Do you think Amon (from what we were shown) truly beleived in his cause? And I ask the same for Zaheer. I would say yes to both, Amon I feel is a bit harder because we never got scenes like Zaheer talking to some random citizen to show them when they arent around a crowd but if his backstory and Tarrlocks lines about "always wanting things to be equal" mean anything then I would say yes to Amon, and Zaheer as well. I only ask cause I see people all the time who think both were just power hungry.
I’m sorry if I’m answering this late, sometimes Ally will open asks but not answer them so the notification goes away (and vice versa on my part).
I do think Amon believed in his cause but not necessarily for the reasons he presents. He strikes me as an overly righteous teenager thinking his way of standing up to bullies is correct, despite his methods, simply because he’s on the right side of history in his mind. He’s a self-hating bender, and like any self-hating member of a community, he wants to eradicate his kind. So does he believe in his cause? Yes he believes benders should be destroyed, but I don’t think equality plays as much a part in it as his just very angry and hating nature when it comes to bending. He didn’t look at the world and say “non-benders are oppressed let’s help them” he looked at his life and said “my father used bending to be a bully and I don’t want anyone to do that so I’m going to use the disgruntled non-benders of the world to my advantage.” Power hungry? I don’t think so, I don’t think he had designs to become president or anything like that, I think he just wanted what he wanted. I do however think he liked having power over others through fear tactics and his unique bloodbending ability, but I don’t think he actively sought and desired power. He’s an interesting villain and it’s even more interesting they put something as complicated as a self-hating, hypocritical ruler of a grassroots movement in a children’s show because it is very complicated and a giant grey area.
Zaheer didn’t want equality, he was a very zealot believer in a specific type of natural order. It’s hard to tell if his belief in anarchy stems from a dislike of authority (because we didn’t get a backstory on him) or if is a truly and purely pious belief. He’s a very calm man so it’s hard to read his emotions, even at his most emotional he barely bat and eyelash. I don’t think Zaheer was power hungry, at least not in the way people think. He was knowledge hungry and he thought himself better than everyone else, but you can argue knowledge is simply a different type of power. It’s possible the root of all that he did was a subconscious desire for power over others and you wouldn’t be wrong because he has no backstory and therefore anything is far game. But where it stands Zaheer believed in his cause more than Amon believed in his own.
