L.J. Writes

Yeah, that's the part that boiled me up--it was a premise with so much potential, and they just poured it down a drain in the most offensive way possible.

And what was the point of the leader pretending not to be a bender?

He hated his own bending powers because his bender father abused him, and he came to believe bending should disappear from the world. Which might have been interesting in its own way if the story hadn't so utterly failed to resolve the issues it had raised about benders and non-benders.

In addition to all the other crap the story had Abuse Makes You Evil (and Unfit to Live) implications in spades: the leader's younger brother, also abused by their father, grows up to be a conniving politician. At the end of Season 1 the brothers flee the city together, and the younger brother murder-suicides them both. Fuuuuuck.

I like your idea of a voidbender better than anything than came out of that whole fiasco. The de-bending was supposedly a form of waterbending called bloodbending, and it didn't turn out to be permanent or even a very hard problem--everyone's bending is instantly returned in the final episode by deus ex machina, rendering the season even more pointless than it already was.