The Spirit World isn't monolithic. Plenty of individually powerful spirits out there, you know.

Although the city being what it is, I bet Tenzin spent a lot of time thinking "Oh, great. They're going to find him in an alleyway with a shiv in his kidney, and I'm going to have to explain about the difficulties of eradicating entrenched poverty and then have the death talk."

I'm honestly not sure about that. I have complaints about Aang (lord, do I have complaints about Aang) but the world needed a man of peace, accommodation, and diplomacy to help heal itself after having the shit kicked out of it for like a century.

So I thought this show was like an ironic Power Puff Girls things but apparently it's not.

I'll just say this; I comment about pop culture primarily on the AV Club primarily to avoid this sort of thing.

… any list that doesn't have It's About Time in the top five is automatically fail.

Am I the only one who thinks that, if Korra doesn't already know how to commune with her past lives, that someone needs to teach her how to do so really goddamn fast?

And it's a plausible scenario! But if that is indeed the case, the next obvious question is what steps Amon has taken to ensure his cover story isn't seen through. I find it unlikely that if he's doing this through purely natural means then the massive investigation about to be launched will fail to figure that out.

Well, I think Amon will lie, and lie outrageously and well, if he thinks it suits his purposes. He seems like that kind of guy.

Well, the obvious explanation is that they're not in fact entirely dependent on bending.

There's filler, and then there's giving your characters room to breath.

Police work, government positions, and the military are dominated by
benders, organized crime seems to exclusive to benders, and all of the
professional sports we have seen so far require bending.

So what you mean is you want to watch this legally, in a high-definition format, that doesn't involve using services you don't like.

A lot of people seem really convinced that Amon can't energybend, enough to make rather ironclad pronouncements about it right out of the gate.

Independent George at least made a critique that has a certain degree of substantivity to it. That puts him one-up on a lot of other people.

Well, here in the real world, being ruled by a Big Man or by a small oligarchy was the norm for thousands of years. It only hasn't been the norm for the past couple hundred years, and representative democracies have a disturbing tendency to turn towards authoritarianism whenever they enter a failure state.

It was not, I'm afraid. I've spilled a lot of ink about Iroh over the years. I've written fanfiction about Iroh. But this is the first time I did it here.

Huh. I don't know where I got 37 from. I accept the correction cheerfully.

Well, something to keep in mind is… actually, I'll let Zuko and Aang say it for me. From "The Promise":

What with bending being innate, it can't be disarmed practically short
of taking the approach it took to the Air Nomads and Southern Water
tribe benders (or giving Aang a heck of an energybending project).