Additionally I had not ment a stroke in the bloodflow of the head but a stroke in the chi but you basically got what I meant. I'm not sure I follow your terminology, as I'm pretty sure "strokes" don't occur with chi or chakra; I think its purely a physical phenomenon. So Neurons in the brain are surrounded by water. And when the electric signals go through them, they temporarily polarize.
So I think with super advanced water bending, he could know what part of the brain is used when someone is bending.
Then he could use the water in that area to sever the axioms from the neuron. It also explains why Korra was able to airbend after he took it because new neural pathways were formed. Explore Wikis Community Central. Between then and the events of Book One, Noatak would become Amon, start the Equalists and learn how to use bloodbending to block someone's bending indefinitely. While doing this requires bloodbending, Amon's ability also applies a more advanced understanding of chi blocking, which fans were first introduced to with Avatar: The Last Airbender's Ty Lee.
As seen with Ty Lee, chi blocking can temporarily inhibit a bender from using their bending, and it can make anyone's muscles useless for a certain amount of time.
Anyone can learn chi blocking, and the Equalists have several members who used chi blocking against Korra on multiple occasions. With how the Equalists and Amon rely on chi blocking for some of their attacks, it's not surprising that Noatak also applied the same logic to bloodbending. Amon created a way to take away a bender's bending by disrupting the chi flowing through their body, and this is likely thanks to his knowledge of chi blocking, as well as his bloodbending.
This is so effective that even Katara -- one of the best healers and a waterbender who reluctantly learned bloodbending from the first bloodbender -- could not bring back a bender's bending, despite her being able to treat the effects of Ty Lee's chi blocking before. Eventually, Korra learned how to undo what Amon did to her and the other benders thanks to her past lives.
Aang visited Korra at one of her lowest points, and he touched her forehead like Noatak did, except this time, Aang and their past lives returned Korra's bending and taught her how to do the same for the other benders who fell victim to Amon. That's why powerful bending attacks didn't faze him in earlier episodes, and that's why Mako's lightning didn't do serious harm to him. Korra's airbending caught Amon by surprise, because he didn't think Korra had any bending left in her, so he didn't have the time to try weaken it.
Also, weakening different forms of bending probably required Amon to use different bloodbending techniques, and he didn't really have much experience fighting airbenders, so Korra was able to gain the upper hand on him. Electricity kills by disrupting the beating heart, stopping blood flow it also burns, but the burns themselves aren't usually fatal.
How could Amon be beaten so fast and Korra become fully realized in no time? After 10 episodes of buildup, arguably the greatest Magnificent Bastard in Western Animation and all his plans were ruined in 10 minutes or so? No chain is stronger than its weakest link. All of Amon's success hinged on his mind games - the fundamental fact that everyone assumed his story was true. Also the Equalists' style of fighting had a weakness towards Airbending. Or that Korra could now Airbend.
There was a bit of foreshadowing at the final rally. Amon dodges all the other bending attacks, but had no way of dodging or blocking Tenzin's attack. Sure, it all came crashing down for Amon and friends, but face it, they had a lot of help.
Besides, it's rather critical that thanks to Asami and Bolin, they lost their air superiority, allowing the UF forces to promptly rout the confused, chaotic insurgency at their weakest, which ironically is exactly the tactic they used to gain the upper hand in the first place. Amon is also even more vunerable to airbending than the rest of his men. His combat style relies on throwing off their forms using subtle bloodbending, which relies on him at least understanding those forms at a basic level.
Notice he tries to blood bend Korra at the end, but she just flowed with it and unleashed her attack anyway. Plus, each time Amon was fighting an airbender, he didn't have much space. While fighting Tenzin on the stage, Mako and Korra were also throwing attacks at him, leaving him too distracted to focus on Tenzin's air gusts.
When fighting Korra's airbending, he was in a very tight hallway, leaving him no room to doge or use his signature chi blocking attacks, thus he was thrown around like a ragdoll.
Also , Amon's way of overpowering people involves dodging their bending attacks to get close to them, but he has to see those attacks in order to dodge them. We, the audience, can see the air as it's bent because it's a visual medium, but there's no indication that airbending makes the air visible in-universe.
What the heck was up with Amon's skin tone? Amon being Tarrlok's brother was a common fan guess right after the whole bloodbending thing was revealed. However, many people thought Amon and Tarrlok couldn't be brothers, because Tarrlok had the brown skin of the Water Tribe, whereas Amon's skin was clearly lighter. Then Tarrlok revealed Amon was indeed his brother. Okay, maybe Amon was just born with a ligher skin tone than his brother?
So it seems the makers of the series deliberately cheated the viewers and changed Amon's skin tone with no in-universe explanation, just so that people wouldn't guess who Amon really is. We did see Yakone somehow able to get darker skin from plastic surgery.
Except this isn't like a white person having a tan and then staying indoors for a long time. This is the skin color that's been consistent for the entire race, and skin color that's naturally that dark wouldn't change so drastically just from not getting enough sun. Maybe there is some good in-universe explanation for Amon's skin change, but since the writers didn't explain it in any way, it just feels like cheating.
There is a such thing as skin whitening cream's as well as other methods of artificial skin whitening. In our world, yes. There's no reference to them existing in the Avatar world. It has been shown that they wash and dye their clothes, so yes, the same chemicals would exist in the Avatar world. You ever not gone outside much? You quickly have people saying you're pale, and might need to go outside And why does eveything need an in-universe explanation, you feeling cheated or otherwise?
Er, that's not how melanin works. Light-skinned white people can get paler if they stay indoors and their skin loses the tan it normally has. But people born with a darker skintone like Tarrlok and Noatak can't have their skin so radically lighten because lack of sunlight. And having an in-universe explanation would make the story better, because it's an important detail that was inexplicably inconsistent.
Good writers have in-universe explanations for such inconsistenties, bad writers try to pretend they don't exist. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, on the matter of in-universe explanations determining the quality of a show; it's not a clear-cut idea, it's different between individuals. When done badly, they just drag down the quality of the show, damaging the emotions we're supposed to be feeling. Besides, some of us find it fun to think about the answers ourselves especially if the in-universe ones don't suit what we wanted , outside of the target's universe.
Okay, if you are brown-skinned and you stay indoors for long enough your skin will lighten. You won't turn white, but a brown person can pretty pale. In fact, there's an issue with people from tropical climates living in far northern climates because the lack of sunlight can be harmful for us in the long run, just like too much sun can be harmful to a light-skinned person.
Maybe waterbenders just tan really well. Yakone had relatively light skin himself, until he went to the pole and started getting out more. The Foggy Swamp Tribe has light skin, and they're just waterbenders that left the poles, and live in a very shady environment. Noatok stays inside all day, and covers almost every square inch of his skin to boot. It's unsurprising that he would lose his tan, unlike his brother, who is also athletic but presumably is free to get out more.
Just look at that guy, he's very pale. The closest he looks to have gotten to the sun is under the arena lights. Swampbenders presumably moved to the swamp countless generations ago, so their skin tone has slowly changed via evolution, just like white Europeans are descended from black Africans.
As for Tahno, there's no indication he is from either of the Water Tribes, he was probably born in Republic City. Maybe one of his parents or grandparents was a Water Triber, but most likely he has other nationalities in his heritage too, which would explain his lighter skin. And it can't be just that Water Tribers "tan really well", because the poles get less sunlight than other parts of the world. If the brown skin was just tan, Tarrlok in TLoK as well as Sokka and Katara in AtLA should've become more tanned when they left the pole and started living in sunnier places, but that clearly isn't the case.
Actually, when you live in an area that is snowy for most of the time, you can get a decent amount of sun exposure because the sunlight bounces off all the snow. That doesn't change the fact that on the poles the sun stays out for long periods; the snow can't reflect the sunlight if there's no light to begin with.
So the sun exposure you get on the poles would still be smaller than what Katara and Sokka got while they were travelling the world, especially since they were staying outdoors for most of the time. Also, remember the case of Hama from "The Puppetmaster"? She was kept inside a cage with no sunlight exposure for years, possibly decades, yet the flashbacks in that episode showed no significant change in her skin tone during that time.
Okay, several things. First, Hama DID lose her tan. Look at her and Katara! Third, just look at Yakone and Noatok. This whole thing is completely overblown, it's not like he went from being black to albino.
It's true that Hama had a paler skin when Katara met her, but that was when she was an old woman who'd spent decades living in normal sunlight. If you look at the flashbacks where she's in prison, her skin tone isn't that different from the she was before she was captured, even though she spent years in that cage. So maybe it was old age or something that made her skin pale, but it certainly wasn't lack of sunlight.
And it's also true that in some scenes in the finale the unmasked Noatok appears to have the same skin tone as Yakone, but that doesn't change the fact that in earlier episodes he had a much paler skin than in the flashbacks to his childhood, and there's no explanation for this.
Maybe the makers of TLoK decided to colour the unmasked Noatok somewhat browner than the masked Amon so people wouldn't notice their cheating, but they couldn't make him as brown as he was as a kid because then the discrepancy would be really obvious and the cheating would be exposed anyway. Ok, so Hama is old and that makes her pale or whatever. Couldn't the same apply to Noatok? Particularly in conjunction with his utter lack of sun?
The mind has a tendency to exaggerate things in the past based on our assumptions. You thought Amon was pale all along, your mind conveniently forgets his more moderate skintone. Thus, it's more of a shock when you see that he isn't that pale.
There's no indication that aging makes Water Tribers go pale in general; all the other old and middle-aged members of the Tribes we see in AtLA and TLoK still have brown skin.
So Hama was a special case. And the picture of masked Amon you posted is not a still from the show, it's a promo pic with some weird lighting. If Hama was a special case, why not Noatok? Seriously, when is the last time he had ANY exposure to the sun?! Amon is a bloodbender , and a ridiculously skilled one at that. He can alter human physiology in intricate ways. He could have deliberately done some bloodbending plastic surgery to himself. Also, while this is WMG, it seems that all bloodbenders are unusually pale for Water Tribe members; this seems to imply that using the power a lot will change you physically.
Hama, Yakone and Amon all became unusually pale over time. That means that however small, there could be a minority of pale-skinned waterbenders. Amon's plan was doomed to fail in the long run. What were his true motive? There is no way Amon could have hoped to get rid of bending. Even if he somehow debended an entire generation of benders, it's certain that their children and future generations would still be born benders.
Even Energybending cannot stop that. Amon cannot divulge his secret to any one and sooner or later and after him bending would anyway make a resurgence. Of course, this is not accounting the sheer impracticality of tracing down every bender in the world.
Even the fire nation couldn't do that with Water and Earth benders or even Aang given years of tyranny and a nation's worth of manpower. So what was his real motive? Was it revenge against the Avatar for debending Yakone? Was he carrying on his father's goal of taking over Aang's beloved city just like Tarrok?
Did he really want to destroy all bending? Or had all that bloodbending muddled his mind and resulted in a bit of Joker-ish insanity? This is a little Fridge Brilliance that carries on from all the similarities and Shout Outs to Batman we've seen among our characters and their backstories.
His true motive was advancing his own power, and living up to his father's pressure to avenge him. He definitely wasn't avenging his father, he hated Yakone. My theory is that Amon really did hate bending, and thus hated himself too, and wanted to eventually die as a martyr for the Equalist cause, probably at the hands of Korra. Their leader being killed by the Avatar would've given the Equalist movement a strong impetus to carry on, so even if Amon wasn't able to debend everyone, his legacy of anti-bending would've lived long after he was dead.
If Korra had not found out about his true identity, all this might've actually worked. It feels that his motive was power and a chance to impose his views. All that bloodbending affected his mind and filled him with lust for more power. Look at the way he gets the wolves to bow down to him. He hates his father and accuses him of being weak. To him, the most powerful ability of all was the Avatar's ability to remove bending, which had defeated even his father's psychic bloodbending.
So he made up his mind to make himself more powerful than the Avatar and acquire the ability to remove bending himself, and then beat the Avatar with Aang's own ultimate technique. But on the other hand, his hatred for bending stemmed out of how his father was biased against Tarrlok because he was the better bender and the Training from Hell that they were put through.
History lessons probably reinforced the feeling that bending leads to discrimination and Republic City was the perfect place to pitch his views. It would give him a chance to use the bending removal technique he believed was the most powerful ability of all, while also satisfying his desire for Equality.
By debending the Avatar, he would succeed where his father had failed, and establish himself to be more powerful than the avatar, master of the ultimate ability, while simultaneously becoming a symbol for equality. Why does his motive have to be anything different from what he said? Just because it's realistically unattainable doesn't mean that it isn't honestly his goal.
Lots of people have goals that they think they can pull off that are just about impossible, on every level imaginable. After de-bending the Wolfbats, Amon declares that any bender who stands in his way will meet the same fate. Once the Equalists take over, Hiroshi's speech says that the first thing they did was declare bending illegal. The benders lined up for the "public execution" scene were mostly in uniform - cops and White Lotus members; in other words, people who were fighting the Equalists during the coup.
It seems the plan was to rule mostly through fear , with Amon acting as his own Sword of Damocles : "Live like the rest of us and you'll be left alone, but get caught practicing your perverted bending and it's straight to Amon for you.
There would, of course, be a hard-core group of holdouts , but they'd be easy to demonize via propaganda. On whether or not Amon really was genuine in his desire to destroy bending, there's an extremely strong piece of evidence in favor of that in episode Tarrlok saying it was so as part of an Exposition Dump on Amon's true backstory.
It's exceedingly rare for information reveal that blatant to turn out to be false, and even then, in virtually every known case of that happening, the fact that the Info Dump was false is made very, very clear, and the fact that we can still call Amon Ambiguously Evil ambiguous as to how evil he was shows that there was no such denouncement of Tarrlok's exposition, so we can safely say in my opinion that Amon was at least partially genuine about his cause. That said, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he was lying to himself about how much of it was really for the people, and how much was about personal glory or upstaging his father.
Amon's plans couldn't realistically be brought to the world-stage—he probably wouldn't even survive the inevitable uprising of depowered benders—but those were never really the stakes the show presented. Amon is a threat in the framework of the story because he endangers Republic City's benders, Korra and her friends, and the last remaining air benders.
He had the potential to do catastrophic damage, even if his plans had no long term or global viability. Amon and Tarrlock's fate. So, did Word of God confirm that they were both dead? Because the show didn't say it. I thought that it was intentionally open ended in case the show got Screwed by the Network.
Mushroom clouds arent usually intended to be ambiguous. Yeah- I doubt there's anything in even a master bloodbender's arsenal to survive being right in the middle of an explosion. They were about as explicit as could get without showing the charred corpses, which they'd never have gotten away with anyway.
Does Amon have a bloodbending based "chi sense"? How did he find Korra and bloodbend her out even though she was well hidden, and at the one moment where she let down her guard, but not Mako? This man is the greatest bloodbender who ever lived. Is it possible that all his years of bloodbending has given him a "blood sense" like Toph's seismic sense? Think about it. Similar to Toph, that give him an advantage in predicting his opponent's moves, by sensing their muscular movements?
It would also explain how he could sever the chi paths in a bender, he senses where the chi is flowing using this ability and then destroys those chi paths. He'd need the sense because his bloodbending would need surgical precision for that.
What's interesting is this theory would also explain how Korra could still airbend. Amon has never had any experience debending an airbender, so he might not know exactly where the air paths were.
After using his technique he would have detected zero chi flow and concluded that he had beaten Korra. Since Korra's chi paths connected to the Air Chakra were not active, he couldn't sense them, so he would never know the difference.
But then her Air Chakra opened it's opened by love , and she could airbend. Tarrlok pretty much says this when he's talking to Korra.
If you listen carefully Korra lets out a sigh of relief once Amon has walked past her, then she gets bloodbent out. Amon just heard her breath and figured out where she was. It could be that benders especially water and earth all have an intuitive sense of where their element is around them, even if they're not actually manipulating it at the moment.
Toph refined hers to the point of Disability Superpower , but many benders have shown the ability to bend without looking to see where their element is first. If you're a powerful waterbender, and you sense a collection of water under a table when you're looking for someone who's hiding from you, what do you think it could be? Amon doesn't hold anything against Tarrlok for foiling his plans? He must know that Korra learned his true backstory from him, since that's the reason why he imprisoned him separately in the first place.
Yet neither of them bring it up when they reunite, and Noatak is so genuinely happy to be with his brother the one who directly contributed to the defeat of the movement he invested years of time and effort in that I must have forgotten myself, considering it took so long after the finale for me to realize this. First of all, even if Noatak realized Tarrlok had helped bring him down, at that point he had no one else left.
He had spent years, possibly decades, living as Amon, and almost all his worldly connections were made with the Amon persona. When Korra effectively destroyed the Amon persona, all those connections were severed. After that Noatak tried to grasp his last straw, the only emotional bond he had left that that preceded him becoming Amon: his connection with his brother. Secondly, just like Tarrlok did, it's possible that at the moment of his defeat Noatak realized that he had actually continued his father's legacy, even though he had intended to rebel against it.
Yakone had cruelly molded him as a vessel of his revenge, and Noatak had rebelled against that by trying to make the world see all benders were power-hungry despots, like his father was, but in the end he had tried to do exactly what his father had wanted: defeat the Avatar and become the ruler of Republic City. So it's possible Noatak actually felt remorse for the things he had done as Amon, and that he came to realize, like Tarrlok did, that Yakone's evil legacy had lead them both astray.
If this is true, Noatak probably felt more sympathy than hate towards his brother. Why use fake scars? So the whole reveal with Amon at the end. I can buy that groupthink could reasonably lead to "He has a scar, just like he said, this proves his entire backstory true," but then it just ends up being face paint? Really, Amon? Couldn't be bothered to spend 30 seconds actually scarring your face? Do you really, seriously think that "30 seconds" is all the inconvenience there's going to be from burning your face off?
That is really, really not how it works. Burning his face off would have been one of the stupidest things Amon could have possibly done. You're saying he should have crippled himself for life. Let's start from the top—his eyes.
If he wants a scar that would justify wearing a mask, we're talking a really bad scar covering his face. This would mean cooking his face , and you may not realize it but fire isn't a precision tool. There's no way he's going to get that big, that horrific a scar without burning out his own eyes.
Next, his nose and lips—he's saying goodbye to his sense of smell at best, and without lips he's not going to be much of a public speaker. Then there's the recovery—maybe Amon is capable of healing, but could he concentrate on that when he's in maddening pain from literally cooking his own face?
Facial burn scars aren't just some cosmetic thing you can just slap on and move on with your life. They're a crippling disfigurement.
Fire may not be precise, but this is also a world with firebenders Which granted fire's uncontrollable nature is one of the key points of it, but they're able to achieve SOME level of precision with it. And obviously it would hurt, but I dunno, there's something decidedly disappointing about a villain who's not willing to go through excruciating pain for his cause Death to the benders! I just hope none of those firebenders hit me, cause that stuff is like seriously hot, you gaiz.
Hell, it doesn't even have to be that disfiguring, he just needs a scar to be like "See, that thing I said totally happened. I'm just saying, even if the villain is supposed to be wrong, it'd be nice if he'd at least commit Even springing for face paint that isn't going to come off in water, especially given how large crowds plus underground steam vents generally equals wet. He needs to have some alleged facial disfigurement to justify the mask.
If he said he just wore it to avoid being recognised, or to hide a small scar, his fellow equalists may get suspicious if they NEVER see him with the mask off. That way, he has a sympathetic reason for this. Furthermore, actually hurting himself would be very impractical. Not only for the reasons mentioned above; without his mask, he can just disappear in a crowd.
Nobody knows what he really looks like, and nobody expects him to not be disfigured. If something goes wrong, he removes the mask and the make-up and he's gone. I'll give you that, though, the face paint did come off rather easily.
I dunno, one of my friends did a Joker style cosplay for a con, and based on how long it took him to do the relatively tiny mouth scars, I would think that creating such a detailed and convincing scar every morning as part of a Xanatos Roulette Not only on the off chance that someone calls him out on it, but even then banking on his followers being frothy enough to not actually stop and think about it doesn't seem all that practical. Though I guess the ability to disappear in a crowd makes sense.
If he lived alone, he would have had to do it rather infrequently. I can also see him just appearing to live life like the average non-bender, perhaps even using his real name. Hell, he might not ever have used makeup until he captured Tarrlok, who very quickly figured out who he was and might have betrayed Amon long before Korra found him.
He's not going to use a Firebender, because that's either one person alive who knows the truth which is one more than he would want , or someone he's going to have to kill to prevent loose ends—both of which are still more work and complications on top of , once again, cooking his own face. And his make-up wasn't "detailed and convincing. For one, his nose isn't at all misshapen, his eyebrows are still there, the skin itself isn't deformed at all except for upper lip—it was enough make-up to fool people from 15 or so feet away for 30 seconds before he put the mask back on.
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