#then you’re not allowed to touch the mentally ill child villain trope

[thelostsisters]

no he did deserve better and i truly mean that

[sokkastyles]

Hey I just saw your Azula ask and you’re totally right! I’m currently writing an Azula like “redemption” fic based on “I Wanna Get Better” by Bleachers, and the premise of it is essentially that Azula in her time in a psychiatric facility comes to realize that she does wish it could have been different, doesn’t like what she’s done, but like essentially refuses to admit to herself that she regrets it because she “knows” everything she did was necessary. Then she has to figure out what it was necessary for, and then that the goal was wrong and not what she wanted, and then that she truly is sorry. (All because she learned from her father’s treatment of Zuko that his love was conditional and she had to be perfect for him and like everything she internalized from her father.) All of this is accompanied by her sort of slowly becoming friends with the GAang, particularly Katara, and working to make up for everything she did to them. After that she starts to repair her relationship with Zuko and they find Ursa (who isn’t like she is in the comics bc I hate them and hc that she was actually a good mom who wasn’t allowed to be a good mom to Azula bc Ozai sucks).

My interpretation for the “Dad’s gonna kill you” scene is that she was saying it because she wanted to mess with him, and she didn’t quite realize the severity of the situation until her talk with her mother. What is your opinion on this way of interpreting/writing Azula?

Hi! I think it sounds like an interesting story, although I would be careful with the psychiatric stuff because a lot of the "she's crazy!" stuff with Azula is based on crazy = evil and not an accurate portrayal of mental illness, and also touches on the hysterical woman trope, which is why female villains in particular get this treatment. I personally do not see her as mentally ill although she definitely has ptsd, but so does Zuko. I think a redemption arc can work but it would be tricky.

I think you are on the right track with focusing on her realization that she could be different and that she has a reason to want to. I also like the idea of a friendship with Katara because I do think she needs female friendships that don't follow a subject/ruler dynamic. Although I also think making her redemption rely too much on Katara, or Aang, or any of the gaang, runs into the same problems as if Zuko's redemption and friendship with Katara and Aang in particular had not been done with as much care as it was in canon. It is not the job of the people who have been hurt by them to "fix" them and redemption arcs run that risk if not handled carefully.

About the scene in "Zuko Alone," I definitely agree that she did not realize the severity of the situation. She's like, what, eight? I do think she realized she was hurting her brother and it was more than "messing" with him, she clearly enjoyed his fear, but I think she had very little empathy for her brother's pain because the way she was raised was basically "this is how we treat Zuko, this is what Zuko deserves." Even as a teen I think she felt that even the pain of her friends was not quite real. In "The Beach" she calls everyone's confessions "performances" and then denies her own pain. It's not like, a general lack of empathy, because she doesn't think her own trauma is real, either, because she was raised to see it as shameful weakness. And any opportunity to prove that she is strong and Zuko is weak is a win for her, so obviously she enjoys taking the opportunity to one up him, whether through scaring him or the actual thought that he might die.

I don't think she quite understood what was going on when she parroted Azulon's words to Ozai to Zuko. She did not understand that her dad was being punished for suggesting that he take Iroh's place. If she did, she probably would not be so happy about it, given how we know she feels about Azulon and Iroh, and how she sees her dad as the most powerful and worthy of the throne. Even though she tells Zuko that she overheard Azulon say "you must know the pain of losing a firstborn son," if she had understood she might have made a jab about how Zuko wasn't a worthy firstborn son anyway or felt indignant on her father's behalf of him having to face the same consequence as Iroh. As it is, she probably just saw killing Zuko as something her father would do because hey, this is how we treat Zuko.

She also had enough awareness that her behavior was wrong to couch it in manipulative language ("I'm only telling you for your own good") and to hide it from her mother when she intervened, so she definitely knew that 1) she was intentionally causing Zuko emotional distress, and 2) Zuko might die, but both the household she grew up in where violence towards Zuko was normalized and her child brain probably didn't fully process it, though.

All of this is important to discuss when talking about Azula and how she felt / what she thought, but it doesn't make the situation any better for Zuko, who clearly has lasting trauma from that whole episode.