Talk:Amon/@comment-69.126.161.239-20120731035040

With all this debate about whether or not Amon actually believed in his own rhetoric or not going around, I'd like to put this little meta-analysis out here:

The scene in which Tarrlok reveals Amon's true backstory and states that he believes Noatak genuinely believed that bending was the root of all evil is a very blatant exposition dump, and there's very little arguing that. If you look at exposition dumps in general, we're usually supposed to take what's said at face value. While exposition dumps sometimes turn out to be red herrings, it's pretty much guaranteed from what I've seen of such cases that the revelation about the false infodump will be very obvious so as to avoid confusion. While it's possible to point to the borderline personality cult Amon developed around himself as counter evidence to Tarrlok's infodump, those were introduced prior to the infodump, which naturally takes precedence over prior events in the story. As such, I think it's fairly safe to conclude that Amon was not in it for power (or more likely was deluding himself into thinking personal power and his father's expectations had nothing to do with it and his motive was completely selfless), and did indeed see his own bending and that of others as an inherently immoral power.