#Zuko redemption

[impossiblycolorfulpanda]

Zuko's redemption is associated with water. If Azula were to have a redemption, it'd be associated with air.

Water is the element of change.

Zuko's arc starts with his life recently being changed for better and for worse. He has trouble accepting change but he either must learn to adapt to the change or end up crushed.

A different type of firebending move he learns is one that's associated with waterbenders. We don't see him try any other techniques from other nations.

It's also interesting that when around Katara, he keeps a cool head. He cares the most about what she thinks.

By the time Zuko becomes Fire Lord, he has a hand in changing the world for the better.

...

Air is the element of freedom.

Azula's arc would be about trying to free herself from toxic expectations.

For her whole life, she's been trapped and her earthly attachment has always been Ozai. Azula was taught that young people must have rigid discipline and order. Almost the polar opposite of what Aang was taught. Being told she has to be Fire Lord has trapped her even more. That expectation proved more than what she could handle.

She may be restrained in a straightjacket but her real prison is her broken mind and the lies she's been told her whole life. Now believing she doesn't belong anywhere.

Something to add to her redemption that differs from Zuko's is for her to open and master her chakras. It can take her a while to warm up to that idea, and it likely wouldn't be possible for her to take it without her and Aang obtaining a spirit bond that's developed after Aang lets go of Katara and embraces his last chakra, but once it's done, she truly becomes free.

To better represent her freedom, she takes the mantle of Phoenix Queen for herself. She's reborn, stronger than she ever was before, and goes from belonging nowhere to belonging everywhere. You could say she's "free as a bird."

[atla-confessions]

If zutara was a romance, Zuko's character would have been a lot weaker for it.

"Colonizer who's actively trying to kill or subjugate marginalized people for the sake of his own glory/honor/expansionism comes to belatedly realize they're human beings after all because he caught feelings for one of the women from that culture" is a godawful trope with a very storied, very racist history.

X

[avatars-and-fire-lords]

I know no one follows this blog because I haven’t been here in fully two years but —

A dark Avatar AU where Zuko finds Aang in the iceberg instead of Katata and Sokka, so none of the events of the show’s main timeline take place. Zuko takes Aang home to the Fire Nation and gets everything he thought he wanted long before Iroh had much effect on him. And the Fire Nation disposed of the Avatar. So over the following fifteen years, both the world and Zuko get much worse than they were in canon.

At one point, Azula and Zuko conspire to murder and overthrow Ozai, a thing Zuko fully expects (being very angry and confused) will make him feel better, but instead it makes him feel much worse, though he denies this to himself and others.

The story begins when Zuko is 30, and his royal doctor tells him he’s dying of alcoholic organ failure. The Fire Nation has just dealt the resistance a devastating blow in a battle that was widely considered the resistance’s best chance. So Zuko decided he has one last great act in him before he kicks the bucket: He will end the war. Since he’s had so much luck hunting symbols before, he decides he will hunt down and kill the symbols of the resistance, Toph the Builder and the Turncoat General Iroh. With their heroes dead, the resistance will crumble, and Zuko can die at peace knowing he made the Fire Nation’s supremacy enduring and complete. (What he doesn’t realize is that he is very much mistaken about the causes of his lack of inner peace.)

There’s just one problem: Azula knows Zuko is a drunk, even if he is also a capable military commander, so she sends a trusted aid of unknown origin but unquestionable loyalty along with Zuko: The intelligent, sarcastic Soza. They dislike being on this mission together immediately, and things don’t get any better when they come across a man and a woman in the forest outside the Fire Nation stronghold in Ba Sing Se. The woman is someone who Soza fears will recognize him—resistance spymaster Katara. She’s just busted out this man, who claims he’s an escaped mental patient who used to believe he’s the Avatar—and who Zuko alone knows *is* the Avatar, which means Azula has been hiding important things from Zuko all these years.

So with a little luck and a little skill, Zuko convinces this strange crew to help him find his uncle—lying to them that he just wants to see the man again. The rest of them would love to find Iroh’s hidden encampment, since the fractured nature of the resistance means they don’t always know where he is. So they set out together, Zuko absolutely filled to the brim with betrayals waiting to happen, Soza working very hard to not go within six feet of Katara, and Aang battling the deeply ingrained belief that he cannot trust his own mind for anything.

[theartistpiratewrites]

Zuko makes a promise and a new sister?

[aakiwa]

So embarrassing but I’m having a zukka moment rn

Also Azula + Sokka bffs bcs if she got the therapy she deserves I’m telling u their brains together wud be unbeatable

(Ugh I keep flipping Sokka’s scars forgive me)

[bonksoundeffect]

Pov you've been judged and found wanting

Anyways, just felt like drawing older Zuko and Azula

+

[isthei]

redeemed!azula becomes zuko’s advisor

based on this post

[burst-of-iridescent]

the thing with zuko and azula that people, specifically azula stans, seem to forget is that they are intentionally and specifically characterised in opposition to each other.

i keep seeing discourse about how azula deserves a redemption arc & even leaving aside the fact that a) saying someone “deserves” a redemption defeats the purpose of what redemption is and b) there was no space in the original show for azula to redeem herself anyway, azula could not have been redeemed because part of her narrative purpose is to be a foil to zuko.

zuko and azula are each the metric against which the other’s evolution (or devolution) is measured, and it’s the striking disparity between their character arcs that makes said arcs as impactful as they are: the child who swallowed the poison vs the child who spat it out. the fire nation royal who perpetuated the cycle of violence vs the fire nation royal who broke it. the abuse victim who became an abuser vs the abuse victim who became a protector.

would zuko’s redemption have felt as satisfying and hard-won if we hadn’t seen in azula the alternate path he might have so easily gone down? would azula’s downfall have been as terrible and saddening if we hadn’t seen the possibility of a better future embodied in zuko?

thematically speaking as well, the fire nation royal family exists as a microcosm of the fire nation itself — the generational trauma and violence passed down from sozin to azulon to ozai to azula and zuko is symbolic of how the fire nation’s warmongering has turned inwards, back on itself, a self-inflicted wound that grows and festers and rots until they’ve destroyed themselves just as much as they’ve destroyed the world. but where zuko represents a way out — hope for healing, for peace, for an end to the self-destructive nature of war — azula represents the cost of that war, the damage that can never be undone, the danger of remaining mired in an ouroboros, forever the snake that bites its own tail.

a version of the show where both zuko and azula redeem themselves together would have lost the grave, sobering impact of that message: that getting out as zuko did is the exception, not the norm, because the system in which they exist is built to be a trap. and even when that system is dismantled, the destruction it’s wrought cannot be fully erased.

the point of zuko and azula’s story lies in its inherent juxtaposition: there was never going to be room for both of them to rise or even fall together, not in the world in which they were raised and the virtues it extolled. and it’s because zuko exists as who azula could have been and azula exists as who zuko might have been, that their individual arcs are so powerfully poignant, and their relationship so infinitely tragic.



[impossiblycolorfulpanda]

Redemption of both royal fire siblings

Zuko's redemption would truly be complete when he learns lightningbending and Azula's redemption would be complete if she opens her chakras and can bend rainbow dragon fire.

Why?

Because, with Zuko, he's always been driven by rage, hate, uncontrolled passion, internal conflict, and turmoil. With lighting at his beck and call, that turmoil and fury are truly gone, and has found true tranquility and control over his emotions. This comes in handy when he begins to act like Iroh, if not better.

Azula, on the other hand, has been cold, calculating, distant, and always tries to suppress and bottle up her emotions. She was truly convinced that the Great War was justified and saw nothing wrong with it. So, when her reality begins shattering, she begins to fail to bottle up her emotions. As evidenced when she takes longer to charge up, Zuko's life was hung by a thread when hit, and was easily healed by regular water. With her chakras opened and her being proven worthy to Ren and Shaw, she's more open, playful, passionate, can freely speak her mind, and controls her emotions instead of internally locking them away.

Two sides. Same coin.

[atla-confessions]

Fullshade,Katara dosen't owe Zuko jackshit.None of his redemption arc was for her and that's good on his part,he did all That because he wanted to improve instead of wanting to be the hero who gets the girl.He can have me though

X

[linkspooky]

I'm excited to post this commission by @ oakyvii of a future scene in my Azula redemption / Azulaang fanfic. It's are moment of Zuko and Azula getting along as they wander the palace grounds.

if you're interested please check out my fic here on AO3.

[wilcze-kudly]

One thing I don't get about the atla fandom is why so many people are so desperate to somehow prove Zuko was a good person from the begining of the show. Or that he was somehow innately better and kinder than any other fire national.

I've seen this point tossed around a lot and I can kinda see where its coming from but like.... guys. Yon Rha did that too. You know the guy who traumatised Katara for life and took her mother? He did it almost word for word.

He went on in there looking for a singular genocide survivor, found that survivor. The survivor gave themselves up after he promised to leave the village alone.

The only difference is that instead of killing Aang on the spot, Zuko took that 12 year old hostage with the goal of handing him over to the Fire Lord to be kept in conditions described as "You'll be kept alive. Barely" by Zhao.

Zuko's paralels to Yon Rha and his poor morals in the begining are crucial to his arc and to his and Katara's relationship.

Hell, you could even point out how similarly shaped the scarlet detailing on the Southern Raiders' helmets and Zuko's scar are.

[avatars-and-fire-lords]

“Remember who you are” is what Ursa and Iroh constantly try to tell Zuko. His redemption is cast as a return to himself. Azula they see as a monster—that’s who she is. Yet by Ozai, who holds the emotional power, Azula is good and Zuko is bad.

This fits with the narcissistic parent dynamic of the scapegoat and the golden child. The scapegoat is abused and degraded and put down by the powerful narcissistic parent. But he gets to retain his identity, since he is othered from the toxic family unit. The golden child, on the other hand, is absorbed by the family unit. Perfection in a role in exchange for love and acceptance; a complete lack of personal identity development in exchange for childhood psychological safety. When a scapegoat grows up they often have a lot better luck finding real happiness than golden children. Golden children have been robbed of not a happy childhood, but of having a childhood at all. They never explored how the world works or who they were, because they were performing.

Zuko’s redemption arc is good, but Azula’s could be even better. She is the more damaged of the two, and damage is what a redemption arc is for. She’s done bad things, I know. But that is literally the point of a redemption arc. And she is so massively a victim. There’s so much to explore.

[thelonelyhangman]

Does anyone know who the artist of this work is? I've been looking for him for a long time🥺, and I can't find a trace (excuse my English, I'm using Google Translate)