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firelxrdazula · 7 years

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what makes Azula your favorite?

I’m just going to this as an opportunity to go in-depth about Azula’s character, in hopes that you will understand why I like her so much for her complexity and depth…

Okay, well, I’m just first going to establish her base personality.

Azula’s personality is all about control. She’s a great villain, and an even more dangerous leader at aged 14. That’s precisely because of her establishing control in every situation she’s in. She establishes her control in almost every situation, and we only see her lose control of the situation three times.

Namely in The Chase when she was cornered by Sokka, Katara, Aang, Toph, Zuko, and Uncle Iroh. And in this situation, she chose the bitch way out. Basically, she lost control of the situation and her first impulse was to escape this situation. Basically, her bitch way out was to attack one of them directly to distract the group so she can escape.

The next time we see her lose control was in Ba Sing Se, Crossroads of Destiny. Now, this is one of my favorite episodes. She was losing control of the situation when she was against Katara and Aang. Now, had Zuko not stepped in, she would have lost. Even after Zuko stepped in, she was still losing control with Katara. Katara had the upperhand again, had Zuko not stepped in she would have lost yet again.

The last time we lost her lose contol was of course, in Sozin’s Comet. She starts losing control of herself, not the situation. This whole losing control of herself took her whole character into a whole new route. It basically gave her so much depth, and because of that it caused people to question her whole character than answer it.

She establishes control and dominance in every situation she’s in. That much is visible in almost her every scene, but the most notable one for me would be when she was in Ba Sing Se taking it down. You see that when she got the opportunity to control the whole city, she took it. Long Feng and her are very similar. They both are less on the fighting, more on the manipulation but both are actually kick ass when it comes to fighting also. Basically, Long Feng starts out as a normal kid, growing in the Middle Ring of Ba Sing Se who had to crawl his way into power, until he became the Grand Secretariat of Ba Sing Se in which he took control of the whole city. The whole city doesn’t even know about the war, and he has control over the Dai Li agents. So much can be said about Long Feng’s ability to control situations… However, Azula’s control was JUST so much more. Long Feng achieved everything in years and years whereas Azula took over the whole city in less than a week!Now, she established her control and dominance in her interactions with Long Feng at the throne room. Where she said “don’t flatter yourself, you were never even a player.”

Now, onto her friends, and how she establishes control over them. Basically, she uses fear and manipulation. Not much can be said about Mai because she doesn’t exactly suck up to Azula, and went with her just because she was bored. Now… As for Ty Lee, that’s where Azula’s manipulation and fear is really visible. She uses fear to manipulate Ty Lee into joining her, and Ty Lee is obviously scared of her and is always trying to get into her good side by always sucking up to her. Although her friendship with them was not fake, it was based on sheer manipulation.

The next thing about her control is her fire as I’ve discussed in another ask. But I’ll discuss it here briefly. Basically, she has so much control over her fire that she can control its intensity while still bending it like the normal yellow-orange fire.

Second, I’m going to compare her to Zuko. Since Zuko was first introduced, we already know much about him. We already know that all his life, he’s had to struggle and that Azula didn’t(totally not true, and ill discuss that issue later), and basically we start seeing from Zuko’s perspective because he talked about her, and basically gave us the idea of how she was a person.

“And Zuko is her brother, they basically grew up the same, right? So, then, how did two siblings grow up to be so different?” that question is what first intrigued me about Azula. I wanted to understand her as a character, as a person.Mainly in Book 2, we see her from his perspective. But we first saw her from his perspective in Siege of the North. In Zuko Alone, we saw the whole episode was about Zuko. We basically see that Azula as a child has always been kind of a bully of some sort to Zuko. She always lies, she always is mischievious. But then, we also see that Ursa didn’t treat them the same way. Ozai also didn’t treat them the same way. So, we kind of see how these two diverge from each other.

As for why I think Azula turned out that… I think it’s mainly because of Ozai and Ursa. She has severe issues with both her parents, but she only seems to acknowledge her issue with Ursa. It’s established that Ursa favored Zuko, Ozai favored Azula. And, that took a toll on both of them.

Keep in mind that as kids you look up to your parent of the same sex. So, for Azula not being accepted by her mother messed her up. The same thing happened to Zuko, it literally fucked him up. The way Ursa treated Azula messed her up so bad, and she was only able to get her father’s acceptance got her to act as the Fire Nation’s heir to the throne. Personally, I think that because of Ursa not treating her as the “fire nation princess,” descriminated her, picked favorites… Then it got instilled in Azula’s mind that “ALRIGHT I am going to BE the Fire Nation’s heir. I AM GOING TO OUTDO ZUKO”

Another cause for this would of course be her father, Ozai. Ozai was an abusive father to both of them. It’s definitely not true that because Azula was favored that she had it easier than Zuko. In fact, to some degree, she had it worse. Being Ozai’s favorite prevented her from being with her mom. It prevented her relationship with her mom so much, that’s mainly why Ursa didn’t agree with Azula all the time. It’s because of all the ideas that Ozai instilled in her head.

So, basically, it’s Ozai who’s more at fault about Azula’s traumatic childhood, although Ursa is still to blame. They both were very shitty parents, but Zuko and Azula had different versions of the same parents. However, when Ursa left, Zuko and Azula were left motherless but Zuko still had Iroh whereas Azula completely lost the good influence in her life. Even then, Ursa wasn’t even a good influence to Azula in the first place, but she could’ve done something for her. I believe that in The Search Ursa realizes that Ozai raised Azula not as a daughter but like.. A basic henchwoman who he could send out to do the things he didn’t want to do and he had complete control of because she was his daughter. Anyways, Ozai didn’t teach her the normal things at all, how to make friends, and how to react to things.

And basically, the biggest factor that caused her fall was Ty Lee and Mai’s “betrayal” which is really more like them realizing her faults more than “betrayal.” But I suppose that their friendship really was real, but as soon as Ozai really took control of Azula, that’s when their friendship changed. I guess it turned more into like Azula being more controlling and using them like soldiers where they had to be loyal to her or else. Basically, Azula treats them like tools she could use, and that’s what she learnt from her father because her father treats her the same way. But the real cause of her spiral was that she couldn’t exactly understand that there’s anything more powerful than fears. Azula has always manipulated them by playing on their fears, and it has worked so well. And since she’s never exactly been showed love, she couldn’t understand why Mai would do that so she couldn’t react properly. I mean, I said a few paragraphs ago that Ty Lee sucks up to Azula, but you can see that it’s genuine admiration, but Ty Lee at that moment kind of realizes that Azula isn’t being friend to her. So, this is such a big moment for Azula because she lost her control over both of them. Like, they’ve been her friends her whole life, and she couldn’t do anything about it. There was nothing more powerful than what they felt at that moment, and Azula couldn’t exactly understand that.

Then, there’s Zuko who’s getting more and more powerful, and he’s not backing down anymore. So I guess that’s when Azula started losing it more and more just because one thing went out of control.

Because yes, Azula does have a great ability to contol people, but she doesn’t know how to adapt to situations when she’s lost control because she lacks the other factors needed.

The factors she lacked were shown in The Beach. (I’ve already talked about this episode but I guess i’ll give an overview of my whole viewpoint of it)Anyways, in here, it’s given so much emphasis that she does not know how to be proper friends with people, she only knows how to manipulate them, how to control them. And you can see that she TRIES so hard, but it’s totally out of her control and she doesn’t know how to adapt to it at all. And that episode was not filler at all because you get the hint that there really is more there than Azula the villain when they’re all around the campfire, talking about their own issues. But Azula accidentally blurts out her own issues.. But shrugs it off, saying “oh but i dont really care lol” but she does. And I guess this is foreshadowing her downfall, wherein her mother’s hallucination kinda of pushed her more out of control because she doesn’t know how to deal with situations out of her control, so she went bonkers over it in the finale.

tl;dr her character kinda had the most realistic downfall of any other villain, and at age 14 she was a remarkable character with so much depth and complexity. her introduction was very very intriguing and so it kinda made me so interested in her that it made me ask complicated questions like “how did her and zuko turn out so differently”, “why was she like that” and many many other questions which i chose to answer as i was watching the whole show. Analyzing and reading her was the best experience. I could go on and on about her characteristic being so intelligent and militaristic and always being the better child blah blah but that would just drag this already really really long post

Anyways, thank you, anon for giving me a reason to discuss Azula’s character because everything about her makes her my favorite!

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