Good question. I'm sure many of us have been wondering that for a while. Luckily...I happen to have an official answer.

Official Image!


Sorry about the bad quality. If you can't make out the text, the important part reads, "A Waterbender can control water in any of its forms - as a liquid (water), a solid (ice or snow), or as a gas (steam), including moisture in the air and ground."

This is from a scholastic book in a whole series. If anybody has any burning questions about other avatar related things, I can check in the other books for you in case there're any answers.

[glow=purple,2,300]<Katara Edit: Sorry Sawora, image was too big! >[/glow]

What a life-saver in the desert in the early morning when the dew point reaches it's zenith. Indeed, even in a desert there is almost always water.... somewhere. In cacti, small animals, deep underground, so even if a waterbender couldn't pull the water from the air except during the most humid point of the day... (during the early morning dew), if they weren't against killing other living things to obtain that water... then I don't see why they couldn't. I don't remember exactly where I saw it. Wiki I think, they were saying that Waterbenders could even bend the water in a human being (since we're made up of so much of it) and sort of control them by controlling the water in their bodies. This would take someone of Avatar proportions, I'd think.. to get that precise of control of the element.

That's true. It seems to be an official fact that waterbenders can bend moisture, but I don't really see it often. It does come up in "the desert" though. Well in a way. Katara pulls the water out of the ground. Of course, I believe that at some point some benders created mist from moisture in the air.

It feels like my thoughts always come back to whether a waterbender could bend the water in a person. I say yes. It all makes sense, but I don't think it's come up in the show yet just for story and balance reasons. If any of you have seen Xmen 2, Magneto pulled a neat stunt and sucked the iron in a guy's blood right out of him. If waterbenders went around doing the same with the water in a person's body, which is at a much higher amount than iron, then the whole avatar world would be thrown off balance. It just gives them way too much power.

I doubt the pull water inside a Human being vary much, otherwise it would have been done.

My Theory is that the water that consists in a Humans own body is harder to bend by a huge margen because of a persons natural chi flowing through it, disrupting bending from happening inside of there bodies.

To itterate my point on it not being totaly impossable, theres a Card in the Avatar TCG that has a waterbender that bends the water inside a person to make them sick.

I think personaly that the Chi inside of a person makes it harder to bend the water because inside your body is where your Chi is the most concentrated, like trying to swat a fly on the other side of the screen door. "Yes they will feel it, but it won't have the same effect as if the fly was on your side of the screen."

Now on them bending steam, I'd say yes, but I wonder how well that can be used and how hard it is to bend steam and turn it back and forth from vapor to solid.

Sawora: Them are some very useful books to have! Any chance I could obtain the title of them from you? ^^ (it would be easier than searching through scholastics entire database)

Funny that the idea of bending water in a human came up as that was one of my planned ace in the hole moves (only it would be using the water in my own body, not someone elses)

Going further with that line of thought, I think Hanabi does have a valid point about their chi disrupting it. Although I'd still think a powerful enough bender ( or a moderate one against someone with weak Chi) could control it. It would all become a battle of wills, and thus the main reason why you don't see them going around in the show doing it. Defense is always easier than offense and so while the water-bender is trying so hard to bend the water in his opponents
body, the lady he is fighting is putting some energy into defending his attemt and the rest in hurling a fireball or boulder into the water-bender's head.
Now if the person was willing to give into the water bender... (say in the desert for instance and they need some water to heal an injury)

I agree with the whole Chi theory. And what’s really interesting is considering the possibility that unless one willingly directs his Chi to allow the water in his body to be controlled, it would take a huge amount of effort to control it while fighting for it. It’s kind of reassuring too, because if people theoretically went around in the avatar world controlling others by their body’s water content, there would at least be some kind of defense.

Now pardon me as I get a little science-y, but another obstacle in this is the fact that the water in our bodies just isn’t sitting as water inside of us. It’s running through our veins and soaked up in all the cells of our organs. Think of it like “The Drill,” when Katara was bending the rock/water slurry, it was probably a lot harder than bending just normal water. In fact, Toph came up later and helped her to bend the earth portion of the slurry. You could almost say that Katara had only half the normal bending abilities with the slurry, and it would probably be the same with our bodies. Unless of course you withdrew the water to control it better, which, ignoring Chi, is probably very hard to do anyways, especially without contact.

The books are called: Avatar the Last Airbender, the last scrolls.

Good points all of you. Chi probably would get in the way for whatever reason. I wonder if it would make a difference if the person whose water the bender was trying to bend was a bender or not. Maybe the chi in a bender would be stronger, and therefor more of an obstacle.

It's also true that the water in us isn't just sitting in a pool somewhere. Then again, it is more concentrated in certain areas.
It's all very complicated isn't it?

But back to the original topic. Moisture in the air...
I believe it mentioned in the book that the bending of steam is a very defensive move. Benders can use it as an obscuring sort of shield. I'm sure it could come in handy.

And, not to mention, that Katara has already manifested this trait in Book Two, when Sokka busts a valve in the Drill — she uses the steam and turns it into ice to freeze the engineer who comes to take a look.

But Katara has already pulled moisture from the air too, sort of. In collaboration with Aang, she and he created that cloud symbol to help fake the prediction about the volcano errupting in Aunt Wu's village (Episode: The Fortune Teller).

Well, now here's a question. If waterbenders cannot bend the water inside a person because of the automatic defenses that person's chi and fighting spirit put up...What about a dead person? And I mean a corpse that has just died, meaning not all of the blood has clotted and still retains all liquids inside the body?

So could waterbenders "reanimate" (of sorts) the dead?