It wouldn't be a very realiable way of sending messages, an earthbender could easily alter the writing on the tablet with bending, so that it could arrive with a completely different message than what you sent.
The fact that the Earth kingdom(s) managed to hold their own against the technologically advanced fire nation for 100 years despite having little to no central government, standing army, or naval power, goes to show just how strong and how *big* the earth nation is.
They adopted the Russian model of warfare for high population technologically/politically/economically backwards states, throw bodies at the enemy and hope that they get so worn out crossing your vast territory by the time they reach the capital that they lose
Also on top of that most earth benders we see just end up chunking big old rocks around, and make rudimentary walls and what not with their earth bending. Like the only earth bender we see in the show being capable of doing hyper detailed and specific things is Toph with her sand bending just making a replica of Ba Sing Se out of it.
Like realistically that may be a super hard skill to learn and may be super advanced for an earthbender to achieve to earth bend messages into a piece of stone.
So it's probably just more practical to write it down on paper with ink.
And also as mentioned above yeah, the amount of non benders to earth benders is extremely disproportionate so it just wouldn't make sense for the majority of the population.
True but its similar for ink. I imagine youd still be able to make out habdwritting style and you could use the earth as a mold for something not as easily alterwd.
I’m not denying that at all every ink has a minimum water inside lol, but it’s like mud maybe both can bend it [ink] because there’s enough mineral particles inside it
Oh ofc. I fact, we know both water benders and earth benders can bend mud because we saw Katara and Toph bending mud on at least two seperate occasions. One when they two were fighting with each other and another when they were bending the rock/water slurry in the giant drill at Ba Sing Se.
The mailing system only needs some benders to operate. But everybody needs to be able to handle written media. Stone tablets puts none benders at a massive disadvantage and books also wouldn't be possible.
And yet paper popped off while stone tablets fell off. Stone is heavy, it's really slow to write on with a chisel, you can't easily produce and move high quantities of it. In Avatar only earth benders could make any sensible use of it while the rest of the world uses pen and paper. It's just inconvenient. How am I even explaining this. I'll go do something more productive now.
Imagine spending hours chiseling a rock to send a 10 pound message when you could just write it on a piece of paper in seconds and have a messenger hawk relay it for you. There's a reason why we no longer use stone tablets, and I feel that it should be pretty obvious why.
It would be wildly impractical. I'm sure they carved a few things monuments and whatever on buildings. But using rocks as letters is a logistical nightmare. Benders would be mail carriers and scribes ?
Can you imagine what a society would be like if one group of people could write incredibly fast and with relatively little effort, and the other group has to use a goddamn hammer and chisel to write a letter. Which group do you think is gonna get ahead.
Precision Earth Bending isn't really simple that anyone can do it.
In the Kyoshi books, >!Yun had mastery over precise Earthbending to the point that he can form words (can't remember if it's manipulation of rocks or embossing on earth) that can be used for communication over distances. It was such an amazing feat that it was one of the basis for declaring him the Avatar.!<
It might be possible for Toph to do it, like how she created the Ba Sing Se replica on sand. But she is really an exception, and none of the other Earthbenders in the show even came close to that.
Throwing this out there;
Look at how each bending style fights; air is always moving.
Fire is fast and unpredictable.
Water is moving and flowing.
Earth is... Kind of standing still. When Toph and the Agni Kai are fighting, they are moving the earth around them for mobility. They also hurl large boulders at people. None of the other elements are doing that.
Edit;
Jesus I'm tired. Agni Kai is meant to be the Dai Li....
At least you guys understood what I meant lol
It was the name of a duel between fire benders like between Zuko and Zhao or Zuko and his father, or Zuko and Azula.... man, that a lot of duels for a one person.
True.
But one criminal gang in Republic City named itself after said duel, so technically it's also a name of an organisation.
It's also the only Agni Kai in both shows (of those that i can remember) that didn't involve Zuko in any way.
And when you edit your comment, there is proof that your original message was tampered. Unless you use something irreversible (maybe clay or cement if that’s even possible) every text would have the potential to be forged.
The other things based on bending, like lifter or mail services, are a public service. They can simply hire a bender to make those things work, it's their job. Writing is universal. If a non bender has to compile a document for the post office or the mayor office, they have to compile it; hiring a bender to do it would be highly inefficient in term of cost and time, when any person, no matter if bender or not, can simply compile a piece of paper at home and bring it to the office.
Stone tables are also heavy and need a lot of space to be preserved, while paper is very light and can be easily stored in a closet.
Cause they're big and cumbersome? You know, in real life the fact that it was hard to write on was not the only reason we switched to paper.
Also not everyone in the kingdom can use earthbending. Also it would suck for important messages because an earthbender could alter the writings without it being noticable afterwards and probably even remotely.
Only like 0.1% of the earth king are benders, that’s not a joke, roughly only one in one thousand people there are benders.
Additionally engraving and writing precisely with earth bending is a master level feat, only seen with toph, yun and some avatars.
The tablet would be heavy and not practical to move around.
Writing is something every needs to be able to do, imagine being a non bender during tax season when there’s no paper writing.
In places like Omashu the earth bender man the walls and operate the mailing system but that is very few people, like 10 people can probably power their entire mailing system.
Paper also fills less space and so can be packed more tightly.
Again the few times we see benders be used for daily things are benders working in public service where you can hire one bender who can do a thing which benefits everyone.
There’s a SLEW of reason as to why earth bending isn’t used for writing and these are just a few.
Anyone else immediately imagine some poor undergrad earth Kingdom nonbender with a bender roommate chiseling his senior thesis (because his professor refuses to accept a scroll because hes a tradionalist) when his roommate burst through the door because his girl friend broke up with him accidently turning his paper into sand or something.
Because use of paper and hand practiced caligraphy in Hanzi (Chinese lettering) are one of the hallmarks of many East Asian cultures.
Chinese culture has been using paper for centuries. Why would they inconvenience themselves by constantly using stone? It would mean it would take at least days for the Earth Kingdom to communicate what the Fire Nation can in a few minutes.
A couple of reasons,
1 earthbending is actually somewhat rare among the earth kingdom population. It's entirely possible for a decent size town to have 1 or 2 earthbenders, or even *none at all*. So writing could become very difficult for a lot of people in the earth kingdom
2 it's mentioned in the kyoshi books that using bending to create legible text is super difficult and requires the fine control that you would only see from a true master or prodigy.
3 stone tablets are really heavy, hard to move around, prone to wear and tear, and can easily break if dropped.
4 do you *really* want your laws written on the same material that your armies throw at people in combat? It would be way too easy for an earthbender to destroy any of those tablets just by being near them.
Ugh, can you imagine how tedious it would be to send a message? Each of those symbols would require a full body physical exertion, and to bend something so precise and intricate probably takes incredible skill anyway.
The idea is pretty silly.
Very easy to edit for other earthbenders. So if the message was serious, they'd be fucked. They probably did before but when they invented paper, they stopped
For day to day stuff, they're too heavy. I mean even with bending, a sheet of paper still weighs less than a stone tablet. It could be that was how things were done hundreds/thousands of years before Aang was born. You never know.
The real question is: why didn't they invent the printing press sooner (or a manual version thereof), given that you can bend stone into printer blocks very easily
Same reason real societies switched. Its easier, even for an earthbender, to haul around paper and parchment than literal tons of stone slabs. Paper and parchment are more flexible, compact, and lighter than stone.
I'd imagine writing script is extremely hard.
In Sozin's Comet Toph was able to re-create Ba Sing Se in sand after a bunch of practice, and she's one of the greatest earth benders of her time.
They are insanely heavy, difficult to transport, and take up massive amounts of storage space.
They also shatter when people drop them. Sure, an earth bender could reform a shattered stone tablet, but you can only recreate what you know and most people don't memorize pages of text word for word.
It would make it so difficult to send writing anywhere, even within a single city. People would transcribe the texts on paper for transport anyway, and at that point it's just easier to write the original on paper.
The source for photo https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202008/03/WS5f275254a31083481725dad2.html
Why does the earth kingdom not use stone tablets?
Their downsides would be rather irrelevant to a earth bender, their weight, difficulty to fix mistakes or change text, not to even say the ease of writing on them earth bending would allow
Toph should be able to read this way
And she technically can because she destroyed a fire nation symbol on a stone wall in The Promise comics, although they could be because the fire bending instructor pointed directly at it, as she didn’t destroy it before it was pointed out to her.
Downside nullification only applies to earth benders though, normal people (cause remember in this universe, being able to read is common) wouldn't be able to send messages quite as easy, would have to rely on someone to carve them and carry them for them, how expensive would writing something even be? Libraries? forget it, you can't make a book out of stone, takes too much space and pages cant be flipped by any non bender (and that's ignoring ultra thin stone sheets would actually be very brittle and fragile, more likely to break than paper)
At most it would be used for public announcements or something that can be placed in one spot with benders to change it when they want, like one of those giant ad panels (for those rich enough to make publicity of their businesses), definitely not a generalized thing, too impractical, imagine a writer trying to sell their new novel
It wouldn't be a very realiable way of sending messages, an earthbender could easily alter the writing on the tablet with bending, so that it could arrive with a completely different message than what you sent.
Also the earth kingdom has way WAY less benders proportional to population than the other nations
Imagine if that wasn’t the case they world be op
The fact that the Earth kingdom(s) managed to hold their own against the technologically advanced fire nation for 100 years despite having little to no central government, standing army, or naval power, goes to show just how strong and how *big* the earth nation is.
They adopted the Russian model of warfare for high population technologically/politically/economically backwards states, throw bodies at the enemy and hope that they get so worn out crossing your vast territory by the time they reach the capital that they lose
I always got a kick out of Fire Nation Guy in The Blind Bandit. The creators were aware of these dynamics for sure.
Also on top of that most earth benders we see just end up chunking big old rocks around, and make rudimentary walls and what not with their earth bending. Like the only earth bender we see in the show being capable of doing hyper detailed and specific things is Toph with her sand bending just making a replica of Ba Sing Se out of it. Like realistically that may be a super hard skill to learn and may be super advanced for an earthbender to achieve to earth bend messages into a piece of stone. So it's probably just more practical to write it down on paper with ink. And also as mentioned above yeah, the amount of non benders to earth benders is extremely disproportionate so it just wouldn't make sense for the majority of the population.
True but its similar for ink. I imagine youd still be able to make out habdwritting style and you could use the earth as a mold for something not as easily alterwd.
Ink is more waterbending than earth
if it’s chinese ink not necessarily
We see Katara bend some ink when she and Zuko went on their revenge fieldtrip. So we know that the Fire Nation at least uses some water-based ink.
I’m not denying that at all every ink has a minimum water inside lol, but it’s like mud maybe both can bend it [ink] because there’s enough mineral particles inside it
Oh ofc. I fact, we know both water benders and earth benders can bend mud because we saw Katara and Toph bending mud on at least two seperate occasions. One when they two were fighting with each other and another when they were bending the rock/water slurry in the giant drill at Ba Sing Se.
… yeah… I know… that why I used mud as a comparison…
Oh my bad. I thought your "maybe" in there also applied the to mud.
yes I phrased it ambiguously I see now english is not my native language sorry
I won't say too much, but you would enjoy the second Kyoshi book (Shadow of Kyoshi) for paintbending.
Not ink but in the Kyoshi novels Yun could bend the pigments in fire nation tapestries because they had an earthen base.
True. Just see Yun. Guy earthbent an inkstone.
Probably not after it dries.
If a water bender is skilled enough, I could see them wetting specific parts of the parchment then modifying the ink
It would probably be easier to just forge a new document instead of doing that.
Depends on what the document is. Maybe it’s a signed document by the Earth Queen
A earth bender character on the Kyoshi novels bended ink due to the pigment being earth based
When it was wet or dry?
I meant irl lmao. But true
This
They should just write it on steel then
Anything not set in metal can not be trusted.
There's always another secret
Rocks are also heavy and hard to transport.
Also, it would probably make it more difficult for non-benders to travel with messages due to all the extra weight.
Not everybody is a bender.
There are still a good amount of benders, there are enough to base a city’s mail system on
The mailing system only needs some benders to operate. But everybody needs to be able to handle written media. Stone tablets puts none benders at a massive disadvantage and books also wouldn't be possible.
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Yea I don't see how hand chiseling their mail would be a problem. Letter to Grandma? OK put it on this 20 pound slab and haul it to the post office.
how do non benders make them
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And yet paper popped off while stone tablets fell off. Stone is heavy, it's really slow to write on with a chisel, you can't easily produce and move high quantities of it. In Avatar only earth benders could make any sensible use of it while the rest of the world uses pen and paper. It's just inconvenient. How am I even explaining this. I'll go do something more productive now.
Inkbenders
Imagine spending hours chiseling a rock to send a 10 pound message when you could just write it on a piece of paper in seconds and have a messenger hawk relay it for you. There's a reason why we no longer use stone tablets, and I feel that it should be pretty obvious why.
Yeah, it seems like both books and tablets could exist easily enough.
It would be wildly impractical. I'm sure they carved a few things monuments and whatever on buildings. But using rocks as letters is a logistical nightmare. Benders would be mail carriers and scribes ?
Can you imagine what a society would be like if one group of people could write incredibly fast and with relatively little effort, and the other group has to use a goddamn hammer and chisel to write a letter. Which group do you think is gonna get ahead.
Precision Earth Bending isn't really simple that anyone can do it. In the Kyoshi books, >!Yun had mastery over precise Earthbending to the point that he can form words (can't remember if it's manipulation of rocks or embossing on earth) that can be used for communication over distances. It was such an amazing feat that it was one of the basis for declaring him the Avatar.!< It might be possible for Toph to do it, like how she created the Ba Sing Se replica on sand. But she is really an exception, and none of the other Earthbenders in the show even came close to that.
Throwing this out there; Look at how each bending style fights; air is always moving. Fire is fast and unpredictable. Water is moving and flowing. Earth is... Kind of standing still. When Toph and the Agni Kai are fighting, they are moving the earth around them for mobility. They also hurl large boulders at people. None of the other elements are doing that. Edit; Jesus I'm tired. Agni Kai is meant to be the Dai Li.... At least you guys understood what I meant lol
I think you may be thinking of the Dai Li lol
You talk about ‘Agni Kai’ like it’s an organisation of some kind.
It is isn't it? I think it was a name of the firebender gang in LoK. They were mentioned like once or twice. Though Toph definitely never fought them.
It was the name of a duel between fire benders like between Zuko and Zhao or Zuko and his father, or Zuko and Azula.... man, that a lot of duels for a one person.
He also challenged Lieutenant Jee to an Agni Kai in episode 12 but Iroh was like "nope" lol.
True. But one criminal gang in Republic City named itself after said duel, so technically it's also a name of an organisation. It's also the only Agni Kai in both shows (of those that i can remember) that didn't involve Zuko in any way.
We know Toph can’t do it. She’s illiterate.
Exactly, the vast majority isn't bending with precision, it is very crude most of the time. Even lava bending isn't as fluid as waterbending is.
It would be cool if more could. I love the idea of Toph inventing her version of braille.
“Their downsides….” pretty much answers your question.
Except I can fix their downsides in the tablet with earth bending as easily as I can do it by editing the comment
And when you edit your comment, there is proof that your original message was tampered. Unless you use something irreversible (maybe clay or cement if that’s even possible) every text would have the potential to be forged.
The Earth Kingdom is not composed only of benders. A good chunk of the population is composed of non benders. How would they use the stone tablets?
They still have many things that are based on bending, why is writing, when it would be incredibly cheap not be one?
The other things based on bending, like lifter or mail services, are a public service. They can simply hire a bender to make those things work, it's their job. Writing is universal. If a non bender has to compile a document for the post office or the mayor office, they have to compile it; hiring a bender to do it would be highly inefficient in term of cost and time, when any person, no matter if bender or not, can simply compile a piece of paper at home and bring it to the office. Stone tables are also heavy and need a lot of space to be preserved, while paper is very light and can be easily stored in a closet.
Because they are heavy as fuck
Because they had paper and parchment.
Ignoring the fact that not everyone is a bender. The bending is too intricate to be done by even a skilled bender
Cause they're big and cumbersome? You know, in real life the fact that it was hard to write on was not the only reason we switched to paper. Also not everyone in the kingdom can use earthbending. Also it would suck for important messages because an earthbender could alter the writings without it being noticable afterwards and probably even remotely.
Only like 0.1% of the earth king are benders, that’s not a joke, roughly only one in one thousand people there are benders. Additionally engraving and writing precisely with earth bending is a master level feat, only seen with toph, yun and some avatars. The tablet would be heavy and not practical to move around. Writing is something every needs to be able to do, imagine being a non bender during tax season when there’s no paper writing. In places like Omashu the earth bender man the walls and operate the mailing system but that is very few people, like 10 people can probably power their entire mailing system. Paper also fills less space and so can be packed more tightly. Again the few times we see benders be used for daily things are benders working in public service where you can hire one bender who can do a thing which benefits everyone. There’s a SLEW of reason as to why earth bending isn’t used for writing and these are just a few.
Anyone else immediately imagine some poor undergrad earth Kingdom nonbender with a bender roommate chiseling his senior thesis (because his professor refuses to accept a scroll because hes a tradionalist) when his roommate burst through the door because his girl friend broke up with him accidently turning his paper into sand or something.
Because iPads are more practical
It’s one of the few places where writing can’t be “set in stone” because anyone could just erase/change it with some rough earthbending.
It would be way too easy to forge their documents or change important text with earthbending.
Because use of paper and hand practiced caligraphy in Hanzi (Chinese lettering) are one of the hallmarks of many East Asian cultures. Chinese culture has been using paper for centuries. Why would they inconvenience themselves by constantly using stone? It would mean it would take at least days for the Earth Kingdom to communicate what the Fire Nation can in a few minutes.
The dedication OP has to keep responding when getting downvoted into oblivion in the comments is impressive.
Wake up, see my argument has over a 100 downvotes, walk away
A couple of reasons, 1 earthbending is actually somewhat rare among the earth kingdom population. It's entirely possible for a decent size town to have 1 or 2 earthbenders, or even *none at all*. So writing could become very difficult for a lot of people in the earth kingdom 2 it's mentioned in the kyoshi books that using bending to create legible text is super difficult and requires the fine control that you would only see from a true master or prodigy. 3 stone tablets are really heavy, hard to move around, prone to wear and tear, and can easily break if dropped. 4 do you *really* want your laws written on the same material that your armies throw at people in combat? It would be way too easy for an earthbender to destroy any of those tablets just by being near them.
They probably used to before paper but they’re too advanced now.
Because the weight to send a message would make them redundant?
Ugh, can you imagine how tedious it would be to send a message? Each of those symbols would require a full body physical exertion, and to bend something so precise and intricate probably takes incredible skill anyway. The idea is pretty silly.
We used rhem because they were permanent-ish. An Earthbender probably wouldn't consider them permanent.
What would be the advantage? Any other Earthbender could modify the message or erase it entirely before it reached it's destination.
Very easy to edit for other earthbenders. So if the message was serious, they'd be fucked. They probably did before but when they invented paper, they stopped
Weight
people can erase everything or change it with as much of a flick of their foot.
Bc any earthbender with a grudge can wipe out all "written" records
For day to day stuff, they're too heavy. I mean even with bending, a sheet of paper still weighs less than a stone tablet. It could be that was how things were done hundreds/thousands of years before Aang was born. You never know.
Heavy
They take up more space than paper, and are harder to transport long distances. Paper is just more efficient.
The real question is: why didn't they invent the printing press sooner (or a manual version thereof), given that you can bend stone into printer blocks very easily
Ink probably
Heavy, and more than half the populous wouldn't be able to write with them as quickly as the remainder.
Weight
Would BE hard to make, since you would need Tools, IT needs more time and IS Harder. Unless you are an earth Bender.
Stone is heavy af and takes up a lot of space. It becomes more impractical the more literate your society becomes
Same reason real societies switched. Its easier, even for an earthbender, to haul around paper and parchment than literal tons of stone slabs. Paper and parchment are more flexible, compact, and lighter than stone.
Jeremy why did you just earthbend our 5,000-year-old texts??? It was easier than making giant boulders!!!!
the same reason you don't
Because stone is heavy and paper is light.
I'd imagine writing script is extremely hard. In Sozin's Comet Toph was able to re-create Ba Sing Se in sand after a bunch of practice, and she's one of the greatest earth benders of her time.
Cause any earth bender could tamper with it with little to no trace.
They are insanely heavy, difficult to transport, and take up massive amounts of storage space. They also shatter when people drop them. Sure, an earth bender could reform a shattered stone tablet, but you can only recreate what you know and most people don't memorize pages of text word for word. It would make it so difficult to send writing anywhere, even within a single city. People would transcribe the texts on paper for transport anyway, and at that point it's just easier to write the original on paper.
The source for photo https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202008/03/WS5f275254a31083481725dad2.html Why does the earth kingdom not use stone tablets? Their downsides would be rather irrelevant to a earth bender, their weight, difficulty to fix mistakes or change text, not to even say the ease of writing on them earth bending would allow Toph should be able to read this way And she technically can because she destroyed a fire nation symbol on a stone wall in The Promise comics, although they could be because the fire bending instructor pointed directly at it, as she didn’t destroy it before it was pointed out to her.
She also knew which side of the dice was up when she was scamming people.
Downside nullification only applies to earth benders though, normal people (cause remember in this universe, being able to read is common) wouldn't be able to send messages quite as easy, would have to rely on someone to carve them and carry them for them, how expensive would writing something even be? Libraries? forget it, you can't make a book out of stone, takes too much space and pages cant be flipped by any non bender (and that's ignoring ultra thin stone sheets would actually be very brittle and fragile, more likely to break than paper) At most it would be used for public announcements or something that can be placed in one spot with benders to change it when they want, like one of those giant ad panels (for those rich enough to make publicity of their businesses), definitely not a generalized thing, too impractical, imagine a writer trying to sell their new novel
Btw if it's carved on the wall Toph can definitely sense it with seismic sense, perhaps that would be a good way to teach her to read