 I'll start off with the obvious. Avatar The Last Airbender is an amazing show for a variety of reasons that others have already explained for over 15 years now. Legend of Korra is more controversial, but I still enjoy it. One of the best parts of the show is just how big and rich the world it takes place in is. There are tons of different animals, unusual geography, a deep magic system, a long history, and many different cultures to explore here. I've wanted to make a video about this for a long time. The problem is that so many others have already done that it would just be retreading old ground. But while rewatching the show for the fourth or fifth time, I found myself paying attention to exactly how all the different nations are run and I noticed that there's a lot of thought and care put into that. After all, examining the ways that governments and traditions screw people over is a big part of the series. I'll say now that this isn't some sort of the heroes are actually villains type videos, so don't expect that. The title is a tad inflammatory but it's 100% accurate. Every government shown in both The Last Airbender and Korra is a dictatorship. They're just different types of dictatorships. Because all governments exist on a spectrum, from Democratic on one end to authoritarian on the other. It isn't as simple as this evil guy is in charge and people do what he says because reasons. There are reasons for people to be members of the evil armies and fight against the heroes. Much like how complex villains are better than simple ones, well-thought-out evil regimes are better than ones that just exist. I'm going to look at not just how the governments and avatars world work but how they change over time. Because I had no friends as a child and I've been stuck inside for two years. But before that, sponsored time. Our world is a chaotic place. We are small, insignificant drops of water caught up in a raging tsunami of history. Our families, friends, allies and enemies alike are just part of a fathomless, ever-shifting mass of humanity. Billions of people, each with an internal realm as complex as our own and each following their own goals. Like a colony of ants, we swarm over the corpse of the earth, tearing our civilization's sustenance from its belly without a single word of thanks. We poison our own water and air without a thought for consequence. And when one half of the colony sees a different path than our own, we threaten to kill ourselves as a means of deterrence. But who cares about all of that when we have campfire.com? More than 150,000 writers use campfire to organize, improve and showcase their writing. Organize your stories in campfire right with over a dozen modules like character sheets, timelines, relationship webs and a manuscript editor that lets you reference your notes while you write. Everything you create is private, safely stored in the cloud and shareable to collaborate with friends. Improve your craft with campfire learn their hub of educational resources. Showcase your projects in campfire explore to share your work with the community and build a following. Choose what parts of your project to share and craft a homepage to present your story. Create an account for free and enjoy access to everything from the start. If you're working on bigger projects in campfire right, you only have to pay for the features you need. Start a subscription for as low as 50 cents per month or pay a one time price with campfires all a cart options. Plus campfire just released their offline desktop app with even more updates on the way like new modules of mobile app and the ability to monetize your writing in explore. Write better stories faster with campfire. Click the link in the description to learn more by campfire today. When the bombs drop, you won't regret the time you spent having fun. And if you live somewhere that contains resources that global superpowers want, you may as well just quit your job and follow your dreams right now. Campfire. The villain of the original series is the industrialized imperialist empire led by Fire Lord Ozai. Despite being relatively small, they've managed to destroy the air nomads, wreck half the water tribes and colonize a decent chunk of the earth kingdom. Turns out tanks are useful. The Fire Nation is a pretty straightforward absolute monarchy. What the Fire Lord says goes end of story. But how do they maintain that iron grip? How do they convince others to follow them and do their bidding? This is the question at the heart of all governance and what it comes down to is that every ruler needs a support base to stay in power, whether this base is large or small, you can't just declare that you're in charge offer no benefits to people and expect them to follow you. In the third season of the original show, we get a good look at how this works. First, regular Fire Nation citizens are inundated with propaganda. In their mandatory schooling, in addition to learning stuff like reading and math, they're indoctrinated with all sorts of ideas about how their country is the greatest in the world and how their imperialism is justified. Their genocide of the air nomads? Self-defense. They attacked first. Just like how the Armenians attacked those poor Turkish soldiers' bullets with their bodies in 1916. Their invasion of the earth kingdom? We're spreading our ideals to the barbarians, just like how the Spanish used smallpox to heroically civilize the Inca. This goes a long way to explaining why people are satisfied with the current regime. Propaganda only goes so far though. Eventually, reality sets in and you need to make a material difference in your followers' lives before they catch on to you. All leaders need the support of some of the people they lead to stay in power. In democracies, they need a large coalition of followers. In autocracies, they only need a small coalition. But either way, there are some people they need to keep happy and loyal to stay in power. The Fire Nation is not a democracy, it's a small coalition government. The Fire Lord has seemingly surrounded himself by a loyal aristocracy that commands his military and otherwise executes his will. So even if the average citizens weren't on his side, he would still hold all the power in his country. The peasants don't have tanks, nor do they have access to all the best firebending training and the time to practice, so even benders would be at a disadvantage. A rebellion would be unlikely to succeed. And why do the aristocrats follow Ozai? They're the ones who own all the factories, pumping out war machines and other various products, and this ownership makes them wealthy. However, to manufacture products, you need resources, and whoever controls those resources controls the country entire. This is what's known as the Paradox of Plenty, or the Resource Curse. Countries with a lot of natural resources have the opportunity to grow wealthy, but in reality, that wealth flows to those in control of the resources. Ha! You thought this video was about avatar and I'm giving you an economics lesson. I tricked you again. Saudi Arabia is one of the most authoritarian countries on earth, and the reason for that is that the royal family controls all the oil. There's very little else making money in the country, so the government has no competition and no motivation to build proper infrastructure or allow its citizens certain freedoms that would allow them to diversify the economy. The Fire Nation is located in a volcanic archipelago, and those are treasure troves of metals. The first fire lord would have been whoever grabbed control of these deposits. Then he could gift some of that wealth to his favored servants, who would be above everyone else and able to enforce his will, but still dependent on him. After the country industrialized far enough, they would have used a lot of their home resources, and that means going abroad for more. The reason the Fire Nation invaded everywhere else was for things their factories need to run, like coal, iron, and the tiers of subject peoples. The only way they can get a hold of those is through the Fire Lord, who is in charge of the war and the colonies that the war created. If any of the local elites tried to take control of the resources themselves, Ozai's forces, fearing losing access, would swoop down on them and put down their rebellion without mercy. Obviously if they all rose up at once then he'd be unable to do anything, but they never will. Some of them would be content with the current status quo, some of them would be distrustful of their fellow would be revolutionaries, and others would just be fearful of retribution. There would never be more than a minority of Ozai's support base that wanted to overthrow him or otherwise escape from under his thumb. Unless he does something to threaten their wealth and power, they feel they have nothing to lose. This is the balancing act that rulers have always had to play. As long as Ozai keeps the war going and the resources keep flowing in, their wealth will stay secure and they'll help keep him in power. It's clear that the Fire Nation's industrialization hasn't been a benefit for everyone. The pollution caused by it has destroyed entire villages, but they're poor. They're not a part of Ozai's support base, so who cares? It doesn't matter what happens to them, he stays in power either way. Why waste the treasury on peasants? The water tribes, the Inuit inspired people who live on the poles of the planet and somehow don't freeze to death. The northern and southern tribes are largely separate from one another due to their distance. They've developed distinct identities and cultures, though they still see themselves as two branches of the same tree. By the time the show starts, the southern tribe has been reduced to little more than a tiny village on the ice filled with children and the elderly. They don't seem to have much governance or need for governance at all. They just want to be left alone. Based. The northern tribe has defended itself better and thus has a lot more people. However, their economy is extremely simple. It's based on small substance farming and hunting. Their only exports are animal products like fur. They don't have any building materials either. The only reasons they can have permanent structures is because they control water and ice. They don't have an army since those require a lot of support and organization to function, but they do have a large well-trained militia of both benders and non-benders. And the good thing about that is there are no permanent generals or admirals for the leader to keep happy. The tribe is led by a hereditary monarchy, although their leader is called a chief instead of a king. He holds direct control over the army and navy without anyone else getting between him and his men. We see during the siege of the north that the chief takes a direct role in planning both small missions and the defense of the entire city. There is no potential for other leaders to undercut him or stage a coup. As long as he keeps the regular soldiers in the militia loyal, he stays in power. Beyond that, he has a lot of control over most aspects of how the tribe operates. The only thing that seems to prevent the northern tribe from being a complete autocracy is an independent judiciary that tries and punishes criminals. Of course, they're still susceptible to bribery as we see with Unalok during Legend of Korra. The two tribes were extremely far apart from one another for their whole history, meaning the south was much smaller and less developed than the north. By the time Korra starts, the southern tribe is led by chief Tonrok, who was originally from the north before being exiled. How exactly he came to power is unclear, but after season one of the original series, delegates from the northern tribe go to help rebuild the south. With their superior military and economic position, as well as their bigger population, it's not hard to imagine them exerting a lot of control over their sister tribe, turning it into a sort of colony. The thing is, when the north comes in to take over directly, people are upset. However, before the war, the northern chief was already the head of both tribes, at least nominally, and they've already been under heavy northern influence for at least two generations by then. It seems a tad weird for them to be upset at Unalok for nationalistic reasons and not Tonrok. They are literally brothers. Tonrok even helps lead the resistance efforts against the northern tribe. Maybe Unalok isn't the only one who's taking advantage of a crisis to gain power for himself. This one is harder to pin down, partially because the air nomads barely exist by the time the series begins, and we only see their society operate in few brief flashbacks. Here's what we know. Airbenders are born and raised in one of their temples. They wander the world throughout most of their adulthood, and then when they're old, they come back to the temples as monks. We also know that the pre-war air temples were theocratic, meaning they were ruled by religious authorities. Each temple had a council of elders made up of five monks. There's no central government for all temples as far as we see. The way in which the elders are chosen is unknown, but something tells me it's a decision made by the elderly monks, not by the children or absent adults. So that's already cutting most of the population out of the government. The monks are in charge of raising the children, most of whom don't even know their parents, so there aren't any aristocratic families forming an opposition to them. The nomads are all one big family really, which is wholesome as fuck. There's no army here, but the monks don't need one. They're all benders, and they hide up in the mountains where few can reach them. Maybe the adults could start a revolution, but since they would have been absent from the temples most of the time, they would have had no way to build up a power base, insert themselves into governance, or foment change. That might have been the original reason for the tradition's creation in the first place. Or maybe the temples just couldn't produce enough food for everybody and they needed to shed population. Either way, all in all this theocratic system was a very small coalition regime. At the same time there's little reward in being in charge. The head monks aren't living in palaces, they aren't crushing their enemies before them and hearing the lamentations of their women, they just get to boss some people around. Part of the reason for this is how basic their economy seems to be. As far as we see, they just have some small scale agriculture at their temple so they don't starve. They don't produce anything of value like machinery or clothing or food and they don't do much trade with the outside world, which is part of why the other nations are so unfamiliar with their culture. That might also go a long way to explaining why there's no revolution, too much risk for little reward. These monks are closer to the leader of a homeowner's association than Augusto Pinochet. A small dictatorship is still a dictatorship though. After the war harmonic convergence granted air bending to more people and so the air nation is founded again, sort of. This isn't an official government, just an autonomous collective of airbenders where they don't take turns acting as a sort of executive officer for the week and they travel around helping to fight crimes and shit. Tensin and some of the others are respected and the rest will do much of what they say, certainly, but what happens as the nation grows and becomes more complex. They can't be a small nomadic vigilante force forever, eventually some of them will settle down, likely in the old air temples. Once that happens, how will the new air nation organize itself? Impossible to say for certain, but if no one thinks ahead and decides to set up a democratic system then it would be all too easy for it to fall victim to the same authoritarian tendencies that the rest of the world has. The Earth Kingdom is the location where the bulk of the original series takes place, which makes sense considering the sheer size of it. Around half the planet is controlled by the king and bossing se, sort of. What's clear from the beginning is that the fire nation occupies a significant portion of the country. Their industrialized economy along with their more centralized government allowed them to set up colonies all over the place and consistently keep the enemy army on the back foot. Much like the fire nation, the Earth Kingdom has a hereditary monarchy. However, the Earth King is in a much weaker position than the Fire Lord. The Earth Kingdom before and during the war was more of a loose confederacy than a single nation. The king and bossing se may have been the sovereign on paper. In reality he couldn't impose his will on the far reaches of his domain. In real life, a lot of big empires form when a heartland with some sort of advantage conquers some of their immediate neighbors then uses the resources to conquer some more. Rome was a single city that took over and assimilated other cities in Italy with their superior military organization, then they used their new manpower to expand out more and more. The Mongols were basically just one tribe who united all the other steppe nomads before conquering everything. However, in these cases the empire was still run from the heartland. From here there are three possibilities. Either allow the subject territories a limited degree of autonomy, give them a say in running the empire, or constantly put down rebellions. The Mongols gave their subjects autonomy which kept the peace for a while, Rome let foreigners gain citizenship and vote, and 90% of other empires played whack-a-mole with revolts until they fell apart. Places like the Great Divide have no infrastructure or military presence to aid any sort of travelers. The only way across that we see is an old earthbender. Then there's the Siuang Desert which is huge and empty and isolated. The only towns we see are all hugging oases and seem to have little government presence at all. And of course there's the swamp, home to an entire tribe of waterbenders who were unaware of the outside world. Things like this would prevent the rulers in Ba Sing Se from being able to exercise much control over the far ends of the kingdom. Sending armies or even trade over land would be dangerous, expensive, and slow. In real life the Sahara Desert and the Congo prevented most contact between northern and southern Africa until sailing technology got good enough to move down the coast. And the far edges of the earth kingdom are largely independent, with their own rulers, laws, and customs that greatly defer from the heartland. Omashu still has its own monarchy that, while nominally subservient to the king in Ba Sing Se, doesn't depend on him to stay in power. King Bumi has his own army which seems more loyal to him and Omashu than the earth kingdom at large. I doubt him and his ancestors had to do much for the earth king other than pay some tribute. Kiyoshi Island is similar. They have their own warriors for defense and they didn't even fight in most of the war. They weren't under control of the central government. The southern reaches of the kingdom are a hub for criminal gangs, smuggling, and incursions from the fire nation, and so on. For situations like this governments have to delegate tasks and exert indirect control. The most indirect form is tribute. Basically the subservient state has to give taxes to their ruling state, whether in the form of money, food, soldiers, or other valuables, and beyond that they get left alone. And yes, this isn't counting how by the time the show starts the king is just a puppet. When the kingdom was first founded it's likely that his power rested on control of the army. But when Avatar Kiyoshi founded the Dai Li, he gained a new, more stable power base. The Dai Li are both secret police and bodyguards. They root out any dissent in the population and government to make sure the monarchy stays in control, kind of like the Okhrana in the Russian Empire. So once the king lost control of the Dai Li to Longfang he lost control of the country. How exactly this happened is unknown, but with half the country occupied by the fire nation it's not hard to imagine things getting unstable. And when Longfang lost control of the Dai Li, he was powerless. After the war ended though, technology advanced quickly and the Earth Kingdom lost a bunch of territory to the new United Republic. With the invention of trains and the lack of an occupying army, the previously decentralized Kingdom ceded more and more power to Ba Sing Se. By the time the events of Korra takes place, the Earth Queen is a true monarch that rules her entire country, albeit it is smaller than before, and she still relies on the Dai Li to do so. The United Republic is unique in that it has two separate governments that we see. The one that Amon tries to overthrow in the first season and the one that replaces it. So I'll go over one at a time. The early republic is interesting in that its executive body is a council rather than an individual like a president or prime minister. That sort of thing has existed in real life before. In the first French Republic, right after the monarchy was overthrown, they had a succession of governments, most of which did not have a single person in charge. Organizations like the Executive Council, which had 24 members, and the Directory, which had five, all exercise the powers normally given to the head of government. The modern Swiss government operates in a similar way. It's a way of preventing any individual from accumulating too much power. How well this system works is a matter for debate, but it has existed in the real world. The United Republic Council has five members, one representative from the Earth Kingdom, one from the Fire Nation, one from each of the water tribes, and Tenzin. First, I'd like to note how woefully undemocratic this is. Obviously they're all unelected, which is awful. What's worse is how the populations they represent vary wildly. Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation each get one vote, which seems fair enough unless one has far more people, and I'm pretty sure the Earth Kingdom has a bigger population than the Fire Nation. But why does each water tribe get their own vote? Even together they probably have fewer people than either of the other countries. Ice caps don't exactly have a lot of farmland, and Tenzin gets to vote on behalf of his family and no one else. What the hell kind of idiot would make an unbalanced system like that? When most of the council is absent, one member can make decisions for all of them, which seems like a flaw in the system too. The more I think about it, the more justified Amon's Rebellion was. After season one, a president is elected. His exact powers are unknown, all we can say for certain is that he's the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and he runs the Republic City Police Force. There's also no legislative body that we see. No congress or parliament or diet to do the bulk of the legwork for a government. These are the people that actually write the laws, so they're kind of important for things to function. If nothing else, you want them as a counterweight to the executive. Imagine if the president could do whatever he wanted all the time with no obstacles. What's to stop him from canceling elections and becoming dictator for life? You might be tempted to say that presidents are democratically elected, so if Raikou becomes truly unpopular, the people will remove him from office by voting for his opponent. However, just having elections doesn't turn a regime into a democracy. There are a thousand different ways to cheat or rig the results, especially when you're already in power. You know who else holds elections? This guy. No one believes that all his votes are legitimate. From his position, Raikou can arrest or disqualify his opponents, restrict who is allowed to vote and how, have the counters throw out ballots for kakamemi reasons, even have soldiers or paramilitaries attack voting stations or ballot collecting centers to interrupt the process. Any of these can disrupt things enough to tip the scales in his favor, and that's assuming this is a simple popular vote system. If there are any structures in place to put more obstacles between the people and putting their desired representative in power, like an election system that waits votes in certain precincts or a winner-take-all apparatus that doesn't require a majority of votes to win and prevents more than two parties from forming, then it becomes even easier. Normally, executive power would be restricted by other branches of the government, but as we've discussed, there aren't any here. Raikou seems to operate entirely on the honor system. One other question. How does Republic City produce electricity if lightning vendors are unavailable? I'd guess coal, since that's what the Fire Nation powered their technology with. Do they have their own deposits, or do they have to import it? And that goes for all the metal they use, too. If they took all those resources from the Earth Kingdom when they founded the Republic, it's no wonder the Queen was so pissed at its existence. Kuvera was, too, which brings me to my final segment. The Earth Empire mainly differs from the kingdom in how much central control Kuvera is able to exercise and who she depends on to stay in power. The Earth Queen may have been a proper monarch rather than the head of a confederation, but she still had limits on her authority. Even right outside Ba Sing Se, there were uprisings from peasants who didn't want to pay their taxes. She wasn't well-liked, and so when she was gone, her regime completely fell apart. The Earth Kingdom was decentralized, meaning the king, or whoever led the country, needed to keep all the local leaders content to make sure that tribute continued to flow, meaning that despite the existence of a monarchy and a secret police force, it wasn't really an autocracy. The ruling coalition was small, but it was bigger than the Fire Nations or the water tribes. The Earth Empire, on the other hand, had a much smaller coalition. Because Kuvera had access to high speed railways, distance was no longer as much of a problem when ruling. On top of that, she had to spend years reuniting the country after the constituent states broke apart. When she did this, she humbled the local ruling elites and broke their power bases. Even if they stayed in control of their regions, they were dependent on her to stay in power. She was their only source for resources like food. Officially, Kuvera did all this on behalf of the Earth King, but since the king was a distant figure, the army wasn't loyal to him. They were loyal to their leader, Kuvera. Wu had no support base that would have allowed him to stop her Ku, even if he wasn't an idiot. However, since she took all the power of the old aristocrats, they would have hated her, meaning she had to restructure things a bit. She outright threatens to send people to re-education camps if they disobey her, which means she's begun to embrace Fire Nation-style propaganda. We don't know for certain that that consists of, though it's not hard to imagine. Something along the lines of, Kuvera is perfect and freed you from the warlords that made your life hell for years. She's also getting rid of all the foreign influence that destroyed our country before. Yeah, Kuvera straight up purges the empire of anyone who isn't of Earth Kingdom origin, a practice commonly referred to as ethnic cleansing. Thanks for putting that in your children's show, Nickelodeon. All this combined indicates that her support base isn't the old aristocracy. It's a combination of the average citizens who she's helped in her campaigns and Earth Empire ultra-nationalists who want to reunite their country and get rid of any people who don't fit their definition of what a true citizen looks like. And when Kuvera's army is smashed in the series finale, her support base no longer has the necessary strength to impose its will on the regional separatists. When the new king decides to allow them independence, there's simply nothing that they can do to stop him. In the aftermath of the empire, all the old states are turned into independent countries with elected rulers. Will they be genuine democracies? Some of them will. Others will be fake democracies with sham elections and strong man leaders. There are a million variables that could affect things. Don't worry, though. President Raiko can always invade his neighbors to install some good old democracy if they decide not to sell them resources at low prices. So the world of Avatar is a nightmare of authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and oppression. Before, during, and after the events of both shows, all the ruling bodies we see are run by a minority of the population. The rights, needs, and desires of everyone else goes out the window. It's easier to balance the needs of four nations than the few dozen that exist after the Earth Empire's disillusion. The southern water tribe might officially declare independence at some point. The fire and air nations may split into smaller states, too, and that complicates things further. That's the thing, though. The Avatar wasn't there to make things better. They were there to keep balance, to keep things the same as they've always been. Ozai, Kuvira, Longfang, and Unalak were all nasty dictators and the villains of the show, though they were not the only dictators in the show. When you get down to it, the heroes were often just fighting one authoritarian regime in order to prop up a different authoritarian regime. They may not have seen it that way, and they were always choosing the lesser of two evils, but that's what was happening. They were fighting against change, not oppression. That's to be expected in a world where some people are born with the power to move mountains and craft tsunamis. An elite class will be created. It's inevitable. With the continued march of technology, non-benders will grow closer and closer to parody with those who previously ruled over them, and since they outnumber them by far, the aristocratic system that's been in place for thousands of years will no longer be tenable. That doesn't instantly mean all governments will be run by large coalitions in the future. Non-benders are perfectly capable of creating social hierarchies and locking other people out of power, and revolutions often just change power from one group of elites to another. What does the future look like? Hard to say, but there's plenty of room for improvement. TL, DW, Zaheer was right. Don't you think the world would be better off if leaders like them were eliminated? All of you are just absolutely the best. If you want to get your name on here, consider becoming a patron. If you don't want to do that, you can always support the channel here on YouTube, or just like the video, comment and subscribe to my channel. All those are great, and that's all for my takes for today. Goodbye.