#I've always brought up that parallel between Iroh and Azula

[seyaryminamoto]

From what I remember in your story, even taking Iroh's initial biases into account I thought part of his intense hostility leading up to his report to Ozai was that he was truly convinced that Azula's true nature was either no better or even significantly worse than Ozai's due to the Iroh's suspicions arc. Azula herself told Sokka she was worried that by throwing him of the trail of their relationship that she may have brought the worst out of him. Honestly this was probably my favorite exploration of their conflict, because if they were truly able to trust each other and talk they could have avoided so much pain and trouble, but both of them over the course of the story had developed genuine and/or biased reasons not to trust one another and viewed themselves as doing the right thing despite their actions ultimately resulting in the worst outcome. Azula was trying to prevent a known adversary from having ammunition to ruin their lives and future plans, and Iroh believed that he was essentially hindering the fire nation by turning what he thought were essentially two Evil Ozais with a good relationship with one another into enemies. I can't lie that I'm not slightly disappointed that in the latest chapter that this aspect of their conflict wasn't brought up more explicitly in the conversation with Zuko when Iroh was talking about his biases. Was I personally thinking that the dynamic was more significant than it actually was or is that dynamic being saved for a future conversation Iroh may have with Sokka and Azula?

Uuuuuh, as for the last question... I don't really know if I'll bring it up some more since I do think I've had Iroh acknowledge why and how he fucked up in that respect in the past + exteriorized that if Azula had acted differently he might just have done it too? Am I crazy for thinking so? Did I write that or didn't I? That's a complicated game to play when you're almost at 5 million words of a story... 🤣

Azula and Iroh miiiight have one more conversation in the future and maybe this will come up there, but I haven't written it yet so I won't make any promises on that front. Admittedly, I don't expect their future encounter to be particularly fruitful. Iroh is 100% genuine in what he has understood and learned, though, that can't be denied and I always have hoped to portray him not as a super wicked villain but as a character who thinks he understands far more than he actually does, with motivations that push him into making mistakes he very much comes to regret.

This being said, the Azula-Iroh and Zuko-Ozai parallels in this story are and always have been 100% intentional. Those two tugs-of-war have been going on forever, and the crux of them was very much the fact that Azula and Iroh distrusted and second-guessed and suspected each other soooo much... because they have similar natures, similar thought processes, and they're both intellectual, suspicious, hiding what's REALLY going on underneath the surface, and immediately wary when they recognize all those traits in each other too. Likewise, Zuko and Ozai have some REALLY ugly parallels and one of those parallels, already given away by the chapter you sent this ask over, is going to be the driving force of the conflict between those two, much as a similar thing was the driving force between Iroh and Azula, in its own way: the more they fight to push the other away, the harder they reject the other, the more they end up embodying the flaws they see in that other person, to an extent where they could do absolutely TERRIBLE things just out of wanting to push the other one as far away as possible.

So yeah, the point was never for Iroh to feel like some sadistic mustache-twirling villain who wanted Azula to suffer just for shits and giggles. He had his reasons to do what he did. Doesn't mean he was right. Doesn't mean he should've done it. What it means is it made sense in his head due to his biases, the information he had at hand at the moment, and the particularly awful relationship he had with Azula. Likewise, Azula's rejection of Iroh back in "Iroh's suspicions" caused her uncertainty and anguish because she KNEW she had taken it too far. She was afraid of the consequences. A part of her KNEW that if she acted differently, there was a chance, however slim, that Iroh might not have made the choice he did. And that's why this is such a messed up situation! :')

Ultimately, I want my characters to have motivations that just... add up. That can be traced. That, upon looking at their actions and choices, anyone can go "oh yeah, this is why they did whatever they did". This is good when it comes to establishing ultimate goals, and it's also good when you want to put characters to the test: how far are they willing to go, what are they ready to do to achieve whatever they're trying to achieve? How much are they willing to sacrifice for it? And the answers to those questions can be VERY extreme and painful. Just so, we can find characters who decide to back down and simply surrender over their goals when they realize that there are other things that matter more. But it's a manner of game a writer plays when it comes to gauging and figuring out what a character wants vs. needs, what a character will fight for and what it will take for them to surrender, and so on. Fundamentally, that's how I built up Iroh and Azula's chaotic dynamic. Whatever comes from that in the future, ultimately, their biggest problem may just be that they were just too smart for their own good, tried to outsmart each other a little too much, and never allowed themselves to just... accept each other properly. They came close to it once, yes! But... they failed. And it's depressing as hell, but complicated characters will always be challenging this way...

[seyaryminamoto]

I think it's kinda funny how for the most part Season 1 Iroh is very much a villain, but in Seasons 2 and 3 the writers try to make it look like Iroh is a kindly old man who can do no wrong. In the Season 1 episode "The Spirit World" Iroh gets captured by Earth Benders for what he did in Bing Sing Se. Iroh struggles to give a sincere apology to them for what he did in Ba Sing Se so I don't believe that Iroh was always on Aang's side from the start of the show.

... Wait a whole second now, my anon: did he try to apologize? O_o I don’t remember him saying anything that sounded like an apology xD

Yep, just went over the transcript and he didn’t say anything that suggested he wanted to apologize to the Earth Kingdom soldiers for what he did in Ba Sing Se. Which, in the end, just lends more credence to your claim that Iroh in Season 1 wasn’t the kindly old man the later seasons characterize him as.

This really just takes me back to my old analysis post on Iroh’s character being split in three parts. Book 1, in my opinion, doesn’t try to feature Iroh as a villain per se, but as comic relief with occasional glimpses at depth, but not quite the sort of depth you can 100% ascertain means he’s on the Avatar’s side or on the Fire Nation’s side. There are a few instances where it feels like Iroh is actually getting in Zuko’s way and hindering him in his quest to find the Avatar... but then once you reach Book 1′s finale, Iroh is outright telling Zuko he’ll help him nab the Avatar before Zhao can. Someone can obviously argue that he’s saying it for the sake of it, that he doesn’t really intend to help Zuko that way, that this is how he’s kept Zuko reassured that he’s his ally rather than trying to sabotage him... but it’s also possible he’s not bullshitting Zuko about helping him catch Aang before Zhao does.

The thing is, Iroh getting in Zuko’s way is mainly done for comedic effect. His every instance of sabotaging Zuko’s quest is turned into jokes, such as a whole episode of him trying to find his White Lotus tile and derailing Zuko’s journey completely for something that irrelevant... especially when the punchline of such a detour is that the tile was in Iroh’s sleeve all along. It’s very difficult to interpret these scenes as “villainous” Iroh because he has absolutely nothing to gain from getting in Zuko’s way if he’s not supporting the Avatar in secret. There are some moments, though I can’t fully remember them atm, where Iroh seems to be doing things to help Aang get away Zuko, so it puts forward the very commonly accepted theory that Iroh was actually on the good guys’ side all along!

Now, though, Iroh’s character did go through different stages across development, that can’t go ignored:

“Iroh was originally intended to be just a strict teacher to Zuko with a gruff personality; however, his character eventually changed to become his uncle and with a softer side as seen in the series.”

There’s a veeeery strong possibility that he only becomes what he does in Books 2 and 3 because that’s when they finally settled on a certain direction for his character, and that the strange ambiguity in his character throughout Book 1 is actually a consequence of them not being fully sure of how they wanted Iroh’s character to develop and turn out in the show’s endagme. I absolutely see a strong change in Iroh’s writing between Books 1 and 2, so it’s entirely possible he wasn’t always treated, in the writing room, as secretly conspiring to help the Avatar... but it’s hard to judge Iroh’s character properly during Book 1 because of how the narrative constantly oscillates between featuring him as full-blown comic relief and veeeery occasionally wise. I don’t really think they wrote him as a villain, outright and deliberately, but they did write him so vaguely that it’s entirely possible to take Iroh from Book 1 (perhaps up until he defies Zhao) and interpret him as a not-too-effective villain with a sense of humor, rather than a secret hero waiting to turn his back on his nation.

All this being said, the show was 100% determined to sweep Iroh’s very likely war crimes under a rug, and that episode from Book 1, forgettable as it may be for a lot of people, is a veeeeery important one in terms of offering us a glimpse not only at Iroh’s past, but at how the show virtually presents the Earth Kingdom soldiers as in the wrong for capturing Iroh. I’ll never get tired of bringing up a very strong and ironic parallel in that episode with The Chase...

Outnumbered by the enemy...

Feigns surrender...

Mercilessly attacks the enemy when they lower their guard...

All be it to stage an escape, to varying degrees of success.

I honestly don’t think there’s any morally acceptable reason to consider Iroh had any sort of excuse to fight back, injure or escape from those soldiers, especially if he regrets the harm he’s brought the Earth Kingdom. While, yes, someone might argue Iroh’s intentions towards the Earth Kingdom are no longer nefarious, his crimes are still very much real to the people who not only fought against him but suffered the actual consequences of his siege directly. 

At this point, you can 100% argue that what Iroh did is objectively worse than anything Azula had been shown doing, personally, up until the Chase. Was she 100% a supporter of her father’s regime and war crimes? Yes, she was! But she wasn’t directly responsible for actual war crimes yet, let alone war crimes on par with a six hundred day siege. At this point, Team Avatar + Zuko & Iroh just want Azula to leave them be, apparently: it isn’t a matter of capturing her to take her to justice. That’s what the soldiers did want with Iroh, and he not only escaped but by the last fight in that episode, him and Zuko definitely must have hurt several of the soldiers escorting Iroh to Ba Sing Se, not just the one Iroh burns in the scene I used for the parallel there. But somehow, Azula doing what she does is a sign of pure, absolute evil. When Iroh does this? Everyone just shrugs it off, turns the other way, pretends he’s entitled to fight back because he’s funny or because he supposedly learned better (not that we know for sure, as first-time viewers, that he learned better at all, at this point in time).

Book 1 Iroh is a lot sketchier than most people want to accept. The fact that we’ve got a literal play-by-play situation with Azula where Azula is 100% framed as morally appalling, down to Iroh calling her insane in the next episode as a consequence of her actions... when he did the exact same thing she did, merely one season ago? Again, there’s no way Iroh is more justified than Azula in what he did back in Book 1. He basically gets away because he knows Earth Kingdom justice won’t forgive him, and that’s that. How is that somehow morally acceptable? :’)

Aaaat any rate. I don’t really think Iroh was intentionally written as a villain, but I do think there’s some huge gaps in the logic of his behavior and writing throughout Book 1, not to mention some serious carelessness in the writing department if they actually intended to feature an Iroh who’s repenting for the wrong he did in his youth. That’s not the man we saw in this episode, absolutely not. It’s not even the man we see in Book 2, we’re actually meant to infer Iroh regrets his past and his mistakes because his entire journey of confronting his wrongdoings happened offscreen and we’re merely meant to take at face-value that it happened. Like I said earlier, it’s not impossible to read Iroh, up until the Siege of the North Part 1, as a morally dubious man who just so happens to make frequent jokes whenever he wants to. We see him giving Zhao moralizing speeches on honor when he (Iroh) broke the rules of an Agni Kai by stopping the fight before either Zuko or Zhao had been burned (how very honorable :’D), only to see him honorably injuring enemy soldiers with a very justified grudge on him in a later episode!

Basically, you have to pretend some things didn’t happen at all to trust Iroh was indeed a nice guy since day 1 of ATLA, supporting Aang from the shadows while enduring Zuko’s hysteric fits. I’m pretty sure, like I said earlier, that they only really unraveled what direction they wanted for Iroh’s character when Book 2 came along, and that’s why Iroh was not written with that same purpose in mind back in Book 1... which is why it’s relatively easy to interpret him as you have, anon.