as it’s not in the form of any element after Vaatu is imprisoned.

One is completely different from the other.

And the Avatar does have barrier creation as an ability in the Avatar State, as we see Wan sealing the spirit portals up as barriers as well. What also proves this is the fact that ONLY the Avatar is capable of un-creating them. Unalaq tried piercing one of the sealed portals with waterbending and failed.
No no no. We know it becomes the barrier that seals away Vaatu in the Tree of Time when it is put into the tree. Putting it in the tree is a requirement for sealing to happen. Before Wan or Korra do that, it is a ball of the four elements, none of which have ever shown to have such properties to seal spirits away (or even interact with spirits to any relevant degree without a specific technique to do so). They don’t even function as a way to seal humans and animals beyond being physical obstructions that you don’t need bending for.
I mean, this point doesn’t really change much. The sphere is first made from air and…it’s air. Being stuck in a spherical whirlwind of air has nothing to do with one’s tier.

That and bending in the avatarverse has the hax component of working on souls.
Yeah … it doesn’t. Waterbending (and the others) doesn’t just “work” on spirits. As a matter of fact, it was shown to be useless against them without Unalaq’s spiritbending technique.
The power of the Avatar State comes from Raava, however. This Avatar States power = Raavas strength. So a Tiny Raava means the Avatar State just gets power from that Tiny Raava in that condition.
Dude. You gotta stop asserting the bolded as true. It has never once been stated and has actually been shown otherwise that the AS > Raava’s power.
And no, past lives don’t add any power to this that makes the Avatar State any stronger then it already would be.
That’s nice? I’ve never argued it has and any words I’ve had on the matter are explicitly against past lives doing anything in terms of actual output.
They ALL get power from the exact same spirit, Raava, otherwise they’re just normal tier 8 humans.
Go tell that to Yangchen lol
Past Avatars are connected because Raava herself acts as a connection between the current Avatar and past incarnations. Hence why the Avatar can reincarnate into later Avatars after dying, why the Avatar cycle ends when the Avatar Spirit (Raava) is destroyed, why the current Avatar can inherit their past lives abilities, and why Korra couldn’t enter the Avatar State after losing Raava herself.
Thank you for the random lore that I (and everyone else following this thread) already know and adds nothing to the OP or resolving the disagreement.
And like I said above, these would be outliers then. Especially from an Avatar State powered by a weakened Raava
It. Cannot. Be. An. Outlier. Stop just saying this and actually present a proper counter argument to it. All you’ve done so far is call the only feats someone has PIS/outliers with no actual reasoning beyond the shoddy basis of “Vaatu was holding back” even though it makes absolutely no sense regardless of what kind of intangible metric you choose to use. It goes against the narrative, the writing, Vaatu’s actions and character,
This stance also, as far as I’m aware, isn’t accepted on the site anyway. We don’t accept Avatar State being greater than the very spirits that… the said Avatar State uses as their source of power.
And that matters … why??? The stance is objectively correct as I’ve already proven at length. You only need to watch two fights not even 10 minutes long combined to know it’s true.
Anyway, I have made my response to this and we still seem to have enough staff members to make changes at this point, unless we can ask them to re-give opinions.
Fair enough though seeing as there really weren’t any objections to the OP nor were basically any of the arguments I used made prior to the agreements given, getting their takes again is probably best. Fingers crossed we don’t need to type up anymore bibles.

P.S. Just in case, Imma apologise ahead of time if my post comes off as sassy. No offense is meant by it, I’ve just been in a good mood recently and … well you can see what I’m like when that happens lol.
 
If you’re still interested in this King, what do you think of everything that’s been presented here?
At the moment, the god tiers (the main 5, 2 light nd dark spirits, then the ppl who fuse w/ em) can be 5-C. Everyone else, no

Although I'm not a fan of scaling ppl to the GBE of the moon. Any other method of the moon's energy that it lets off is better imo
 
Welp I had prepared a response for this to post overtime, but seems as if it got deleted. RIP.

So I’ll try getting through this as similar as can be

Except that, once again, these are pseudo-AS and AS Wan’s only feats. They cannot be outliers.
If we are to accept such reasoning for this, we would need to overhaul the entire site’s profiles to give them tiers appropriate for their “most consistent” tier of feats. To put it another way, ten 5-B feats wouldn’t make X character 5-B by your logic and they would instead be 10-B because they have twenty 10-B feats. That is what you are arguing for Wan while doing a 180 when it comes to your CRT.

Tui has one or two 5-C feats depending on how you take it and La has one statement of being equal to Tui. Koizilla? No 5-C feats or statements and a bunch of them showing it isn’t 5-C while bloodlusted. Vaatu? A bunch of not 5-C feats. Raava? Even more not 5-C feats. Kaiju Korra? More of the same. AS Korra post HC? You get the idea.
Once again, it is an impossibility for it to be an outlier for Wan when it is all he does. Korra replicating similar feats just goes to show that it is consistent.
It. Cannot. Be. An. Outlier. Stop just saying this and actually present a proper counter argument to it. All you’ve done so far is call the only feats someone has PIS/outliers with no actual reasoning beyond the shoddy basis of “Vaatu was holding back” even though it makes absolutely no sense regardless of what kind of intangible metric you choose to use. It goes against the narrative, the writing, Vaatu’s actions and character,

And that matters … why??? The stance is objectively correct as I’ve already proven at length. You only need to watch two fights not even 10 minutes long combined to know it’s true.

I get where your coming from, but the issue is, that’s not necessarily how Outliers always work. Sure, if a character has certain performances as their only feats, or a larger amount of feats performed at a particular tier, then most of the time, that is how we can tier them without problems arising. However, this isn’t the absolute truth in every single case when evaluating characters feats. There are other factors to consider before something can or cannot be determined to be outlier too, not just the number of performed feats done. If you look at the guidelines for outliers on the Outliers page anyway.

3) Is the event unexplained and unjustified? If an extreme incident is not accompanied by any kind of explanation that justifies it, it is probably an outlier. But if it can be explained by means of some power-up, vulnerability, or limiter, it is likely not. If Superman is wounded by a bullet, it's probably an outlier. But if Superman was under the influence of red sunlight or was previously weakened with Kryptonite, it is not.

4) Does the event break the previously established power-scaling? Here we must take into account a number of factors, such as comparable characters possessing feats or statements of a similar level to the hypothetical outlier, the outlier not being supported by fights that might suggest a similar level, or subsequent events or statements that contradict it in some way.

5) Does the event break with the narrative of the work? Many times an outlier breaks with what has been previously established or shown in a work, creating inconsistencies that are difficult to resolve unless we invalidate one of the two events. If, for example, a character claims not to be able to dodge bullets, even though he was previously seen dodging them explicitly, we are faced with a contradiction where we will probably have to resort to using the more reliable evidence.

Factors to also consider like breaking pre-established power scaling, or if any narrative details gets broken, or if it’s unjustifrd, are also important things to keep in mind, and I would argue Avatar, in this case here, does break at least some of these factors quite extensively to still reach outlier territory, no matter the times the feat is done.

Even if we take things like Korra and Psuedo-Wan damaging Vaatu at face value and add them to their arsenal of feats, the large problem at hand with accepting this is that the logic behind this scaling and tiering them at those levels just doesn’t fit with the very narrative Avatar / LoK sets. It just doesn’t make sense. There’s a reason I keep reiterating Raava & Vaatus relationship & how it affects them as an argument, because that’s explicitly a plot point in Avatars lore, and an important one at that.

Like I mentioned before, as the forces of light and darkness in the Avatar universe, Raava and Vaatu have a relationship of influencing each other, and as a result, their power. When darkness grows, light fades, and vice versa, and doing so makes one stronger and the other weaker. For 10,000 years prior to Wans harmonic convergence, Raava and Vaatu were borderline equals, the former being just enough capable of keeping the latter in check and the world in balance. Until Wan accidentally splitting them caused the shift in power to now favor Vaatu, who was reaching levels of power beyond his normal strength, and Raava now getting weaker than her normal strength at that point in the series. It’s not a stretch to even say Vaatu was almost at his most powerful possible level of power, and Raava being close to her weakest possible power level before the point of just straight up dying. Strength between these 2, under these conditions, can’t even be compared. Ones significantly above the other under these conditions.

Being split from Vaatu caused Raava to be depowered and no longer have the strength or means to be capable of fighting, let alone stopping, Vaatu on her own for Harmonic Convergence, requiring Wans assistance. This is a plot point in the lore and something explicitly important that’s acknowledged in the narrative.

To accept Psuedo Wan and weakened Raava to still scale to Vaatu, is to ignore this very explicit plot point in the story for the sake of scaling, and then requires reasons to be conjured up in order to now justify this inconsistency that doesn’t fit with established information the verse gives.

And what can actually justify it, even? As far as I’m concerned, it’s unjustified. Wan isn’t anywhere close to these levels of power by himself, so his power being added into this (even if we assume it isn’t just Raavas power getting drawed on by him) doesn’t logically make this jump make sense. Raava herself in this state is much weaker than Vaatu when being enhanced. So where is this extra power coming from that lets them reasonably stand against Vaatus enhanced power? From where I’m sitting, it’s coming from nowhere. It’s an unexplained circumstance done for the sake of story demanding it so the series can happen as it does, so we shouldn’t take this as anything more than an inconsistency. PIS, outlier, however it is to be deemed as.

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Cases like Tui & La, Koizilla, etc are all effectively different because an aforementioned case like with Raava and Vaatu, with breaking pre established information, just doesnt exist for them. So your able to play the “these are there only feats” card here and it can work. It’s justified and reasonable for them.

Tui and La are in a class of their own for being pretty much the very next strongest spirits in the verse, right under Raava and Vaatu, with their own dominion over the worlds balance for being the ocean and moon and having dominion of them. Literally being the moon and ocean, and having the forces of the moon and ocean (High 6-A & 5-C) are their only existing feats. They’re the strongest non-god tier spirits in the verse with nothing other than Raava and Vaatu scaling from them, so them being that strong is justified. So their feats safely fit in Avatars lore without breaking anything we’ve seen or known beforehand.

Kozillas the same as that’s just the Ocean Spirit + Aang in AS.

Giant Korra is the same as she’s using the Tree of Times power specifically to link with cosmic energy to be strong enough to contend with UnaVaatu. It’s a one time power up that she can’t perform on her own, so it scales to pretty much nothing but Giant Korra, making it justified to be tiered that way. Again, not conflicting with any pre established scaling or idea.

And Raava & Vaatu? Self explanatory.

And as for the whole “not doing anything 5-C” thing, you know as well as I do that that just falls into the typical “AoE fallacy” territory and pretends that AP isn’t an existing thing. It’s not a real factor to use for determining outliers.

AS is most certainly not just using Raava’s power. See Yangchen’s fight against General Old Iron. Her base form just after completing her Avatar training stalemates a stronger Old Iron in his armor than the one that stalemates a mastered AS Aang while her AS stomps him.

You know that this reinforces my point against this even more, right? Because let’s take this at face value for a moment.

If we go with the idea that the Avatar State combines both Raavas power and the Avatars individual strengths, that would mean Aang would, logically and objectively, have a stronger Avatar State then Yangchens, since his AS would be drawing on strength from all Past Avatars before him, including Yangchens very own strength. The very same strength she used to stomp Old Iron. Yet, he has a more difficult time against an even weaker version of an opponent Yangchen herself performed better against?

That gives us a few options to choose from.

Either Yangchen and/or Aang become an outlier for the use of their AS being inconsistent compared to each other, or the Avatar State doesn’t actually in fact combine each Avatars individual power and just draws on Raavas as the source of power.

Uh, no? That’s basically arguing AOE fallacy here. Even if there are more smaller wounds caused by attacks than bigger ones, the discrepancy in numbers between the two different sizes of wounds is by far and large, far closer than the difference between 5-C feats and statements vs the actual feats of said characters.

From what I recall, there are usually different kinds of damage depending on the nature of the attacks done, like how piercing damage or damage done by burning is deemed different from normal conventional attacks, unless im misremembering or mistaken on this.

That said, I’m fine with dropping this part of the discussion for more simplicity, since the scaling being an outlier / inconsistent is moreso what my point is more than anything else.

What are you talking about? Vaatu’s entire fight with Wan is him actively chasing and attacking Wan.

This point is about Korra, mostly. Even if Vaatu was attacking Wan while the latter blasted him, that certainly wasn’t the case when Korra fought against him.

“This version of Raava” =/= “Raava possessing/fused with an Avatar”. Please stop conflating the two. One is shown to be gutter trash to humans while the other beats up Vaatu. They are not the same.
Once again, stop conflating weakened Raava with the AS. We literally see that they are not limited by her individual power and are clearly greater than the sum of their individual parts.

And as I’ve explained and pointed out, being fused with an Avatar makes no difference, it is still the same tiny weak Raava who is providing the power boost for said Avatars AS, and it against Vaatu should be deemed an outlier.

Unless you are suggesting the individual Avatar in question, a tier 8-7 human at best, provides half of the boost, which is pretty unsubstantiated.

He could and it is technically possible. It just makes absolutely no sense given his stated and acted upon goals of, ya know, winning HC and requires us to completely ignore everything he does in his fights and his entire character to be anything more than incredibly improbable.

Wanting to win HC isn’t an argument that Vaatu would need to seriously hit Raava and Wan at full power in order to do that. You can have the objective of being victorious and just be deemed cocky or arrogant enough to try winning without taking it seriously.

Which can also be entirely apart of the literal incarnation of darkness and evils character to do, especially when seeing the very enemy who held him in check for 10 millennia is now a tiny facet of who she was and can’t offer resistance to her anymore.

This right here contradicts your whole argument. Weakened Raava very much cannot contend with a much stronger Vaatu without assistance. But guess what she has when fighting Vaatu? Assistance which lets them contend with and stomp him. Crazy.

You mean assistance from someone, who again, is a tier 8 to 7 being on his own at the absolute most, going up against a spirit who’s significantly higher into High 6-A / 5-C than he normally is?

That doesn’t contradict my argument, no.

This is nice and all but it still isn’t Raava and her Avatar vs Vaatu which is what you’d need to actually present to say my stance is an outlier with any actual basis.
Yeah, that’s on me. I should have phrased it better. Obviously the AS draws power from both Raava and the bender in question but what I’m saying is that it isn’t just the simple addition of their power. If we were to assign numerical values to the characters involved, AS is not Wan (10) + weakened Raava (1) = 11 because we see that AS > Vaatu (100).
Your own post talks about how by the time of HC, Raava was struggling to even fly and could only be active for brief periods of time before she was exhausted from the effort. Given how abysmally weak she was at that point, if AS just simply the addition of her power to her host’s, why does Wan or any Avatar become so much stronger to the point of people comparable or superior to their base forms get beat up like it’s Iron Mike vs 3 year old?

Ahhh. I have a better understanding of what you were trying to say now with this. Well, I’ll have 2 or so answers for this, so let’s start with the first.

You also have to remember that the amount of beings in this universe who are actually around the level of Raava, Vaatu, Avatar State, even lower spirits like Tui & La are….remarkably small. Like, the number of them can be counted on one hand. The vast majority of characters in Avatar are significantly below these tier of characters, around peak human to just flat out being ordinary everyday humans. Some not even being benders with any relevant stats at all. So the Avatar, at their strongest, has very little to rival them, and even individually without being AS? Not many normal benders can realistically match them.
Why do you think the Avatar is revered as such a powerful figure in their verse? Not just because of the Avatar State ofc, but because of things uniquely special to them, like their unique bending capabilities of using and mastering all 4 elements, having access to top tier class bending masters to train with, access to knowledge and skills most benders wouldn’t have access to like past life guidance, naturally better bending capabilities, basically being a demigod compared to ordinary people. Most people can’t rival the Avatar, and for those who can, it’s not by a significant amount.

Sure, some characters in the series have unique bending and skills of their own that can rival or give a base Avatar trouble, but in terms of actual strength, being as skilled in bending as an Avatar doesn’t necessarily mean they’re “above” their power. For instance, characters like Zuko, Azula, Combustion Man, etc are certainly able to match Aangs fighting skill, but they don’t quite overpower him in a strength match. They just have skills that are also unique and unorthodox to deal with, like Combustion Man firebending with his mind, Azulas lightning bending, and the fact that she and Zuko are both Rokus descendants, so they’re naturally much stronger firebenders in a royal bloodline than your typical one. Even for someone like Ozai during Sozins Comet, Aang (who also naturally got a boost from the comet since he has firebending) was doing quite fine against him before unleashing Avatar State. If not for Aangs pacifistic nature of not wanting to fight, I’d say he wouldn’t have had issues against Ozai in base form.

Or as an another (better) example, Korra. Legend of Korra gives us characters with even more remarkable unique bending abilities. Amon and Tarloks bloodbending, being able to mentally blocobend, Unalaqs spirit bending and being a top tier waterbender, the Red Lotus who has someone with lavabending, a female Combustion man, Kuviras metal bending, etc. They are certainly abilities difficult to overcome, but that doesn’t mean Base Korra would be weaker. Korra has shown to even fight some of these opponents in Base and still do remarkably well. Skill and ability become factors that make this more complex than a simple comparison of who flexes more power.

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As for the second answer, this proposal makes use of taking an assumption as fact first. Your proposal on the idea of Avatar State granting a considerably bigger boost beyond just Raava and the individual combining is that because Wan and a weakened Raava could contend with an enhanced Vaatu, it has to result in the AS giving said kind of bigger boost.

But this argument is taking the assumption of Wan and Raava doing that to Vaatu and citing it as a legitimate feat to begin with in order to argue a bigger boost is granted, when the argument can also just be those two being on that level in the first place is just an outlier and is inconsistent, like how I’m arguing. It’s just an interpretation.

And compared to anyone else other than Vaatu, whether or not she’s depowered, Raava is still a dominant force in the Avatar universe as being one of the two all-powerful spirits that’s existed since time started and is dealt with the role of determining the fate of the world & keeping it in balance. Even at her weakest, she provides the Avatar power and feats remarkably above that of any other bender, like cracking mountains, moving clouds, moving cities, making volcanoes erupt, causing islands to sink, making tidal waves, splitting apart islands (Kyoshis famous AS feat), etc. A normal bender would be lucky to do anything beyond taking down buildings on a good day.

So even if just by adding Raavas power to an Avatar, there doesn’t need to be an extra big boost in order for her and them to do to a regular bending opponent what Iron Mike would do to a 3 yr old. It’s Wan and Raava just combining their energies together by merging. That’s it. There’s no amp other than the human that’s getting power from the obviously much more powerful spirit as a power source. Somewhat akin to like Naruto & Kurama.

Why does having regen suddenly make his durability fluctuate or allow him to manipulate it?

To clarify, altering his durability was not the point of why I said this. The point was that if Vaatu can regenerate, then he’d know that he can take whatever attack Wan or Korra could dish out against him and still come back for more. He wouldn’t permanently get destroyed, so it could also be argued in reverse that he wouldn’t need to output full power against them when he could use anything less and the result would still be the same.

As explained above, AS is not just the power of the spirit in question and I don't even know why you are bringing up past lives in a cycle when they are useless outside of a theoretical standpoint for learning the knowledge of past Avatars or taking over the body to protect inexperienced Avatars.
We know for a fact that past Avatars can and have been stronger than future Avatars because of Yangchen.

All that you’ve said in the above quote is a pointless tangent that requires you to ignore everything else I’ve said in favor of a clearly incorrect interpretation of my words.

These points can be dropped since it was made under my misinterpretation of what you said when saying “AS isn’t just Raava and the Avatar”

So in that case, you can just see above of what I said against this.

I did read the OP. It being wrong is why I am disagreeing.

Right, so Vaatu is simply able to hold back and alter his durability because Raava is weakened with absolutely no basis for such an ability being shown? Or he continues to hold back against Wan when parts of his body have been repeatedly ripped off wholesale? He was holding back when he sensed a huge burst of energy from his two enemies fusing to the point of backing off (implying he has reason to be wary of what’s happening and therefore not holding back like you claim) and just … kept holding back when Wan cut him in half and stuffed him in a ball? He was holding back against Korra when he prioritised making Unalaq his Avatar? He must’ve been holding back all those times he started spamming his laser beams at Wan and Korra too even though he clearly uses more energy in it than we see him use in his 10,000 year wrestling match with Raava too, huh?

Firstly, where is the “10,000 year wrestling match” point coming from? That was a minute long tustling between those 2. We know for a fact Raava and Vaatu can destroy one another, since Raava explicitly explained one can’t exist without the other and when one is destroyed, they get restored inside of the other. She wouldn’t have already known this and said it to Wan if it didn’t already happen before.

Secondly, like I had said before, Vaatu “backing off” from Raava and Wan doesn’t amount of much of anything. Something that’s never happened before in history, or for how long you’ve existed, is happening before you. Being weary of that doesn’t equate to them matching Vaatu anymore than it just means him not knowing what’s going on.

Furthermore, I would argue some of this is in fact true or closer to that. Like I said before, just because Vaatu is the incarnation of darkness and evil doesn’t mean he’s above being arrogant or cocky.

Even after his encounter with Wan, 10,000 yrs later facing Korra, he still remains arrogant & stupid enough to think he could permanently rid himself of Raava when he should know full well neither can exist without the other and have never done so

He was even arrogant enough to even try fusing with Unalaq immediately after getting freed, right in front of Korra, seemingly thinking no resistance to that would have been offered.

So it’s not entirely out of left field to argue that is part of Vaatus character as well.

I don’t know if you’ve realised but in every single scene where Vaatu is supposedly “holding back because Raava is so weak” for your argument to hold water, we must ignore that he clearly chooses to take precautions against facing Korra and has been planning such for years by your own admission, only fights her when he is forced to, and experience Wan’s ability to harm him yet be such a complete and utter moron as to keep holding back after reflexively backing off, which contradicts the fact that he is a duplicitous and decently intelligent SOB who is being a snake in the background for years on end or lies and paints himself as a victim just to get the slightest bit of an upper hand.

As far as “painting himself as the victim” goes to show his deceitfulness…that’s much more on Wan being the idiot than showing Vaatu being intelligent when Wan was the one who, after having just connected with spirits when living in the Spirit Wilds, interferes with their battle after Vaatu made one simple “she’s tormenting me!” remark.

And taking precautions against Korra? Again, he was dumb enough to try ignoring her all together and try fusing with Unalaq literally right in front of her face, AFTER she threatened to re-seal him back up in the Tree of Time mind you. I’d argue that this is closer to just Vaatu being arrogant & oblivious instead of this careful, calculating villian we’ve never seen him be.

If that was actually the case, he could’ve simply avoided her all together and not fight her at all, but that wasn’t the case. When they “fought”, all their battle amounted to was him blasting her with ONE SINGLE spirit way, and then trapping her in Spirit Vines. He could’ve just done that and went to the physical world to find Unalaq, but that wasn’t what happened either.

You don’t have to. Him planning for years to get his own Avatar cough the very thing that let the uber weakened Raava beat his supercharged self in the last HC cough and prioritising getting one before fighting Korra instead of just winning (as your entire argument implies he can if he just stops holding back) says more than enough on the topic.

And that’s why such things called PIS & CIS are existing concepts as well, which this can very much apply to be as too (even with this idea of Vaatu being a very calculating villain by planning something along with somebody else assisting him)

Insane, I actually agree with this. What’s more insane is that you still disagree with me even after saying this. If AS doesn’t scale to Vaatu or Raava’s “greatest spirits” or what have you level of power, why in the actual hell would he not just pimp slap her instantly and move on with his day to enjoy the next 10,000 years of darkness because he won HC?

For the same reasons I just said above (and earlier in this discussion, actually). Plot Induced Stupidity, or Character Induced Stupidity, however you want to try labeling it as.

Korra, the main character, not getting instantly floored because the plot demands her to resolve the crisis no matter the factors involved or the main villian, the literal incarnation of darkness and chaos, not one shottint because of sheer arrogance or foolishness? Tons of cases like these exist in fiction to qualify as PIS or CIS and I don’t see why this wouldn’t be yet another thing to add to those numbers.
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Not to mention, you’re forgetting Unalaq, the other member of this alliance, who actively wanted to become a Dark Avatar as well. This isn’t just Vaatus plan, it’s BOTH theirs.

Why is his entire plan (according to you) to get an Avatar of his own to win HC if he. Doesn’t. Even. Need one?

See above. Unalaq is equally apart of this plan, they both conspired to pull this off, not just Vaatu. As we learn from Zaheer in Book 3.

(And as a small side note, having an Avatar as a vessel would be useful to his purposes since he’d have someone who, like Wan/Raava, can reincarnate endlessly, have bending and help further his control of the human and spirit realms. Why wouldn’t he agree to do this?)

This … is completely baseless. Like, actually baseless. Nothing says he can escape from the tree a second time just because of Harmonic Convergence.

Except, it’s not. All the parameters for using Harmonic Convergence to escape are literally there to use. The amplified spirit energy given off by the fused portals during harmonic convergence is required for Vaatu to escape the tree.

Are the portals fused during HC? The answer is yes.

When the portals are joined, is spiritual energy amplified? The answer is yes.

Does spirit energy remain amplified while HC is going on? The answer is yes.

So what’s baseless about this? Everything is there and available to use, there’s literally nothing speculative to say Vaatu could escape a second time if he has the energy to draw on, which he would.

Last time he lost, Wan sealed him during HC and he didn’t escape.

Because, your forgetting, Wan closed off one of the spirit portals immediately after he sealed Vaatu in the tree. Both spirit portals need to be opened at the same exact time during HC in order for Vaatu to escape with this method, one of them being closed shuts this option down.

And Vaatu wouldn’t have known he could do this at that time, anyway. He has never been trapped in the tree before fighting Wan, so there’s no reason to think he’d already know how to escape through this method until at some point later on.

We even see this in the clip I linked in the OP with Jinora finding that book on the Tree of Time and reading this theory the book cites.

Jinora: “The tree of time. That’s where Avatar Wan imprisoned Vaatu. The elders believed that as long as the portals are closed during the Harmonic Convergence, Vaatu will remain imprisoned and the battle between good and evil will not be fought again. But, if both portals are open, spirit energy is amplified greatly. During the Harmonic Convergence, this energy will be great enough to allow Vaatu to break free from his bonds. The material world will again risk being consumed by darkness.”

Considering the very book said that the elders believed this, that means this method wasn’t even a known thing until at some point after Vaatu is sealed and Wan gets recognized as the first Avatar. Either way, Vaatu definitely wouldn’t have been immediately aware he could do this when being sealed the first time, so it wouldn’t defeat my point that he could do it the second time now possessing that knowledge.

Both times we see HC, we see it from the very start and we see it lasts for a long ass time. Korra has the time to fight Vaatu for a few minutes, fight Dark Avatar for a few minutes, be mopey after Raava was ripped out and destroyed for a few minutes, meditates to become a kaiju, has a fight with UnaVaatu for several minutes, rip out Raava and win, go back to the tree where HV is still going to have the two fuse and start a new cycle after a conversation. Shit lasts for half an hour or smth

Of course HC lasts a long time. The point, however, is if BOTH portals are open while it’s going on to amplify spiritual energy.

In Wans case, they weren’t. So he couldn’t. In Korras case, they were, so he could.

and yet Vaatu doesn’t escape against Wan even though it’s been 10 minutes since HC started.

This is wrong. Wan and Vaatu were fighting before their Harmonic Convergence even started, evidenced by the fact that the portals didn’t merge at first when they began to fight. The portals merge immediately when HC starts. And Vaatu literally even says it didn’t start yet as he has Wan pinned down in front of one of the portals.

Vaatu: “The Harmonic Convergence is about to begin. The era of Raava is over…”

HC doesn’t actually start until right towards the end of their battle.

Why? Because Raava and Vaatu are supposed to fight during HC to determine whether the rest of us get 10,000 years of darkness. If Korra seals him away, he loses just like before. End of story.

Yes, and this would be the case if it was just a normal fight without humans intervening. Or if both portals weren’t open during HC. But neither of those things were the case.

Wan made sure both portals weren’t open right after Vaatu was sealed away, and Vaatu couldn’t have been aware he could use the spirit energy to escape the first time.

The second time around during Korras HC? That’s a different story. HC was still happening when Korra tried sealing Vaatu away again, and both portals were still open. Vaatu by this point is aware he can use its power to escape the tree, and the spirit energy of HC was amplified all over the planet. He had everything available to just escape again.

Sealing Vaatu away again while all that is happening would be literally useless.

And then we actually have even more evidence saying the opposite of what you are in the form of Unalaq, Eska and Desna needing to enter through the spirit portals to keep their bending so that they could use it to break the seal and free him.

Um….they were trying to break open the sealed Northern Spirit Portal. Not Vaatus prison.

This is wrong.

They failed, but there is a reason why he needs them to try in the first place … because it doesn’t work like what you said as we have already seen.

If your suggesting Vaatu tasked Unalaq, Desna and Eska to try breaking him free, this is also wrong.

They were trying to break open the sealed Northern Spirit Portal since only the Southern portal was opened so far, and Vaatu didn’t even ask them to do that. Unalaq took it upon himself to try doing that because he thought Korra was dead.

No no no. We know it becomes the barrier that seals away Vaatu in the Tree of Time when it is put into the tree. Putting it in the tree is a requirement for sealing to happen.

This is headcanon. Where is it ever said the tree of time is a requirement in order for that to happen? That is was never said at any given point in the show.

And what about the spirit portals when they got closed? They were encased in barriers as well, but did Wan need the tree in order to make those too? No.

The very fact that the Avatar can also seal the spirit portals in barriers proves they can create barriers, in general, at any time they wish. So why wouldn’t the same apply for Vaatus prison? The tree simply is the place they chose for Vaatus prison to be physically encased in.

Before Wan or Korra do that, it is a ball of the four elements, none of which have ever shown to have such properties to seal spirits away (or even interact with spirits to any relevant degree without a specific technique to do so).

Probably because outside of the Avatar, who quite obviously has special skills like energy bending and rare spiritual abilities, bending is just normal elements to the vast majority of other characters? Characters who can’t bend all 4 elements either?

Yeah … it doesn’t. Waterbending (and the others) doesn’t just “work” on spirits. As a matter of fact, it was shown to be useless against them without Unalaq’s spiritbending technique.

Tenzin, Mako, Bolin, Kya, Desna and Eska all literally defended Korras body in the spirit world against an army of dark spirits with bending and were capable of destroying them

Wan used bending to keep spirits at bay from killing his friends

Korra used bending against dark spirits when they tried keeping her from opening the Southern Spirit portal.

There’s multiple cases of bending, from an Avatar and non-avatar, working on spirits without specialized techniques like spirit bending.

Dude. You gotta stop asserting the bolded as true. It has never once been stated and has actually been shown otherwise that the AS > Raava’s power.

Because there’s something called common sense that we can use at times to get the answer for us, and this….id say is one of those times. A human enters this state because he merged with a spirit. When merging with said spirit, he glows, gets a large boost in power and strength and better bending ability. And he never had said boost until merging with said spirit. What does that tell you? We don’t need a statement of the AS using Raavas power when we clearly and visibly see that it does.

What we don’t have, however, is a statement or any evidence of this notion that the AS exceeds the very power of said spirit.

Go tell that to Yangchen lol

I wouldn’t agree with her being above tier 7 without the Avatar State either. Korra isn’t, Aang isn’t, Roku & Kyoshi aren’t. And if Yangchen had an actual page for the site, I doubt she would be anything different.

Thank you for the random lore that I (and everyone else following this thread) already know and adds nothing to the OP or resolving the disagreement.

Well the Past lives is what I was assuming you were referring to when saying the AS is more than just Raava, so that’s why I included this as a point. But the earlier points here will have already made mention of this.

And that matters … why??? The stance is objectively correct as I’ve already proven at length. You only need to watch two fights not even 10 minutes long combined to know it’s true.

Because you’ve been here long enough to know as well as I do, we don’t use what the site doesn’t have applied and acceptable. If wanting this to be the case, then get it accepted here first. Otherwise personal interpretation doesn’t mean a lot (not to be snippy, just saying that this is how the site has always operated for us on pretty much anything).

Anyway yeah, hope no more bibles come from either of us as this reply will pretty much be the crux of what I’d argue and think.
 
Welp I had prepared a response for this to post overtime, but seems as if it got deleted. RIP.

So I’ll try getting through this as similar as can be






I get where your coming from, but the issue is, that’s not necessarily how Outliers always work. Sure, if a character has certain performances as their only feats, or a larger amount of feats performed at a particular tier, then most of the time, that is how we can tier them without problems arising. However, this isn’t the absolute truth in every single case when evaluating characters feats. There are other factors to consider before something can or cannot be determined to be outlier too, not just the number of performed feats done. If you look at the guidelines for outliers on the Outliers page anyway.



Factors to also consider like breaking pre-established power scaling, or if any narrative details gets broken, or if it’s unjustifrd, are also important things to keep in mind, and I would argue Avatar, in this case here, does break at least some of these factors quite extensively to still reach outlier territory, no matter the times the feat is done.

Even if we take things like Korra and Psuedo-Wan damaging Vaatu at face value and add them to their arsenal of feats, the large problem at hand with accepting this is that the logic behind this scaling and tiering them at those levels just doesn’t fit with the very narrative Avatar / LoK sets. It just doesn’t make sense. There’s a reason I keep reiterating Raava & Vaatus relationship & how it affects them as an argument, because that’s explicitly a plot point in Avatars lore, and an important one at that.

Like I mentioned before, as the forces of light and darkness in the Avatar universe, Raava and Vaatu have a relationship of influencing each other, and as a result, their power. When darkness grows, light fades, and vice versa, and doing so makes one stronger and the other weaker. For 10,000 years prior to Wans harmonic convergence, Raava and Vaatu were borderline equals, the former being just enough capable of keeping the latter in check and the world in balance. Until Wan accidentally splitting them caused the shift in power to now favor Vaatu, who was reaching levels of power beyond his normal strength, and Raava now getting weaker than her normal strength at that point in the series. It’s not a stretch to even say Vaatu was almost at his most powerful possible level of power, and Raava being close to her weakest possible power level before the point of just straight up dying. Strength between these 2, under these conditions, can’t even be compared. Ones significantly above the other under these conditions.

Being split from Vaatu caused Raava to be depowered and no longer have the strength or means to be capable of fighting, let alone stopping, Vaatu on her own for Harmonic Convergence, requiring Wans assistance. This is a plot point in the lore and something explicitly important that’s acknowledged in the narrative.

To accept Psuedo Wan and weakened Raava to still scale to Vaatu, is to ignore this very explicit plot point in the story for the sake of scaling, and then requires reasons to be conjured up in order to now justify this inconsistency that doesn’t fit with established information the verse gives.

And what can actually justify it, even? As far as I’m concerned, it’s unjustified. Wan isn’t anywhere close to these levels of power by himself, so his power being added into this (even if we assume it isn’t just Raavas power getting drawed on by him) doesn’t logically make this jump make sense. Raava herself in this state is much weaker than Vaatu when being enhanced. So where is this extra power coming from that lets them reasonably stand against Vaatus enhanced power? From where I’m sitting, it’s coming from nowhere. It’s an unexplained circumstance done for the sake of story demanding it so the series can happen as it does, so we shouldn’t take this as anything more than an inconsistency. PIS, outlier, however it is to be deemed as.

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Cases like Tui & La, Koizilla, etc are all effectively different because an aforementioned case like with Raava and Vaatu, with breaking pre established information, just doesnt exist for them. So your able to play the “these are there only feats” card here and it can work. It’s justified and reasonable for them.

Tui and La are in a class of their own for being pretty much the very next strongest spirits in the verse, right under Raava and Vaatu, with their own dominion over the worlds balance for being the ocean and moon and having dominion of them. Literally being the moon and ocean, and having the forces of the moon and ocean (High 6-A & 5-C) are their only existing feats. They’re the strongest non-god tier spirits in the verse with nothing other than Raava and Vaatu scaling from them, so them being that strong is justified. So their feats safely fit in Avatars lore without breaking anything we’ve seen or known beforehand.

Kozillas the same as that’s just the Ocean Spirit + Aang in AS.

Giant Korra is the same as she’s using the Tree of Times power specifically to link with cosmic energy to be strong enough to contend with UnaVaatu. It’s a one time power up that she can’t perform on her own, so it scales to pretty much nothing but Giant Korra, making it justified to be tiered that way. Again, not conflicting with any pre established scaling or idea.

And Raava & Vaatu? Self explanatory.

And as for the whole “not doing anything 5-C” thing, you know as well as I do that that just falls into the typical “AoE fallacy” territory and pretends that AP isn’t an existing thing. It’s not a real factor to use for determining outliers.



You know that this reinforces my point against this even more, right? Because let’s take this at face value for a moment.

If we go with the idea that the Avatar State combines both Raavas power and the Avatars individual strengths, that would mean Aang would, logically and objectively, have a stronger Avatar State then Yangchens, since his AS would be drawing on strength from all Past Avatars before him, including Yangchens very own strength. The very same strength she used to stomp Old Iron. Yet, he has a more difficult time against an even weaker version of an opponent Yangchen herself performed better against?

That gives us a few options to choose from.

Either Yangchen and/or Aang become an outlier for the use of their AS being inconsistent compared to each other, or the Avatar State doesn’t actually in fact combine each Avatars individual power and just draws on Raavas as the source of power.



From what I recall, there are usually different kinds of damage depending on the nature of the attacks done, like how piercing damage or damage done by burning is deemed different from normal conventional attacks, unless im misremembering or mistaken on this.

That said, I’m fine with dropping this part of the discussion for more simplicity, since the scaling being an outlier / inconsistent is moreso what my point is more than anything else.



This point is about Korra, mostly. Even if Vaatu was attacking Wan while the latter blasted him, that certainly wasn’t the case when Korra fought against him.




And as I’ve explained and pointed out, being fused with an Avatar makes no difference, it is still the same tiny weak Raava who is providing the power boost for said Avatars AS, and it against Vaatu should be deemed an outlier.

Unless you are suggesting the individual Avatar in question, a tier 8-7 human at best, provides half of the boost, which is pretty unsubstantiated.



Wanting to win HC isn’t an argument that Vaatu would need to seriously hit Raava and Wan at full power in order to do that. You can have the objective of being victorious and just be deemed cocky or arrogant enough to try winning without taking it seriously.

Which can also be entirely apart of the literal incarnation of darkness and evils character to do, especially when seeing the very enemy who held him in check for 10 millennia is now a tiny facet of who she was and can’t offer resistance to her anymore.



You mean assistance from someone, who again, is a tier 8 to 7 being on his own at the absolute most, going up against a spirit who’s significantly higher into High 6-A / 5-C than he normally is?

That doesn’t contradict my argument, no.





Ahhh. I have a better understanding of what you were trying to say now with this. Well, I’ll have 2 or so answers for this, so let’s start with the first.

You also have to remember that the amount of beings in this universe who are actually around the level of Raava, Vaatu, Avatar State, even lower spirits like Tui & La are….remarkably small. Like, the number of them can be counted on one hand. The vast majority of characters in Avatar are significantly below these tier of characters, around peak human to just flat out being ordinary everyday humans. Some not even being benders with any relevant stats at all. So the Avatar, at their strongest, has very little to rival them, and even individually without being AS? Not many normal benders can realistically match them.
Why do you think the Avatar is revered as such a powerful figure in their verse? Not just because of the Avatar State ofc, but because of things uniquely special to them, like their unique bending capabilities of using and mastering all 4 elements, having access to top tier class bending masters to train with, access to knowledge and skills most benders wouldn’t have access to like past life guidance, naturally better bending capabilities, basically being a demigod compared to ordinary people. Most people can’t rival the Avatar, and for those who can, it’s not by a significant amount.

Sure, some characters in the series have unique bending and skills of their own that can rival or give a base Avatar trouble, but in terms of actual strength, being as skilled in bending as an Avatar doesn’t necessarily mean they’re “above” their power. For instance, characters like Zuko, Azula, Combustion Man, etc are certainly able to match Aangs fighting skill, but they don’t quite overpower him in a strength match. They just have skills that are also unique and unorthodox to deal with, like Combustion Man firebending with his mind, Azulas lightning bending, and the fact that she and Zuko are both Rokus descendants, so they’re naturally much stronger firebenders in a royal bloodline than your typical one. Even for someone like Ozai during Sozins Comet, Aang (who also naturally got a boost from the comet since he has firebending) was doing quite fine against him before unleashing Avatar State. If not for Aangs pacifistic nature of not wanting to fight, I’d say he wouldn’t have had issues against Ozai in base form.

Or as an another (better) example, Korra. Legend of Korra gives us characters with even more remarkable unique bending abilities. Amon and Tarloks bloodbending, being able to mentally blocobend, Unalaqs spirit bending and being a top tier waterbender, the Red Lotus who has someone with lavabending, a female Combustion man, Kuviras metal bending, etc. They are certainly abilities difficult to overcome, but that doesn’t mean Base Korra would be weaker. Korra has shown to even fight some of these opponents in Base and still do remarkably well. Skill and ability become factors that make this more complex than a simple comparison of who flexes more power.

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As for the second answer, this proposal makes use of taking an assumption as fact first. Your proposal on the idea of Avatar State granting a considerably bigger boost beyond just Raava and the individual combining is that because Wan and a weakened Raava could contend with an enhanced Vaatu, it has to result in the AS giving said kind of bigger boost.

But this argument is taking the assumption of Wan and Raava doing that to Vaatu and citing it as a legitimate feat to begin with in order to argue a bigger boost is granted, when the argument can also just be those two being on that level in the first place is just an outlier and is inconsistent, like how I’m arguing. It’s just an interpretation.

And compared to anyone else other than Vaatu, whether or not she’s depowered, Raava is still a dominant force in the Avatar universe as being one of the two all-powerful spirits that’s existed since time started and is dealt with the role of determining the fate of the world & keeping it in balance. Even at her weakest, she provides the Avatar power and feats remarkably above that of any other bender, like cracking mountains, moving clouds, moving cities, making volcanoes erupt, causing islands to sink, making tidal waves, splitting apart islands (Kyoshis famous AS feat), etc. A normal bender would be lucky to do anything beyond taking down buildings on a good day.

So even if just by adding Raavas power to an Avatar, there doesn’t need to be an extra big boost in order for her and them to do to a regular bending opponent what Iron Mike would do to a 3 yr old. It’s Wan and Raava just combining their energies together by merging. That’s it. There’s no amp other than the human that’s getting power from the obviously much more powerful spirit as a power source. Somewhat akin to like Naruto & Kurama.



To clarify, altering his durability was not the point of why I said this. The point was that if Vaatu can regenerate, then he’d know that he can take whatever attack Wan or Korra could dish out against him and still come back for more. He wouldn’t permanently get destroyed, so it could also be argued in reverse that he wouldn’t need to output full power against them when he could use anything less and the result would still be the same.




These points can be dropped since it was made under my misinterpretation of what you said when saying “AS isn’t just Raava and the Avatar”

So in that case, you can just see above of what I said against this.



Firstly, where is the “10,000 year wrestling match” point coming from? That was a minute long tustling between those 2. We know for a fact Raava and Vaatu can destroy one another, since Raava explicitly explained one can’t exist without the other and when one is destroyed, they get restored inside of the other. She wouldn’t have already known this and said it to Wan if it didn’t already happen before.

Secondly, like I had said before, Vaatu “backing off” from Raava and Wan doesn’t amount of much of anything. Something that’s never happened before in history, or for how long you’ve existed, is happening before you. Being weary of that doesn’t equate to them matching Vaatu anymore than it just means him not knowing what’s going on.

Furthermore, I would argue some of this is in fact true or closer to that. Like I said before, just because Vaatu is the incarnation of darkness and evil doesn’t mean he’s above being arrogant or cocky.

Even after his encounter with Wan, 10,000 yrs later facing Korra, he still remains arrogant & stupid enough to think he could permanently rid himself of Raava when he should know full well neither can exist without the other and have never done so

He was even arrogant enough to even try fusing with Unalaq immediately after getting freed, right in front of Korra, seemingly thinking no resistance to that would have been offered.

So it’s not entirely out of left field to argue that is part of Vaatus character as well.



As far as “painting himself as the victim” goes to show his deceitfulness…that’s much more on Wan being the idiot than showing Vaatu being intelligent when Wan was the one who, after having just connected with spirits when living in the Spirit Wilds, interferes with their battle after Vaatu made one simple “she’s tormenting me!” remark.

And taking precautions against Korra? Again, he was dumb enough to try ignoring her all together and try fusing with Unalaq literally right in front of her face, AFTER she threatened to re-seal him back up in the Tree of Time mind you. I’d argue that this is closer to just Vaatu being arrogant & oblivious instead of this careful, calculating villian we’ve never seen him be.

If that was actually the case, he could’ve simply avoided her all together and not fight her at all, but that wasn’t the case. When they “fought”, all their battle amounted to was him blasting her with ONE SINGLE spirit way, and then trapping her in Spirit Vines. He could’ve just done that and went to the physical world to find Unalaq, but that wasn’t what happened either.



And that’s why such things called PIS & CIS are existing concepts as well, which this can very much apply to be as too (even with this idea of Vaatu being a very calculating villain by planning something along with somebody else assisting him)



For the same reasons I just said above (and earlier in this discussion, actually). Plot Induced Stupidity, or Character Induced Stupidity, however you want to try labeling it as.

Korra, the main character, not getting instantly floored because the plot demands her to resolve the crisis no matter the factors involved or the main villian, the literal incarnation of darkness and chaos, not one shottint because of sheer arrogance or foolishness? Tons of cases like these exist in fiction to qualify as PIS or CIS and I don’t see why this wouldn’t be yet another thing to add to those numbers.
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Not to mention, you’re forgetting Unalaq, the other member of this alliance, who actively wanted to become a Dark Avatar as well. This isn’t just Vaatus plan, it’s BOTH theirs.



See above. Unalaq is equally apart of this plan, they both conspired to pull this off, not just Vaatu. As we learn from Zaheer in Book 3.

(And as a small side note, having an Avatar as a vessel would be useful to his purposes since he’d have someone who, like Wan/Raava, can reincarnate endlessly, have bending and help further his control of the human and spirit realms. Why wouldn’t he agree to do this?)



Except, it’s not. All the parameters for using Harmonic Convergence to escape are literally there to use. The amplified spirit energy given off by the fused portals during harmonic convergence is required for Vaatu to escape the tree.

Are the portals fused during HC? The answer is yes.

When the portals are joined, is spiritual energy amplified? The answer is yes.

Does spirit energy remain amplified while HC is going on? The answer is yes.

So what’s baseless about this? Everything is there and available to use, there’s literally nothing speculative to say Vaatu could escape a second time if he has the energy to draw on, which he would.



Because, your forgetting, Wan closed off one of the spirit portals immediately after he sealed Vaatu in the tree. Both spirit portals need to be opened at the same exact time during HC in order for Vaatu to escape with this method, one of them being closed shuts this option down.

And Vaatu wouldn’t have known he could do this at that time, anyway. He has never been trapped in the tree before fighting Wan, so there’s no reason to think he’d already know how to escape through this method until at some point later on.

We even see this in the clip I linked in the OP with Jinora finding that book on the Tree of Time and reading this theory the book cites.

Jinora: “The tree of time. That’s where Avatar Wan imprisoned Vaatu. The elders believed that as long as the portals are closed during the Harmonic Convergence, Vaatu will remain imprisoned and the battle between good and evil will not be fought again. But, if both portals are open, spirit energy is amplified greatly. During the Harmonic Convergence, this energy will be great enough to allow Vaatu to break free from his bonds. The material world will again risk being consumed by darkness.”

Considering the very book said that the elders believed this, that means this method wasn’t even a known thing until at some point after Vaatu is sealed and Wan gets recognized as the first Avatar. Either way, Vaatu definitely wouldn’t have been immediately aware he could do this when being sealed the first time, so it wouldn’t defeat my point that he could do it the second time now possessing that knowledge.



Of course HC lasts a long time. The point, however, is if BOTH portals are open while it’s going on to amplify spiritual energy.

In Wans case, they weren’t. So he couldn’t. In Korras case, they were, so he could.



This is wrong. Wan and Vaatu were fighting before their Harmonic Convergence even started, evidenced by the fact that the portals didn’t merge at first when they began to fight. The portals merge immediately when HC starts. And Vaatu literally even says it didn’t start yet as he has Wan pinned down in front of one of the portals.

Vaatu: “The Harmonic Convergence is about to begin. The era of Raava is over…”

HC doesn’t actually start until right towards the end of their battle.



Yes, and this would be the case if it was just a normal fight without humans intervening. Or if both portals weren’t open during HC. But neither of those things were the case.

Wan made sure both portals weren’t open right after Vaatu was sealed away, and Vaatu couldn’t have been aware he could use the spirit energy to escape the first time.

The second time around during Korras HC? That’s a different story. HC was still happening when Korra tried sealing Vaatu away again, and both portals were still open. Vaatu by this point is aware he can use its power to escape the tree, and the spirit energy of HC was amplified all over the planet. He had everything available to just escape again.

Sealing Vaatu away again while all that is happening would be literally useless.



Um….they were trying to break open the sealed Northern Spirit Portal. Not Vaatus prison.

This is wrong.



If your suggesting Vaatu tasked Unalaq, Desna and Eska to try breaking him free, this is also wrong.

They were trying to break open the sealed Northern Spirit Portal since only the Southern portal was opened so far, and Vaatu didn’t even ask them to do that. Unalaq took it upon himself to try doing that because he thought Korra was dead.



This is headcanon. Where is it ever said the tree of time is a requirement in order for that to happen? That is was never said at any given point in the show.

And what about the spirit portals when they got closed? They were encased in barriers as well, but did Wan need the tree in order to make those too? No.

The very fact that the Avatar can also seal the spirit portals in barriers proves they can create barriers, in general, at any time they wish. So why wouldn’t the same apply for Vaatus prison? The tree simply is the place they chose for Vaatus prison to be physically encased in.



Probably because outside of the Avatar, who quite obviously has special skills like energy bending and rare spiritual abilities, bending is just normal elements to the vast majority of other characters? Characters who can’t bend all 4 elements either?



Tenzin, Mako, Bolin, Kya, Desna and Eska all literally defended Korras body in the spirit world against an army of dark spirits with bending and were capable of destroying them

Wan used bending to keep spirits at bay from killing his friends

Korra used bending against dark spirits when they tried keeping her from opening the Southern Spirit portal.

There’s multiple cases of bending, from an Avatar and non-avatar, working on spirits without specialized techniques like spirit bending.



Because there’s something called common sense that we can use at times to get the answer for us, and this….id say is one of those times. A human enters this state because he merged with a spirit. When merging with said spirit, he glows, gets a large boost in power and strength and better bending ability. And he never had said boost until merging with said spirit. What does that tell you? We don’t need a statement of the AS using Raavas power when we clearly and visibly see that it does.

What we don’t have, however, is a statement or any evidence of this notion that the AS exceeds the very power of said spirit.



I wouldn’t agree with her being above tier 7 without the Avatar State either. Korra isn’t, Aang isn’t, Roku & Kyoshi aren’t. And if Yangchen had an actual page for the site, I doubt she would be anything different.



Well the Past lives is what I was assuming you were referring to when saying the AS is more than just Raava, so that’s why I included this as a point. But the earlier points here will have already made mention of this.



Because you’ve been here long enough to know as well as I do, we don’t use what the site doesn’t have applied and acceptable. If wanting this to be the case, then get it accepted here first. Otherwise personal interpretation doesn’t mean a lot (not to be snippy, just saying that this is how the site has always operated for us on pretty much anything).

Anyway yeah, hope no more bibles come from either of us as this reply will pretty much be the crux of what I’d argue and think.
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I get where your coming from, but the issue is, that’s not necessarily how Outliers always work. Sure, if a character has certain performances as their only feats, or a larger amount of feats performed at a particular tier, then most of the time, that is how we can tier them without problems arising. However, this isn’t the absolute truth in every single case when evaluating characters feats. There are other factors to consider before something can or cannot be determined to be outlier too, not just the number of performed feats done. If you look at the guidelines for outliers on the Outliers page anyway.



Factors to also consider like breaking pre-established power scaling, or if any narrative details gets broken, or if it’s unjustifrd, are also important things to keep in mind, and I would argue Avatar, in this case here, does break at least some of these factors quite extensively to still reach outlier territory, no matter the times the feat is done.

Even if we take things like Korra and Psuedo-Wan damaging Vaatu at face value and add them to their arsenal of feats, the large problem at hand with accepting this is that the logic behind this scaling and tiering them at those levels just doesn’t fit with the very narrative Avatar / LoK sets. It just doesn’t make sense. There’s a reason I keep reiterating Raava & Vaatus relationship & how it affects them as an argument, because that’s explicitly a plot point in Avatars lore, and an important one at that.

Like I mentioned before, as the forces of light and darkness in the Avatar universe, Raava and Vaatu have a relationship of influencing each other, and as a result, their power. When darkness grows, light fades, and vice versa, and doing so makes one stronger and the other weaker. For 10,000 years prior to Wans harmonic convergence, Raava and Vaatu were borderline equals, the former being just enough capable of keeping the latter in check and the world in balance. Until Wan accidentally splitting them caused the shift in power to now favor Vaatu, who was reaching levels of power beyond his normal strength, and Raava now getting weaker than her normal strength at that point in the series. It’s not a stretch to even say Vaatu was almost at his most powerful possible level of power, and Raava being close to her weakest possible power level before the point of just straight up dying. Strength between these 2, under these conditions, can’t even be compared. Ones significantly above the other under these conditions.

Being split from Vaatu caused Raava to be depowered and no longer have the strength or means to be capable of fighting, let alone stopping, Vaatu on her own for Harmonic Convergence, requiring Wans assistance. This is a plot point in the lore and something explicitly important that’s acknowledged in the narrative.

To accept Psuedo Wan and weakened Raava to still scale to Vaatu, is to ignore this very explicit plot point in the story for the sake of scaling, and then requires reasons to be conjured up in order to now justify this inconsistency that doesn’t fit with established information the verse gives.

And what can actually justify it, even? As far as I’m concerned, it’s unjustified. Wan isn’t anywhere close to these levels of power by himself, so his power being added into this (even if we assume it isn’t just Raavas power getting drawed on by him) doesn’t logically make this jump make sense. Raava herself in this state is much weaker than Vaatu when being enhanced. So where is this extra power coming from that lets them reasonably stand against Vaatus enhanced power? From where I’m sitting, it’s coming from nowhere. It’s an unexplained circumstance done for the sake of story demanding it so the series can happen as it does, so we shouldn’t take this as anything more than an inconsistency. PIS, outlier, however it is to be deemed as.
And Wan and Korra’s feats don’t go against any of these that you quoted? Raava alone is said to be unable to contend with Vaatu during HC because of Wan’s actions, they merge, Wan can now deal with Vaatu. During the Wan flashback, this is hinted at, implied or straight up said numerous times over the course of 2(?) episodes where it’s repeatedly explained and justified.

No scaling is broken as this is the scaling being established.

This cannot break the narrative as this is the entire narrative for the season.

The “extra power” isn’t coming from nowhere, it’s the result of the two fusing, something that is (once again) repeatedly shown every time Wan temporarily fuses with Raava and gets massively stronger than the sum of their parts.
Cases like Tui & La, Koizilla, etc are all effectively different because an aforementioned case like with Raava and Vaatu, with breaking pre established information, just doesnt exist for them. So your able to play the “these are there only feats” card here and it can work. It’s justified and reasonable for them.

Tui and La are in a class of their own for being pretty much the very next strongest spirits in the verse, right under Raava and Vaatu, with their own dominion over the worlds balance for being the ocean and moon and having dominion of them. Literally being the moon and ocean, and having the forces of the moon and ocean (High 6-A & 5-C) are their only existing feats. They’re the strongest non-god tier spirits in the verse with nothing other than Raava and Vaatu scaling from them, so them being that strong is justified. So their feats safely fit in Avatars lore without breaking anything we’ve seen or known beforehand.

Kozillas the same as that’s just the Ocean Spirit + Aang in AS.

Giant Korra is the same as she’s using the Tree of Times power specifically to link with cosmic energy to be strong enough to contend with UnaVaatu. It’s a one time power up that she can’t perform on her own, so it scales to pretty much nothing but Giant Korra, making it justified to be tiered that way. Again, not conflicting with any pre established scaling or idea.

And Raava & Vaatu? Self explanatory.

And as for the whole “not doing anything 5-C” thing, you know as well as I do that that just falls into the typical “AoE fallacy” territory and pretends that AP isn’t an existing thing. It’s not a real factor to use for determining outliers.
You are the one who brought up these characters not performing tier 5 feats. Let’s not pretend I was the one who started this lol.
You know that this reinforces my point against this even more, right? Because let’s take this at face value for a moment.
And you are once again misconstruing my words and purposely misinterpreting them to strawman me.
If we go with the idea that the Avatar State combines both Raavas power and the Avatars individual strengths, that would mean Aang would, logically and objectively, have a stronger Avatar State then Yangchens, since his AS would be drawing on strength from all Past Avatars before him, including Yangchens very own strength. The very same strength she used to stomp Old Iron. Yet, he has a more difficult time against an even weaker version of an opponent Yangchen herself performed better against?

That gives us a few options to choose from.

Either Yangchen and/or Aang become an outlier for the use of their AS being inconsistent compared to each other, or the Avatar State doesn’t actually in fact combine each Avatars individual power and just draws on Raavas as the source of power.
Stop saying this as if this is my argument. I like to think that I have made it pretty clear that I don’t think past lives add anything to the Avatar State outside of their wisdom and life experiences. That’s what my example of Yangchen was for as it explicitly shows us that a previous life was stronger than a future life in the Avatar Cycle.
From what I recall, there are usually different kinds of damage depending on the nature of the attacks done, like how piercing damage or damage done by burning is deemed different from normal conventional attacks, unless im misremembering or mistaken on this.

That said, I’m fine with dropping this part of the discussion for more simplicity, since the scaling being an outlier / inconsistent is moreso what my point is more than anything else.



This point is about Korra, mostly. Even if Vaatu was attacking Wan while the latter blasted him, that certainly wasn’t the case when Korra fought against him.
… in other words he tried to avoid the fight with someone you claim is a billion times weaker and could have simply defeated whenever he wanted but simply … didn’t?
And as I’ve explained and pointed out, being fused with an Avatar makes no difference, it is still the same tiny weak Raava who is providing the power boost for said Avatars AS, and it against Vaatu should be deemed an outlier.

Unless you are suggesting the individual Avatar in question, a tier 8-7 human at best, provides half of the boost, which is pretty unsubstantiated.
And as I’ve explained and pointed out, this isn’t merely the addition of the two individuals that make up the Avatar seeing as every single time it happens, they become far stronger than either.

You keep saying that Raava is too tiny and weak and thus cannot be responsible for making up the gap between tier 7/8 and tier 5 and yet your proposal is that the same crippled Raava who struggles to even float 10 meters is responsible for a tier 7/8 reaching tier what? 6? If we are supposed to add the two’s individual powers together like you propose, Raava wouldn’t even be adding tier 9 amounts of power to any Avatar and causes your argument to fall in on itself because it isn’t even internally consistent. AS wouldn’t be anywhere close to the power up it is if what you propose is true and you can’t even claim anything else without it supporting my own argument and sweeping the shaky leg your stance is standing on.
Wanting to win HC isn’t an argument that Vaatu would need to seriously hit Raava and Wan at full power in order to do that. You can have the objective of being victorious and just be deemed cocky or arrogant enough to try winning without taking it seriously.

Which can also be entirely apart of the literal incarnation of darkness and evils character to do, especially when seeing the very enemy who held him in check for 10 millennia is now a tiny facet of who she was and can’t offer resistance to her anymore.
That’s nice. Why didn’t he just clap up Korra real quick then? There is no reason for him to be cocky and arrogant against her when he got stuffed in a ball the last time he did that and she even stole his Avatar candidate away from him seconds ago. Instead of winning he just loses the fight?
You mean assistance from someone, who again, is a tier 8 to 7 being on his own at the absolute most, going up against a spirit who’s significantly higher into High 6-A / 5-C than he normally is?

That doesn’t contradict my argument, no.
It does when fusing with that tier 7/8 person repeatedly shows an enormous increase in power even though Raava can barely get out of bed for a few minutes.
Ahhh. I have a better understanding of what you were trying to say now with this. Well, I’ll have 2 or so answers for this, so let’s start with the first.

You also have to remember that the amount of beings in this universe who are actually around the level of Raava, Vaatu, Avatar State, even lower spirits like Tui & La are….remarkably small. Like, the number of them can be counted on one hand. The vast majority of characters in Avatar are significantly below these tier of characters, around peak human to just flat out being ordinary everyday humans. Some not even being benders with any relevant stats at all. So the Avatar, at their strongest, has very little to rival them, and even individually without being AS? Not many normal benders can realistically match them.
Why do you think the Avatar is revered as such a powerful figure in their verse? Not just because of the Avatar State ofc, but because of things uniquely special to them, like their unique bending capabilities of using and mastering all 4 elements, having access to top tier class bending masters to train with, access to knowledge and skills most benders wouldn’t have access to like past life guidance, naturally better bending capabilities, basically being a demigod compared to ordinary people. Most people can’t rival the Avatar, and for those who can, it’s not by a significant amount.

Sure, some characters in the series have unique bending and skills of their own that can rival or give a base Avatar trouble, but in terms of actual strength, being as skilled in bending as an Avatar doesn’t necessarily mean they’re “above” their power. For instance, characters like Zuko, Azula, Combustion Man, etc are certainly able to match Aangs fighting skill, but they don’t quite overpower him in a strength match. They just have skills that are also unique and unorthodox to deal with, like Combustion Man firebending with his mind, Azulas lightning bending, and the fact that she and Zuko are both Rokus descendants, so they’re naturally much stronger firebenders in a royal bloodline than your typical one. Even for someone like Ozai during Sozins Comet, Aang (who also naturally got a boost from the comet since he has firebending) was doing quite fine against him before unleashing Avatar State. If not for Aangs pacifistic nature of not wanting to fight, I’d say he wouldn’t have had issues against Ozai in base form.

Or as an another (better) example, Korra. Legend of Korra gives us characters with even more remarkable unique bending abilities. Amon and Tarloks bloodbending, being able to mentally blocobend, Unalaqs spirit bending and being a top tier waterbender, the Red Lotus who has someone with lavabending, a female Combustion man, Kuviras metal bending, etc. They are certainly abilities difficult to overcome, but that doesn’t mean Base Korra would be weaker. Korra has shown to even fight some of these opponents in Base and still do remarkably well. Skill and ability become factors that make this more complex than a simple comparison of who flexes more power.
Right … everything in the quote right above this sentence? It’s all meaningless words that only exist to take up space in regards to this conversation. Absolutely none of it has any relevance whatsoever to what you quoted from me.
As for the second answer, this proposal makes use of taking an assumption as fact first. Your proposal on the idea of Avatar State granting a considerably bigger boost beyond just Raava and the individual combining is that because Wan and a weakened Raava could contend with an enhanced Vaatu, it has to result in the AS giving said kind of bigger boost.

But this argument is taking the assumption of Wan and Raava doing that to Vaatu and citing it as a legitimate feat to begin with in order to argue a bigger boost is granted, when the argument can also just be those two being on that level in the first place is just an outlier and is inconsistent, like how I’m arguing. It’s just an interpretation.

And compared to anyone else other than Vaatu, whether or not she’s depowered, Raava is still a dominant force in the Avatar universe as being one of the two all-powerful spirits that’s existed since time started and is dealt with the role of determining the fate of the world & keeping it in balance. Even at her weakest, she provides the Avatar power and feats remarkably above that of any other bender, like cracking mountains, moving clouds, moving cities, making volcanoes erupt, causing islands to sink, making tidal waves, splitting apart islands (Kyoshis famous AS feat), etc. A normal bender would be lucky to do anything beyond taking down buildings on a good day.

So even if just by adding Raavas power to an Avatar, there doesn’t need to be an extra big boost in order for her and them to do to a regular bending opponent what Iron Mike would do to a 3 yr old. It’s Wan and Raava just combining their energies together by merging. That’s it. There’s no amp other than the human that’s getting power from the obviously much more powerful spirit as a power source. Somewhat akin to like Naruto & Kurama.
Except your entire argument is that Raava is incredibly weakened and thus they cannot scale to anywhere close to her normal self. If Raava is astronomical distances from tier 5 and cannot downscale from it, you would have to quantify how strong she is. And no, you can’t say she makes up the difference between an Avatar’s base and their AS because that directly contradicts your stance that AS = base + Raava based on feats. Raava can barely do anything and is weaker than even the lowliest of spirits and animals when she and Wan beat tf outta Vaatu.
To clarify, altering his durability was not the point of why I said this. The point was that if Vaatu can regenerate, then he’d know that he can take whatever attack Wan or Korra could dish out against him and still come back for more. He wouldn’t permanently get destroyed, so it could also be argued in reverse that he wouldn’t need to output full power against them when he could use anything less and the result would still be the same.
That still doesn’t explain how he gets harmed by pseudo-AS and not full power Raava. Unless you are saying that he can alter his dura, Wan has a dozen feats superior to Raava or Vaatu.
Firstly, where is the “10,000 year wrestling match” point coming from? That was a minute long tustling between those 2. We know for a fact Raava and Vaatu can destroy one another, since Raava explicitly explained one can’t exist without the other and when one is destroyed, they get restored inside of the other. She wouldn’t have already known this and said it to Wan if it didn’t already happen before.
The moment they get separated, Raava gets giganerfed and Vaatu immediately gets stronger as his influence spreads. That means they were connected the whole time and Vaatu is clearly trying to escape to the point of doing anything he can to accomplish his goal of doing so, implication being that he struggles to do this most of the time before Wan helps him out.
Secondly, like I had said before, Vaatu “backing off” from Raava and Wan doesn’t amount of much of anything. Something that’s never happened before in history, or for how long you’ve existed, is happening before you. Being weary of that doesn’t equate to them matching Vaatu anymore than it just means him not knowing what’s going on.
So now he isn’t cocky because he hasn’t seen something before but you expect me to believe that he is cocky against Korra for their entire fight when he knows for a fact that she can and will lock him up again? Which one is Vaatu? A really cocky and arrogant spirit or someone with some degree of a sense of self-preservation? Because it’ll be really confusing if you say the latter or both seeing as you were literally just arguing that he will hold back against pseudo-AS just because he has regen to deal with anything that harms him. Doesn’t make sense to back off if you think your opponent can’t do anything to you at all.
Furthermore, I would argue some of this is in fact true or closer to that. Like I said before, just because Vaatu is the incarnation of darkness and evil doesn’t mean he’s above being arrogant or cocky.

Even after his encounter with Wan, 10,000 yrs later facing Korra, he still remains arrogant & stupid enough to think he could permanently rid himself of Raava when he should know full well neither can exist without the other and have never done so

He was even arrogant enough to even try fusing with Unalaq immediately after getting freed, right in front of Korra, seemingly thinking no resistance to that would have been offered.

So it’s not entirely out of left field to argue that is part of Vaatus character as well.
In what way is trying to fuse with Unalaq arrogant? He already lost to a crippled Raava because she got an Avatar and he made it his plan to get one for their rematch. Maybe, just maybe, he is rushing to complete this because he will lose otherwise? As we see happen 5 mins later.
As far as “painting himself as the victim” goes to show his deceitfulness…that’s much more on Wan being the idiot than showing Vaatu being intelligent when Wan was the one who, after having just connected with spirits when living in the Spirit Wilds, interferes with their battle after Vaatu made one simple “she’s tormenting me!” remark.
Wan being an idiot doesn’t change the fact that Vaatu was still going as far as to lie to some meatbag to get help when he didn’t even know said meatbag could help. End of the day, the arrogant and cocky Vaatu was more than willing to make himself look like a bitch to some lower life form just to escape.
And taking precautions against Korra? Again, he was dumb enough to try ignoring her all together and try fusing with Unalaq literally right in front of her face, AFTER she threatened to re-seal him back up in the Tree of Time mind you. I’d argue that this is closer to just Vaatu being arrogant & oblivious instead of this careful, calculating villian we’ve never seen him be.
So what was he meant to do? Stay separate? He was flying full force to merge with Unalaq and got slapped away by a blast of fire. Unalaq was irrelevant against her outside of blindsiding her from behind when she thought he was in another plane of existence. There is no point in following Unalaq outside when she just showed that she can yeet him instantly without Vaatu being able to do anything. Of course Vaatu tried to fuse with his goon so that he is able to fight Korra after she threatened him to his face.
If that was actually the case, he could’ve simply avoided her all together and not fight her at all, but that wasn’t the case. When they “fought”, all their battle amounted to was him blasting her with ONE SINGLE spirit way, and then trapping her in Spirit Vines. He could’ve just done that and went to the physical world to find Unalaq, but that wasn’t what happened either.
Did you miss the part where he flew straight at her, tried to whip her and after the beam and vines, tried to swing before she pieced him up with her bending and put him in a ball? Him barely getting off any attacks was because he wasn’t good enough to throw out anymore. Leaving for Unalaq does nothing seeing as they couldn’t pull off their fusion dance while she is even looking in their direction.
And that’s why such things called PIS & CIS are existing concepts as well, which this can very much apply to be as too (even with this idea of Vaatu being a very calculating villain by planning something along with somebody else assisting him)
Dude … when your argument has devolved into dismissing half of a season as PIS and CIS when there are much simpler and more obvious explanations that doesn’t require ignoring half of the season to make sense, the odds are pretty high that you are just wrong.
For the same reasons I just said above (and earlier in this discussion, actually). Plot Induced Stupidity, or Character Induced Stupidity, however you want to try labeling it as.

Korra, the main character, not getting instantly floored because the plot demands her to resolve the crisis no matter the factors involved or the main villian, the literal incarnation of darkness and chaos, not one shottint because of sheer arrogance or foolishness? Tons of cases like these exist in fiction to qualify as PIS or CIS and I don’t see why this wouldn’t be yet another thing to add to those numbers.
Because that would require literally any grounds for it to be such. We are shown two Avatars fighting against Vaatu and both Avatars just straight up win. You claim he is arrogant and holding back? That makes absolutely no sense when he has a plan to get his own Avatar to fight in HC and when that gets shutdown and he is forced to fight, he still gets his ass beat anyway despite having absolutely no reason to be cocky and arrogant.
Not to mention, you’re forgetting Unalaq, the other member of this alliance, who actively wanted to become a Dark Avatar as well. This isn’t just Vaatus plan, it’s BOTH theirs.
Whoop dee doo? Who cares if Unalaq wants this? Vaatu doesn’t have to hold up his end of the bargain at all. The moment he is free, there is no reason for him to rush to fuse with Unalaq if he is as powerful and capable of just one shotting Korra as you say.
See above. Unalaq is equally apart of this plan, they both conspired to pull this off, not just Vaatu. As we learn from Zaheer in Book 3.

(And as a small side note, having an Avatar as a vessel would be useful to his purposes since he’d have someone who, like Wan/Raava, can reincarnate endlessly, have bending and help further his control of the human and spirit realms. Why wouldn’t he agree to do this?)
He also becomes trapped inside of them and doesn’t get to choose what he does anymore? And why does he need reincarnation when he can just live that time as himself? Why does he need bending when he is supposedly so much greater than it? You’re saying things but those things mean nothing.
Except, it’s not. All the parameters for using Harmonic Convergence to escape are literally there to use. The amplified spirit energy given off by the fused portals during harmonic convergence is required for Vaatu to escape the tree.
And the moment HC began, he broke free. Why did he not just break free right after Wan put him in the tree? We saw Wan turn around after his heroic declaration to go close the portal and made no sign of hurrying to do so. Care to explain why Vaatu just randomly decided to be a model prisoner?
Are the portals fused during HC? The answer is yes.

When the portals are joined, is spiritual energy amplified? The answer is yes.

Does spirit energy remain amplified while HC is going on? The answer is yes.

So what’s baseless about this? Everything is there and available to use, there’s literally nothing speculative to say Vaatu could escape a second time if he has the energy to draw on, which he would.
It’s baseless because he doesn’t do it when he has all the reason in the world to and the one guy capable of putting him back in or stopping him went on a merry stroll to close a portal.
Because, your forgetting, Wan closed off one of the spirit portals immediately after he sealed Vaatu in the tree. Both spirit portals need to be opened at the same exact time during HC in order for Vaatu to escape with this method, one of them being closed shuts this option down.
No he didn’t. Bro calmly walked a long ass distance to a portal to close it while HC was still ongoing.
And Vaatu wouldn’t have known he could do this at that time, anyway. He has never been trapped in the tree before fighting Wan, so there’s no reason to think he’d already know how to escape through this method until at some point later on.

We even see this in the clip I linked in the OP with Jinora finding that book on the Tree of Time and reading this theory the book cites.

Jinora: “The tree of time. That’s where Avatar Wan imprisoned Vaatu. The elders believed that as long as the portals are closed during the Harmonic Convergence, Vaatu will remain imprisoned and the battle between good and evil will not be fought again. But, if both portals are open, spirit energy is amplified greatly. During the Harmonic Convergence, this energy will be great enough to allow Vaatu to break free from his bonds. The material world will again risk being consumed by darkness.”

Considering the very book said that the elders believed this, that means this method wasn’t even a known thing until at some point after Vaatu is sealed and Wan gets recognized as the first Avatar. Either way, Vaatu definitely wouldn’t have been immediately aware he could do this when being sealed the first time, so it wouldn’t defeat my point that he could do it the second time now possessing that knowledge.
So Vaatu, the guy who has experienced HC numerous times and what it does since time itself began, doesn’t know he could do it the first time he is sealed even with all of your requirements checked off but some random elders, who have never experienced HC, believe he can do it the next time if the portals are open is what lets him know he can do it?
Of course HC lasts a long time. The point, however, is if BOTH portals are open while it’s going on to amplify spiritual energy.

In Wans case, they weren’t. So he couldn’t. In Korras case, they were, so he could.
They literally were open and he did nothing.
This is wrong. Wan and Vaatu were fighting before their Harmonic Convergence even started, evidenced by the fact that the portals didn’t merge at first when they began to fight. The portals merge immediately when HC starts. And Vaatu literally even says it didn’t start yet as he has Wan pinned down in front of one of the portals.

Vaatu: “The Harmonic Convergence is about to begin. The era of Raava is over…”

HC doesn’t actually start until right towards the end of their battle.



Yes, and this would be the case if it was just a normal fight without humans intervening. Or if both portals weren’t open during HC. But neither of those things were the case.

Wan made sure both portals weren’t open right after Vaatu was sealed away, and Vaatu couldn’t have been aware he could use the spirit energy to escape the first time.

The second time around during Korras HC? That’s a different story. HC was still happening when Korra tried sealing Vaatu away again, and both portals were still open. Vaatu by this point is aware he can use its power to escape the tree, and the spirit energy of HC was amplified all over the planet. He had everything available to just escape again.

Sealing Vaatu away again while all that is happening would be literally useless.
Except that it literally worked last time. You say both portals are open so he can go free? Why can Korra not just immediately close them again and stop that dead in its tracks like you claim Wan did?
Um….they were trying to break open the sealed Northern Spirit Portal. Not Vaatus prison.

This is wrong.



If your suggesting Vaatu tasked Unalaq, Desna and Eska to try breaking him free, this is also wrong.

They were trying to break open the sealed Northern Spirit Portal since only the Southern portal was opened so far, and Vaatu didn’t even ask them to do that. Unalaq took it upon himself to try doing that because he thought Korra was dead.
So in other words, they tried to break him free by using their bending to crack open a barrier that kept him sealed. This is still Vaatu’s plan to escape depending on humans every step of the way.
This is headcanon. Where is it ever said the tree of time is a requirement in order for that to happen? That is was never said at any given point in the show.

And what about the spirit portals when they got closed? They were encased in barriers as well, but did Wan need the tree in order to make those too? No.

The very fact that the Avatar can also seal the spirit portals in barriers proves they can create barriers, in general, at any time they wish. So why wouldn’t the same apply for Vaatus prison? The tree simply is the place they chose for Vaatus prison to be physically encased in.
Hold on … what? Tf you mean the tree isn’t a requirement for the seal? Why in gods name are they bothering to use the tree in the first place if they can just wrap him up in elements? Who needs to be told it’s a requirement when we see these guys always try to use it and not just spawn a barrier like you claim they can? Every time we see an Avatar make one of these barriers, they are making contact in some way with some spiritually powerful thing.
Probably because outside of the Avatar, who quite obviously has special skills like energy bending and rare spiritual abilities, bending is just normal elements to the vast majority of other characters? Characters who can’t bend all 4 elements either?
This has nothing to do with what it is responding to. It also doesn’t support your case. Why does putting multiple elements around someone give the elements additional superpowers that none of them have individually? After all, you’re the one who is saying that stuff needs an explanation for where bonus stuff comes from and unlike what I argued, this has absolutely nothing to support it.
Tenzin, Mako, Bolin, Kya, Desna and Eska all literally defended Korras body in the spirit world against an army of dark spirits with bending and were capable of destroying them
No they weren’t. We saw them fight against a single spirit with the Avatar’s help maybe a week ago in verse and even the AS couldn’t do shit to destroy the dark spirit. Just because they can hold them off by pushing them back doesn’t mean anything.
Wan used bending to keep spirits at bay from killing his friends

Korra used bending against dark spirits when they tried keeping her from opening the Southern Spirit portal.

There’s multiple cases of bending, from an Avatar and non-avatar, working on spirits without specialized techniques like spirit bending.
And they all can only push them back at best. If normal bending was actually effective, Korra would never have needed to learn spiritbending.
Because there’s something called common sense that we can use at times to get the answer for us, and this….id say is one of those times. A human enters this state because he merged with a spirit. When merging with said spirit, he glows, gets a large boost in power and strength and better bending ability. And he never had said boost until merging with said spirit. What does that tell you? We don’t need a statement of the AS using Raavas power when we clearly and visibly see that it does.

What we don’t have, however, is a statement or any evidence of this notion that the AS exceeds the very power of said spirit.
And said human and spirit combined are blatantly far stronger than said spirit so why would we need a statement to say that the boost exceeds the individual power of the spirit when we see that it is the case. Don’t just sit there and lie that we don’t have “any evidence of this notion that the AS exceeds the very power of said spirit” when both you and I have linked the very feats and videos showcasing such.
I wouldn’t agree with her being above tier 7 without the Avatar State either. Korra isn’t, Aang isn’t, Roku & Kyoshi aren’t. And if Yangchen had an actual page for the site, I doubt she would be anything different.
So you just want to disregard feats to fit your agenda? Good to know that it’s pointless discussing anything with you I guess? Couldn’t have slipped this part in at the start and saved me some time 😂?
Well the Past lives is what I was assuming you were referring to when saying the AS is more than just Raava, so that’s why I included this as a point. But the earlier points here will have already made mention of this.



Because you’ve been here long enough to know as well as I do, we don’t use what the site doesn’t have applied and acceptable. If wanting this to be the case, then get it accepted here first. Otherwise personal interpretation doesn’t mean a lot (not to be snippy, just saying that this is how the site has always operated for us on pretty much anything).

Anyway yeah, hope no more bibles come from either of us as this reply will pretty much be the crux of what I’d argue and think.
Except that the site clearly does accept this seeing as Goku and Vegeta fuse to become far stronger than their power levels added together even though it requires Goku to nerf himself down to Vegeta’s level to even perform? Two beings fusing together has never been limited to the sum of their parts when they have clearly been shown to be greater than that. DB does this, YGO does this, Digimon does this and a bunch more that I don’t care to name do this. Why is it a problem that Avatar does the exact same thing as them by showing and not telling like other profiles/standards accepted on site?
 
And Wan and Korra’s feats don’t go against any of these that you quoted? Raava alone is said to be unable to contend with Vaatu during HC because of Wan’s actions, they merge, Wan can now deal with Vaatu. During the Wan flashback, this is hinted at, implied or straight up said numerous times over the course of 2(?) episodes where it’s repeatedly explained and justified.

No scaling is broken as this is the scaling being established.

This cannot break the narrative as this is the entire narrative for the season.

The “extra power” isn’t coming from nowhere, it’s the result of the two fusing, something that is (once again) repeatedly shown every time Wan temporarily fuses with Raava and gets massively stronger than the sum of their parts.

You are the one who brought up these characters not performing tier 5 feats. Let’s not pretend I was the one who started this lol.

And you are once again misconstruing my words and purposely misinterpreting them to strawman me.

Stop saying this as if this is my argument. I like to think that I have made it pretty clear that I don’t think past lives add anything to the Avatar State outside of their wisdom and life experiences. That’s what my example of Yangchen was for as it explicitly shows us that a previous life was stronger than a future life in the Avatar Cycle.

… in other words he tried to avoid the fight with someone you claim is a billion times weaker and could have simply defeated whenever he wanted but simply … didn’t?

And as I’ve explained and pointed out, this isn’t merely the addition of the two individuals that make up the Avatar seeing as every single time it happens, they become far stronger than either.

You keep saying that Raava is too tiny and weak and thus cannot be responsible for making up the gap between tier 7/8 and tier 5 and yet your proposal is that the same crippled Raava who struggles to even float 10 meters is responsible for a tier 7/8 reaching tier what? 6? If we are supposed to add the two’s individual powers together like you propose, Raava wouldn’t even be adding tier 9 amounts of power to any Avatar and causes your argument to fall in on itself because it isn’t even internally consistent. AS wouldn’t be anywhere close to the power up it is if what you propose is true and you can’t even claim anything else without it supporting my own argument and sweeping the shaky leg your stance is standing on.

That’s nice. Why didn’t he just clap up Korra real quick then? There is no reason for him to be cocky and arrogant against her when he got stuffed in a ball the last time he did that and she even stole his Avatar candidate away from him seconds ago. Instead of winning he just loses the fight?

It does when fusing with that tier 7/8 person repeatedly shows an enormous increase in power even though Raava can barely get out of bed for a few minutes.

Right … everything in the quote right above this sentence? It’s all meaningless words that only exist to take up space in regards to this conversation. Absolutely none of it has any relevance whatsoever to what you quoted from me.

Except your entire argument is that Raava is incredibly weakened and thus they cannot scale to anywhere close to her normal self. If Raava is astronomical distances from tier 5 and cannot downscale from it, you would have to quantify how strong she is. And no, you can’t say she makes up the difference between an Avatar’s base and their AS because that directly contradicts your stance that AS = base + Raava based on feats. Raava can barely do anything and is weaker than even the lowliest of spirits and animals when she and Wan beat tf outta Vaatu.

That still doesn’t explain how he gets harmed by pseudo-AS and not full power Raava. Unless you are saying that he can alter his dura, Wan has a dozen feats superior to Raava or Vaatu.

The moment they get separated, Raava gets giganerfed and Vaatu immediately gets stronger as his influence spreads. That means they were connected the whole time and Vaatu is clearly trying to escape to the point of doing anything he can to accomplish his goal of doing so, implication being that he struggles to do this most of the time before Wan helps him out.

So now he isn’t cocky because he hasn’t seen something before but you expect me to believe that he is cocky against Korra for their entire fight when he knows for a fact that she can and will lock him up again? Which one is Vaatu? A really cocky and arrogant spirit or someone with some degree of a sense of self-preservation? Because it’ll be really confusing if you say the latter or both seeing as you were literally just arguing that he will hold back against pseudo-AS just because he has regen to deal with anything that harms him. Doesn’t make sense to back off if you think your opponent can’t do anything to you at all.

In what way is trying to fuse with Unalaq arrogant? He already lost to a crippled Raava because she got an Avatar and he made it his plan to get one for their rematch. Maybe, just maybe, he is rushing to complete this because he will lose otherwise? As we see happen 5 mins later.

Wan being an idiot doesn’t change the fact that Vaatu was still going as far as to lie to some meatbag to get help when he didn’t even know said meatbag could help. End of the day, the arrogant and cocky Vaatu was more than willing to make himself look like a bitch to some lower life form just to escape.

So what was he meant to do? Stay separate? He was flying full force to merge with Unalaq and got slapped away by a blast of fire. Unalaq was irrelevant against her outside of blindsiding her from behind when she thought he was in another plane of existence. There is no point in following Unalaq outside when she just showed that she can yeet him instantly without Vaatu being able to do anything. Of course Vaatu tried to fuse with his goon so that he is able to fight Korra after she threatened him to his face.

Did you miss the part where he flew straight at her, tried to whip her and after the beam and vines, tried to swing before she pieced him up with her bending and put him in a ball? Him barely getting off any attacks was because he wasn’t good enough to throw out anymore. Leaving for Unalaq does nothing seeing as they couldn’t pull off their fusion dance while she is even looking in their direction.

Dude … when your argument has devolved into dismissing half of a season as PIS and CIS when there are much simpler and more obvious explanations that doesn’t require ignoring half of the season to make sense, the odds are pretty high that you are just wrong.

Because that would require literally any grounds for it to be such. We are shown two Avatars fighting against Vaatu and both Avatars just straight up win. You claim he is arrogant and holding back? That makes absolutely no sense when he has a plan to get his own Avatar to fight in HC and when that gets shutdown and he is forced to fight, he still gets his ass beat anyway despite having absolutely no reason to be cocky and arrogant.

Whoop dee doo? Who cares if Unalaq wants this? Vaatu doesn’t have to hold up his end of the bargain at all. The moment he is free, there is no reason for him to rush to fuse with Unalaq if he is as powerful and capable of just one shotting Korra as you say.

He also becomes trapped inside of them and doesn’t get to choose what he does anymore? And why does he need reincarnation when he can just live that time as himself? Why does he need bending when he is supposedly so much greater than it? You’re saying things but those things mean nothing.

And the moment HC began, he broke free. Why did he not just break free right after Wan put him in the tree? We saw Wan turn around after his heroic declaration to go close the portal and made no sign of hurrying to do so. Care to explain why Vaatu just randomly decided to be a model prisoner?

It’s baseless because he doesn’t do it when he has all the reason in the world to and the one guy capable of putting him back in or stopping him went on a merry stroll to close a portal.

No he didn’t. Bro calmly walked a long ass distance to a portal to close it while HC was still ongoing.

So Vaatu, the guy who has experienced HC numerous times and what it does since time itself began, doesn’t know he could do it the first time he is sealed even with all of your requirements checked off but some random elders, who have never experienced HC, believe he can do it the next time if the portals are open is what lets him know he can do it?

They literally were open and he did nothing.

Except that it literally worked last time. You say both portals are open so he can go free? Why can Korra not just immediately close them again and stop that dead in its tracks like you claim Wan did?

So in other words, they tried to break him free by using their bending to crack open a barrier that kept him sealed. This is still Vaatu’s plan to escape depending on humans every step of the way.

Hold on … what? Tf you mean the tree isn’t a requirement for the seal? Why in gods name are they bothering to use the tree in the first place if they can just wrap him up in elements? Who needs to be told it’s a requirement when we see these guys always try to use it and not just spawn a barrier like you claim they can? Every time we see an Avatar make one of these barriers, they are making contact in some way with some spiritually powerful thing.

This has nothing to do with what it is responding to. It also doesn’t support your case. Why does putting multiple elements around someone give the elements additional superpowers that none of them have individually? After all, you’re the one who is saying that stuff needs an explanation for where bonus stuff comes from and unlike what I argued, this has absolutely nothing to support it.

No they weren’t. We saw them fight against a single spirit with the Avatar’s help maybe a week ago in verse and even the AS couldn’t do shit to destroy the dark spirit. Just because they can hold them off by pushing them back doesn’t mean anything.

And they all can only push them back at best. If normal bending was actually effective, Korra would never have needed to learn spiritbending.

And said human and spirit combined are blatantly far stronger than said spirit so why would we need a statement to say that the boost exceeds the individual power of the spirit when we see that it is the case. Don’t just sit there and lie that we don’t have “any evidence of this notion that the AS exceeds the very power of said spirit” when both you and I have linked the very feats and videos showcasing such.

So you just want to disregard feats to fit your agenda? Good to know that it’s pointless discussing anything with you I guess? Couldn’t have slipped this part in at the start and saved me some time 😂?

Except that the site clearly does accept this seeing as Goku and Vegeta fuse to become far stronger than their power levels added together even though it requires Goku to nerf himself down to Vegeta’s level to even perform? Two beings fusing together has never been limited to the sum of their parts when they have clearly been shown to be greater than that. DB does this, YGO does this, Digimon does this and a bunch more that I don’t care to name do this. Why is it a problem that Avatar does the exact same thing as them by showing and not telling like other profiles/standards accepted on site?
Gonna have to agree with you here, its consistent that avatars with weakened raava are undoubtable capable of going up against near prime vaatu, the different between the two just isn't quantifiable and even korra can damage vaatu with weakened raava.
 
Pretty sure this has been giga accepted already but no one is actually applying it and the discussion devolved into Base Wan / Psuedo-Avatar Wan scaling to super amped Vaatu.

I’m gonna be real, I don’t think that should be a thing. I think it’s pretty clear that the damage Vaatu is taking is irrelevant to him, as he immediately reforms every single time. It’s very possible that his physical form just doesn’t matter and he’s either toying with them or can’t catch them. Their attacks make holes in his body but why would Vaatu have durability equal to the moon/ocean spirits total power? Especially since he just permanently reforms and appears to be completely impervious to real damage? He can get pushed around but he never seems to make noises like he’s being hurt or that bending is capable of genuinely harming him.

Unless we believe base wan is 5-C for surviving those energy beam blasts. The Avatar state does not improve your physical durability, and Wan was taking attacks in both base and Psuedo-AS. So Vaatu is using the exact same power against base Wan as he is against Wan+Raava.
 
Pretty sure this has been giga accepted already but no one is actually applying it and the discussion devolved into Base Wan / Psuedo-Avatar Wan scaling to super amped Vaatu.

I’m gonna be real, I don’t think that should be a thing. I think it’s pretty clear that the damage Vaatu is taking is irrelevant to him, as he immediately reforms every single time. It’s very possible that his physical form just doesn’t matter and he’s either toying with them or can’t catch them. Their attacks make holes in his body but why would Vaatu have durability equal to the moon/ocean spirits total power? Especially since he just permanently reforms and appears to be completely impervious to real damage? He can get pushed around but he never seems to make noises like he’s being hurt or that bending is capable of genuinely harming him.
Raava and Vaatu’s dura scale to their AP because neither of them are harmed by the other when they are wrestling and body slamming each other around. They, Cosmic Korra and Unavaatu are all scaling > Tui and La because of the statement putting the former two at the top of all spirits.

Vaatu’s regen doesn’t change the fact that Wan and Korra were damaging him, a far better feat than full power Raava had against a weaker Vaatu.
Unless we believe base wan is 5-C for surviving those energy beam blasts. The Avatar state does not improve your physical durability, and Wan was taking attacks in both base and Psuedo-AS. So Vaatu is using the exact same power against base Wan as he is against Wan+Raava.
Wan went on a training arc for HC and was getting stronger the whole time. Him being 5-C physically isn’t exactly a problem. Once he becomes the Avatar, Wan is never shown to be harmed. Even when he is dying, dude is old and exhausted with only his clothes having tears on them.

As for AS not amping their physical stats, earthbending is currently accepted as the benders in question being physically able to perform the feat. If their earthbending scales, their physicals do as well. The only time an Avatar in AS is harmed is Aang dying to Azula’s lightning which is just a case of dura neg since we know that lightning redirection requires the user to redirect it around their heart because it would kill them otherwise.
 
Raava and Vaatu’s dura scale to their AP because neither of them are harmed by the other when they are wrestling and body slamming each other around. They, Cosmic Korra and Unavaatu are all scaling > Tui and La because of the statement putting the former two at the top of all spirits.

Vaatu’s regen doesn’t change the fact that Wan and Korra were damaging him, a far better feat than full power Raava had against a weaker Vaatu.

Wan went on a training arc for HC and was getting stronger the whole time. Him being 5-C physically isn’t exactly a problem. Once he becomes the Avatar, Wan is never shown to be harmed. Even when he is dying, dude is old and exhausted with only his clothes having tears on them.

As for AS not amping their physical stats, earthbending is currently accepted as the benders in question being physically able to perform the feat. If their earthbending scales, their physicals do as well. The only time an Avatar in AS is harmed is Aang dying to Azula’s lightning which is just a case of dura neg since we know that lightning redirection requires the user to redirect it around their heart because it would kill them otherwise.
So you’re claiming that Wan by himself is massively stronger than Raava? In that case why would any Avatar after him be 5-C since they wouldn’t share his physicals? Or are you advocating that everyone who scales to Base Season 2 Korra should be 5-C?

Can you prove that his physical form scales to the total spirit energy he has? Being strict on Universal Energy Systems is all the rage nowadays. If they’re scaling above Twi and La’s creation feat, do they have feats on a similar level? Is there a statement or showing of how spirit energy manifests itself in attacks that are comparable to the total energy of a being? Twi and La gave up any defenses they could have and their immortality to create the moon and ocean, so would Vaatu not be expending far less energy than that feat in normal combat?

He takes attacks and his form seems to be torn by them but that doesn’t seem to actually hurt him. He doesn’t imply or look even remotely injured after anything Wan does, he just regenerates as if nothing is happening. Why should he care about increasing his defense if he can’t be killed?

Can you prove that Raava physically scales, in her manifested form, to Twi and La’s feat? They’re stronger than them sure, but that’s a creation feat vs a physical, immortal spirit body, of which there should be no relation.
 
Just to be straight: you believe that, because Wan’s bending can create holes in Vaatu’s physical form, that Wan, by himself and with no amps, is strong enough to one shot peak power Vaatu if he did not have regeneration, and that S2 Korra is comparable to him.
 
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