In the fantasy genre novels (generally medieval fantasy) the world and its magic is based in the four great basic elements Water, Earth, Fire and Air/Wind and usually these basic elements results in advanced forms: Ice (derived from water), Metal (derived from earth) and Lightning (derived from wind). Which is the fourth advanced element?
Perhaps poison? some consider it a seperate element It can also be: light, darkness, void, creation...
Plant? Edit; I think advanced elements are like 2 of the basic combined: Fire + Earth = Metal Wind + Water = Lightning Water + ??? = Ice Earth + Water = Plant etc. tho it depends on the novel.
In Avatar TLAB, lightning came from fire. I think it's more scientifically accurate for it to come from wind/air (as far as fantasy science gets anyway). Anywho, for fire, there was a dude who shot "fire beams" with his mind. I think that could possibly be "explained" by plasma i.e., a superheated ionised gas. I'd say plasma is the advanced element of fire.
water/earth = wood water/air = ice air/fire = lightning (edit: in some novels lightning is also just an element in itself) it works like this in some novels in some cultivation novels with spirit roots, ice for example is simply a mutated water spirit root, metal is mutated earth spirit root. so looking for advanced elements is hard as water, earth, fire and air are simply the 4 base life elements, fire for example is just hotter fire untill you combine it with another element and then it becomes magma/lava or lightning or steam/fog(lol, cuz u know.. fire and water) depending on the element you combine it with? advanced elements could also be negative elements like (these negative elements are just some shit im pulling out of my brain so feel free to ignore them) void/negative which is the opposite of air/positive (dont feel that this is correct as void is more of a space-ish type of power) salt/negative, earth/positive (for some reason the salt element is op as fuck in some stories, dunno why but ... here it is anyways)
Forget about this above. So we got "Ice (derived from water), Metal (derived from earth) and Lightning (derived from wind)" right? then it got to be Explosion magic (derived from fire) There is your answer.
science doesn't really translate to elementalism very well, but if the advanced water (which is fires opposite) removes energy from the atoms to freeze, then advanced fire would be to add energy to the atoms to heat? so it's not super impressive sounding, but heat, melt, vaporize??
I prefer an advanced elemental system.. 1 Plasma 2 Liquid 3 Solid 4 Gas Advanced elements... 5 Electromagnetic 6 Weak Nuclear 7 Strong Nuclear 8 Gravity.
How come these ones are the advance elements when they were considered to be the driving force that created 1-4?
I thought of that too but I think its light based but fire also releases light then what is fire's drawback? It's slow compared to the other presented elements but since lightning is already presented another light based element destroys the purpose of wind so we go through around that so that's why I came up with explosion.