#if they had even put a QUARTER of the effort into humanising ozai the way they humanise azula

[watchmakermori]

analysing The Beach (and why it’s one of the best Avatar fillers)

this essay is going to be full of bad punctuation and rambling because I’m not at uni anymore and Fuck Academic Style

Avatar does filler episodes better than most (see: all) shows, but there are two that really stand out. one is The Tales of Ba Sing Se, one is The Beach. what do they have in common? they balance humour with solemn, hard-hitting revelations, and they are completely devoted to character development. the internet isn’t short of people talking about how great The Tales of Ba Sing Se is (i’ll stop crying over The Tale of Iroh NEVER) but i just wanna scream about what makes The Beach so good

to call it a bottle episode for the villains isn’t completely accurate, because Azula is about the only character that fully qualifies as a villain when you take in the whole series. however, it is the first episode where we really see Mai and Ty Lee operating as independent characters rather than just accessories to Azula. my first point of praise: without The Beach, Ty Lee (and Mai to an extent) would be much, much flatter characters. they have fairly little to do in season 2 outside of fighting and delivering in-character quips. Ty Lee is the ditzy one, Mai is the emo gloomy one. that’s not to say they make bad sidekicks, but The Beach gives them a depth that was definitely missing

the way Ty Lee is used is particularly effective, because it isn’t just the characters that see her as a dumb airhead - up until that episode, that’s all she is to the audience as well. but then we learn about her internal struggle with her own individuality. we learn that her cutesy attention-grabbing is a cry for validation, which is absolutely Buckwild but also really fucking good, okay

it’s also the first episode where Mai’s apathy isn’t positioned as something dry and funny and relatable (it’s 2008, we gotta appeal to the emos amirite), but rather as an unhealthy mindset that stems from years of repression. this episode picks apart preconceptions and asks the question: why are these characters like this? Is there more beneath the surface? and the answer it gives is a resounding yes. 

beyond that, this episode is absolutely crucial to Azula’s arc. in terms of her development and decline, I actually think this episode does more legwork than any other, because it’s the first time that our perception of Azula as the golden child is challenged.

throughout season 2, Azula is positioned to align absolutely with Zuko’s understanding of her. she’s PEAK villain -  ruthless and cunning and precise, never meeting an obstacle she can’t overcome. she takes over ba sing se, secures her brother’s wavering loyalty, and literally kills the avatar (kind of). even when we see her in flashbacks, she’s taunting and devious and far ahead of Zuko in ability. she’s the child who was born lucky.

The Beach, however, does something that I wish more shows did. It shows how the villain behaves when they aren’t being a villain

seeing Azula in such a mundane context - a relaxing beach holiday - lays all of her oddities completely bare. she doesn’t know how to relax. she turns a beach game into an absurdly ruthless tactical operation. she shows up too early to a house party and insists that they’re the ideal guests. she has no idea how to flirt. when she’s taken outside of her antagonistic context and placed into a typically teenage situation, she’s ridiculous and bizarre and unsettling. 

of course, most of these revelations are used for humour, so they aren’t necessarily as stark as they seem here. but they are undeniably deliberate, as is made clear in the final scene around the campfire. after Ty Lee and Mai and Zuko pour out their various emotional baggage, Azula applauds. she doesn’t have any of her own, at least not as far as she and the other characters are concerned. there are only these lines, which are some of the best-written in the whole series:

I don’t have sob stories like all of you. I could sit here and complain that our mom liked Zuko more than me. But I don’t really care. My own mother thought I was a monster. She was right, of course, but it still hurt.

the episode shows us all of the ways that Azula is strange and dysfunctional and completely out of touch with the real world, but these lines make it clear that she hasn’t processed any of it. unlike Ty Lee and Mai and especially Zuko, who have enough introspection to recognise their imperfections, Azula hasn’t even realised that there’s anything wrong with her. she doesn’t realise how much her mother and father have damaged her, because she’s never stepped outside of the tiny bubble in which she is worshipped and powerful and lucky. 

this is a far cry from the azula of season 2, even if her actual downfall is a long way off. this is the first time we start to see that zuko has something she doesn’t: self-awareness. he knows he has flaws, knows he needs to better himself, knows that he was mistreated, even if he hasn’t fully come to terms with it yet. Azula never does. she’s a twisted, stunted child, groomed into violence by her father, punished for that violence by her mother, and she never really understands that. it takes until the end of the season for the curtain to fall, but The Beach is the first glimpse behind it

tl;dr The Beach is a fucking masterpiece