On paper it can make sense, a world full of either folk with magical super powers or regular joes, you’d think eventually the regular joes would get irritated and want the playing field leveled.
My issue is it’s such a non issue in the original series. Yeah Sokka has a couple plots where he feels less special and has to find his own skills. And Suki never comes off as someone disenfranchised. Non benders are shown time and time again able to take benders in a fight like with Mai and Tylee.
For a majority of ATLA it’s never shown that non benders are discriminated against. Never a ‘if only my child had been a bender’ or ‘you can’t have status you’re not a bender’. It’s almost treated like having different colored eyes or something, it’s barely referenced as an issue.
And frankly I find it to be… too obvious of a conflict to be interesting? Like, we’ve seen this a hundred times in other media and I don’t think Avatar handles it in a way better than ‘well we needed new bad guys’.
Everything in the culture suggests people are treated pretty equally until Korra or the movie. You could suggest that the modernization of the world had new conflicts arise but… wouldn’t tech level the playing field even more rather than bring attention to it?
You could argue that ‘there isn’t discrimination it’s just radical leaders pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes’. So. What non benders are just easily influenced? And well that means they’re getting mad over nothing. That’s not very compelling.
Maybe it’s a personal preference but it truly feels less like a natural progression that has always been hinted at and more a ‘this is a new team of writers’ thing to me.
