#also one of these days i'm going to write my full manifesto on iroh

[spacedace]

Alright so I know a lot of peeps aren't going to like my take here, but the thing to remember about Azula smiling at the Agni Kai between Zuko and Ozai is that we're shown Azula smiling only because that's how Iroh imagined her reacting.

Thr flashback we see is from Iroh's perspective, everything we see is what Iroh saw. Except that Iroh looked away when Ozai burned Zuko. He told us this and we say it in his flashback. Specifically he turned away from where Azula is standing next to him, so there's no way he could have seen her smile.

But we did see her smile in his flashback which, to me, means that her smiling while her brother got burned was just what Iroh imagined her to be doing at the time.

Now, I want it on record that I don't hate Iroh (I love him and his tea so much yall, i just think he's a lot more complex and interestingwhen you acknowledgehis character flaws) and I'm not saying that he purposefully lied to make Azula look bad either. I think it's simply a matter of how Iroh sees Azula, which pretty consistently has been shown he doesn't seem to like her very much. He favors Zuko, but I think Iroh - much like a lot of other people - see Ozai favoring Azula and think that his brother does so because Azula is like Ozai, and holds that belief against her. So much so that he can't see the child beneath the image projected on her (by herself and others) like he can with Zuko.

TL;DR: we have no idea what expression Azula really had during thr Agni Kai and are only seeing Iroh's skewed ideas of what she looked like in the scene.