The very premise of Avatar: the Last Airbender suggested an eternal cycle, and a structure by which you could have new adventures. In the original show, Aang has visions of past avatars - such as Kyoshi and Roku - who serve as guides to him, even as they are, in a way, also his past selves.
But as is often the case with fantasy, the world of Avatar seems mostly stagnant in The Last Airbender - our flashbacks of Sozin during Roku's time show a Fire Nation that isn't really that different than the "modern" one we see 100 years on. There's a bit of fun in the third season when Aang is using some very outdated slang (remember that he's actually 100 years older than he looks) while they're undercover in the Fire Nation. It's true that the Fire Nation does seem to have some kind of industrialization going on, but to what extent that's a new development versus a feature of their culture is sort of left to your imagination.
In Legend of Korra, the world has profoundly changed, and the technological level of Republic City is explicitly meant to evoke early-20th-century New York - with cars, airplanes (though to be fair that's a bit of a reveal toward the end of the season) and radio.
With that 20th Century feel, though also comes a change in politics.
Obviously, claiming that the 20th Century was more politically revolutionary than the previous ones is a little disingenuous - while the 20th saw the competing forces of fascism, communism, and capitalist liberalism, the 19th of course also saw the rise of nationalism and socialism, and the 18th saw, well, you know, the American Revolution. Political change is a constant.
But the big bad of Korra's first season definitely uses the 20th century tools of politics - propaganda, rallies, symbolism, and mass media.
Amon and his Equalists have an agenda that, while extreme, seems based on some genuine grievance. One element of the world of Avatar is that some people are just born lucky, getting the power to magically manipulate one of the four elements, giving them both the obvious supernatural power, but also a leg up economically - if you can shoot fire from your fists, you'll probably be pretty welcome in a factory that might require that fire to drive its machinery.
And we see in the first episode that bending gangs exist - using their elemental bending abilities to intimidate non-benders into paying them protection money.
It's actually one of the big problems in any setting in which magical powers are granted to some but not all, earned not by their own work or study, but by sheer luck, which is that you inevitably create two classes of people.
Now, we do get some clear examples of how this impediment is not universal - the richest man in the city is Hiroshi Sato, whose Future Industries provide the city with cars and other fancy technology, and he (and his daughter Asami, who's one of the core cast members of the series) have no elemental powers at all.
Still, between a police force (yes, founded by the fan-favorite Toph Beifong from the original series) that uses magical metal-bending to overpower civilians and gangs that use their powers to intimidate, you can hardly blame people from being attracted to a guy who wants to take power away from these super-powered people.
At the same time, Amon just screams villain, always wearing a mask, so I was actually sort of surprised that they didn't subvert things.
Ultimately, it's revealed that Amon is the worst kind of villain - he's a hypocrite. Being a waterbender himself, Amon is just using these injustices as a path to power.
This series of course came out before our current political moment. While the U.S. prior to 2016 certainly had its problems, nowadays everything feels like a political minefield of problematic messages.
You could read Amon in different ways: the "law and order" reading, which I find a lot more problematic, is the notion that movements toward equality are all just mislead masses being manipulated by some disingenuous leader or conspiracy. One of the most common tactics to oppose civil rights movements in America has been to invent some evil ulterior motive, given that opposing the stated motive (which tends to be just "please let us enjoy the rights that this country promises") is an immoral position to stand upon.
At the same time, you could also read Amon as someone who has chosen a scapegoat minority (while not uncommon, Benders are, I think supposed to be less common than non-benders) and cultivate bigotry toward said group in order to score a political following.
Of course, this latter reading, while it makes the Equalists more vile villains (and thus makes it easier for us to root for heroes fighting them) also breaks down a little when you see how benders are, in fact, quite privileged in Republic City society.
The truth is that we don't really know what kind of class divisions would occur in a world where people had supernatural powers, because, well, what makes them supernatural is that they don't exist in nature, i.e., this reality.
The politics of Legend of Korra are thus a bit muddled. While some might cry "it's just a kid's show," in some ways I think that makes getting the politics right all the more important. Now, what politics are "right" is naturally a matter of political opinion, but I'll just say that I think generally promoting tolerance of people who are different from you ought to be one of those easily-agreed-upon values. For what it's worth, especially given the anti-imperialism message of the first series, I assume that the writing crew for Korra (which has many of the same people) has their heart in the right place.
One of the consequences of making your setting more reminiscent of the modern world is that modern ideas about authority, class, and politics start to become more relevant. I think that's extremely fertile, but also behooves the writers to be careful about the message they're delivering.
All of this is also, of course, going on as the backdrop of a story about a teenager who is trying to make her way in this new environment. Korra herself gets swept into politics, becoming an agent of the state for a time before breaking off to do her own thing.
I suspect the choice to have Korra be older than Aang was during his series is a conscious one - coming five years after the first show, they probably expected to have many kids who grew up on the original tuning in as an older audience. As such, it makes sense for Korra to be both older to be more relatable to that audience, but also to deal with more complex issues (not to say that ATLA was without its clever nuances.)
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