Is there a minimum amount of a substance required to make an elemental?
From what's implied, possibly.
Is there a maximum size?
The air elementals are clouds, aren’t clouds made of water?
Well, they're made of water vapor, so technically, yes. Admittedly, the reason they're personified as clouds is prolly because you can't really see air (or what defines air).
Element City
Why are elements that are dangerous to each other choosing to live together?
Actually, the water, air, and earth elementals aren't so much dangerous to each other and, actually, can be beneficial to one another (plants on the earth elementals give out oxygen which the air elementals absorb and water kinda feeds into both of 'em).
Who is making all of these machines and internal combustion engines?
Isn’t it incredibly unsafe to have water people working with concrete? Should that be restricted to other elements for safety reasons?
Casual Murder
Did the air ball player devour his competition to come back from a 40 point deficit?
Wade in the sponge:
How on earth did Wade get out of the sponge?! Cause there's no way he could get out of a sponge on his own.
Presumably someone wrung him out once they found him.
That's not how fire works, y'all
Ember got a pamphlet for those whose businesses are about to shut down and kept it without burning it until she solved the water problem, yet the fire people still have to be very careful around earth people and plants?
Her dress is fireproof and it's implied (though not shown) she was keeping the pamphlet in her pocket. As for her holding it, it seems fire people can restrain the heat in their hands if they try.
My guess is that the Elementals can control their elements to a degree, so she could hold a pamphlet without it burning. As far as why fire has to be careful around the Earth people is because the Earth people have plants on them, but they're otherwise fine since their true bodies are made of dirt, which is less flammable than plants.
What did they do with the leak?
Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough, but I didn't see anything suggesting it was fully fixed by the end, nor any repercussion for the allegedly foolproof fix failing.
Because it's not really important. It's just there to drive the primary conflict.
Given that it nearly killed all the people of Fire Town, it's not crazy to assume that a city crew was sent to properly fix it, if only to prevent a class-action lawsuit.
The only reason the leak wasn't repaired properly the first time is because the construction team was mad at Wade so wouldn't make it a priority out of spite. Now that the threat is obvious and known to the public they'll fix it up immediately.
How do the Fire Elementals clean?
If they have no water (which I'm assuming after the other elements moved into Fire Town they had to put water back) how do they do dishes, clean up the floors, etc? I know you can clean a lot with scrubbing and heat.
Maybe they use alcohol-based cleaning products? Alcohol strengthens fire instead of putting it out, and it has been known to kill germs (it's one of the most common ingredients in hand sanitizer).
We see Cinder with a spray bottle of water that she uses to break up kissing couples. Presumably that same spray bottle is used for cleaning.
How do Elements die?
Ember's grandma died by vanishing. But fire mainly "dies" when doused or it runs out of fuel or oxygen. That doesn't seem to be the case with Ember's grandma. Also how did Wade's dad die? Did he evaporate and never re-condensate? I get that they want to give the elements human relatability, but questions in general are raised.
As portrayed on screen, it seemed like Ember's Grandma "ran out of fuel". That she didn't have anything left to burn, and was gone. As for Wade's dad? Maybe he couldn't hold himself together anymore and collapsed in a splash, with his water too spread out to reform.
A way of looking at it is that fire people are born with x-amount of fuel in their bodies and, as they get older, it slowly starts to run out (not unlike how cell replication/replacement starts to slow as one ages). Water elementals probably operate in a similar way, except, in their case, they prolly evaporate overtime. The Earth elementals prolly just erode away (or their plant parts die off/stop growing) and INS how the air ones might die but I guess they'd just disperse and fade away. Another, bigger question is "How'd Elementals reproduce?"
Cement
Why didn't those construction workers who were in stuck in cement just get out? They are water after all, and they could squeeze through.
Some cements aren't porous, so maybe the kind of cement they used wasn't porous or porous enough.
How did they find out?
How did Ember's parents find out that Gale cancelled the ticket?
I'm guessing they've used a ticket app on their phones.
Elements and Elementals
I know the whole point is that Elements can mix and mingle, but we clearly see that water puts out fire, and fire boils water painfully, in the Elemental world. How do Water people not put out Fire people, or Fire people boil Water people alive?
Same as with the pamphlet above: Ember's able to restrain the heat in her hands. Water people can "go with the flow" in a larger body of water (see the kids swimming around Wade's family's floor pool) but can also concentrate to maintain their surface tension to hold things. It probably takes concentration from each of them to touch without turning to steam, but it's possible.
Why was the air bubble shrinking?
When Gale creates an air bubble so that Ember can see the flowers in the flooded garden, it shrinks over time, and Wade advises Ember to take smaller breaths to keep it from shrinking too quickly. But both human respiration and fire combustion work by primarily combining carbon (from human food or from the coal and wood we see fire elementals eating) with oxygen to create carbon dioxide. Replacing the oxygen in air with carbon dioxide doesn't change its gas pressure (one mole of O2 is transformed into one mole of CO2), and air is predominantly nitrogen anyway. A human breathing, or a fire burning, shouldn't change the amount of gas in a sealed container, just its composition.
Rule of Perception — A shrinking air bubble conveys urgency and claustrophobia as Ember is closer to being "crushed" or "flooded". Whereas "Your air bubble hasn't changed in appearance but trust me, you are very low on oxygen!" is a harder sell.
What the pipes are doing there?
If the pipes are not supposed to have water, why the store still has them? Water is hazardous for fire people, so plumbing shouldn't have utility for them.
The plot of land was a derelict when Bernie found it: nobody had deliberately removed the pipes. He didn't completely remove them when he was fixing up the land to build a shop on it, because he's not a professional builder.
