Talk:Equalists/@comment-75.72.206.224-20120730022430/@comment-4211718-20120807055959

I never really saw the benders as a minority at all, I've always seen it as incredibly close to a 50/50 split if anything, especially from The Last Airbender...I mean, there were benders in that everywhere you looked except for places like the Southern Water Tribe where the Fire Nation had pretty much exterminated them all, and the Earth Kingdom to some extent where the Earthbenders would all mostly be off on the front lines. Ba Sing Se though, there were plenty of Earthbenders present there. Bryke can claim they envisioned benders as the minority all they want, but personally I feel they did a really terrible job of showing that so far, benders have always been just about plentiful as non-benders and neither really seems to outnumber the other. As for non-benders not having high positions, most of these are in AtLA but still, it applies. The Earth King wasn't strictly a bender, I can't speak for any of the past Earth Kings, but Kuei sure wasn't an Earthbender, yet he was ruler over the biggest of all the Four Nations. And the two chiefs of the Water Tribes were non-benders, Yue, the heir to the Northern Water Tribe's leadership position was a non-bender, Mai's family were non-benders, Toph's parents, the Fire Nation guy who led the attack on the Mechanist's Air Temple and commanded the drill under Azula at Ba Sing Se, or in Legend of Korra the Sato family or the owner of Cabbage Corp...I could go on, but that would be a rather long list. My point is that there are just as many non-benders in high or influential positions as there non-benders.

Adressing some of that other stuff in your opening paragraph now, using a specific talent for a specific job is not oppression or discrmination of any sort, having Firebenders is an easy, effective, and easily renewable source of energy, it would be idiotic to not use it, just because a non-bender can't do it doesn't make it oppression anymore than some random person in the real world not being able to do something. Not everyone is suited or can do every task on a proffessional level. That matter is no different. The council is made up of representatives of the Four Nations, two of which have no problem with and often do have non-bending leaders (Earth Kingdom and Northern/Southern Water Tribes) and one of which doesn't even have a proper leadership at all (Air Nomads, it's a little different than in Aang's day of course since the only Air Nomads are one family, but still), it has nothing to do with the Four Nations being separated by their bending disciplines, it's only about the Four Nations, and I will just say it here and now that the Council is not limited to benders either as when Aang was still alive Sokka was pretty much the chairman of the Council and we also see in the flashback an Air Acolyte in the Air Nomad seat on the Council.

Chi-blocking was never illegal or training in it, that hideout was captured and the people there arrested because it was an Equalist training center, whatever the goals of the Equalists might be, they are terrorists and the government has every right to treat them as such. If you don't want to be arrested, don't sign up to train Chi-blocking in a basement adorned and plastered with huge banners of Amon and his face plastered everywhere. It's no different than busting into and arresting the people in a hideout belonging to groups like the IRA. And no one has ever died from being frozen in Avatar before, have you forgotten Katara freezing herself and Azula, or the people she froze on Zuko's boat in the second episode of AtLA? And that Triple Threat thug Korra froze the head of in the first episode of LoK as well, he was perfectly fine too. Why should freezing people change now?

Showing a great many Equalists actually doesn't really mean anything if you don't also show a reason for their being so many. Some things you can get away with not really giving a reason for or showing/explaining, but something like the Equalists and reasons they may or may not for joining up is not one of them. You're perfectly right, oppression doesn't need to be showed every other episode, but you need to show enough to make the claims of the people saying they're oppressed or trying to combat oppression seem even remotely legitimate...Legend of Korra did not do this. We never saw any oppression at all, except for Tarrlok's law in "When Extremes Meet", which was created in response to the actions of the Equalists, and if they weren't staging an active revolution or trying to get what they want through violence, then Tarrlok's law would never have even come up or been passed.