The Gaang makes a return visit to Earthen Fire Industries, and discovers an entire town has grown up around it thanks to its success and the new inventions that enable the factory to be far more efficient. Unfortunately, those inventions have also effectively replaced the jobs of many benders, stirring up discontent among them and the non-benders who replaced them. Aang naturally decides it's his duty to resolve the conflict, but it grows far more complicated than he dreamed as even forces within the city council are making their own plots to take advantage of the situation.
Imbalance provides examples of:
- Aggressive Categorism: Liling's motive is revenge against all non-benders by proxy because she despised the Earth King who let Ba Sing Se fall. She believes the weakness was because the man wasn't a bender and thus too weak to fight back against Ozai. Baffingly, she holds no remorse against Ozai who lead the invasion because she sees it as a bender making a smart move against a non-bender who can't defend against that power.
- Alas, Poor Villain: Liling seems to think that Aang should have just killed Ozai instead of letting him live without his bending, seeing the later as a Fate Worse than Death.
- All Crimes Are Equal: Discussed between Toph and Katara with Toph taking this viewpoint. She believes that Liling won't stop until her bending is taken from her. Katara retorts that while Liling is as despicable, there's a difference between a warlord who wouldn't stop and a run of the mill criminal who won't stop. Katara believes that such a drastic action should only be reserved for those like Ozai who will not change and can cause destruction on a national level if not stopped. Meanwhile Toph argues that the difference between Ozai and Liling is really a matter of degrees and that while Ozai was bad on a national level, Liling is just as bad at a city level.
- Art-Shifted Sequel: The art style is notably different from the Gene Luen Yang comics, due to Gurihiru also retiring as artists for the comics, with Peter Wartman taking their place.
- Ascended Meme: There was a long-standing joke about Toph having so many statues because she just went around building them and nobody would stop her. Imbalance begins this trend.
- Badass Boast: Aang has a very polite one, deriving its badassery from how calm and nonchalant he is about it."I'd prefer if you didn't. If you fight me, it's not going to go well for you. I mean, I am the Avatar."
- Big Bad: Liling, who has an agenda of her own to escalate the violence. However, it's worth noting that unlike other cases, Liling is ultimately a symptom of the violence plaguing the city and Part 2 outright confirms this. They capture Liling, but Sokka points out that many others were at that meeting ranging from local thugs to higher members of the council. Sokka outright confirms in part 2 that Liling is really just spitting out the truthful resentment between benders and non-benders in the town that have been brewing for what could've been years if not ages.
- Boomerang Bigot: Ru is one of Liling's Co-Dragons in her Bender Supremacist movement despite being a non-bender herself, something that is pointed out to her by Team Avatar. She eventually defects to their side, having originally been for her mother's cause for equal rights, only to realize that it was about benders dominating non-benders.
- Both Sides Have a Point:
- Aang has an especially hard time resolving this conflict because there's no real bad guy to fight, just an unfortunate situation where two sides have their own justified desires that simply can't both exist at once. Case in point, the benders have been using their abilities to harass and rob from non-benders and other benders as well. The non-benders don't even feel safe walking down the streets; but an outright ban on bending in the city will serve nothing but to antagonize the benders further, not to mention in the Avatar Universe, removing bending from a bender is like removing a vital limb. He tries to broker a compromise by training a bender and nonbender police force. This might have worked...if the woman suggesting the plan weren't the story's actual Big Bad.
- As mentioned in the point above, Toph argues that taking her bending away would stop her in her tracks quickly. Katara points out that Liling is not the same as Ozai and doesn't deserve that degree of punishment; and that, arguably, her taking her bending won't stop the silver tongue, nor would it affect other benders who would see that as a slight and more discrimination against them; something Toph thinks will stop cold in its tracks if Liling is stopped, here and now. In the end, Aang decides not to stop Liling's bending because it wouldn't change her mind and turn her into a martyr for the pro benders. He instead allows the government in Cranefish town to put her prison on a public display and next to the factories, while working on resolving the tensions.
- Call-Back: Toph's lie detector abilities get good use in this chapter. She's able to tell just by the running and the seismic patterns that it was Yaling and Ru at the refinery when it was destroyed.
- The end of part 2 has Toph ask Aang to make a statement out of Liling by doing the very same thing he did to Ozai: remove her bending completely.
- A brilliant call back to The Promise is that unlike Liling, Ozai knew that Kuei wouldn't have fared any better regardless if he could bend or not.
- Sokka explicitly draws the parallel between Ru's decision to work against her mother and sister to Zuko fighting his father and sister.
- Call-Forward: Cranefish Town provides plenty more of the steampunk gadgets that will have spread all over the world by Korra's time. The bender/non-bender conflict will unfortunately also have gotten a lot worse by then.
- Toph gets a hold of some metal wires and remarks she may have a use for them. Also, Cranefish Town gets it's first police force courtesy of Suki training their forces.
- Speaking of Toph and police, Toph herself solves much of the mystery in the second book, particularly by questioning Yaling. It's not hard to see how she ended up a police chief as an adult.
- There's an aerial shot of the coastline and bay of Cranefish Town, easily identifiable as Korra's Republic City— right down to the future Air Temple Island and the island where the giant statue of Aang sits. There's a reciprocal Call-Back in The Legend of Korra: Turf Wars, where Tokuga hides in the abandoned Earthen Fire Industries.
- Co-Dragons: Liling's daughters, one of whom is an Earthbender and the other a non-bender. Interestingly enough, the Earthbender thinks herself higher than the non-bender, which irritates the non-bender and causes undue friction among the sisters.
- "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Aang's not angry when he realizes that Liling was staging a pro bender coup; he's disappointed. He tells an arrested Liling that if she had been honest about solving the problems in Cranefish Town, none of this would have happened. Liling is unrepentant.
- Covers Always Lie: You can't tell by the covers that Suki plays a major role in this trilogy.
- Don't Create a Martyr: Part of the reason why Aang chooses not to take away Liling's bending; It would simply polarize the divide between Benders and Non-Benders, and further fuel Bender resentment against the Avatar. At best, they would only comply with Aang out of fear, which is no different from Ozai.
- Fantastic Racism: In book 2, Liling is attempting to manipulate the benders into a war with the non-benders to drive them out. Ru, Liling's non-bending daughter has serious doubts about the movement as she's realizing that her mother is ultimately going to alienate her. Book 3 reveals her motives: apparently, she despises the king for being a non-bender; thinking that because he was too weak to stand up to the likes of Azula or Ozai, he allowed the city to be taken. Liling's really missing a lot of the story, but she only has an outsider's perspective as to why the great city fell.
- One of the benders shouts the phrase "We will not be replaced!" which has been a common saying done by many white nationalists in the current age. It's one thing to have a prejudice, but Liling is outright directing it towards violence.
- Heel–Face Turn: Ru finally has enough of her mother's demeaning insults, and defects to team Avatar.
- Horrible Judge of Character: Yaling gets manipulated by Toph to help the team find the meeting place. She's played like a fifty-cent kazoo.
- Ice-Cream Koan: Sokka laments that trying to stop change is like trying to stop a lion-turtle: You can't and it'll just crush you. Though it does tie into a lesson of change he learned from North and South.
- Idiot Ball: Toph threatens to arrest Liling for the incident... by herself in a room full of benders spoiling for a fight. It's by a sheer miracle they manage to lock her up.
- Inherent in the System: With the progress made towards automation of abilities that required benders, it was only inevitable for the businessman to save money and remove people not needed for the task anymore. Because of this, combined with insufficient funds to be able to move, people are now forced into poverty and they can't break out of it; so they're turning to crime. Katara explains this viewpoint regarding Cranefish Town's civil war. She doesn't think anybody or any group of people set out to make life harder than necessary, but it's just that everyone who came to the town is trying to get a piece of it for themselves and to be able to call home in a town like that; and the changes made to Earthen Fire Industries put a huge damper on that.
- Part 2 has Satoru reflect on this, saying that maybe technological advancement at the rate he did was a bad idea for putting people out of work. Toph remarks that while it did, there wasn't going to be a way for Earthen Fire industries to employ each and every single bender in the town. The problem was going to happen either way.
- Incompletely Trained: With the threat of an impending civil war, Aang had to have Suki train Cranefish Town's own force to Chi Block. They really aren't ready but they've got fundamentals down, which had to do.
- Industrialized Evil: A rare non-violent case. Satoru's inventions and creations put a lot of people out of work who are turning to crime as a result to get by; which means he's part and parcel (even if it's not his intention to do so) of the problem.
- Kick the Dog: For someone who came off as quite a smug-looking threat, Ru really seems to take a verbal and emotional beating in the second book.
- Mama Bear: Liling does give herself up to buy time for her daughters to escape. The words undermine her intent willingly: She wants Ru out of there to carry her sister who was Chi blocked and calls Yaling useless without her bending. She is either failing to notice the damage she risks doing to her own daughter Ru or simply doesn't care. Part 3 blows this out of the water, with her straight up calling her non-bending daughter worthless. This leads to Ru making a Heel–Face Turn.
- Manipulative Bastard: Liling does quite a fine job of not only getting the town whipped up into a frenzy the Avatar might not be able to fix, but also able to turn the benders against him by a few choice questions that already prey on the benders' frustration.
- Might Makes Right: Liling's Bender Supremacist philosophy boils down to this. She blames Kuei's lack of bending abilities for Ba Sing Sei being invaded while justifying Ozai's reign of terror as something that the strong are entitled to do over the weak.
- Misplaced Retribution: Liling's angry that Kuei had let Ba Sing Se fall against the Fire Nation and therefore wants to vanquish the non-benders, whom remind her of weakness like that of Kuei. However, Liling is also underestimating the strength of Azula and Ozai and doesn't have the full picture of what Kuei was up against. She doesn't realize or accept that a man like Kuei would've stood no chance against the likes of Azula or Ozai and would've fallen anyway.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
- Liling told her daughters "no loose ends" after they hired a Firebender to destroy Lao's factory. Yaling takes this to the logical extreme when she sees Aang capture the Firebender— she causes the cliff he's on to crumble into the ocean, forcing Aang to save his life. This leads to the Firebender gratefully telling Aang everything he knows. It isn't much, but the information he gives — that he was hired by two teenage girls — is enough of a lead for Toph to recognize Yaling and Ru as two of the people she sensed running away from the destruction, especially once she casually asks if Yaling has ever been to that cliff and Yaling lies to her. Yaling follows up this stunning performance by "getting" Toph to teach her Metalbending, which Toph uses to casually interrogate her about the bender supremacists' plans.
- Liling's bigotry towards nonbenders is what causes Ru to tell Sokka and Suki all about her mother's plans, and ask Suki to teach her chi-blocking.
- Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: Liling starts out organizing her revolution because she sees the technological efficiency replacing bending's importance as an existential threat against benders, politics eventually siding with the non-benders at their expense. Over time however, it becomes more and more clear that she is operating on a Super Supremacist Might Makes Right mentality that seeks to drive out the non-benders in Cranefish Town all-together.
- Odd Name Out: Liling, Yaling, and Ru. Liling and Yaling are Earthbenders trying to terrorize nonbenders out of Cranefish Town. Ru is the nonbender who has a Heel–Face Turn.
- Offing the Offspring: When Ru reveals that she has defected to the Avatar's side when she sees that her mother is going too far, Liling tries burying her alive without hesitation.
- Parental Favoritism: Liling tends to have more respect for her Earthbender daughter than she does for Ru, the non-bender. Ru doesn't take it very well though still does what she's told until hitting a Rage Breaking Point.
- Powder Keg Crowd: All of the benders ready to start a revolution in Cranefish Town. While Liling was ultimately the one to unite them and light the fuse, odds are good it was only going to be a matter of time before the keg blew up. If not by her, then someone else.
- Running Gag: Sokka is repeatedly dismayed by the uncreative names for Cranefish Town and its various innovations.
- Shadow Archetype: It's easy to see Yaling and Ru as Katara and Sokka respectively if the two water nation siblings allowed Katara's bending to drive a rift between them.
- Shaming the Mob: Toph tells Aang that taking away Liling's bending might be the best way to get the benders to calm down. Aang does consider it but concludes that it would instead lead to people following the law out of fear.
- The Social Expert: Aside from being a strong Earthbender, Liling has quite a silver tongue and can use it to manipulate the benders into violent bigots. Unfortunately, she makes the mistake of explaining all of her plans at a pro-bender rally. While the Gaang is attending incognito and investigating her.
- Super Supremacist: Liling and her followers believe in a Might Makes Right philosophy where benders lording over non-benders is the natural order, thus seeing advancing technology outmoding them as an existential threat to their superiority over their non-bending coworkers.
- Title Drop: Imbalance coincidentally happens to be the password needed for the team to get to the meeting underground.
- Took a Level in Badass: Suki really shows her stuff in part 2. She not only picked up Chi Blocking (likely from Ty Lee); but she swiftly disables Yaling and Liling herself, leading to the latter's capture.
- Underestimating Badassery: Downplayed. Liling's anger is at a king too weak. She thinks that it's because he can't bend that he can't lead his nation effectively. Liling's got no clue exactly how dangerous and capable the likes of Azula and Ozai are. She doesn't and possibly won't understand that even if Kuei could bend, he'd still have lost against them. Also, by that point, Long Feng had already staged a coup against him, and Long Feng was a Earthbender.
- Vagueness Is Coming: Liling, before her defeat yells at Aang that even if she is stopped, the ideology she already started will not end with her. In the end, she's right about that; the bender/non-bender conflict in Cranefish/Republic City persists even into Korra's time; Aang was never really able to solve it, one of the main problems that he passed down to Korra. 70 years later, the same ideology persists when Councilman Tarrlok uses it to target non-benders; the inverse ideology is also spearheaded by Amon, who's anti-bending movement, the Equalists, even briefly succeed in taking over Republic City.
