#Azula probably isn't that mentally ill though if at all.

[balanceoflightanddark]

Well... I don't think that Azula hallucinating Ursa is her first hallucination.

Her reaction is slight initial surprise but then she's immeadiatley just ... annoyed. She isn't shocked or freaked out at all. It's like she's used to it. She talks to the hallucination as if it was just another day. Then she smashes the mirror, like she is fully accquainted with the fact that this isn't real.

That's not the reaction of someone who sees and hears their lost mother for the first time. No way.

(Ofc some people don't like to headcannon in this direction of her having long-lasting mental illness and prefer to think it was just a single breakdown. Which I get and is super fine).

Just thought, objectively looking at the scene, there's no freaking way this was her first hallucination.

It looks like she's been dealing with this for quite some time. And surely alone. She couldn't show weakness to Ozai. And I don't think the royal palace is big on mental health.

;

Headcanon that fits this:

Despite Azula's betrayal of Ozai (lying to him, failing him etc.), he still planned to keep using her because... that's what narcissists do. They use you as long as you can be used. And Azula is super useful! Why would he throw her away after all she did for him? When she is still so desperate for his "love"? When she could still be so very useful to him?

He wanted to keep using her, but when he saw Azula starting to "lose her mind", he decided to ditch her.

Iroh: "She's crazy and she needs to go down"

Ozai: "She's crazy... gotta ditch her. (...) Better give her the throne she never wanted so she doesn't kill me. Lmao if she turns on me im dead this bitch has blue fire, killed the avatar and conquered Ba Sing Se. She different. I still can't read maps and fire only comes out when angry"

...okay. Let me just preface this with saying that Ozai's last sentence is hilarious, is completely in-character, and should be framed.

I should also say that...since we're gonna be going into territory which is a bit of a sore subject for myself, whatever I say is not an attempt to tear you down. I do not believe in that and will try to keep this as levelheaded as possible.

With that said, while I certainly respect your opinion on Azula...I still don't believe that she has a mental illness that results in recurring hallucinations. We only have the one scene and there's only so much we can get from that. And I certainly don't think we should base everything we know of a character over their worst and lowest moment. I know because...I was guilty of that with Zuko.

But I digress.

This masterpost belongs to my dear friend @prying-pandora666 who goes into quite a bit of detail concerning Azula and mental health if you're interested. But the crux of it is, when looking at it from the lens of a professional, we don't have any evidence that Azula was mentally ill. Does that mean she wasn't? No. Of course not. It's just we don't have too much onscreen evidence to make a definitive conclusion.

And even if Azula was mentally ill (I don't think she was and was probably suffering from a mental breakdown), one should be careful to make sure it's not overemphasized to the detriment of her upbringing and Ozai's bullshit. After all, even the best kid wouldn't last too long under his parentage without getting SOME kind of trauma.

As for your headcanon, I don't necessarily believe Ozai was aware of Azula's deteriorating mental state. She didn't show any signs of it initially and he left before things got really bad. In this case though, I'd pin the blame more on Ozai's lack of focus on Book 3. Is it possible he saw the signs? Yeah, and I can believe that. Doesn't make him any less of a scumbag for abandoning her. I'd argue it makes him even worse since he left her when she needed him most after years of presenting himself as the only stable adult figure in her life.

And as a quick aside, can please stop using the "crazy and needs to go down" quote as evidence? Eshasz and Greg Baldwin both said that Iroh was in the wrong there for saying that.

...sorry. I have autism which can be constituted as a mental illness, so I get a little bit tender when discussing this. There's nothing inherently wrong with Azula being mentally ill like so many would say and you're completely within your right to believe she is. My personal advice would be to just...be careful is all. Treat Azula as a person instead of a mental illness, never try to give people the wrong idea about mental illnesses or misdiagnosing characters (especially minors) and you'll be fine.

[asocial-inkblot]

"I don't understand why people think Azula has schizophrenia." Because it is the only way to explain the symptoms of comics!Azula's mental illness & her resulting behavior. For I personally thought she had a stress induced nervous breakdown before reading the comics, which are sadly canon no matter how much we complain about it until Bryke say otherwise.

You're completely right, Anon. There is no evidence in the original series that Azula's behavior near the end of the series was caused by a schizo-type illness (there are multiple). We saw, at most, one psychotic episode over a prolonged period of days to weeks. The pages of the comics don't even deserve to wipe someone's butt, and took the events from a few episodes during an intensely nerve-wracking period for Azula, to mean that she's cuckoo-loco Lady Macmeth. If these so-called fans really want to armchair diagnose her that badly, they should at least pay attention to the flaws we actually see her have throughout the series. In no particular order:

1. Perfectionism: This can be a symptom of OCD and low self-esteem.

2. Lack of directness with those closest to her when wanting something from them: This can be caused by a hidden anxiety around direct conflict or a desperate desire to acquire a necessity, but not wanting to come across as overly demanding because you were taught to never ask for or expect anything.

3. Going above and beyond for a family member you don't owe jack to, all things considered: This can be caused by a sense of unquestioning obligation to your family because you're hopelessly attached to them in some way, or think one of them in particular may eventually come to appreciate you if you give that person everything he/she has ever wanted on a golden plate and don't even ask for a coin back.

4. Admitting one of your deepest insecurities and agreeing with the idea that you may have been unworthy of love even from one of the few people who should have loved you unconditionally, in front of peers who aren't even trying to sympathize with each other or you: A sign of abandonment trauma and seriously wanting someone to converse with about your hardships but knowing at your core, or believing, that you have no one, or just not wanting to come across as weak because you've been conditioned to try and avoid feeling or letting your emotions control you, by your family, culture, society, etc.

5. Smiling when something terrible happens to a sibling or "mocking" them while warning that their life is in danger: Easily due to being young/mentally underdeveloped and not fully aware enough of your surroundings and circumstances yet to understand the severity of the situations. It could also be that the child has put on a front to defend itself from harm by proxy even when clearly alert and afraid, and maybe has convinced him/herself that this is how s/he truly feels or should feel. (Or two very biased people are imagining her doing some things she didn't quite do.)

6. Killing someone during battle as soon as the opportunity presented itself without a second thought: A sign that a child soldier has been so perfectly groomed for war, to the point that killing a (power-charging) enemy and watching their lifeless body fall to the ground, is seen as just another day in their life and not something to consider for long. (It should also be noted that she was defending herself and her brother and fulfilling her nation's most yearned for wish, and that the enemies (who just so happen to be mains) she (and Zuko) were fighting, were fighting hard. It was Aang or her.)

Btw I didn't make that original comment/quote, but I did agree with it and the rest of that post.

[sokkastyles]

hi :) u up 2 talk about Azula? i wonder what kind of help she could get. what do u think? also - names to mental stuf in a pre-dx world?

Hi! Happy V Day <3

First of all, I've said before that I don't like diagnosing fictional characters with mental illnesses at the best of times. In a pre-DSM world, it's almost impossible. I've also said before that I don't consider Azula to be mentally ill, especially not in the series proper (the comics don't exist, shhh.) Unless you mean in the sense of having CPTSD due to prolonged abuse, but like, Zuko has that, too.

One main difference between Zuko and Azula is that Zuko actually recognized that he needed help. Even when he didn't know it himself. Everything he did was a cry for help, even (especially) when he was like NO I DEFINITELY DO NOT NEED TO CALM DOWN WHY WOULD YOU SUGGEST THAT I AM PERFECTLY FINE!!!!!

That's the whole thing about Zuko's speech where he talks about Azula being "born lucky" versus his "lucky to be born." I love that speech so much, as you can probably tell if you have been following my blog because I talk about it all the time. If you've been with me on my personal you probably know that speech was the moment I started to love Zuko as a character. And people who talk about Azula and Zuko's relationship talk about that line a lot, but rarely focus on what Zuko says after:

I don't need luck, though. I don't want it. I've always had to struggle and fight and that's made me strong. It's made me who I am.

This is the thing. This is what makes Zuko redeemable. The way Dante Basco delivers these lines is so good. There's a lot of false bravado, but also a lot of pain. Building an identity around having to constantly struggle caused Zuko a lot of pain but it also prevented him from falling into the mindset Azula was in, and ultimately the lessons he learned about picking himself up helped him to rebuild himself in the end and become a better person. Azula built her identity around being "born lucky" so that was always something she had to maintain, and the idea that she was superior by nature was fed by her father and her country's violent fascist ideologies. We do see that she struggles to maintain this mask of perfection even from the moment she is introduced to us, but what she doesn't ever do is admit that she struggles to maintain it.

That attitude is also seen in her speech to Long Feng about being a born leader. To her, it's a zero sum game; if she isn't born to win, then she loses.

I think help for Azula would need to involve first and foremost admitting that she needed help, and she really isn't in that place until she hits rock bottom. And she is in that place by the end of the series, but not before.

Think about all the steps Zuko had to go through to get redemption. Leaving the Fire Nation, humbling himself to the gaang, admitting that he'd lost his firebending. Can you imagine Azula doing any of those things? Zuko jokes about how Azula would just threaten them, which actually she wouldn't, she would manipulate, but anyway, the point is that she could never sincerely bring herself to that point because she has to WANT to do that, and more importantly she never learned how to. Zuko is able to humble himself enough to change partly because of being forcibly humbled throughout his life. Zuko knows what it feels like to hit rock bottom, and thus learned how to build himself up again, even if it took him a while to do it right.

Now, I'm also not saying that redemption necessitates suffering. That was also something Zuko internalized that was an obstacle for him to overcome, but it was because he learned how to grow from suffering that he was able to build himself back up. Azula has definitely suffered, but I don't think she would have considered any of the crap Ozai put her through as hurting her (even though it did) because she also believed the lie about her own superiority. That's why she built a fake wall around herself and who she was. Zuko talks about who he is; Azula says that she's a monster. Azula has no real idea who she is. That's what she needs to find out in order to get help, and she has to want it.

If it weren't for Aang and co., though, Azula would have still considered herself lucky. That's another difference between her and Zuko. Zuko would have denied that he was hurting like he did in the beginning of the series, but he would still know that he was. I don't think Azula even knows that she was hurt. At the end of the series, to her, the source of her suffering is something she blames on everyone else except 1) Ozai, and 2) her own toxic worldview. Remember when Zuko also had to admit that he was angry at himself? Azula would need to do something similar. Not to sound trite, but the first step to getting help is admitting that you have a problem, and as hard as that was for Zuko, it would be even harder for Azula because she was fed her whole life on a steady diet of her own superiority.