Toph Beifong, a blind 12 year old girl, was first introduced to us in Season 2 while the main character Avatar Aang and his friends are at an underground earth bending tournament and immediately you can tell that she has a lot of confidence in her abilities. In fact, her first line of dialogue is telling “The Boulder”, a professional earth bender, that he didn’t want to fight her because he was scared. This infuriated “The Boulder” and led to a fight between the two, in which we see that she has the strength to back up her claims. With her being able to defeat “The Boulder” in a single move. This makes Aang take a liking to her and wants her to become his earth bending teacher.
To convince Toph to become his earth bending teacher, he decides to fight. Due to Aang being light on his feet, Toph cannot sense him with her seismic sense (the ability that allows her to see) so Aang is able to knock her out of the ring with relative ease. This infuriated Toph so she stormed off and returned home. This is where we learn more about Toph. She comes from an extremely rich family that holds lots of power, however, due to Toph being blind, her parents shelter her and see her as weak. When Aang comes to find Toph, we learn that Toph’s parents don’t even know shes an earth bender, despite her being a master. When Aang tries to convince her parents that she is in fact an earth bender, they ridicule him and demand he leaves. After this, both Aang and Toph are kidnapped by bandits, who demand ransom in exchange for both of them back. So team Avatar and Tophs parents make their way back to the underground fighting arena. When they arrive and exchange the money, the bandits release Toph, but they don’t release Aang. This leads to a fight breaking out between Toph and the bandits in which Toph defeats them in combat. After freeing Aang, Toph believes that her parents will now let her go with the Avatar because they have seen her strength and abilities. This still doesn’t convince them though and they make Toph return home with them. However, Aang acknowledging her strength makes Toph want to leave with him and teach him earth bending, so in the middle of the night Aang, Toph, Katara, and Sokka all depart away from Tophs home.
While teaching Aang how to earth bend, she states that he wouldn’t ever be able to do it because he is a coward. She tells him that the only way to learn earth bending is to be fearless. This is the first time we truly get an understanding of what makes Toph such a great earth bender. Her pride in her abilities doesn’t allow her to fear anything, making her the perfect bender for an element that requires you to have no fear. Toph wasn’t always fearless though. In fact in her backstory it shows Toph as a little girl who is scared in a cave. Only after finding badger moles, the original earth benders and blind animals, she learns to not only see by using seismic sense, but also she loses all fear because all her fear came from the thought that she was weak. Which was reinforced throughout her entire life because she was blind. However gaining strength gave her confidence which led to her becoming stronger and a cycle started to occur in which every time Toph got stronger it gave her more confidence and the more confidence she has leads to her becoming stronger. Using this method allowed for Toph to progress at an extremely fast paced, being able to fight grown men at the age of 12. This was just the beginning for Toph though.
In season 3, Toph is captured by bandits sent by her father to bring her home. To stop her from escaping they locked her in a metal box due to earth benders not being able to bend metal. The bandits start to taunt Toph for being helpless and this angers her. While the taunting continues, Toph realizes that even metal has minerals in it that can be controlled. This allows her to break free from the box and defeat both bandits. Toph is the second person in the series to create a sub type of bending. However it took the other person years to develop the technique, while it took Toph a matter of minutes. This moment shows that Toph is a far greater prodigy than anyone could have imagined.
Toph learning to metal bend was a crucial point in the story for her and this ability made the final fight against the Firelord and the Fire Nation, far easier due to no fire bender being able to damage Toph’s metal armor. However while attempting to stop Fire Nation blimps, Toph and Sokka are cornered and Toph is hanging off the side of the blimp. This is the first time that Toph truly loses faith in her abilities and begins crying. This moment shows that Toph’s pride comes from her abilities and not an external factor like her family’s status. Toph felt helpless because in that moment she wasn’t able to protect the people she cared for. I think this shows that Toph isn’t the narcissistic person that she seems like throughout the series, but instead she is a person who needs her pride to continue surviving. If Toph wasn’t as prideful as she is, than she would have never developed metal bending, she would have never proved her parents wrong, and most importantly she would have never joined the Avatar.
Toph’s pride makes her fearless, which is the key fundamental of earth bending. So Toph’s pride in her abilities is what makes her the perfect earth bender and it’s why no other earth bender in the series is able to control the element in the ways that she is able to. No other earth bender in the series would have been able to create metal bending because the way in which she created it was a direct reflection of who Toph is as a person. If she was any less confident in her abilities then she wouldn’t have even attempted to bend metal. So Toph’s pride in herself and her abilities is what makes her the greatest earth bender ever.
