#also i look forward to the ridiculous azula anti anons i'm going to get after this

[raksha-the-demon]

Do you mind expending on your headcanon of Azula being fundamentally a good person?

It's a new perspective I hadn't considered yet.

The thing with Azula is that the perspective of her as a bad person is largely a result of protagonist-centered morality. From the perspective of the Gaang she’s a villain, and therefor she’s presented to the audience as a bad person.

Except if you stop viewing her as The Antagonist, and instead just view her as a teenager raised in an environment of extreme propaganda and parental abuse, she stops being a villain and starts being a person trying her best to do the right thing. She just has been raised with a warped idea of what “the right thing” is. 

She believes that serving the Fire Lord, and by extension the Fire Nation, is fundamentally moral. She’s a dyed-in-the-wool patriot. We as the audience know that the Fire Nation is on the wrong side of this conflict, but then people take that a step further and decide that any actions taken in support of the Fire Nation are wrong (at least, when Azula does them). 

But if you reject the idea that supporting the Fire Nation means someone must be fundamentally evil (which is necessary to accept the redemption of Iroh and Zuko) then there really isn’t a whole lot of reason to think Azula is a bad person. She fights the Gaang, but it’s a war and they’re the enemy. She conquers Ba Sing Se, but it’s a war and she does it without bloodshed. She almost kills Aang, but it’s a war and he’s a walking WMD on a mission to kill her father. 

Azula can certainly be mean, but so can Zuko, and nobody suggests that he’s fundamentally a terrible person. There’s absolutely no reason to think Azula wouldn’t change her behavior if given the kind of mentorship that Zuko got.  

And none of this even gets into the fact that she’s raised by an abusive father, or the psychological impacts of being a child soldier, both of which make it even harder to look at Azula’s actions and conclude that she’s fundamentally a bad person. Not to mention the huge issue with declaring a fourteen-year-old to be irredeemably evil. Nobody is finished developing and maturing at age fourteen. If Iroh can have a redemption as a fully-grown adult and former warmongering general, then surely we can accept that a kid is capable of growth.