Avatar: The Last Airbender's Toph Beifong's Metalbending Academy, Explained

Spoiler warning. This breakdown covers the whole graphic novel, ending included.

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With the six trilogies on our list of Avatar comics set between the show and Korra all wrapped up, it's time for the standalone books. We're starting with Toph Beifong's Metalbending Academy, since it's the earliest one in the timeline. It takes place after The Rift, when Toph's school is up and running, and before Smoke and Shadow.

Dark Horse released it on February 17, 2021, as a single 80-page graphic novel. Faith Erin Hicks wrote it with help from Tim Hedrick, one of the original show's writers, while Peter Wartman (Imbalance) drew it and Adele Matera handled the colors (Dark Horse).

Why is Toph so bored?

The book opens with the academy doing better than ever. Earthen Fire Industries, the company Toph's dad helps run, paid for new buildings, so the students finally have real beds and don't have to sleep on the ground. Toph still teaches metalbending for free, and the whole operation pretty much runs itself.

Her first three students, Penga, Ho Tun and The Dark One, now teach the beginner classes. Scouts find new metalbenders, and assistants handle the bills. Toph's day has turned into the same loop every single time, which means she wakes up, eats, teaches kids and goes to sleep (Avatar Wiki).

That's a rough spot for the girl who invented metalbending while escaping a metal cage, and who used to win tournaments as the Blind Bandit for fun. Now she runs a school so smoothly that nobody really needs her anymore, and she hates it.

Who are Sokka and Suki taking her to see?

Sokka and Suki show up for a visit, and Suki promises to shake up Toph's routine. Toph is hoping for a fight or an adventure, so she's less than thrilled when the surprise turns out to be concert tickets.

This is where the book drops its best deep cut. Sokka explains that before they met Toph, he, Katara and Aang got stuck in a cave near Omashu with some traveling musicians. "It turned out the cave was actually a secret tunnel," he says. Those musicians are Chong, Lily and Moku from the Season 1 episode The Cave of Two Lovers, and they've since become a hit band called Trustfully in Love.

Suki is a huge fan who knows every song, and when Toph asks Sokka how many songs they have, he says "too many" (a man who has heard Secret Tunnel live has earned that opinion). The concert runs about three hours, and Toph walks out partway through and leaves Sokka behind.

Here's the official live reading of the book from the Avatar Legends channel, where Michaela Murphy (Toph), Jennie Kwan (Suki) and Jack De Sena (Sokka) read their parts alongside Hicks and Wartman.

What does Toph find in the underground tournament?

Walking through Yu Dao alone, Toph feels a vibration in the ground that seems like earthbending but isn't quite right. She follows it to the back of a building and finds an illegal bending tournament. A boy named Sun dodges an earthbending attack and fires back with lava, which surprises Toph since lavabending is incredibly rare.

The crowd recognizes her as the Avatar's earthbending teacher, and the whole place clears out when someone shouts that "the man" is shutting the event down, even though Toph insists she only wanted to watch.

Why do Toph's students enter the tournament?

Back at the academy, Toph cuts her teachers' weekly reports short and walks away mid-sentence, which leaves Penga, Ho Tun and The Dark One wondering what's wrong. Ho Tun has a theory. Toph learned to fight in brutal tournaments and invented metalbending during a war, and now she runs a school with soft beds, which might be what's bugging her.

When Ho Tun hears new students talking about an underground tournament, he decides the three of them should enter it to prove they're tough too. Penga and The Dark One think it's a bad idea. They go anyway, because Beifong metalbenders never leave a friend behind, which is a pretty sweet line for three people who started out as Toph's punching bags.

What do Toph and Chong talk about?

The next night, Toph goes back looking for the tournament and literally runs into Chong, who's hiding from a crowd of fans. She throws up a rock wall to hide him, and the two of them end up having the most honest conversation in the book.

Toph admits the academy makes her proud, but her life feels dull, and the fighters she used to admire now treat her like the enemy. Chong says the band used to play just for love, and money changed how it felt. It's a surprisingly grown-up talk, and it's the heart of the whole story. Both of them got exactly what they wanted, and both of them miss how it felt before.

What happens when the warehouse collapses?

Toph feels the vibration again, launches herself and Chong onto a warehouse roof, and peeks through a hole at the fights below. Chong describes three new fighters to her, including one shaped like a potato and one with great shoes, and Toph realizes they're her own students. She is not happy.

In the ring, Sun faces a waterbender who freezes the floor. Sun slips, touches the ground and lava bursts out everywhere. He can't control it, the crowd panics and the warehouse starts coming down. Penga tries to hold up a metal beam, but it crashes down and traps people.

Toph bursts in, drops Chong off the roof and tells him to help her students. The three of them lift beams to open escape routes. When a metal beam flies at Sun, he throws up his hands like he's metalbending it, but it's Toph who redirects it. She clears the exit and tells him flatly that he isn't a metalbender.

How does Toph Beifong's Metalbending Academy end?

Once everyone's out, Sun and his friends try to run, so Toph ties him up with a strip of metal, and his friend explains that "he doesn't mean to lavabend, it just happens sometimes." That changes everything for Toph.

She invites Sun and his friends to the Beifong Metalbending Academy, where he can learn to control his lavabending and pick up metalbending from "three of the best metalbending teachers in the Earth Kingdom." Sun says yes, and they all walk back to the academy together. Toph finally has a real challenge again, and her students finally get the credit they wanted.

Is Toph Beifong's Metalbending Academy worth reading?

My read is yes, especially if Toph is your favorite (and let's be honest, she's a lot of people's favorite). It's short, funny and full of fan service that actually means something. Bringing back the secret tunnel band could have been a cheap joke, but Hicks uses Chong to say something real about growing up and losing the thrill of the thing you love.

It also plants some fun seeds for The Legend of Korra. A school full of metalbenders feels like the first step toward Toph's Metalbending Police Force in Republic City, and Sun's wild lavabending is a nice early look at the power Bolin and Ghazan would show off decades later.

The only real downside is the length, since at 80 pages it's over fast and the tournament ends right when it gets good. Still, as a Toph character study, it nails who she is, because she doesn't want an easy life. She wants something worth fighting for.

If you want to read it, it's available as a standalone paperback, and it's also collected in Team Avatar Treasury with Katara and the Pirate's Silver and Suki, Alone.

• Avatar: The Last Airbender, Toph Beifong's Metalbending Academy
• Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Rift Omnibus (the story right before it)

Which standalone should we break down next? Tell us in the comments.

More Avatar coverage is right here.

Header image is the cover of Toph Beifong's Metalbending Academy from Dark Horse Comics. In-article panels are from Dark Horse's official preview, art by Peter Wartman with colors by Adele Matera.