He was completely in the right, he just didn't have the right method

He was completely in the right, he just didn't have the right method.

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I mean he was right, but he acted like a total dumbass about it, trick the avatar into the state by “killing” one of his friends and you think he wouldn’t go berserk and be uncontrollable after that?

Nah in universe there's a huge precedence for trying to master the Avatar State the right way.
Trying to game it by trickery rather than mastery is obviously a bad idea, and that's not getting into his method of agitating it out of Aang.
In the end they'd just end up with a strong but poorly controlled weapon that couldn't be reliably deployed and everytime it's used put the spiritual balance of the world at risk.
It was a bad desperate idea.

Not really, he just wanted to use Aang as a weapon and had no willingness to understand the need to bend other stuff.

Fong was not a spiritual man, he was a general who understood weapons and war, and treated the Avatar state largely like this, like a weapon of mass destruction he could harness to blast the Fire Nation and win the war. He brought in spiritualists and spiritual help but most of them seemed like quacks, and they didn't understand the need for Aang to open his chakras, and the emotional and spiritual growth that would require. Fong wanted to use the Avatar State as a massive weapon to just blast through the Fire Nation to the Fire Lord, whereas actual masters of the state in previous incarnations used it sparingly, for just an instant, to power their greatest feats of bending prowess. To try to keep the Avatar in that state would be incredibly dangerous both to the future of the Avatar, to everyone around, and likely to how the Avatar is perceived by the world, and on top of that, Fong was willing to abuse children to achieve his military aims. He's a perfect example of how a purely consequentialist morality system with no sense of just conduct is destructive and ultimately harmful rather than helpful, especially in a setting like Avatar, where so much of the consequences characters create around them are reflective of their emotional and spiritual balance.

He was in the wrong but I can understand why he did it.

Avatar fucking off right around the time notJapan decides to take over the world in a century long crusade that they are winning which has left much of the world not only being subjugated by their imperialism but a consequence being holocaust of an entire people to show how crazy and desperate they are, just for the Avatar to finally return when everything seemed bleak?

Yeah, I'd probably want to fast forward all the spiritual bullshit too and just end the god damn war already.

It seems like Earth bending doesn't require a whole lot of spirituality. I wonder why. It seems Water and Air are the only ones with a emphasis.

Well, that's why I said he didn't have the right method. Aang didn't need to learn the elements, he needed to learn how to master the Avatar state. It was the Avatar state that allowed Aang to defeat Ozai, not his bending abilities.

>It seems like Earth bending doesn't require a whole lot of spirituality. I wonder why. It seems Water and Air are the only ones with a emphasis.
I'd have to revisit the episode where Toph teaches Aang Earthbending, but from what I remember, the mindset and emotional stat required for it seems to be a sort of stubbornness and directness. With that in mind, Fong's approach makes perfect sense: get the most powerful weapon in the Avatar's arsenal, master that, and use it as a hammer to directly attack the Fire Lord. It's part of the solution, it's just not the whole package needed to actually do what the Avatar must do.

you remember he was still bending earth, water, and fire while in the avatar state right? and he uses them all against ozai in the finale?

Earth bending philosophy is basically "JUST DO IT FAGGOT" and Fire bending philosophy is about using your emotions to fuel your power, and while rage/anger isn't the only emotion ii is one of the most straightforward and easy to understand.

So it makes sense those two are the most aggressive and as already mentioned, straightforward.

Yes, but he can bend elements he hasn't learned yet while in the Avatar state. He waterbended the very first time we saw him use it, and he earthbended in the General Fong episode.

>Gets one shot
Heh, nothing personel kid

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He ended up being right all along, Aang would've never beaten the Fire Lord without the Avatar State.

Well if you're ignoring all of the fight except for finishing Ozai off, it was his bending abilities in conjunction with energybending, like the Earth-sensing that Toph taught him, earthbending to restrain Ozai, and fire and airbending and firebending to defend himself from Ozai's last attack, followed by taking Ozai's powers. He could have used the Avatar State to take Ozai down, but he made a different call. If you take the fight as a whole, you also see him use the Avatar State to turn the tide of the battle, but you also see him use every other form of bending, including lightning-redirection that saves his life, which Zuko had pretty much just taught him the method to do, and none of the previous Avatars had that knowledge, because Iroh invented it by studying and understanding waterbending and the mindset involved.

He also never would have beaten the Fire Lord without a lot of other things he learned.

Also, if he had no qualms about killing Ozai, he had him dead to rights when redirecting Ozai's lightning.

& have the right of it.

But also, at the time, the Earth Kingdom capitol was being run by a literal brain washing illuminati and in general the stability of any given town or village or city was REALLY dependent on how competent local government was. Hell, in some cases there was a clear might-makes-right mentality going around.

Who's to say Fong weaponizing the Avatar State would have stopped with blasting the Fire Nation to hell? Maybe he had designs to then immediately use that power to steamroll and conquer everything else-- there's precedent of that with Chen the Conqueror trying to fuck shit up. Fong may well have looked at that story and took from it the lesson he needed to use the power of the Avatar for his own gain, not stand in front of it.

In a rewatch it surprised me how much of a great earthbender he was.

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>weaponizing a pacifist, vegetarian god child
the madman

>Who's to say Fong weaponizing the Avatar State would have stopped with blasting the Fire Nation to hell? Maybe he had designs to then immediately use that power to steamroll and conquer everything else-- there's precedent of that with Chen the Conqueror trying to fuck shit up. Fong may well have looked at that story and took from it the lesson he needed to use the power of the Avatar for his own gain, not stand in front of it.
This is a great example of the show's repeated lesson of how you win being just as important if not more important than whether you win. Balance is key, both political, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

I do like you, a lot, but we can't be together, and not for the reason you think.
It's because...
I've been blacked

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Fact: Aang should have struggle more during the fight with Ozai. He won too easily.

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I wish more shows would have the villains trying to do this while the hero is doing their flashy powerup.

>he just wanted to use Aang as a weapon

Well yeah. Aang's entire selling point was, "I can become strong enough to defeat the fire lord and end the war. Eventually."

This guy just wanted to speed up the process be focusing on the Avatar State rather than normal bending. And as we saw in the finale, Aang's individual ability to bend elements was irrelevant once he went into the Avatar State; he immediately beat Ozai effortlessly.

Dude wasn't wrong that figuring out the Avatar State was the quickest way to beat Ozai, even if it wasn't "the right way" as far as the main characters were concerned.

needs of the many

aang fucking deserved to stay dead for this.

samefag

>needs of the many
Were met by acting in accordance with Aang's values, and doing his duty as the Avatar to master the elements. Fong's naked consequetialism with no consideration of justice or respect, rather than causing the positive consequences he strove for, actually caused no benefit, and resulted in injury to many of his own soldiers.

Why?

i dont think he was. ignoring the fact that he manipulated a 12 year old into thinking he had murdered his best friend and love interest:

-his assumption is completely based on the siege of the north, where aang also used the power of the ocean spirit along with the avatar state, making him nigh unstoppable in a naval combat based scenario
-while he's significant more powerful than any one bender, he's not invincible. crossroads of destiny is enough proof of that.
-even if the odds were in aangs favor if he chose to just avatar state the problem away at this stage in the story, Fong is still risking the entire avatar cycle on a gambit, which is just irresponsible to the world at large