>>38564
>lightning bending being common
I actually liked that part and wished they could have explored it more. The way I imagine it, and this is me doing the work of the authors, is that up until Aang, lightning bending was a secret technique reserved for the royal family. Information was limited, and there was only one way of doing it, the traditional way. When Zuko became Fire Lord, either as a fuck you to his sister, or because he saw value in spreading information, he made the technique's learning process public knowledge. Some peasant looked at it and said "Fuck this shit, I am not doing all that" so he developed his own lightning bending that was a shitty version of the original, but anyone could learn it. So he made a dojo, taught everyone, including kids, some died because it was a shitty and dangerous, until someone came and said "Holy shit, this is fucking insane! You should do this instead", so he makes a new way of doing lightning bending that is safer and a bit more powerful. So by the time of Korra, you had like 7 different schools of lightning bending all with their pros and cons, there are conferences, books written, and so on. It could have been a plot point, that in season 1, Mako only knew the shittiest version, but by season 4 after traveling with Korra for so long, and seeing all the other lightning masters, he develops his new style that is actually better than the traditional one. The idea would be to show how the spread of information, helped revolutionize techniques and empower the people.
Of course this is not what we got, instead we got them uaing lightning to power generators.