To be honest, I've always found the arrow and other symbols connected with Reddie confusing and meaningless ever since I was a kid. The winds in a tornado, for instance, do not go down(it goes around and around)--and nor does fire(it goes up). WATER wants to go downward if it can, not either of those. And I've never ever EVER understood what the one on his chest denotes. So it makes little difference to me.
I would suggest, however, that--speaking as someone who was reading comics since Alan Moore started all this "elemental" guff--I am sick to death of DC's use of it, whether in Firestorm, here, or adapting it to the Green Lanterns by pretending that only the ROYGBIV spectrum exists and only 7 emotions/drives exist. The last times I found it interesting were Mark Millar's "trials" story with Swamp Thing, and Jamie Delano's exploration of "the Red" in ANIMAL MAN(which I'm surprised no one else has picked up & run with). There are other motifs, and ones that are more complex, interesting and...less classical or medieval.
The thing about the Aristotelian "elements?" He meant them in the way we mean the word now. But he was wrong about that, as he was with most everything. None of them are. Water is a compound. Earth is a mixture of elements, including water, in fact, as well as air(like nitrogen). Fire is a chemical transitional/catalytic state between energy and matter. And air too is a mixture of elements, one of which is water. These barely even describe categories of things, let alone elements. The world is not made up of these four; these four are part of the world that is made up of things more basic and also more complex than that. It's not just tired; it's useless as a metaphor--it's gibberish. The world is made up of CHEMISTRY, not alchemy. And even further down, physics.
When I see this now, twenty years on since Alan Moore introduced it(though Gerry Conway did plant the seed where Reddie is concerned), I wonder when we'll get a comic based on a motif of the four humors or a flat earth. (Of course, DC has always been one for simplistic cosmologies; think of the Silver Age view in DC of the cosmic battle between Good and Evil, embodied in Earth-3)And I have to wonder just how much can be gotten out of hammering pre-existing stuff into the motif at this point. I dunno, just, yawn.