Legend of Korra with Jacob! Episodes 15 and 16

I watched the original Avatar: The Last Airbender some time ago and I remember the basics of the world, but not a lot of specifics.  However, I remember liking it very much, so I thought I’d watch the follow up series.  Please no spoilers for this show, but if I’m forgetting something from the original series, feel free to remind me.  I will be spoiling episodes as I go along, naturally, so consider yourself warned.

Episode 15 + 16 - Civil Wars Part 1 + 2

I've gotten pretty recappy, which is pretty much the opposite of what I want to do and this blogs mission statement.  There's a lot of reasons for that, the chief is that recaps are easy and take less time or thought.  But that ends now.   It's time to dive deep into Avatarland and this episode is a great place to catch up on that since what happens is very straightforward, the Northern Water Tribe invades the Southern Water Tribe.  A resistance is formed, crushed, and re-established, everybody turns out to be corrupt and Korra realizes that she's very easily manipulated.

This episode raises a lot of questions about the political situation of Avatarland.   We know we have four "nations", the Fire, Air, Earth, and Water, being one Nation with two Tribes.  To keep them allied, we have Republic City and a council of a representative from each nation except Water, which got two.  But more on that later.   The combined Republic has it's own military, which seems to be mostly Firebenders from what I saw.  I do not recall any Water or Earthbending going on when they fought the Equalists.

What I do find very interesting is that the Northern Water Tribe has a significant and advanced military force of its own.  Does this mean that all the Nations have their own military as well?  The Northern Water Tribe invading the South would sort of be the equivalent to the USA sending an occupying force to Puerto Rico or Guam, if I understand the political situation (both the real world and the Avatar land situations) correctly.  I believe the South is not an independent nation, but then why did they have a representative on the Republic Council?  Are they independent or not?

This leads me to my main point, which is The Equalists are totally right.  If we look at the Republic Council as something akin to the United Nations or, probably a better parallel, the European Union, we see a number of issues right away.  If Northern and Southern Tribes, despite being one Nation, though quite different culturally, get two representatives, why don't other Nations split to get more power?  Surely there's enough different Earth or Fire Nation cities where each could claim to be a different tribe and load the council?   Furthermore, we see the standard problem of representation by population versus group.  Is it fair that the considerably smaller Air and Southern Tribe have the same number of votes on the Council as the larger Northern, Fire, and Earth Nations?  This is why the EU has the Parliament and Council after all.  Plus there is the the European Commission which is a different body altogether and tasked with representing Europe as a whole, as opposed to the other two bodies which are supposed to be more in line with the interests of individual member nations.  My point is these sort of Confederation governments are complex and representation is a hard thing to nail down in any circumstances.  And the Republic Council is far from normal because they have Benders and Non-Benders.

Tenzin ends up being the point that really proves the Equalist cause to have legitimate underlying principles.  I didn't really bring this up in the first season because I thought the Air Nation consisted of literally just Tenzin, his wife, and three children.  Representation of the Air Nation's interest would have to fall to an adult and his wife married into the Nation, so it seemed natural that Tenzin would be the representative.  But now that we see Air Temples have been rebuilt and there are plenty of non-Bender citizens at other locations, I cannot help but wonder why any of those people could not be the Council member while Tenzin attends to other duties that are required of him, such as training other Airbenders, a job that Tenzin literally is the only person capable of doing.  It seems it was a requirement that Council members be Benders.  The position is only available to people who are born with a certain trait, so it sounds like the term racist should apply.   But race is really complicated in Avatarland.

See, unlike in the real world, where race is biologically largely irrelevant (some disease susceptibilities is about it, I think), race in Avatarland has some serious implications genetically.  See, Waterbenders have Waterbender children, Firebenders have Firebenders, and so on, while the Avatar is outside of the realm of genetics and firmly in the magic/spiritual side of the world.  Besides the Avatar, there is no known case of multiple style Benders.  We have a limited sample set, but enough to figure out some part of how this works.  Aang and Katara had three children, a Waterbender, an Airbender, and a non-Bender. All of Tenzin's children with a non-Bender are Airbenders.  Katara was born to two non-Bending parents.  Korra's father is a Bender, but not her mother (I assume, I haven't seen her bend)*.  So from this sample set, we can conclude that Bending is probably very similar, genetically, to Blood Type.  I like this analogy because we have positive and negative blood types as a parallel to the specialty Bendings that not every Bender of a type can do (Only some Earthbenders can Metalbend, Fire and Lightningbending, etc). So a non-Bender being a member of a particular nation is still very important because that non-Bender can only have a particular type of Bender child.  So a non-Bender member of the Earth Nation is still a carrier of Earthbending.  So there is a weird intersection of personal identity going on here, where a non-Bender is both definitely a member of a Bending Nation, but also a non-Bender and therefore has more in common, physically, with non-Benders of another Nation.  Hey, my biologist friends out there, could controlled breeding eventually lead to Bending going extinct?  Not that I'd advocate that, just curious.

The term I want to use for discrimination against non-Benders is "ableist."  Bending is a genetic condition, one that is uncommon but not too rare.  But it definitely would change how one views the world and themselves.  So what we have here is essentially the inverse of X-Men, where the powerful mutants are running the government and the normal people have little political representation.  But we also have a situation where people's political and cultural identity is tied to their familial relations to the mutants powertype.   You have a group that is cross-culturally oppressed, to varying degrees, yet that group is a fundamental, yet integral part of society and the perpetuation of that group.  While I see some parallels to Feminism, there is a level of objective capablity that a Bender hsa over a non-Bender which doesn't truly exist between the sexes.  I mean, yes, there are, generally, distinct physical differences between men and women, but I don't believe that compares to the ability to make fireballs with your mind**.  Generally, "ableism" applies to discrimination against people who are handicapped, and that might be a fair designation for a non-Bender.  They are certainly less capable than a Bender.   According to the 2010 US census, about 19% of the US population is classified as handicapped.  That's a significant portion, larger than I expected, but much smaller than I would guess the ratio of Benders to non-Benders is.  For non-Benders to not only be unrepresented, but to be apparently forbidden from being on the Council is a huge problem.  A true Democracy would have the equivalent of the A.D.A. for non-Benders.  And it would certainly allow them representation.

That's why I say the Equalists have a valid cause. That's about 2000 words, so I'll stop here.  But future topics will likely include Bender criminal violence (as that comes up a lot in the show) and further musings on a fair political system for this screwed up world.

Thanks for reading!

*If the show ever mentions that Bolin and Mako have parents from different Nations, that'll support my theory.  If their parents were not one Earth and one Fire Nation, though, then this whole thing is debunked

**For the most part, gender roles in Avatarland seem pretty equal. We see more or less equal distribution between council members, the police, pro-Benders, and the main characters. Pema hasn't really done much beyond be a mom, but I really don't get the impression that's because society is forcing her into that role so much as that's what she really wants to do.

Stray Observations

• Furthering my theory that this show is really meant to be watched how I'm doing it, all the two parters of these season line up.
• Tenzin's family is great.  I mean, they have issues, of course, but they really are fun.  I find myself wanting more of this and less of Korra.
• I brought up before how Tenzin being the second-to-last Airbender must have caused a lot of emotional issues for him and we see them come to bear here.
• "I'm usually the one startin fights," Korra is becoming way more self-aware.  
• "I promise I won't do anything rash" says Korra.  Literally an hour later she's going full Jack Bauer on the equivalent of a Federal Judge.  I don't think anybody in the room believed her though.
• Varick, the rich, southern Tribe, is the most in favor of war to protect his money.  Strong parallels here to the American Revolution, where most of the Founding Fathers were just the wealthiest people in America.
• Baby Airbison are the cutest.