#he'd be one lethal firebender ]

[atla-confessions]

In chess, a skewer is a joint attack on two pieces at once. One piece is behind another, and that limits the movements of the other piece because they're both being threatened. In combat, especially CQC, especially with a firebender, characters usually evade, deflect, and counter. One usually wants to redirect or dodge a fireball to the face. If they intentionally fight you in a way that you cannot do either because you're being forced to protect someone that they'll burn instead, that, like a skewer, is an attack on both parties. When Azula aimed her lightning at Katara, it was a skewer (honestly a "pin" because Katara is stronger than Zuko, but Azula probably saw it as a skewer?) strategy. The attack was at both Zuko and Katara. Either Zuko would have to give up proper fighting tactics or he'd be forced to tank a blow, but she'd be fine with hitting either. This is a common tactic, especially with firebenders, because forcing a foe to tank a blast of fire or lightning instead of dodge is obviously to their advantage. When Zuko was recklessly, aggressively shooting fire blasts at Aang at point-blank range that were so large Aang had to extend himself to make sure they didn't hit the toddlers behind him, and still the residual heat was cooking and traumatizing the kids, that's a skewer attack. He was forcing Aang (who didn't attack Zuko first, Zuko was just on a mission to finish the job with the Airbenders for the glory of the empire) to just stand there and tank it, and even then the toddlers behind him were going to suffer. It's another example of a skewer attack where the firebender is threatening someone they're jumping to not properly fight back, or they will maim the people who he's skewered in place in front of.

Okay, first. Aang did technically 'attack' Zuko first. Aang entered on a Penguin Seal and knocked Zuko over from behind.

Second, none of the Toddlers were injured, Zuko did not 'cook' them. He scared them for sure. I have no clue of the long term effects of this.

Third, we know why Zuko was looking for the Avatar. It wasn't for the glory of the empire. It was so he could go home. If his priority was the glory of empire and not going home he would have let Zhao have him. (This is Zuko prioritizing himself over the 'glory of the empire')

Four, Azula's targeting was clearly on purpose. And, you said it yourself, Zuko was just fighting too recklessly. This was not a skewer attack in Zuko's case it's Zuko having a lack of control.

Five, Aang was standing between Zuko and the Water Tribe. Zuko literally could not attack Aang without directing his attacks in their direction.

Six, Azula was using lethal force. Which is very different to what Zuko was doing. This makes the situations incomparable in regards to intent.

Zuko was consistently reckless throughout the series. He could have easily injured someone by mistake however, he didn't. And he didn't really intend to in this scene.

(Also, kinda weird how you cause Azula using lethal force forcing Zuko to 'tank a blow' but Zuko being reckless with his fire and letting it get too close to (not burning any of them) children 'cooking and traumatizing')

X

[wyrdify]

So, a lot of you know I draw inspiration from a lot of sources. When it comes to Roy, A:tLA gives me plenty of material to work with regarding how fire works, how it’s controlled, how it’s used in the show, and what one’s style says about the firebender in question (Zuko, Azula, Iroh, Zhao, Ozai, etc). In FMA, that sort of thinking also applies to how one uses alchemy. There are differences in application depending on the person (ex: watch how Ed uses his alchemy in comparison to Al or Izumi).

Flame Alchemy is unique to Roy, and it’s incredibly versatile. Because of that, you’ll probably notice I take some things I saw in A:tLA and apply them for how Roy transmutes. For example, if you’re reading the Camping Trip from Hell thread I’m doing with Kira, you might have recognized something I had Roy do a couple of replies back. If not, this video will show essentially what he did: link.

I had a lot of fun with that, honestly. I love getting to write Roy using his flame alchemy.

A note: Kimblee’s alchemy is the only one that can compare application wise considering they both use explosions. However, the methods differ: Roy is altering the oxygen density in the air while Kimblee works with the imbalance of elements to create reactions.

Another note: If I were to compare Roy to a firebender in the A:tLA/LoK universe, he’d be a mix of Jeong Jeong and Azula with some Iroh mixed in. Jeong Jeong style wise (and views on fire), Azula with her calculated and precise hits (pinpoint aiming much?), and Iroh with his versatility (aka he’s willing to look at other bending styles and adapt).

[lightdancer1]

A two-part scene from the Ba Sing Se AU, Part the Second:

Lu would have four visitors that day. The first two she had met already, one with bravado. One with disbelief and anger that her mind was going again and going that fast until she'd proven real, until the old dream that hurt the worst had also become real. And it didn't hurt nearly as much. The third.....there was an aura of fear and the strange crackle of a kind of Firebending she'd never heard of.

And then the door opened and the Fire Lord stood before her. He too had grown since his sixteenth year, and if not for the red mark on his cheek, the old sign of Ozai's malevolence, and his beardless face it might have been Father looming there in front of her, eyes of hate and anger.

That day, when Zuzu was thirteen, she'd stared with a neutral face when he'd been burned, neither cheering it nor condoning it, petrified lest anything draw Father's anger. Nothingness had as well. She had one of the deepest burns on her right side to show for that wrath, where all clothes she wore would have hidden it. She had been neutral, and a coward. Now she was kneeling on the front in front of him again, and understood all too well what he must have felt at that moment.

Kuei had told her an Earth Kingdom proverb, once, in one of their games.

"What goes around, comes around." Well, history had come full circle and so had their lives. A child of Ozai knelt in utter fear before the Fire Lord, aware that the Fire Lord's wrath could quite literally prove lethally destructive.

-------

Zuko did not see the older Azula he expected, a girl who might have worn Earth Kingdom green again but otherwise would have had that eerie resemblance to Ursa as he did Ozai enhanced. He saw a girl with very close-cropped hair and a tan, a student's clothes. Student. Bandages, shrouding her arm and side and for a moment he remembered Uncle wearing similar bandages on the same place.

Evidently pettiness ran in the family and it was a gift, if gift it was, of all of them. He saw her tanned by Agni's light, a look suiting a laborer rather than a Princess. And most important he saw the fear that mirrored his own.

Ten years ago he had finished cutting off her hair with a visual relish in the deed that had left horror and disgust on the eyes of witnesses and he elected to see only the one. And had stood back from her as she snarled "Get away, mother. I know you're happy to see this. The monster's broken. GET AWAY!"

He'd sighed then and then grabbed her face.

"Stop lying about seeing things that aren't there, Lala." The old name spoken with an anger that jolted her out of it, maybe. Or maybe it was just a temporary moment of lucidity.

"You have no name, no honor, no title. You are banished from the Fire Nation on pain of death. I wanted you put in your place, and so you are."

Now........now she was terrified of him as he had been of Father, and for the same reasons. It was not a sight lost on him. Ten years of denying the truth of what he had actually done and why it had not worked as he expected it to work and it crashed and burned in the sense of wary dignity and pride Lala mustered here, refusing to let him see too much of that fear, much as he had tried to do with Father back in the day.

"Hello, Azula," he said, voice far more level than he felt.

"Long time no see."

She did not tremble, though he saw her knuckles clenched white and her jaw remained taught.

He wanted to reach out to her, to assure her that he was real. His hand moved and then he did see sparks of blue flames from her nostrils and it moved back. She did not relax. He wouldn't have either, that day thirteen years ago.

"Uncle hurt you, didn't he?"

Her gaze was one of anger and raw terror.

"The men of this family are good at that," she said in words that were not a level tone but had something of the rage she did on the day of the comet.

He did not flinch, merely dipping his head in acknowledgment of the truth.

"I'm sorry wouldn't be enough, would it?"

The look of raw hate in her eyes for the first time was answer enough to that. He grimaced, baring his teeth and took a step back.

"Uncle did tell me the Dai Li hurt you. I could believe that they did," he said quietly. "It's what they do. And they're good at making it seem innocuous, to the point that a person wouldn't know what it was until it got them. That's what happened to Jet."

Azula blinked. "Who?"

"Jet," Zuko sighed. "Old friend of the Avatar and his group. Was brainwashed by the Dai Li and it backfired and he killed himself when it failed, or so I was told."

Azula said nothing.

"The point is that when he tells me that they would do it, I have every reason to believe him and to agree with him." His lips were thin. "I was wrong, and I was foolish. I was angry, and I cast you out when I should have directed that anger at Father. If I wanted to rule by terror hanging Father from a gallows would have been a sufficient means to do it. If I wanted to rule by restructuring starting my reign off on a note of the old days before Grandfather was not the way. Either way, you were not the person to target."

He sighed.

"And I know how much I wronged you. I can see that in your hair." He looked at it and his hand moved and Azula snarled.

"Don't TOUCH me." Sparks of blue fire erupted from her mouth and he stepped back further.

She gave him a sour look.

"You banished me on pain of death, Zuzu. Uncle brought me here in chains, same as I brought him. History taking its path of irony, once more." Her lips were thin. "Are you going to kill me the way you said you would?" He could see her knuckles white and the tension that marked that hidden fear.

"No," he said, and her eyes went very wide.

"I was a child trying to be a man and I did the worst of both. Our family's done enough harm to itself and to our people in the name of pride that I won't compound it more than I did. The ban is revoked," he said, and he brought out the documents he'd looked at after his talk with Uncle, "and your title and wealth are yours again."

He tossed the documents to her and she stared at them.

"As is your name."

At that her gaze said very little.

Then Zuko knelt down so that they were at eye level.

"And I promise you whatever the Dai Li did do will be undone. I got you into this mess, Lala, and I will get you out of it."

With that he stepped out, leaving the door unlocked and his sister staring after him and then back at the papers she put under her bed where the other ones were, refusing to look at them much. She said very little and instead went over to the bed and curled up on the other side, so the bandaged part of her wouldn't pull more tightly than it did.

Old ghosts were stirring and now she wished it was her mind's conjurations. She wiped her eyes, and focused on making sure they were dry. She had given up on this world ten years ago. Having what had been hers by birth bestowed on her as a bribe would not draw her back. And then there were the words she'd heard beyond the cell. The Corsair, the same figure who'd confronted Uncle. An attack on Caldera's ports and using artificial Firebending to lay destructive waste to the repair facilities.

The Corsair had inaugurated a new war with a strike that would be studied in Fire Nation textbooks and perhaps those of the other nations as well for centuries to come. Thanks to that Southerner she was stuck in this place. The memory of her wife crossed her mind in the cell and she could only wonder about Jin. Was she all right? Was she even alive?

She shivered and then she did find tears flowing down her face, as they had not back in the day. She was alone in a room with the door closed. Her wife might be dead and the last sight they'd had of each other was a terrible battle in a city burning for the third time at the hands of Iroh of Caldera. And then the reunion with her mother and Zuzu on top of all of this.

She was allowed to be human, Shanghai had taught her. Well she damned well was having a human moment here and if that was it, then so be it.

[lightdancer1]

In tune with my Ivan the Terrible riff with Ozai his relationship with his family and children evolves in stages

As a child he's Henry Bowers from IT with literal magic fire powers (and if people haven't seen IT or read the novel (and I'm so sorry for you if you did make it all the way through to THAT scene) Bowers is pretty horrifying and a deliberate choice for a variety of reasons). He's a vicious bully encouraged to be so by a mother who raised him and out of spite saw that he was mentally ill, stoked his mental illness, and created a vortex even she couldn't control by the time she died. She did the entire thing because Fire Lord Azulon cut her out of actual power and influence and she wanted to weaponize Ozai against him.

As a young adult this same fellow with this same background gets signed up for a Fire Nation version of a Lebensborn program.

A key element to my interpretation here is that he's every bit as much a victim of this as Ursa. Both of them know that, both of them see it that way. It's why he wasn't a complete ogre to her and most of his physical abuse is a combination of his impulsive violence control slipping and going for anyone in the vicinity (Azulon calls him a mad dog for a lot of reasons and this is one of them) and a more calculated emotional abuse pattern to keep Ursa from using steel-cutting firebending against him with very likely lethal effects. Or bothering to realize that she could.

Same thing with his kids. Ozai has a horrific reputation among the Palace prior to his ascension and like the young Tsar Ivan IV literally beat people up for sport. As a prince of the blood he is technically above the law so when he does this for fun people know exactly who he is, what he is, and tremble when he takes the throne. His violence to his kids is mostly emotional and based on his (rather self-servingly delusional) self perception that driving perfectionism brought him to the throne, so he's not asking his kids anything he didn't ask of himself.

Azula does a better job of fitting into this than Zuko does, so he gives her his 'love' insofar as he can do it and plays the kids off against each other for a laugh, as he'd see it. The abuse reaches its height only when he takes the throne and is completely above the law and yesterday's perfectionist is today's tyrant who personally oversees and carries out executions because at the biggest chance of his own creed he utterly and totally failed and let Ursa do it and all the work because in his view he was a coward.

Ozai, unlike Azula, really is a legitimate sufferer of Antisocial Personality Disorder and it's portrayed as a mental illness he's fully aware he has, which he struggles against with inconsistent success until taking power becomes a serious prospect and then he gives up and goes fully off the deep end when he has unconstrained power and nobody can stop him or slow him down. His humanizing and sympathetic elements stem from my use of the eugenics program and his reaction to it (Ozai knows entirely well about Ikem and indulges Ursa's reactions to it because he no more wants to be a part of this than she does) and from the idea that his mental illness makes him a human being, not a dime store Batman villain. It's not a superpower, it's an illness that repeatedly bites him in the ass in spite of his best efforts to go against it.

Ozai tries at multiple points to make Azula like him and it doesn't work because mental illness isn't contagious and Azula's not being like him at fundamental levels but being seen up to a point in the canon-style stories as his favorite and the only child he fully loves is......a very deliberate element of how she's seen versus how she actually is as a person.

In all of this and his deliberate violence against his children he is a direct mirror of Ivan IV of Muscovy, who among his other crimes beat his son to death with a sharp-edged cane. The same cane was used for one of his favorite sports, stabbing courtiers with it and making them give long-winded reports as their feet bled around it.

Ozai was not always consistently horrible or abusive to his kids, and in the earliest stages of Zuko's and Azula's lives both he did his best to control his illness, hence Zuko's happy memories are somewhat accurate, even if he had no idea what either of his parents were thinking.