Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-14610890-20140418234901/@comment-14610890-20140421234218

Now, I was under the impression, though I could be wrong, that what you just said is not how metalbending works. Metal is made by processing and refining metallic ores (rocks that have the elements that make up metals in them) in order to remove the nonmetal parts of the ore. Then you would have a metal. I think metalbenders actually bend the metal itself, the metal atoms that had once been part of ore in the Earth, rather than bending small pieces of rock imbedded in the metal, causing the metal to come along with it. I remember the scene where Toph invents metalbending, and it defintely looks like what you said, not what I said. I will conceit that much, but I'm fairly certain metal doesn't have pieces of rock that large imbedded in it, it's not like you can melt it down and strain out the pieces of rock.