#Ursa is less of an antagonist in an Azula-as-hero story than Azula is to Zuko in canon

[lightdancer1]

One thing to always keep in mind with any version of Ursa in my stories:

She is a complex fully rounded character who in an Azula-centric story is almost always an antagonist (she moves into villain territory in the Dragon-verse and in the Fire Lord Ursa AU but in the former case it's not a role directed at Azula personally and this plays deliberately with the protagonist-centered morality of the original setting). This is because Azula very clearly did want to be loved by Ursa, and very clearly in each AU save the Fire Sage one never was and didn't actually know what love was supposed to look like until she left the toxic environment she was exposed to.

She is not, however, a character defined by her relationship to her children. She has a full history and life of her own before she gets drawn by Azulon into the tangled web of conquest and family dysfunction that is the House of Sozin and equal complexity after she has them.

Her children might not perceive this any more than most children do about their own parents. Katara and Sokka don't exactly figure this out about Hakoda, let alone Kya (though Kya being horribly murdered in front of Katara rather does have a lot to do with that for Katara) for a very long time as well. But it is true all the same.

Ursa's own arcs are defined by her pre-existing hate and anger and resentment of her own circumstances....and the awareness that her Firebending is predisposed to combat, to destruction, and in combat to being an instantantaneous kill if she used it on the human body. She can literally slice and dice with the equivalent of lightsaber beams that cut clean through steel and do horrible things to human flesh.

In some ways it works to give her a view of her own Firebending not entirely dissimilar to that of Jeong Jeong but with far better reason for it, as even if she did switch to a new source her Firebending *still* has that aspect, because that's what she chooses to see in it and how it could be wielded.

And then when she has her first daughter that child begins to develop uniquely colored fires of her own and even the earlier versions had sui generis properties that didn't work quite like other Firebending did before the color-change and she has this horrifying vision that her adult children could end up reliving her own life....and quietly sets out to protect her child from phantoms she projected onto them and thereby blows up a relationship thinking she's literally doing a good and necessary thing.

Which is why the relationship is that of the antagonist, not the villain. It's not merely the 'everyone is a hero in their own story' factor, Ursa sincerely thinks she's sparing Azula a horrible fate and that Azula is too young to understand but would understand and accept when she's older. Her motives, in terms of her emotions, really are good ones and grounded in the harsh realities of her own life. The not so minor context problems Ursa ignores is that her daughter isn't living her life and that she's coming across as a stifling emotionally abusive figure to whom even Ozai, who never bothers to hide malice and abusiveness of both emotional and physical kinds to everyone in his family, is at least willing to manipulate by crumbs of phantom approval.

It creates a vicious circle that only gets broken if one, the other, or both get taken out of the environment that shapes it and then, finally, both of them start to realize that 'wait, what the Hell?' and then go on from there.

And for Zuko and Azula, their lives thus incorporate mirror abuse cycles, albeit the Ozai-centric version physically abuses both of them and the golden child brand of emotional abuse afflicted both Zuko and Azula from different parents. There's far more similarity with Azula and Zuko as children than either are ready to admit for a long time, though where they have their healthiest relationships they do.

[lightdancer1]

Three big rules I use in my Azula-as-hero stories:

1) The canon deliberately anchors Zuko's view as always right and makes everything revolve around him. I refuse to invert its mistakes with Azula in Zuko's place as that perpetuates the faults rather than offering an alternative. Azula is the hero, though Zuko can very much end up a hero just as much as she does depending on the AU. That isn't a zero-sum game. She can be the hero, have major biases and cognitive dissonance and blinders and still be heroic.

Neither Azula or Zuko are entirely right about what they remember as kids. This is part real world 'memory is very hilariously unreliable' (don't look this up unless you want an entirely valid spasm of paranoia for a while), part 'kids are kids and have their perceptions of the world which is a murkier and more complex place where nobody really knows what they're doing, people just act like they do.'

2) The villain in the story is the Fire Lords, whoever slots into that role in the story. The Fire Lord is the architect of a genocidal world war of conquest. You can be the Fire Lord, or you can be the hero. You cannot be both by definition of what the Fire Lord does with the Fire Nation as villains. Save in the Fire Lord Ursa AU, Ursa therefore is antagonist, not villain. Outside the Fire Lord Iroh AUs Iroh is an antagonist or a hero who actually is a good uncle to Azula, not the villain. There is no need to demonize Ursa and Iroh when Ozai and Azulon are already there and canonically sonsobitches.

Demonizing Ursa and Iroh would be very easy from their canon arcs, but it's a mistaken choice that selects the wrong people for no real gain to the story and furthering no. 1, with Zuko's 'I am always right and it's all about me' mentality switched around.

3) Azula's canon arc is about the risk of conflating superpowers as personality, and the 'do not do this cool thing' taken to its logical conclusion. As a hero, her arcs still revolve around having power that's all but unbeatable save by an Avatar, the ethics in how she gets that way....and her challenges in being heroic when she's entirely capable of solving entire arcs by taking the easier villainous path but is actively working against that.

She tilts away from her canon path but still has elements of being an indoctrinated child soldier, and in a sense like her canon counterpart embodies a restraint in use of power rather than simply yielding to it. She doesn't get the Zuko arc of the rightful king returns because she has no desire for the throne, like her canon counterpart had no such desire until Ozai dumped it on her. Her goals differ in each AU where she acts as the hero, but they all center on the ideas of playing off vast power against the Avatar, who is a greater power than her own.

And in each AU she is set up as a direct foil to Katara as well. Both share a dark and ruthless side that they struggle against, struggle against ideas of vengeance and what it is to be a child stuck in a very big war and with cultural predispositions to face vengeance. Both struggle against in-built preconceptions of who they could and should be, and one unlearns the hatred of the aspiring conqueror to the conquered, the other that it's easy to live in a world of black and white hatreds but sometimes things are never so clear-cut as all that.

And in each and every AU as harsh as Azula's childhood is, she never has to fight for her right to be the most powerful Bender she can be. If anything she has to struggle with the implications of indoctrination and having vast power attached to a human being who knows how flawed and messed up she is. Katara, OTOH, has to fight for every scrap of power she gets, and grows from a far less advantageous background to be Azula's equal as a Waterbender. So there is always an element of relative privilege coded in, without hitting the audience over the head with a club on 'privilege is not 'had no problems in life', it's having advantages someone else didn't have and taking them for granted'.

5) This is not Batman or Gotham City. Insanity is not a superpower, and the only mentally ill person in these stories is Ozai, with this making him a tragic monster with human elements without making him any less an irredeemable bastard. The line of making Ozai an utter jackass and not perpetuating a different kind of ableism is its own challenge but I don't like telling easy stories. Azulon, unlike Ozai, is entirely sane, entirely aware of what he's doing, and much worse than his son is. *His* humanizing factor is knowing the Fire Nation is fucked and opting for 'they make a desert and call it peace' and not exactly being WRONG in his conclusions.

Where Azula has hallucinations they're the result of too much stress building up without outlets, when the cause of that stress is removed, the hallucinations stop.