Talk:Amon/@comment-5179242-20120615224726

A lot of people have been saying that Amon isn't really a bad guy. They say that Amon is just a person who was mentally scarred as a kid (after his parents were extorted) and lost his mind. After all, what he really wants is plain old equality, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that. In real life, we've always looked up to protesters as being role models (Ghandi, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr.). Their actions have made our world a better place, and it's hard to imagine modern day society without them.

But Amon is very different from these protesters. Everyone I mentioned above strived for equality through the preservation of peace and basic human rights. Amon is trying to enforce equality through chaos. But chaos, sometimes at the unwillingness of the aggressor, is what destroys equality. My argument is that Amon cannot be considered a good guy in any way whatsoever. Why?

Because he does not see the beauty of the gift of human life.

If I was Amon and my parents were murdered by benders, I could certainly never look at life the same way again. It has been noted by psychologists that children who undergo traumatic experiences tend to look at human nature and society as being cruel, abandoning, reckless. They lose the ability to see why people want to live. Amon cannot see any beauty in the cold world he lives in - the same world that killed his family and turned his back on him. He cannot see the beauty in nature. He cannot see the beauty of children. He cannot feel sympathy for those who have been hurt (mentally or physically). Simple things we enjoy so much in life (getting a gift for Christmas, riding a bike, playing a soccer game, walking in the woods) are all meaningless to Amon. He does not see that non-benders are humans as well, that they have children, that they have jobs, that they are married, that they feel emotion. This is why he is evil. Looking back at The Last Airbender, the reason why we hated Firebenders so much was because they commited genocide on Airbenders. They did not see the beauty of their culture, that they were, in essentiality, just like them.