Avatar Feat Analysis 2 | The Firewall
Today I want to look at one of the most infamous firebending feats, Jeong Jeong's flaming wall in The Deserter.
Due to the continuing issues with GIFs and videos on Comic Vine and the Internet in general, I don't have the ability to upload the full GIF to the site, but here's a link to a GIF, here's a link to a YouTube video with the full scene, and you all know what I'm talking about anyway.
Before the feat itself starts, Jeong Jeong charges for around 2-3 seconds, so this is not within Jeong Jeong's spam capabilities but it is well within his combat capabilities. Once he finishes his movements, he begins to raise the flames. Here's a roughly second-by-second play of what's happening during the formation. I apologize for the YouTube stuff in the way, but getting these perfect frame-by-frame screenshots is difficult in regular play.
We don't see the wall's full expansion on-screen, but it only take about 11 or so seconds to extend from its first on-screen appearance to off the side, and it seems likely that by the time we see the first boats, the wall has covered most of the river. The size of the river itself is inconsistent; sometimes the boats cover most of the river, sometimes they cover very little of it. The main shot of the firewall is about as impressive and full of an idea as you'll get for its intended length and height, so I don't think it's necessary to try and look around the episode for specific shots, but you can re-watch the episode yourself to see the depiction of the river throughout.
The final bit we see of the firewall is when it blatantly takes up the entire screen in front of Jeong Jeong and Zhao while the master holds it up.
This is the very last full frame of the wall. Within a second, due to Jeong Jeong stopping it himself (not due to him no longer sustaining it, as I will attempt to prove throughout this post in case it wasn't obvious), the entire flame instantly dies out. With the feat starting at 1:14 and being fully stopped by 1:36, that's a 22-second long, continuous firebending performance. Even if you knock off a few seconds due to him having to start the wall up, he blatantly held that entire wall for over a dozen seconds straight.
Now that we've gone over the action itself, let's look at the size and dimensions of this wall.
As we see in the main shot, the wall is a bit curved, going straight across the river and curving a bit into land until it stops at the trees. Jeong Jeong is behind the curved portion, since that's where the boats pull up to, and perhaps it's my eyes, but we don't even see the long end of the wall, either due to it being too far off-screen, it being covered by Jeong Jeong's end, or just animation error. No matter which shot you choose, the boats are blatantly dwarfed by both ends of the firewall as well as its height. It seems that the curved end looks nearly like a square, making the height and length of it roughly equal, while the long end is a rectangle, the length surpassing the height. The height is directly comparable to the surrounding trees.
The most interesting thing to look at is the thickness of the wall, something often neglected due to it being much smaller than the other dimensions, but the wall isn't necessarily thin at all. If you look at the shots where Jeong Jeong (and Zhao) are in front of the wall, it seems to me like the burning of the wall extends for quite a bit past the surface of it.
Look at the bottom of the wall, where the notably dark section rises into a yellow or orange outline. If you pay attention to that part in the video or GIF, the motion looks very much like burning flame, and when Jeong Jeong lowers the wall, it very quickly disappears. It doesn't give a concrete measurement by any means, but this idea of a thick firewall is consistent with the shots of the flame as Zhao walk through them:
Look at the dark-colored insides of the flames, as opposed to the lighter color of the surface. That's blatantly the thickness of the wall, big enough for an adult to fit within it, more or less. Probably a little less than a foot, by not by much, about the same as your average firebending blast.
As far as the actual length and height of the firewall, I don't want to get into calc territory with exact numbers, but let's be reasonable. You'd be hard-pressed to find a shot in the episode that puts the boats at less than 20-30 feet in length just by eyeballing, which makes sense considering the average inshore boat length. If we go by low end estimates, we could say the boats are 7 meters in length, and it would be a bit unfair to say the river is less than 21 meters wide since there's very few shots that make the river's width too small to fit the boats in length-wise throughout the entire episode. Going by a pure eyeball, it seems to fair to say the full wall, including the curve, is about 30 meters long at a minimum, with a 10 meter height.
If the volume of this wall can be said to be 30 meters long by 10 meters high by 0.3 meters wide, the whole wall would be 90 cubic meters of flame. This is the same as a decent-sized living room, nearing on 24,000 gallons. This is 27 kilograms of pure fire. This is the kind of power Jeong Jeong can summon and disperse- no, that he did summon and disperse on a whim.
Beyond the scale of this feat, there are some other notable aspects. To start, Jeong Jeong raised this flame directly from the environment and spread it out instead of producing it from his own body the way firebending is traditionally done. The impressiveness of this cannot be overstated. Regardless of whether bending in this manner is a nerf on the general power Jeong Jeong can produce, it is bending in a way that only the absolute greatest firebenders can since it goes against a fundamental of the art. This is particularly impressive for Jeong Jeong since that is practically the only method of firebending he's employed throughout his screen time.
The next notable aspect is that Jeong Jeong bent the flame without burning anything around him, and bent it over water without the flame ever going out. This shows the fine control Jeong Jeong held over the fire with a single stance. Though not the same feat, Jeong Jeong's firewall outside of Ba Sing Se showed him bending the fire in a ring-shape down some rubble, around Team Avatar and back up to the Wall, with his flames dwarfing Appa in length and even height, and he was obviously unbothered by the feat as we see him standing over Team Avatar without even holding a stance to sustain the flame.
Another notable aspect is the intensity of the fire. While sustaining the flames, Jeong Jeong's clothing and loose hair was constantly flowing like it was caught in a great wind despite the reasonable distance Jeong Jeong was standing from the wall. And when he instantly erased the wall, a disturbance in the air is visible from where the flames begin to die out, supporting the idea that his own power was the cause for the wall's disappearance, consistent with his apparent and absolute control of the flames.
The final thing to note, a reiteration more than anything else, is the length of time that Jeong Jeong sustained this blaze. The closest fair comparisons I can think of for high-scale sustained firebending are Roku and Sozin, both of whom charged for less time but (at least in Sozin's case) held for less time as well; perhaps Rangi's white flame against Yun, though the medium of the novel makes it difficult to determine the charge-up time, the scale of the attack or the period she sustained the attack for; and Azula's flame whip, though at this point I'm definitely stretching. On a slightly off-topic note, Jeong Jeong's very next feat of escaping the firebenders of Zhao could be compared and contrasted with Azula's escape in Tu Zin as a fun exercise but I digress.
This feat is an absolute marvel of firebending no matter how you look at it. Jeong Jeong's pacifism is reflected in the unique way he bends, and if not for that moral standard and the family-friendly nature of the cartoon, we could very well have seen a version of Jeong Jeong as terrifying as the strongest benders of the franchise.
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