Toph Beifong

Toph Bei Fong
Voiced by	Jessie Flower
In-universe information
Aliases	The Blind Bandit, The Runaway.
Gender	Female
Position	Protagonist in Seasons 2 and 3
Nationality	Earth Kingdom

Toph Bei Fong (北方 拓芙) is a fictional character in Nickelodeon's animated television series Avatar: The Last Airbender. The character was voiced by Jessie Flower.

Toph Bei Fong is a blind Earthbending master. She grew up in a wealthy and highly respected family, but left them behind when she agreed to teach Aang earthbending to help him fulfill his duty as the Avatar.

History and family

File:BeiFongEstate HiRes.png

The luxurious Bei Fong estate

Toph is the only child of the wealthy Bei Fong family, who reside in the Earth Kingdom town of Gaoling and whose symbol is a winged boar. Toph's parents are highly overprotective of her, viewing her disability as weakness. They assume that she is weak and vulnerable to everything around her. To avoid risk and danger, they kept her lessons at the beginner level of earthbending for over six years and had guards keep close watch on her at all times.

Despite her handicap Toph has developed special skills that make her a very formidable Earthbender. Once, when she was very young, Toph ran away from home, seeking refuge in nearby caves. It was there she found companionship with the blind, earthbending Badgermoles that inhabited the caves. By imitating their movements, Toph came to harness her own earthbending abilities, becoming a master in her own right. However, she kept her talent secret from her family and Master Yu, her earthbending teacher. Toph fought frequently in Earth Rumble, an underground earthbending Lei tai tournament, under the alias "The Blind Bandit". By the time Aang and his friends discover Toph at the tournament, she had won her way to become the current champion, holding a 42-0 win-loss record prior to her encounter with Aang.

In order to escape entirely from her parents' control, Toph fled secretly with Aang and his friends and volunteered herself as Aang's Earthbending instructor. Early on, Toph's defiance of authority and lack of cooperation annoyed Katara. The two eventually put aside their differences and became close friends. It is also shown in some episodes (like "The Serpent's Pass") that Toph may have had a slight crush on Sokka during the time, but it never came to be.

The Bei Fong family appears to be well-known and influential in the Earth Kingdom. In the episode "The Serpent's Pass", Toph's mere display of her family's seal was sufficient enough to gain passage on a Ba Sing Se-bound ferry, despite lacking proper documentation to obtain a ticket normally, though doing so in "City of Walls and Secrets" was not enough to allow them into a party in Ba Sing Se.

Plot overview

As earlier advised by King Bumi, Aang's group searches for an earthbending teacher who "waits and listens", for Aang to learn earthbending from, and arrives in the town of Gaoling and eventually come across the town's underground earthbending tournament, Earth Rumble Six. After watching Toph's performance and recalling the vision he experienced in the swamp, Aang believes she is the requisite person. When Xin Fu, the tournament host, calls for volunteer challengers, Aang takes up the offer for a chance to speak to her. Thanks to his airbending in conjunction with her inability to see what is not on the ground, Aang easily defeats Toph and upsets her winning streak. She, however, does not give him a chance to speak and immediately leaves the arena in a huff.

Aang later finds Toph at the Bei Fong estate, and he is eventually able to talk to her about his quest and need for an earthbending teacher. Before Toph can make a decision, she and Aang are kidnapped by the earthbending tournament staff, who believe that Toph lost intentionally because they failed to see anything hit her.

The tournament wrestlers demand a ransom, which Katara, Sokka, Master Yu, and Toph's father (voiced by Cam Clarke) pay, but only Toph is freed. The competitors announce that they will be handing Aang to the Fire Nation for the reward instead, prompting Katara to plead Toph for her help in rescuing Aang. Her father interjects, claiming that his daughter is blind, tiny, helpless, and fragile, and unable to help them. Slighted, Toph steps forward and single-handedly defeats the entire tournament staff and the host, Xin Fu. Master Yu is speechless and awed by Toph's amazing earthbending skill. Her father is silent.

That night, Toph tries to reason with her parents that she is skillful at fighting and enjoys it, and that she should be allowed to live a normal life. She hopes that all of this new information does not change the way they feel about her. Toph's father replies that it does not change his love for her as a father, but it instead has made him realize that he has allowed her too much freedom. He plans to have guards watching over her all day long. Toph's protests are unheard.

Outside town, just as Aang and his friends are about to depart, Toph appears and claims that her father had changed his mind, saying that she was free to travel the world. Upon hearing this testimony, the group is swift to depart, sailing into the night sky with a new member and earthbending teacher. With his daughter's sudden absence, Toph's father concludes that the Avatar has kidnapped his daughter and issues a large reward to Master Yu and Xin Fu to bring her back by any means necessary.

While traveling with the Avatar, Toph's social attitudes change considerably. She becomes much less snide and private, but nonetheless still retains her cocky attitude. Her bending abilities also improve throughout Book Two, as she has learned to bend metal using her special ability to "see" the impurities (small fragments of earth) in the metal.

Toph joins Sokka and Suki in the series finale to hijack a Fire Nation airship to attempt to prevent the "burning of the old world". While commandeering an airship she uses Metalbending almost as proficiently as Earthbending. The three succeed in stopping the airship brigade, giving Aang the time he needed to defeat Phoenix King Ozai and to save the world. Toph's last appearance is complimenting Sokka's poorly drawn painting of the group by saying "they all look perfect", again pointing out that she cannot see it, and makes everyone laugh except Sokka. It is unknown whether she returned to her parents after the battle ended.

Character

As a tomboy, Toph brings a totally new personality to the group. Unlike the nurturing Katara, flighty Aang, or gruff but goofy Sokka, Toph is fiercely independent, sarcastic, direct, brutally frank, and confrontational. She appears to have the same carefree and adventurous personality as Aang, and she is very tomboyish in the way she acts and dresses very differently than the way she presents herself to her parents. However, unlike Aang, who avoids fighting whenever possible, Toph loves battling and takes great pride in her earthbending skills.

By using her acute hearing and sense of touch, Toph has the ability to perceive people's lies by their heart rate. When Zuko attempted to join the Avatar's group, for example, she was the only one who trusted him. While a good judge of character and often logical, she can sometimes let her fierce pride cloud her judgment, especially when she believes she has been insulted. This makes her quick to anger at others.

Toph's relationship with her parents is conflicted: when Aang suggested that she should leave with them, she was reluctant. After she joined "Team Avatar", she claimed to hate her parents. In "The Earth King", Toph receives a letter supposedly from her mother, saying that she now understood her daughter. Toph is glad for the opportunity to see her mother again, although it turns out to be a trap. In "The Runaway", Toph revealed the reason she relied on Katara: Katara cared about the person Toph was on the inside, instead of seeing her only for her disability. Toph even added that this was more than her own mother ever did. Later, Toph dictated a conciliatory letter to her parents, which Katara wrote and sent on Sokka's messenger hawk.

Toph is brutally honest and is vocal about her opinions of others regardless of status or age. Her occasional spoiled attitude or aloofness may be related to her being the only child of one of the richest families in the Earth Kingdom. Thanks to her time as a competitor and champion of the earthbending tournaments, she is an expert in verbally taunting and insulting her opponents, and on occasion her friends, particularly Sokka.

Inside this hardened exterior, though, Toph hides trace insecurities in regards to her blindness, which is hinted at in the episode "The Tales of Ba Sing Se". She has doubts about her appearance, being unable to see what she looks like. Being coddled by her parents all her life because of her disability, Toph hates being patronized. Her eagerness to prove her strength and independence has led to some initial difficulties with Aang and his friends. Toph insists that she can "carry her own weight" and often mistakes a simple friendly gesture for an act of pity for her blindness. Her encounter with Iroh, however, has taught her that Aang, Katara, and Sokka care for her because they are friends, not because her disability makes them feel obligated to do so. Toph being blind can't see peoples face's or bodies, so she can't judge by looking at them. This is a factor of her great judge of character. For some reason Toph seemed close to Zuko for some part of Book 3 (possibly because they both suffered a troubled childhood), being the first one to trust him when he reappeared after the eclipse. Additionally, in Sozin's Comet: Part I, she claimed everyone else had gone on a 'life-changing field trip' with Zuko and it was her turn when she wanted to pair up with Zuko to find Aang and subsequently started telling him stories about her childhood, although she backed off after he seemed uninterested in her childhood.

One of Toph's most obvious traits involves her very poor personal hygiene. She has been seen picking her nose, spitting, and belching loudly, which is odd considering she belongs to a wealthy family. She is also usually covered in dirt or, as she calls it, "a healthy coating of earth". Despite her uncouth habits, Toph is in fact well-educated in the manners and bearings of high society, which she only chooses to ignore.

Name

Toph is the only character within the series to express a surname, "Bei Fong". In "The Serpent Pass," Toph's passport reads as 土國頭等護照北方拓芙 (tǔ guó tóu děng hù zhào běi fāng tuò fú) which translate as 'Earth Kingdom First Class Passport: Bei Fong Toph'. Here, her name means 'supported lotus', which matches her parents' view of their daughter as a flower in need of protection. In "Tales of Ba Sing Se", her name was written as 托 夫 (Tuō Fū), which means "entrusted man". In "The Earth King," on the document from home, her name is reverted back to 拓芙. Her last name Bei Fong (北 方) is the Mandarin pronunciation for the word "North". The word 托 (Tuō) also means 'to support in one's palm' and the word used for child care and is usually a prefix to another Fù (付) that means "pay".

Earthbending

A visual of Toph's ability to feel vibrations traveling through the ground.

While the Earthbending style used by most Earthbenders is rooted in the Hung Gar style of Kung Fu, Toph's style is uniquely based on Chu Gar Southern Praying Mantis Kung Fu. Though blind, Toph has the unique ability to use Earthbending to "feel" even the most minute vibrations in the earth, be it the presence of trees and buildings or the march of ants several meters away. Through this heightened seismic sense, she can visualize where people are, their relative distance to her, and their physical build. This sense provides her with a distinct advantage when facing other Earthbenders in combat, as they characteristically require contact with the ground and extract rocks from their surroundings. As another result of her blindness, Toph has acquired an acute sense of hearing, enabling her to recognize people by the sound of their voices, figure out a person's physical appearance by the way they sound and home in on distant conversations. Toph also has the ability to sense when a person is lying by feeling the vibrations of their heartbeat, although it does not work against highly trained and focused individuals who can monitor their own heartbeat (such as Azula).

Unfortunately, due to her dependency on vibrations in the earth, Toph is left considerably vulnerable to attacks initiated in midair or opponents who require little constant contact with the ground, such as Aang. Terrain that impairs Toph's ability to sense vibrations also hinders her abilities; she has some difficulty with sand, which constantly shifts and lacks solidity, preventing her from accurately "feeling" her surroundings. Since Toph needs her feet to "feel" the earth in order to perform Earthbending, she becomes truly "blind" if her feet (specifically, the soles of her feet) are badly damaged, as shown when Zuko accidentally burned her feet. As further illustrations of her affinity with the earth, Toph does not know how to swim and expresses an aversion to flying as well as travelling underwater in a submarine.

Toph is the only known Earthbender with the ability to bend metal. When Toph is seen concentrating in her iron prison, the sadhu known as Guru Pathik explains to Aang in a parallel scene that metal is refined Earth. As a result of her ability to feel the vibrations in earth, Toph is able to locate the impurities (the small fragments of earth) and manipulate them to "bend" the metal portion. Later on, Sokka gives Toph a small piece of meteorite, which she can easily mold into myriad shapes.

Toph is shown to be one of the world's most skilled Earthbenders at the end of the series. She and Aang are the only two Earthbenders known to use the Badgermoles' Earthsight ability. She is also the only known metalbender as well as becoming proficient in Sandbending, even making an incredibly detailed sand sculpture of Ba Sing Se.

External Links

• Toph at Nick.com