Toph Bei Fong (北方 拓芙) is a character in Nickelodeon's animated television series Avatar: The Last Airbender. The character was voiced by Jessie Flower.
Toph 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.
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.[1]
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.
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".[5] Despite her uncouth habits, Toph is in fact well-educated in the manners and bearings of high society, which she only chooses to ignore.
Toph's way of 'seeing'
