I have a question that me and some of my friends discussing. Do you consider bending in Avatar to be a form of magic? I have some friends who say yes and some who say no. I say yes just because I consider most things where humans have special powers/abilities without the means of technology to be magic. Most who have said no say that because they only consider traditional magic like Harry Potter, and fantasy related stuff to be magic. One of my friends says no because how it works is explained within the universe, so he doesn't see it as magic.
Well, the answer is basically yes and no. Bending itself isn't magic, but elements of it move into the realm of magic.
Magic is, broadly speaking, a phenomenon that is outside of people's comprehension. Which means that the computer I'm writing this post on right now technically qualifies as magic to me. My understanding of computer science is pretty limited so I can't explain why my computer functions, it just does and it allows me to do something 'unnatural' like communicate complex ideas with random strangers hundreds of miles away. An alternative argument is that true magic is not just not understood, but not understandable. So I could learn about computer science and learn to understand my laptop, even if I don't at present, which makes it not magic. But if I could simply never come to understand it no matter what, then it is. You could say some physical laws qualify as this. We know how light and gravity works, but not so much why they work this way. Why the speed of light is the limit of the universe. Quantum mechanics are like this as well.
With that said, the general sliding scale of fictional magic goes from scientific to numinous, and Avatar's magic falls somewhere squarely in the middle, with elements that go into the numinous side.
Bending is not an illusive or rare ability, like the Force in Star Wars. Roughly 33-50 people in the avatar world are born as benders. Everyone knows it exists and people who can perform it are not viewed with any kind of reverence or divinity. They're just folks that have an ability that others don't, that's all. This frames Bending in a practical light. In the TLA days, you weren't even considered to have an extreme physical advantage over others, because normal person who trained in some kind of martial art could match you (Ty Lee, Mei, Jet, etc). So for the vast majority of people, bending is just a practical skill. They don't even need to fully understand it, much like how I don't need to fully understand my laptop, to make it work in their practical lives.
However, there IS a mystic side to bending. In TLA, whenever one brings up higher understanding of bending, it's always to do with understanding some spiritual truth. This is mostly for fighters who have a dedication to perfect their craft. Most people don't and just like to use the practical aspects of bending. But people like Zuko and Azula and Toph go about how they understand bending as a life style, not just how to throw around elements. This brings in a spiritual aspect to bending that makes it somewhat religious in nature. Katara's waterbending is more physically based than others, but even that is symbolic and meditative in nature to how her culture is encouraged to be: flowing, shifting, changing, dynamic. And of course the air nomads were all monks. So while most people just use bending practically, when you dedicate your life to it, it takes on a spiritual aspect.
But going in even further than THAT is the Avatar. He's the bridge to the spiritual realm from the physical world. The spiritual realm (ignoring LoK), is a realm of beings that don't operate by any real world rules. A face stealer. A shape shifting panda. Dead people. The Moon Spirits. Beings who work with wholly different values than us. All these things are unnatural even to the normal rules of the avatar world, and the Avatar himself is the key to that world. That makes the Avatar basically the equivalent to what a wizard or angel would be in our world. A messenger from the divine sent to guide us. In this case, the divine isn't a judeo-christian god, but it is the very being of the universe, more in line with the eastern philosophies that the show is based on. And due to that divine connection, the avatar has abilities that normal people do not and have no understanding of how that works and confirms the existence of a world that defies explication even within the universe of Avatar itself. That's numinousity. That's magic.
TLDR: I remember one scene where Sokka was complaining to Katara about bending being an explainable, scientific phenomon, to which she pointed out the unexplainable stuff that Aang did. His reply was "That's avatar stuff, it doesn't count." So that's basically it. Bending itself is not a magical thing in Avatar because of how widespread it is but it can lead to what is 'true magic' if you delve deep enough into it.
Yet another wasted potential plotline that LoK could have delved into in it's more advanced setting. I would have killed for an episode to some kind of university where Korra learns about how people are studying bending using something akin to the scientific method.
