ATLA : Imbalance Part Two

[tripodeca113]

24 out of 72 pages.

After catching the saboteur, Aang returns to the Earthen Fire Refinery.


Team Avatar investigates the attacked business's.







Aang decides to visit to try and bridge the gap by getting Bender-run buisness to support their Nonbender peers. They go to see Councilwoman Liling.





Momo knocks over a statue of Avatar Kyoshi,but Liling's daughter Yaling is able to repair it with Earthbending.





Toph agrees to start teaching her Metalbending tomorrow.


Toph plans to use the training session,to cozy up to her and get her to reveal information.



Eel hounds, Avatar writers use them whenever they need to ignore how big continents are, it happened in TV shows, comics and books.



The next day, Yaling is frustrated by her lack of success with Metalbending.







Returning to her friends, Toph explains that she's been invited to a secret Bender rally that Liling will be hosting that night. The group decides to follow Toph there and attended it undercover, so they can get evidence of Liling's wrongdoing.








Team Avatar has what they need, but then Toph is invited to speak.



Yaling attacks Toph, and the others are forced to reveal themselves.




Liling uses her Earthbending to hold off Team Avatar, and let her supporters escape.



They manage to bring Liling own and Chiblock her.

Comments

[akodo_rokku]

Toph does not fuck around.

[sadoeuphemist]

Again, this bending/non-bending conflict is so bizarre. Benders are threatened by machines? I thought—I don't think this was explicitly stated, to be fair, but it's definitely the vibe I got—that the reason the Fire Nation was so heavily industrialized was because they had, y'know, firebenders who could compactly and conveniently power their steampunk war machines.

Technology in the avatar world is inextricably tied up with bending—look at Mako, still powering generators decades in the future, or the Earth Kingdom transport system. Bizarre to say that industrialization is equalizing everything; if anything it would leave more non-benders out.

[sadoeuphemist]

But the conflict is not that benders are forced to work for non-benders—in fact, it is the opposite: that benders can't find work. Yet nearly all the inventions in the series are heavily dependent on bending: the submarines and 'caterpillar tanks' used in Day of the Black Sun would have been useless without waterbenders and earthbenders to man them; even those weird flippy tanks the Fire Nation used would be pretty shit without a firebender inside them, you'd have to try and cram in artillery and ammunition instead.

And of course new technology is dependent on bending, because what kind of inventor would fail to take advantage of the near-free energy source that bending provides? It is not until Korra, decades later, that we have motor vehicles and mechs and so on that can be operated independently of bending, and even then you have power plants dependent on lightningbending. The premise of the story, that benders would be phased out by machinery, is completely absurd.

Also, I think the composition of inventors is less arbitrary if you consider that bending is in a literal sense mastery of martial arts. Sure, perhaps Renaissance Men exist, but the average inventor/industrialist is unlikely to be a Yuyan archer, or chi-blocker, or ninja blade-thrower either.