Why I Dislike Amon and Kuvira
Note: While I don’t think The Legend of Korra (TLOK) is as good as Avatar: The Last Airbender (ATLA), I still think it is a pretty good show, and that 99.9% of its problems can be traced to Nick not giving Bryke a full four seasons with a proper budget from the outset. However, I don’t think any piece of fiction is perfect, hence why I criticize TLOK like I do ATLA.
Amon and Kuvira are two characters who are important to TLOK’s narrative not only on an individual, character level, but also because they represent previously unaddressed social issues in ATLA’s world as well.
This is because in Amon’s case, the Equalist movement he heads deals with an important issue that the original ATLA glosses over at best: the issue of benders being innately superior to non-benders.
Or more specifically, the fact that, unless you are a highly trained and/or highly gifted non-bender like Piandao, Mai, Ty Lee, Suki, or Sokka, your bog standard bender who has the slightest amount of training has a nigh-insurmountable power advantage, and thus has every incentive to lord their unearned power over non-benders.
Meanwhile, Kuvira deals with an issue that up until her becoming the main villain of Season 4 was barely addressed in TLOK’s intro and glossed over in the ATLA comics: how would Earth Kingdomers feel about the United Republic being formed from the Fire Nation’s oldest Earth Kingdom colonies.
Or more specifically, how, after getting pressured by Fire National colonialists and those close to them, King Kuei and Avatar Aang worked with Fire Lord Zuko to give the oldest colonists the option of self-determination, which they exercised to form the United Republic.
This, even though the oldest colonies were dominated politically and economically by the Fire Nationalist colonists and their close allies, with the marginalized Earth Kingdomer masses having little to no say in regards to the above mentioned process.
(If you disagree with my characterization of how Earth Kingdomers would view the resolution of the Yu Dao crisis, please check out The Problem with Yu Dao and A Potential Solution where I go into much more detail about this topic.)
However, it is precisely because Amon and Kuvira represent previously unaddressed social issues in ATLA’s world that I dislike them.
For in Amon’s case, before his identity was revealed, I was interested to see how the Krew would defeat him, let alone defeat the Equalist Movement since it wasn’t a problem that could be punched.
However, after his identity was revealed, I quickly soured on his character since, with him being a psychic, 24/7 bloodbender, it became apparent that the only way to beat him would be having an Avatar State Korra fight him or through a deus ex machina, with the latter being the way how he was defeated.
And I started disliking him once it became clear that the Equalist movement died off just because he was exposed as a fraud and Republic City’s all-bender council got replaced by a democratically elected unitary executive, one who so far has been non-benders due to non-benders numerical dominance.
This is because the underlying issue of benders having an innate advantage over non-benders never really got resolved, and so I hate how Amon’s character was used to avoid a real discussion or give any real solutions to said problem.
Especially since in real life, even if a movement’s leader is exposed as a fraud, the movement, or at least some variation of it, will continue to persist since movements, or more specifically, underlying issues in society, create leaders, not the other way around.
Meanwhile, I dislike Kuvira because, despite growing up in a world where the horrors of the Hundred Year War and the failures of the Hundred Year War era Fire Nation were surely taught to children like her, she decided to repeat them with her reeducation camps and illegal and immoral war of conquest.
(Yes, I know canonically Kuvira did not know about everything that occurred in the reeducation camps, but even if that is the case, I still hold her fully responsible for the horrors they inflicted.)
(This is because commanders/generals in the real world are responsible for the actions of their subordinates when it comes to war crimes, and more generally, leaders are generally responsible for the actions of their subordinates when their subordinates are acting within the scope of their relationship. Thus, I hold her to that standard, even if the war crimes tribunal of the United Republic doesn’t.)
(Also, her attempt to retake the United Republic was an illegal and immoral war of conquest since the United Republic had been a sovereign state for over 70 years, with its sovereignty recognized by all the other nations in the world, including the Earth Empire’s predecessor, the Earth Kingdom. Moreover, even if it hasn’t been said explicitly yet in canon material, I am pretty sure in the 70-odd years between the end of ATLA and the start of TLOK the five nations signed treaties making wars of conquest illegal.)
This, even though her adopted grandma fought in the War and was friends with Fire Nationals who grew up in the Hundred Year War era Fire Nation, and more likely than not told her about her and her Fire National friends experiences.
And why does she do all that? Not because she actually believes that the way the United Republic was formed was immoral and an act of injustice against the Earth Kingdom, but because of unresolved abandonment issues.
And when she “redeems” herself, she does the bare minimum before finally admitting her fault and getting house arrest in Zafou, the closest thing to paradise on Earth.
I thought Kuvira could have been used to tell a story about the evils of revanchism, and how an inability to let go of past territorial injustices and focus on the present leads people to becoming the very monsters they claim to be fighting against.
That and what steps an authoritarian conqueror would have to take to credibly redeem themselves not only in the world’s eyes, but also in the eyes of their people, who they betrayed and misled with their lies about peace and prosperity through violence and subjugation.
Instead, we instead essentially get a sane, adult Azula who doesn’t have the excuse of indoctrination and got a really undeserved and unearned redemption that fanfics often give to a heavily woobified Azula.
This, all while never directly addressing the Earth Kingdom’s lingering resentment towards the United Republic, nor ever giving a concrete resolution to said resentment.
So to conclude, I dislike Amon and Kuvira’s characters because the resolution of their arcs were not only unsatisfying on a personal level, but also ruined the potential to meaningfully address key issues present in TLOK’s world, thus weakening TLOK as a whole.