Interesting topic. I think it's a combination of both. Personally, I think that benders have an advantage over non-benders, but the more skilled the non-bender, the better chance they have in a fight.

For instance, Jun, with her beast's tongue, can bascially take out any bender, as long as they can touch them. The Yun Yun Archers captured Aang, which is saying something. Ty Lee as her accupuncture skill, which can take away a person's bending powers, and with her acrobatics, she can dodge pretty well, and Mai is really skilled with those knives.

As I've shown, if you're a really skilled Non-Bender, then you have a better chance against a Bender, no matter how good they are, of course, the worse they are, the better chance for you...

I agree with Karena. As with the argument of benders of one elopement having an advantage over another, it all boils down to skill and the effectiveness of using that skill. While it is reasonable to assume that benders have the advantage over non-benders, it is not always correct. A bender is influenced by his environment easier than and non bender. Also a bender is more predictable than a non-bender. If a fire bender comes charging at you, you can assume that he/she/it will try to torch you. However if a non-bend comes your way, then you have no way to judge them unless they happen to be carrying a weapon.

Scientist Do Sho Mouya has a point. Benders are easy to read. But people without them are hard to read. There is just so many benders you can start to predict what they are going to do. But if youre a nonbender without a ranged weapon you are doomed for sure.

I'm sorry but you missunderstood me (happens all the time). The first and for most important thing is your effectivness at your skill. Benders have pros and cons. While it give the user great power it also leads to a predictable pattern that is limited by the confines of the bending art. The same is true of the warriors. Look at Sokka. Here is a prime example of how a non-bender can be effective in the area of one weapon and have the other weapons cover up the weak spots. With non-benders the learning can take any direction to any depth. Benders are limited to the scope of their bending power.

You all seem to make the assumption that all a bender can do is bend. Sure, if one is an excellent bender than you would naturally use what you're most profecient in. But what if one is not only a bender, but skilled in other aspects of fighting. Zuko for example. He makes excellent use of twin dao.
The fact that you would expects a bender to be a one trick pony leaves you open to deception.
Bleh, in the end I guess it always comes down to the skill of the person ( but that dosnt make for a fun topic)

Yes we are making assumptions because that way we have an intresting conversation. If we asummed that skill was tossed asside then benders would be the best. And, with all due respect, most benders foucus only on their bending (like katra and toph). Zuko might just be one of many oddballs in this regard. So now refecting back, I would like to think that are assumption are some-what, if not completly, logical. (Check)

(Off topic before I reach my point... If Ty Lee and Mai had shown up before I came up with Galgori concept, they would be my models. Heck, I'm tempted to call them the Twins' dopple gangers.)

Anyway, there's another advantage that nonBenders have over Benders: numbers and the time it takes to train them. In my view, Benders are fairly rare, maybe one in six people at most. Combine this with the fact that they tend to be fairly spread out across the planet, you could throw groups of nonBenders at just about any one Bender you could find and take them down with relative ease. True, they're strong, but they have the weaknesses listed above, along with one other: period of training.

It seems to take a really long time to train a Bender to the point where they can reliably take on, say, ten men at once. Assuming you start at the same age, a warrior training with weapons continusly will be more leathal than a similarly trained Bender at the same ammount of training up to a certain point. Again, variations likely apply...

The only reason Benders rule the world is mental condititoning. Water and Earthbenders play nice, 'doing good deeds' for their 'helpless kin', making wonder cities only they can operate. The Fire Nation is more honest, using far more sitck than carrot motivation. We don't know how the Airbenders worked it, but I suspect they used the 'more holy than thou' tactic, mixing favors to villages with generic tithing to support the monasteries. In either case, this gives them the minions, resources, and above all, time to train themselves into the powerhouses Masters become.

But... If a popular revolution came up and the nonBenders stuck with it, the Benders would win intial victories, but they'd be worn down eventually.

Haha. Halaku I'm surprised you didn't use Kusari Vs. Anei as an example here. I agree almost completely with Halaku, except for a few things. I'm not so sure about how rare benders are. The Fire Nation has a massive army of Firebenders, all of whom are pretty much intermidiate. The Earth Kingdom also has an extremely large mass of Benders. The Air Nomads were pretty much all Airbenders (as gathered from the games we've seen played, and the few times we've seen their everday life in Aangs memory). The only ones I saw really lacking in Benders was the Water Tribe in the South Pole. Katara was the only bender there (supposedly, I'm sure one of the young children would have discovered bending). But that's just because all the other benders left.

That's what we've seen! Hotspots! Combat zones! And the Temples couldn't be the basic unit of Airbender society, because Monasteries require extensive outside support and maintence. There would have to villages to feed those monks, mine raw material, shave their heads, etc... Alot of villages. As to the Fire and Earth Nations... The places we've seen represent concentrations of Benders. Elite units gathered for the front lines and unleashed at the enemy. Think about Bender schools scuoring the country for iniates, drag them back to the state schools, and unleashign them in clusters.

That raises an interesting point. The monasteries would need some outside support for food and what not. And gathering from the term "Air Nomad", the airbender culture might have survied by the running non-bending Nomads. The Temples could have been a been a distraction, a last stand so that the Fire nation would destroy the airbenders. I would make sence to leave the temple itself untouched so as to lure the nomads back and see what became of the temples. If Aang has any hope of finding his culture again, it lies in finding the Nomads and not any airbending monks.

Another point is that in all likely hood the temples were just like a state bending school exept with out the intendent to send them out to destroy the world. This and the points before are all speckulation with no evidance to back it up.

Are we to assume that anyone who didnt live in the temple wasn't a bender?
Maybe each and every air nomad was a bender to some degree, we can't say anything for certain due to nothing being revealed on the matter. We can hardly gather any accurate figure regarding the number of benders in any of the kingdoms, nor have we seen how benders are or if they are selected and the type of training a new bender under goes before he can gain the basic foundations of his style.

As for their support, I think they would just fly down somewhere and get whatever they need. Maybe they have farms and stuff that they run down below, and they fly down on the Flying Bison (natural transporters) and gather whatever they need, whenever they need. It seems pretty simple to me.
Anyway, now that I think about it, Halaku is right. In the episodes I've seen, it's always been a "hotspot". Ehh...

O boy...All of these ideas could work. The sad fact is that we need more information. Though I do belive that everyone in the temples is an airbender because the monks are based off of monks from asia. And every one there is ether hand picked or donated by their parents at birth (I think, don't quote me on that). It would also support the idea that every culture has a "state" school to teach the bending arts to benifit their respective cultures.

I like others agree with Karena... it seems to be a starting advantage to be able to bend but if you are willing to work hard the pay off can at times be bigger for non-benders. Also there is also a chance that a bender would underestimate a non-bender looking down on him... and with a really skilled non-bender that could definatly give them the edge.

I agree that though benders have an advantage, nonbenders can still kick their butts. Look at Ty Lee, who, to compensate for that, takes out bender's arms and legs using pressure points in order to keep them from bending.

I don't think Katara is a Master, just very good. Master Pakku is a master, and Katara is still technically his student. She's just an advanced one, you don't see her creating water cyclones that lift her 40 feet into the air and smashing machines aside with 10 foot tidal waves, like Pakku did.

And Kun you have hit the head of one the theories that has been developed here. Bending or no bending, your ability to use what you have will determin victory or defeat.

You make an interesting and fun to read argument, Halaku, but I disagree with some of your points.

1) Rarity of benders: This one is really up in the air as we don't know what the actual ratio is, but I tend to think of them being more common than 1 to 6, however, I do agree that benders are less numerous than non-benders.

2) Training time: I actually have the opposite view and believe that if non-bender A and bender B were given the same amount of time and same rigors of training, the bender would be the better fighter. My reasoning, is in the words of Katara, "Asking [insert name of the earthbender boy, I cannot remember it] not to earthbend is like asking me not to waterbend. It is who we are." and therefore bending is more innate to a bender than wielding a weapon is to a non-bender. So why have non-benders done so well against benders? Most, if not all, have been elite-class non-benders fighting against average-class benders, (and in regards to the fire benders, unimaginative as well. Come on guys do a fire shockwave that sends a blast in all directions rather than the same old same old point and shoot that seems to easy to dodge...) and no, I do not consider Katara a master-bender. In my opinion, Master Pakku called her "Master Katara" as a poetic way of telling Katara she is now in charge of making sure Aang learns water-bending and that he has faith in her ability to do so. The fact that she was able to advance so quickly once she had a master to study under and did not have to learn everything from scratch also supports my argument.

3) Mental Conditioning: This one I probably disagree the most with as I just don't think the facts support it. First of all, I don't know that benders really do rule. The Northern Water Tribe was ruled by a non-bender, and come to think of it, so was the Southern Tribe (though the latter is not saying much LOL). Aunt Wu more or less ruled her village, despite there being benders there, and the non-bender twin in her village seemed just as cheerful about being a non-bender as his brother was about being a bender. And when you give the example of them building magnificent cities only they can run, I don't know that such would translate into them ruling as here is a scenario that quickly came to mind: "Hi Bob, how are you doing?" "Fine Jim, I'm about to start the afternoon Omashu mail shift." "Mmmm, the afternoon shift is killer this time of year. Be sure to watch out for sledders." "Yep, thanks for the warning, see you later, Jim." "Later, Bob." LOL

4) Popular Revolution: I don't know that this would hold true either as I would have thought the people of the Fire Nation would have done so by now given the harsh treatment they are forced to endure. Granted their revolutions (if there even were any) may not have had the stamina you stated would be necessary.

In regards to benders and predictability, I think that is more a result of the lack of imagination on part of the bender (as stated up above in reference to the fire benders) rather than an actual limitation of bending itself.

Copper for your thoughts.