Talk:Amon/@comment-5385903-20130407155217/@comment-4662143-20130410044020

First, off, the "family killing firebender" wasn't "random" at all. He was a bending extortionist thug, like Lightning Bolt Zolt, Shady Shin, etc. He didn't want to kill Amon's (fictional) parents, because that would deprive him of steady income. He wanted them too scared to fight back, cowed into paying him protection money. The show establishes that this is a fairly common problem in urban life at this point in time, especially in RC, given how enthusiastically the crowd responds to Amon's story.

There are several possible reasons why many people think that the non-bender backstory should have been canon. One is that the actual canonical story was awful. It was so painfully cliched that I thought that it sounded like poorly written fanfiction that some prankster decided to animate. The "long lost brother" trope? Seriously? Is that the best that Bryke could come up with? I honestly expected better, and it felt like just about anything that wasn't so nauseatingly predictable would have been better, especially considering the sheer number of plot holes inherent in the canonical narrative. Like, Yakone, RC's most notorious crime boss goes missing and no one, not even Aang, bothers to look at the North Pole for him? And plastic surgery? The lamest deus ex machina ever! And how does any of that influence Amon's own Equalist views?

Further, the canonical backstory for Amon just makes him a run of the mill ATLA villain: a power hungry bending megalomaniac who manipulates people and uses idealistic rhetoric to sugarcoat and justify totalitarianism. Amon is thus put in the same mold as Sozin, Azulon, Ozai, and Long Feng, among others. What would have given his character depth would be to make him have legitimate grievances against the "bending establishment" and be motivated by true suffering at the hands of benders, causing him to resort to brutal measures to achieve a twisted version of "equality." Amon would thus be a deliciously nuanced "gray character" which, given that cartoons traditionally depict individuals as being monochromatic shades of black or white, would have made the show even more grim and realistic. One of the things that made characters like Zuko and Azula endearing was precisely this "gray" quality. In fact, it essentially defined Zuko's character arc. Amon seemed to be heading in that direction, until the finale suddenly made him into a dull Ozai-like figure gone mad with power, believing his own propaganda. The shift wasn't gradual at all, which is one of the things that made the finally seem so contrived, not to mention rushed.

Granted, unlike Ozai, Amon does show true remorse, but it is precisely this kind of emotional depth of the character that remains unexplored. The show hints at it, with their featuring, for instance, Tarrlock's repressive measures essentially proving Amon's rhetoric correct and making him seem less like a ruthless terrorist and more like a freedom fighter, but this isn't the focus of the show, even though it had tremendous potential. Further, the way the show revealed Amon's past was very sudden. The entire story was dumped upon viewers all at once in a single expository sequence via Tarrlok. It would have been better to reveal a tiny bit every once in a while at the end of an episode as a cliffhanger to build things up.

In addition, there are no major non-bending villains. With the exception of the minor character Jet, all villains and all gray characters are benders. Amon seemed like the only antagonist who gained power through sheer personal magnetism and legitimate aspiration, without intimidating people by throwing rocks or shooting flames with his mind. Amon wielded a different sort of power that could have taken the story in a whole new direction.

Further, the entire story is told from the perspective of the Avatar, and thus, viewers see events from a remarkably biased perspective. Seeing things from the perspective of the Avatar makes it seem like chatting with kings and spirits is perfectly normal. In reality, Aang, Korra, etc. are some of the world's most privileged individuals and travel in the highest of circles. Seeing things through the eyes of a non-bending Amon would have given us a much-needed look into the grim, earthy reality that everyone else experiences in the Avatar universe. No lunches with royalty, and no spiritual mumbo-jumbo, just the daily grind. Backbreaking labor, poverty, and social ostracization at the hands of a privileged caste from which they are permanently excluded from by accident of birth.

We see virtually none of this in ATLA or LOK. The best we get is Sokka's complaining about how he is useless to the group without bending. But even he achieves social advancement by merely associating with powerful benders. The Kyoshi warriors are non-benders, but they were presumably taught martial arts by Avatar Kyoshi herself, and their own influence and noterioity is gained through preserving her memory. Their significiance and influence is thus a pale imitation of hers. Benders have the Midas Touch in the Avatar universe; everything they do and everyone they deal with is important merely by virtue of association. It would be great to see how people who have no access to any of this power and privilege live. In Episode 7, one woman utters what I believe to be the most significant line of the entire season "Please, help us! You're our Avatar, too!" What's it like being a nonbender in a society dominated by benders? Do normal non-benders revere the Avatar the same way benders do? What do they expect the Avatar to do for them, specifically? What sort of "balance" do they expect Korra to restore for them in RC? These are questions the whole "Equalist Revolution" plotline should have dealt with. In fact, I would argue that you could make a series of comparable length to the first on this plotline alone. But the show didn't even scratch the surface and that was disappointing.

The Joker's conflicting stories about his scars was an excellent plot device in the Dark Knight, but it would not have worked with Amon. The Joker was backed by criminals, who only care about money and power. The Joker is thus able to use them as dumb muscle to execute his sadistic plans. Furthermore, note that he told those stories to his victims, in order to intimidte them. In contrast, Amon's power among the masses was rooted in very much in his charisma and hard-hitting oratory. Unlike Ozai who was mostly feared via an extensive imperial cult of personality, Amon was legitimately adored by the non-benders of RC, precisely because they saw him as one of them. They felt that he understood exactly what they were going through on a day to day basis, and was not willing to put up with extortion and bullying any longer. Indeed, Hiroshi's own sympathizing with the Equalists probably had to do with his believing that he and Amon faced the same problem. He transformed their pain into a deadly weapon that successfully brought a demonstrably corrupt and incompetant "bending establishment" to its knees. He gave non-bender frustrations a voice, and brought them dignity and respect that they had long been denied under the shadow of their bending brethren. This isn't "completely lame" at all; it's what makes his movement so realistic. He didn't just magically whip up a mass following out of nowhere, he assiduously built it up by carefully and strategically giving purpose to amorphous non-bender frustration. Giving conflicting stories about his origins makes no sense given this set up; if anything, it alienates his constituency.

Hope this helps clear things up.