Honestly water is a pretty shit element. I love to drink it but damn it's nowhere as cool as literally every other element. If I was born into a magical fantasy world and was assigned the element water as my personal element I would drown myself in a pool of water on the slim chance I get isekai'd into a new fantasy world where my assigned element isn't water.
Really? I mean, think about what you could do if you can really control water. Move it, change state, etc. down to the molecular level. Not some limited splashy-splashy effect from a fantasy movie.
There’s water in stone, that when heated, will cause it to explode.
Destructive weather, you can flood or prevent flooding.
Exsanguinate anything living.
Manipulate and move anything with water. Living things. Earth. Move clouds.
Freeze things. Flash them to steam. Slice them with high pressure water streams.
I dunno, man. If you can really control H2O with no personal cost, it’s probably one of the most powerful “elements” out there. You could move mountains.
I feel like a similar argument could be made for any of the other main elements.
Fire - control heat to the point you control the vibration speed of subatomic particles and cause nuclear explosions at will or draw the heat out of something to absolute zero and cause molecular collapse.
Earth - control of carbon, metal, and magnetism. Pull the iron out your opponent's blood, decay their carbon body into a graphite shell, or turn your skin to diamond for defense.
Wind - control of air, lightning, and the 3d spacial atmosphere. Manipulate the space in-between particles and flow of electricity/ elections to basically control everything.
21st of September - Love was changin' the minds of pretenders.
Fantasy interpretations often miss out that fact that if we really had a 'four element' system governing the world then everything would be made up of those four elements in differing amounts. So any liquid is presumably going to be mostly water. Perhaps oil is a mix of water and earth, or water with fire trapped in it (makes sense, right?), trees are mostly earth but clearly some water, and so on.
True manipulation of a single element would be insanely powerful because it would give you some degree of control over everything. Which, I suppose, is why we don't get that interpretation - we get a quite literal one. Water gives you control over pure water and not much else.
i'd be quite happy with just the abilities shown in ATLA, outside of moon shenanigans
i kinda need water to live, so being able to recycle my sweat and urine is really quite convenient! And then it can be controlled to move things or slice stuff, which is just the icing on the cake!