#now with hindsight and knowing the reveals and redemptions of Zuko we (me) as the audience sympathize with Zuko

[sokkastyles]

I'm already seeing people saying they are gonna "soften" zuko in the first season heh it made me think of your prediction

Listen, the marketing team of this show knows their audience. Zuko is already being marketed as one of the main protagonists. His character and his redemption arc is hugely popular and known as one of the main draws of the series. Does anyone honestly think that the writers of the show are gonna be like "now, listen, we can't make him too likeable." He's their cash cow, and they know it, and of course they're going to play that up.

That doesn't necessarily mean they're going to soften the character, but we'll probably get more of him being portrayed as a protagonist and not just a villain early on.

A lot of this is par for the course with an adaptation. You have to remember that when ATLA was airing, people didn't know how Zuko's arc was going to play out. Oh, there are lots of hints early on that the writers intended for him to be redeemed from the first episode, bit they themselves have said they didn't know how it would happen. That developed along the way.

Netflix has the advantage of knowing all the beats in advance, in an arc that in the original, was more ambitious than any of the other character arcs. But this poses a new problem, because an ambitious arc that we haven't seen before is less ambitious the second time around. So what to do? The obvious answer is to change things up a bit, to play up the things we know are going to happen later. So I suspect we will get some of that.

Am I worried that Dallas Liu won't be able to quite pull off what Zuko did in the original? Yeah, but that's a testament to how good OG Zuko was. It's challenging to pull off that kind of characterization. That and hindsight are both going to affect how people view Liu's performance.

Even so, there are already people who say that OG Zuko is too soft, or that fans soften him, or try to make him seem worse even after his redemption. That's a testament to how complex of a character Zuko is. I find myself analyzing the few seconds we've gotten of Liu's performance, looking for that complexity. That's a lot to put on the young actor's shoulders.

Especially since everything is going to be more subdued going from live action to cartoon. So my guess is that we'll get a less shouty Zuko. The other thing is that a lot of Zuko's early vulnerability is revealed to us by seeing him getting comedically smashed into a wall over and over again, so there will also be less of that. Which means the show will have to show Zuko's mix of simmering rage, petulance, vulnerability and insecurity in other ways. That plus hindsight plus the netflix episode format of less and longer episodes means we'll probably also get Zuko's backstory much more early on, or at least parts of it, probably as early as the first episode.

As for specifically the fear that Zhao being present on Kyoshi Island means Zuko will play less of a role there, I think it's more likely that the show is expanding Zhao's role both as an antagonist for Zuko and as an antagonist for the rest of the gaang, in anticipation of the season one finale. That also goes back to the fact that things will probably need to be toned down in the move to live action anyway. I've said before that it makes little sense to hold Zuko burning Kyoshi against him since it's the result of reckless cartoon bending and Aang puts the fire out very easily via Unagi in an equally cartoonish way. My guess is that in the adaptation Zhao will follow Zuko there and we'll get a three-way fight, and even if Zhao does most of the burning, Zuko will still be responsible for bringing Zhao there, so it's not like they're exonerating Zuko for something the original show didn't even treat seriously to begin with.

[dawnquafam]

Just wodering, why did't you like Ben in first two movies (as a character I mean).

(Imma just open this up with a little disclaimerthat I love Ben now, I find the movies enjoyable overall, and Adam did some danggood acting all throughout this trilogy. These movies snapped me out of a lifetime of avoiding Star Wars, and I’m glad of it. So this post isn’t anti any of that, it’s just an analysis of my initial impressions now that I have the benefit of hindsight.)

And now the reason: Honestly, it mostly comes down to lack ofbackstory, and a bit of Kylo never really showing a desire to be redeemed.

Now, if you’ve followed me for pretty much anylength of time, you’ll know that characters like Ben are my faves – Loki,Lotor, Zuko, I’d die for them all. Going in, based on the scraps I knew beforehand,I assumed I’d fall for Ben just like I fell for them. But the thing about thoselast three is that we saw how their childhoods molded them into villains. Lokiwas treated like he was worth nothing, Lotor was called weak for being halfAltean, Zuko was scarred for life by his father. And at various points invarious ways, they showed that they weren’t heartless monsters, that some partof them wanted to be good.

But with Ben? His parents were Han and Leia, bothof whom clearly loved him. We got one throwaway line about Leia sending himaway, but nothing further was really explained in TFA. From what I could tellthe first time I watched it, we were pretty much just supposed to believe thatthe only child of the heroes of the original trilogy had turned evil in honorof a grandfather he’d never met, the very man his family all risked their lives todefeat. Between that and the glorified temper tantrums, it made him come off asmore spoiled brat than misunderstood villain. So when Han offered him a wayhome, a way back to the light, and Kylo killed him instead of taking it, itfelt like the only reason for that was Kylo just hating his dad for nodiscernable reason (or at least, no discernable reason big enough to explainturning into a murderer). The emotional impact just wasn’t there.

TLJ helped a little when it explained what Lukedid. Nearly being murdered in your sleep by your uncle is certainly somethingthat would push a person away from the light. But a reveal like that should’vecome before we had to watch Kylo kill a character who was both hisloving father and a beloved original main character. And while that and hisinability to kill Leia humanized him a bit, it still didn’t feel like there wasa real reason for Rey to believe so fully that he was conflicted enough to beworth redemption. And once again, he was offered a chance of redemption, butinstead he lost it and tried to kill Luke and Leia and threatened Rey at the end.

And then in TROS he spoke so little thathe couldn’t offer up a reason to be redeemed for most of it but ANYWAY

It wasn’t until that moment in TROS when hedropped his saber mid-battle because of Leia’s call that I got a strong enoughvibe of “Wait, he does still love his parents, maybe they and Rey weren’tfighting for him for no reason” that he seemed to me to be worthy of aredemption arc. The rest of the movie – seeing Han, throwing away the saber,sprinting to help Rey and stop Palpatine, sacrificing everything to accomplish that – waswhen he finally gave me reason to root for him. That was when the brokenboy inside was finally apparent enough that to me that I felt Ben deserved tobe loved.

I’ve learned more about him since then. Inrewatches and fanvids and posts I’ve read, I’ve noticed details of Ben’scharacterization that I didn’t the first time around. I learned that he was just a kid when Leiasent him away, and she and Han hadn’t seen him between then and TFA, makingLuke his primary parental figure for over half his life by the time he nearlykilled him. And, oh yeah, the clearly unimportant little detail that Ben wasn’tthe one who slaughtered all of Luke’s other students, it was Palpatine. (Which was. Actually part of the AUs in my head - that Ben didn’t do it. Would’ve been so helpful two months ago to know that that’s canon.)

The problem with all of that? It’s hindsight. It’sfrom novelizations and comics. And a lot of my love of him still stems from whatI’ve changed and elaborated on in my AUs (the biggest thing being that in myhead, he’s not the one who killed Han). Part of it was also how hischaracterization was written – a bratty child who basically stalked Rey throughtheir bond in TLJ – but if I’d known the things about his backstory then that Ido now? Maybe it would’ve cancelled that out a bit. He would’ve been less brat,more boy who grew up with abandonment issues and was turned on by the only parent he had left. It would’ve been less stalking and harassing, more lonelyboy who’s desperate for someone who understands him. (It still wouldn’t beperfect. But it would’ve been better than what we got.)

Basically, for me, the writing in the movies didn’t dowhat it should’ve done to show why I should like him. So I didn’t. It was mylove of his character archetype, not Kylo himself, that made me dig around for reasons to love Ben. I found them, obviously, but if it weren’t for characters like Loki andLotor and Zuko that I’d loved before? The movies wouldn’t have given me allthat much to care about.