jeong jeong stan account

i think the reason i can't get behind the bender/nonbender conflicts as they're presented in the atla movie & lok is that in atla, the primary bending-based oppression is firebending vs literally every other type of bending - the genocide of the air nomads and southern waterbenders, the treatment of earthbenders in "imprisoned". in the southern water tribe and many parts of the earth kingdom, the idea of nonbenders being oppressed by benders would be completely ridiculous. you're hiding your bender loved ones from the people who want to take them away. maybe fire nation nonbenders would feel oppressed by benders in their own country, but they're not exactly being oppressed by water and earth benders. the idea that people 10 years after this war would think of bender and nonbender as more meaningful distinctions than nation just does not make sense to me. i can maybe be a bit more forgiving of lok bc it's later in the timeline & specific to a city with more unity amongst nations (thus allowing new divides to emerge) but i still don't feel like there was a ton of acknowledgement that nation was the primary axis of oppression for 100 years

At least in the Earth Kingdom we are shown that bending soldiers who aren’t actively on the front lines / engaging in combat against the Fire Nation were fully willing to abuse their power and authority against a largely non-bending villager population. Probably those divides went fairly deep and went deeper once the war ended, so it makes sense for at least one nation to feel that way.

to be clear, i didn’t enjoy anything about the movie. not a single damn thing. but to claim that it “focused too much on aang” is not a critique, but a complaint. a stupid complaint at that. anyone who disliked the aang movie because there was too much aang in their aang movie about aang is simply not aligned with me. personally, I don’t think the movie did aang justice at all, but that’s another matter entirely.