The older I get, more I agree with Magneto.

A Bioshock-like game set on Asteroid M would be, if you will excuse the parlance, baller.

Even the first season had Amon, the guy that wanted equality between benders and non-benders. At one point we're even shown that power was cut to a predominantly non-bender neighborhood, and when people went outside to protest to get their power turned back on, they were all rounded up and arrested. Afterwards, when Korra goes and tries to get the people that were arrested set free, she's told

All equalist suspects are being detained indefinitely. They'll be freed if and when the task force deems them no longer a threat.

Just in case it wasn't clear enough by that point that non-benders were treated as second class citizens.

I've been meaning to re-watch Korra, but I remember even the first time I watched it being a bit disappointed in the "enlightened centrism" where they are trying to paint every conflict as pacifists vs extremists.

I think it's similar to looking at BioShock 1 and BioShock Infinite. There's a lot of writers out there who just use politics and ideology as a setting for the conflict rather than actually being central to their message. It's simply a solid formula to make a villain: take any sort of stance and push it to violent extremes. Comstock is a religious zealot, Andrew Ryan I don't think ever even mentions spirituality if I remember. Ken Levine's message in the two games is not about religion, but extremes.

There are benefits. It makes the villains more nuanced and relatable. It gives the protagonist room for doubt and allows for some of the "good" guys to take on antagonistic roles. But Korra also ends up supporting an oppressive regime, and Booker DeWitt gets shoehorned into fights against the people rebelling against his enemy because... Reasons?

Cylons being manipulated by other cylons doesn't absolve them of guilt.

BSG did have a few instances of the reverse of OP's question tho -- where the "good guys" turned out to be bad" -- trying to say this without spoilers; it's a 20 year old show but ffs of you haven't seen it, go see it now.

• the (temporary) new admiral
• several main characters during the part where they live on the dirty planet
• a very specific set of seven main characters (wink wink) ... .and more,..

And there's one specific example of the full 360 -- a character that starts good, turns bad, but turns out they were actually good all along. I won't give the name, but they were passing messages to the resistance.

That show was awesome.

One note tho, on the topic generally: flipping character alignments is a frequent pre-shark-jump thing, and is often bad writing. In BSG, tho, all of the "flips" are pre-planned, or at least 100% true to their character (eg the 360 example above).

Snape was never a good guy though. Very brave, yes and he had some good qualities. He was also vindictive and a bully - willing to put his petty dislikes above the quality of his teaching.

I cant see Ozymandias as a good guy. At all. None of the "heroes" are, but Oz was the worst of them.

Nah ozymandies was kind of an ass regardless . Did he solve a big problem ? Yes . Was he a good guy ? Far from it.

I think Jaime becomes a good guy. He starts out as a bad guy but he had a redemption arc.

Looks like your spoilers aren't working - spoilers on lemmy are three : on either side of the spoiler.