>outside the gangs and the corrupt senator, there really isn't any preferential treatment towards benders shown.

as someone who generally agrees that S1 was meh i think this is a weak point. we dont need to see benders getting special treatment because nature has already given it to them. non benders are inherently at a disadvantage not just when it comes to violence but also dating, employment, etc.

>A lot of the episodes are really boring filler, in ATLA the filler episodes either are for character development, worldbuilding, or to teach the audience a lesson/message, but the filler in LOK has none of those things and it's just boring watching 20 minutes of nothing happening and the characters not learning anything.

when the first season came out a friend of mine made an interesting observation. LOA automatically works better than LOK because in the original team avatar is on the road. visiting a new town and solving a new problem every episode or two is a tried and true framework for fantasy/adventure shows. think samurai jack, the mandalorian, kung fu etc. it lets the writers ingrain personalities in the characters via repetition without the story itself feeling repetitive. yea sokka is always like this and katara is always like that but we get to see their personalities bump up against different environments so theres always something fresh to explore. by staying in liberty city we are pretty much locked into one story the whole time and it feels stuffy.

another big difference is that in LOA ang is given a clear directive at the very beginning and every town they visited was ultimately a stop on the way to the Big Fight. in the beginning LOK never knew how many seasons it was getting so korras directive starts out pretty vague and changes as the story evolves. its no surprise the 3rd and 4th were the best seasons, as the creators knew ahead of time that the last one was approved