They were cool but my god the showrunners can't do politics for shit.

TLA: There's one bad guy, he's evil because he's evil. He has a daughter who's also evil because she's crazy.

LOK: Ok, time to tell more mature stories.

Who's the first villain? Communism! Except:

• The equalist movement picks up an enormous amount of steam basically overnight: their problems with benders dominating society are valid and recognized at large
• Its pure Great Man Theory that only the charismatic ideologue is able to lead the movement
• The moment the leader is recognized as lying about being a bender the movement collapses instantly. Guess their issues with how society is structured weren't that valid?
• Special feature: the eccentric self-made capitalist-inventor

Then we get the second villain, environmentalism!

• Except the environmentalist is also a conqueror intending to oppress people
• And he's doing it in order to dominate the world by doing superpowered mass-scale ecoterrorism
• Remember the eccentric capitalist? He's back as a war profiteer and it's played for laughs

Who's the third villain? Anarchists!

• They don't have a cohesive ideology beyond "rulers bad"
• They kill a monarch (cool) and then tell the world's largest civilization to idk figure itself out and peace out

And the last villain? Fascism.

• The fascist is shown to be correct on the details constantly
• Her campaign of brutal conquest is successful at unifying the kingdom the anarchists broke apart
• She builds a superweapon which ends up changing the world for the better
• The war profiteering capitalist has zero problems with helping the fascists until his own life is threatened
• Unlike every other villain in the show, the Avatar shows her active empathy and compassion

I think the showrunners got that terminal :LIB: brain