So I’m sure a lot of us have enjoyed both Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra, which both dropped on Netflix this year. It felt good to finally finish the two shows that I didn’t complete when they were on TV.

I have very few complaints, if any, about ATLA. It is, truly, an elite show. After it ended, I couldn’t stop thinking about it for a good week, and since I value memorability, that was a sign that the show had struck a chord with me on a deeper level. Its characters, story arcs, and themes lingered with me, proving its impact.

I sped through Legend of Korra in about week, and overall I enjoyed it. Similar to ATLA, it balanced humor and solemnity very well. I enjoyed seeing Korra grow from a somewhat hotheaded brat to a pretty level-headed Avatar, someone who grows not only in skill but in self-awareness and empathy.

But I couldn’t help but feel like the show could’ve done a lot more, specifically with Korra’s antagonists. I may talk about the other ones later, but for now I want to focus on the very first “villains” Korra ran into as the Avatar: the Equalists.

So let me take it back to ATLA real quick. (I know, I know, I’m one of those guys that compares Korra to its predecessor.) Part of what made ATLA great was that they didn’t just tell the audience that the Fire Nation was the antagonist, they showed us why exactly we should feel that way. From political imprisonment, to colonized homelands, to literal genocide, the audience could see with our own eyes the damage that the Fire Nation’s imperialism had caused in the lives of individual people. Which is why it wasn’t hard to hate the Fire Nation.

But that’s not what Korra seems to do, especially with the Equalist arc. See, the Equalists are a group of radicals headed by a masked leader named Amon, who seek to rid society of bending which they see as inherently unfair to non-benders. However, the show doesn’t really dive into this inequality that supposedly exists between benders and non-benders. We don’t get a real look at individual non-benders — in the same way that ATLA had entire episodes dedicated to the victims of the Fire Nation’s imperialism — and how their lives are more difficult and oppressed because they can’t bend. The audience doesn’t really get to feel for the non-benders. Because of that, instead of coming across as genuine revolutionaries who are trying to achieve a faux-equality through questionable means, the Equalists just appear…evil.

That’s it. Just evil. Just a bunch a guys trying to fulfill ethnic cleansing.

And that’s a shame because, as we see all throughout the show, Korra is largely about the lessons we learn from our supposed “enemies”, which is something ATLA didn’t really do. Sure, we had empathy for Zuko, as well as the citizens of the Fire Nation who were brainwashed and indoctrinated their entire lives, but for the most part the Fire Lord (Phoenix King?) and his generals were clear-cut evil, and there weren’t a lot of lessons to be learned from them other than “colonizers are bad.” On the contrary, almost all of Korra’s adversaries come from a position of vulnerability. These aren’t simply power-hungry villains; they’re characters motivated by their ideologies and personal sense of justice. This complexity of motives could have been especially compelling for the Equalists, had it been fully developed.

And because of that, I don’t really feel empathy for the Equalist movement. And it didn’t seem like the other Equalists were down for their own movement because once Amon was exposed as a bender, the movement collapsed.

Again, if the inequality between benders and non-benders was real, why would the movement crumble so quickly once Amon’s deception was revealed? The lack of resilience in the movement suggests that, at its core, the writers didn’t fully commit to the idea of genuine societal inequality, which could have made the Equalists a much more powerful and sympathetic adversary.