#like. please don't mom friend her she has DEPTH she is clearly not an 100% cut and dry Good Kind Person

[ophiliaclement]

I know the game isn't even out yet but I've already seen some really lukewarm takes about castti. I'm begging you all don't do to her what everyone did to ophilia. these are actual characters with agency and emotion beyond mom friend-ifying them

[seyaryminamoto]

May I ask, why does Azula make you passionate? Not a lot of people has the capability to empathize (NOT sympathize) with the antagonists, or a lot don't have the power to share or sense clearly their thoughts and feelings (for many reasons) as they do with the protagonists. Most people are mersiless toward them, even if they were understandable.

Uh, well, if you want the very honest answer? I saw myself in her. But if you want an in-depth answer, click the Read More.

I didn’t mean to, no. I didn’t go looking for myself in her character, I was uneasy about her, even somewhat worried, in her first episodes. She had been characterized very deliberately as colder, more scheming, more efficient than her brother or Zhao, the only Fire Nation villains we knew so far. She hadn’t quite succeeded at anything yet, but there was no tantrum after her failures, no self-pitying act: she simply kept going relentlessly. 

She wouldn’t stop at anything, and after watching her convince Mai so easily that her brother wasn’t worth trading over a king, it’s kind of natural to wonder if she’s really devoid of a conscience… No lie, though, it also reflects heavily on Mai that she agreed so easily. It especially looks like Mai has less of a conscience than Azula, since it’s her brother we’re talking about, and it doesn’t really look like she was scared of contradicting Azula: she had only ever complained about her family ever since she showed up on-screen. In short, I thought they were all weird and mean and morally incorrect! :’D

But I have had a penchant to grow interested in characters who are strong, who are driven to the ends of the earth. I used to think I favored tsundere-types of female characters back when I was in my anime-heavy phase, but soon enough I realized that wasn’t quite right: I was interested in female leaders instead, characters who were often tsundere because they bury their feelings deep down, because their main interests are professional, or academic… basically, they were ambitious people who sometimes went too far in dragging others into stuff they hadn’t signed up for (Ritsu Tainaka, Haruhi Suzumiya, Misaki Ayuzawa, Kyoko Mogami, Natsumi Tsujimoto, and so on…).

Basically, I’ve been appealed by characters who share Azula’s reckless determination, but when I approached Avatar I had also moved on mostly from anime, and I found myself, instead, writing an original story where my protagonist was a princess, hailing from a western nation she was supposed to rule one day. This princess was very determined, physically powerful to the point of being beyond human (then again, she was a literal descendant from gods :’D), with a terrible relationship with her family (in particular fighting with an older half-brother who wants to prove he’s more suitable for the throne than her). Said girl’s priority, first and foremost, is her nation, and she’s willing to go to whatever means she must in order to protect it (even resort to magic, which is frowned upon in her nation of warriors).

Now, after I exposed that character’s main traits to you, don’t you think there’s a few too many similarities with Azula? :’D yep, I thought so too as I continued watching ATLA. Tbh it freaked me out how similar they actually were, since I hadn’t watched the show or been influenced by it at all. I didn’t even know Azula existed!

Anyways! I’ve gone off the rails a bit, but back on track: why did I identify with Azula?

First off, I did start getting the feeling she was similar to those characters I loved, despite she was, obviously, meant to be a villain. But what REALLY did it for me?

It was the scene in Zuko Alone, when Iroh’s gifts arrive. Azula’s dear brother gets something mind-blowing while she gets something pathetic, generic, that someone assumed was going to please her because she’s a girl. Because girls like dolls, right?

Well, in my case, I got play make-up instead. I had a trauma with make-up since age 4, and if people had bothered knowing me, or even talking with my mom about me, they would have known that. They didn’t. It didn’t matter to them either way. Meanwhile, my brother’s gifts were incredible! :’D all sorts of action toys, new Hot Wheels, even remote-controlled cars. And when I wanted to play with them? I got a big ole’ NO from him, along with my parents telling me, often, that the toys were his and that I should let him play instead.

Heck, there was this one time he got this ship-in-a-bottle crafts as a present for his birthday from someone who worked at MY school. When I asked where was mine? Oh, there wasn’t one. My birthday was the day before my brother’s, the guy who made it worked at MY SCHOOL, but he would make a gift of the sort for my brother and not for me. I don’t remember if he even lied saying he’d make one, but fact of the matter is, I never got a handcrafted, special boat-in-a-bottle with my name on it. He did.

Let’s just say… when I saw Azula getting that disappointing doll while Zuko got the incredible knife, my jaw dropped. I literally dropped all my defenses against her along with my jaw, too. I saw that and damn, it put her character in a completely different perspective for me: it made her REAL, her experience with her brother resembled mine so much that I was in genuine shock. The salty “You’re not even good!” comment when he was playing with the knife, spoken with the intent to mask her interest in the weapon and her jealousy? The way she takes the knife later too, smirking and teasing her brother, yet letting him have it back because she knows it’s not supposed to be hers? Anon, I swear that was 100% the way I acted in countless similar situations. And I know, it may make me sound like a very bad sister (in Azula’s defense she’s actually a better sister than I am, in my brother’s defense he’s a better brother than Zuko could ever hope to be), but it’s still how it was.

From there onwards, a lot of my interest in Azula came from seeing how she suddenly stepped out of her “supreme villain overlord” role to prove she was really just a teenager like the rest of the cast. We’re talking about a girl who imitated her brother for shits and giggles, just to amuse herself at the expenses of a completely confused Aang. A girl who made a pun about the Avatar’s fangirls. Her sense of humor, no doubt, is kinda weird and not the sweetest? But she has one! It’s there, and no lie, I laughed my ass off with those two occasions at least.

Eventually, I just found myself more interested in her to the point of recklessly supporting her in the show. Yes, I knew the Gaang would win, and I didn’t mind, I liked them too! But I was slowly and surely loving Azula more with every passing episode, as she proved she was the one villain worth respecting in this entire franchise. And she was a fourteen-year-old girl with zero social skills, self-esteem issues to the ends of the earth, a turbulent relationship with her parents and her brother, and the frankly adorable wish to know if people might like her if they didn’t know she was a princess.

Another big selling point for me, as already stated, was her relationship with her brother. While my brother is a little less of a drag than Zuko can be (meaning, my brother can be happy once in a while :’D he even makes jokes… though seriously bad ones .__. maybe he shouldn’t make them...), their relationship was so similar to ours that it freaked me out. I’ve been competing with my siblings since forever, but when it came to outdoing my oldest sisters I seriously just couldn’t do it (honestly, no 3yo can expect to compete in regards of anything with a 10yo, or can she? :’D and yet I was such a pig-headed brat that I did it all the same). Meanwhile, my brother, only two years older than me, was an easier target to surpass, and I set myself on the task of doing that. Whenever he was better than me at anything, I ridiculed him (remember the knife scene?). Whenever I was better than him at anything, he would try to outdo me again and usually fail, then get annoyed and say it was a stupid thing anyways.

As we grew older, the conflict in our relationship grew a lot uglier in the sense that we didn’t really just snap at each other about toys now. I seriously got so pissed off by how entitled he was acting once that I locked myself up in the bathroom, punched a wall out of sheer frustration and damn near broke my hand in the process. No lie, that helped me vent my frustration real easily :’D

Basically, I’ve experienced the sibling relationship Azula did. My brother is far more popular than I am (well, in regards of people who live in our environment, at least), so everyone flocks to him, and when Azula’s friends betrayed her for Zuko, well… you can imagine how that stung for me :’D I’ve had friends who haven’t quite betrayed me for him or so, but they’ve stopped being my friends and become his, instead. How about that?

Anyways, Azula most likely wasn’t built up to be relatable, she was built to be a rounded character instead. There are more obviously relatable characters in the show, Katara is relatable for most the fandom, Toph is relatable for natural tomboys, and so on. But even then, none of these characters were built to be relatable. They were built to be real and believable, and in being built that way, they became relatable. And that’s what happened to me with Azula.

Honestly, I think I can’t really relate or empathize with Zuko a lot because of my own experiences too. I will judge him harder because yep, I’m biased :’D but I’m not trying to say he’s all bad and Azula is all good or anything. Truth be told, secret I’ve kept to myself for a long time… The finale depressed me for a day or two because I kept wondering if that was the only outcome for someone like Azula. Because in a sense, it looked like the show was saying that was kind of the outcome for someone like me. It felt like it was saying the world would judge me as impossible to save, while my brother got every success I could only dream of. 

And... who knows? Maybe that’s what’s happening indeed. He’s certainly doing better than me these days. All I can safely say is I’m glad he is. Despite things were bad between us, they’re not so bad anymore. So if I’m to be left unsuccessful and he’s off to shoot for the stars, I’ll congratulate him instead of holding grudges about why he gets that and I don’t.

Anyways, the finale freaked me out, but I distanced myself from the character to a degree so I wouldn’t project on her so much. Still, the way her ending wrapped up bothered me, and I was very much unwilling to see her life end that way. As the comics have been building her up either for a very bad downfall or for a very long redemption that still is barely beginning, I lose my patience often as I keep wanting something better for her ASAP. Not a lot of positive stuff has happened yet to her… but that’s what fanfiction is for, for me. Ever since I opened FF.net’s ATLA archive, the first thing I did was search for Azula getting happy endings xD

And thus, that’s why I write her as I do and connect with her as I have. Azula seems to gather most the traits of characters I loved, but on top of that, she had an eerily similar sibling relationship to mine with my brother. A lot of my own eternal chase towards polishing and developing my talents came from a rather toxic place of thinking that having lots of skills was the only way I could be valid, somehow. I’m not exempt from self-esteem issues myself, see :’D

Anyways, I realize the majority of people won’t find Azula relatable, acceptable, likeable in any way. I don’t mind, I don’t really think it’s that odd, the show very obviously featured her as a problem that needed to be dealt with. But I’m not one to stick with supporting only the heroes in stories. Very often I’ve liked villains better, whether because they’re complex and worth exploring, as Azula is, or because they’re simply more interesting than their heroic counterparts. I guess I could have said this from the start and spared you the insanely lengthy insight into how my mind works, right? :’D