#ozai has apd

[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.

[lightdancer1]

I will say I've noticed one gap between my take on Avatar canon and how the actual canon does things:

It uses the Batman version of insanity to make Azula an overpowered plot device for the sake of making her the Ra's Al-Ghul to Zuko's Batman. It presents mental illness in a warped fashion that has next to no resemblance to actual mental illness and furthers a great many ableist concepts at the same time.

In my case I literally introduced Ozai as an actual sociopath to deconstruct this mentality, as his APD is a mental illness he's entirely aware of, and his struggling against it provides means to humanize him and his actions without really making him sympathetic outside a narrow margin. In making him a person dealing with APD it also gives him a context that allows for exploration of cycles of abuse and how Ozai is shaped by one as much as his kids.....and allows for him to be that irrational and deliberately blind figure he is in the cartoon.

It serves as a deliberate plot device to allow threading the needle of multiple aspects of canon, while simultaneously being meant to defang some of the ableist concepts around APD. Ozai is not some wise suave manipulator, and there are a few ATLs where he essentially gets actual therapy and a healthier environment but in the right circumstances one of the symptoms of IRL APD (a willful tendency to violence that the person struggles against) erupts at the worst possible time in the most destructive fashion.

In short where canon uses Batman insanity to dehumanize a character, I use actual IRL psychology/psychiatry (not that the characters in-universe know this or use this logic, they refer to it as 'Ozai's sickness' and have no real idea what it is, only that it exists) to humanize a character and give him actual depth. Without taking away that he is one of the more despicable characters in-universe (and making his daddy a deconstruction in his own right as Azulon is 100% not mentally ill, he's just a dick who knows all about the sunk cost fallacy and ain't wrong with why he acts the way he does, but this doesn't make his actions less devastating for those on the receiving end).

[lightdancer1]

The cumulative effect of making Ozai and Ursa people outside their relationship to their kids

Is that you get a very different kind of story. it's not 'evil father archetype no 23234232342332234325325252' . Granted I like Raven and Teen Titans stories and this is Trigon's entire niche as the most absurdly over the top version down to being a version of Satan on par with Slasher Villain Angel Dude so that is SLIGHTLY related.

It's 'monomaniac with daddy issues who was encouraged to be a murderous sadist with APD from birth marries walking WMD with her own granddaddy issues and training obsessed man turns from burning animals to burning people because he has a semi-technical license to it and massive inferiority complexes to go with everything else.'

And then you give these people actual kids to raise.

And naturally it goes exactly as wrong as it would sound. Leaving Azula and Zuko to navigate their way as kids around Ozai's issues having issues on par with an encyclopedia set and Ursa hating everything about her life and deciding to forcibly prevent history repeating itself and creating the very condition she wanted to forestall without bothering to tell anyone what she does or why she does it.

Also gives Ursa the role of Azulon's spymaster, hence her ease of arranging his murder overnight and why nobody thought of anything suspicious in any of that.

So on the one hand 'Azulon's Dai Li (the Chinese secret police boss not the in-universe organization) with steel-cutting death beams' and 'Vegeta with Goku's parental instincts who bulls his way to 'success' by sheer assholery'.

And that becomes a much more complex story than 'let's make all of Ozai's dickery about how he treats his son and have his mama randomly literally call him a bastard for no good reason because her character exists only in his orbit'

[lightdancer1]

Also equally importantly I always write Ursa as a survivor of domestic violence:

And I will at no point write the survivor and the victim of that violence as a worse evil than the person (aka Ozai) who perpetrated it, and even Ozai is a lesser evil to Azulon, who treated his own son as a part of the same scheme that roped in Ursa. In my stories, at least, Ozai reacts to his father's idea of using him as a part of a breeding experiment with an utter loathing that means there is one line he absolutely refuses to cross.

He may have APD but the one thing he actually does get without knowing how to say it is trauma about some specific experiences and understanding that is why it is the one thing he does not do. But it also creates in him a desire for exercising a petty power and tyranny over other people in his life, which begins with emotional and physical abuse that worsens as he moves up in power and by the time he becomes Fire Lord, if he does succeed in that, it reaches its apex because he has absolute power to *get away with literally anything he wants to do to anyone he wants to do it to*.

So in the sliding scale of threats in an Azula story it's Azulon-Ozai in that order, and then there's Ursa. Who is a distant and hostile figure who does a tremendous amount of psychological and emotional damage but is never seen with the same unconscious to conscious driving hate as Ozai and to a minor point Azulon (where he dies when she's 9 and Ozai moves to astronomically worse) outside the Sins verse where Azulon moves to no. 1 on the Azula hate list.

She is not the greater threat in her child's life, she is never the one who does Azula the greatest and most direct harm. What she does do that's damaging is convince her by the consequences of her actions and those motives she never bothers to explain that the harm Azula goes through is what she actually deserves and does nothing to see a self-loathing building up that needed to be nipped in the bud.

That said she does do some boneheaded things because she's got a mountain range's worth of issues projected on her daughter and a long-standing inability to admit she was making horrible mistakes because she then has to look herself and her child in the eye and see exactly what she's done to them.

[lightdancer1]

As far as the common take on the Iroh-Ozai relationship:

In every single universe one of Iroh's biggest regrets ends up being that he was blind to his brother's actions because he did ultimately love and care about Ozai more than his brother ever actually deserved or earned. It was that blindness that led him to de facto enable Ozai's treatment of his kids and his wife, and facing that for both Azula and Zuko is a part of changes with him and how their relationship grows.

It was just the manifestation that affected the younger generation of a pattern going all the way back to kid!Ozai's Henry Bowers style 'killing animals for fun' and increasingly violent ways of messing with other people and Iroh thinking Ozai just had troubles he'd grow out of. Which all stems from Iroh's most dangerous misconception about Ozai. Iroh thinks Ozai has a core of basic decency to appeal to that actually exists. In reality Ozai becomes stuck in Antisocial Personality Disorder/Sociopathy patterns boosted by an ever-increasing power within an imperialist state.

Kid-Ozai did have a few elements that could potentially have taken other paths, had anyone at all tried to NOT boost everything. His mother willfully encourages it out of spite toward Azulon and her view of his marriage as increasingly neglectful as they grew older, his father neglects him, his brother sees his behavior as nothing to really be concerned about even if it wasn't enabled when it's 'just' animals and surely exaggerated in scale....and the result is when all this becomes a man it goes down very bad paths.

And reaches its worst stages after he becomes the Fire Lord, because the ruler of the second largest country in the world as an absolute monarch who is above the law can become completely unfettered with impulses that worsen with time.

And as far as Iroh knows Ozai is his 20 years younger brother who had a violent streak but didn't *really* hurt other people until all of a sudden it turns out that it did and it was not simply one person, it was his wife, both his kids, and pretty much anyone who pissed him off enough in his presence after a while.

Iroh's blindness to Ozai's actions is no small part of things because between Iroh and Llah Ozai ended up with a not entirely dissimilar negative reinforcement dynamic to what happens to canon Azula, minus that where canon Azula even in the most negative interpretations in the comics actually does have the ability to unambiguously love others (which APD/sociopathy says is a no-go), Ozai is straight up one.

[lightdancer1]

From another perspective the Earth Kingdom AU exists to showcase the two edged sword of my overall take on Ozai:

I write Ozai as having an APD condition that was exacerbated by everyone who could have been a formative influence deliberately taking all the steps to take it as far as it could go....and then he gets bolder as he gets more power. In the Earth Kingdom AU he gets the positive influences he was otherwise denied, so he's capable of cruelty to match any of his other counterparts....but is the only Ozai shown who actually understands emotions, has far less problems with impulse control....and isn't a straight up physical abuser with an inferiority complex.

And this version of Ozai *still* gets stuck in the eugenics program and it's this which ultimately leads directly to the joint Ozai-Ursa purge of Azulon and his supporters. And to Ozai in this AU punishing his second child, born at Azulon's direction, while the third only starts to get the backhand of things when Azula vanishes.

This version of Ozai isn't 'good guy Ozai' at all, even factoring out that he has an 'I shot Marvin in the face' moment with Azula in a fit of rage. He's a willful tyrant with a violent streak that he gets bolder with with time and this is very directly a bad thing for everyone around him.

He's just a version who got the therapy and help his other AU counterparts needed, which makes him not a full-blown case of APD but still an imperialistic tyrannical asshole who can hurt people around him very badly in a fit of rage that can have lasting consequences.

[lightdancer1]

The Eugenics experiment was an unnecessarily 40K-ish retcon as far as the comics go but it does make a useful background for AUs:

It basically turns Azula and Zuko on paper into more or less copies of the Primarch concept, warriors literally engineered to be not merely fighters but generals from the cradle....and then like the 40K Primarchs this concept goes horribly right. In two different directions. Personally I find the concept as implemented in the comics done with far too 20th Century Western a lens for a world that would perhaps have variants of the concept, but not exactly that precise form of it.

The experiment forms a good part of the elements of 'Ursa is not defined by her relationship with her children even if people say she is' and this is the main reason for including the Ikem relationship in some form in every single AU. It gives her a life that she intended to live, sets up a contrast between mentally ill APD-suffering Ozai who in all AUs but one gets the worst kind of reinforcement and reacts accordingly....and deeply empathetic and wise Ikem who avoided the corruption of the Palace. And where Ozai stood in line on the day of creation for a second helping of asshattery Ikem stood in line for a second helping of common sense. He's far from flawless, but where he's written in the Palace his defects are more human and he's not quite dealing with the Palace-amplified versions of faults.

it also in every single universe, with the Sins-verse and the Fire Lord Ursa AUs the most explicit in doing so gets directly and mercilessly subverted. Both Zuko and Azula were intended to be weapons. *He* is by every possible standard a 'failure' in the eyes for which his existence was intended. Zuko has no real empathy for Azula but is rewarded for expression it where she was punished. Zuko has an actually healthy parental background with one parent, Azula canonically had no healthy relationship with any adult in her life (and in the heroic AUs having this and that emotional equilibrium is a vital part of the changes to get there).

Azula is a success....up to a point. The goal was, at least as I write with a wee bit of 40K backdated into it a literal Primarch-like concept. Two super-generals who would wage war with fire and sword (literally) and scourge the Earth for Fire Lord Lu Ten. Azula defies her own indoctrination with restraint where she could easily steamroll anyone short of the Avatar or her equals as Benders (of which there are several. Older Benders have advantages over younger ones primarily in experience and time devoted to exploring the nature of their abilities. Ozai is not superior to either of his children or his wife in raw power, but the man compensates by sheer driving focus on drilling his power and prowess to a point that it's easy to neglect that as a Bender he's a mediocrity with middling power.

One of the main cores in Ozai's specific brand of abuse to his children is that this tunnel vision boosted by his APD *did* work for him. It made him one of the most powerful Benders in the world and it made him one of the most powerful men in the world in political and temporal power. He expects far too much of children and when they cannot meet this because even Azula, as powerful as she is from a very young age is a *child* and tends to overexert and push herself to her limits, he reacts violently to this. Which accelerates astronomically when he becomes Fire Lord and gains absolute power to do so at his discretion.

The irony is that in this sense Ozai did his one major act of rebellion against his father and quietly signaled he knew the entire premise that blighted his life was bullshit. By sheer monomania he outpaced people far more 'naturally' gifted than he was. Firebending is always associated with willpower as a spiritual pattern, so one thing Ozai gets entirely right for the wrong reasons is *willpower literally fuels it* and the man has Victor von Doom tier willpower. If there were lantern rings in the Avatar-verse Ozai would be a Green Lantern, albeit in the Thaal Sinestro vein.

It's a small element of humanizing him and even in spite of his APD and inability to get emotions at any real level, the Ozai I write fundamentally fucks up everyone around him because what he did worked for himself in the short term and he very woefully misread this as 'if it worked for me it'll work for everyone.'

These angles get worked into the treatment of the eugenics program in every single AU. One of the main means of humanizing Ozai without making him any less a genocidal son of a bitch is that for all his other flaws he knows the eugenics program is fucked up and really is marginally less evil to his children even with everything else he does than his father. And that marginal gap is that Ozai really does think of Azula and Zuko as human beings with pronouns and names and Azulon doesn't really bother at any consistent level with Azula *or* Zuko.

[lightdancer1]

In your Avatar AUs, does Ozai know that Ursa is still alive and is living off somewhere in the Fire Nation?

He strongly suspects that she is, yes.

He doesn't pursue her because she's already killed one Fire Lord without Firebending....and because deep down insofar as he's capable of love (which as someone with full blown APD magnified by the conditions that did this is a big 'insofar') he has those feelings for her.

Ozai is both a 100% straight up villain with what redeeming traits he gets stemming from the eugenics experiment and his side of reacting to it.....and something of a tragic villain because he knows he's mentally ill, struggles against it, and repeatedly fails. His not pursuing Ursa is a case of his struggling against that illness with more or less consistent success.

If he were asked the question by his kids, and he is asked it a few times, he doesn't take well to it, and also lies to them shamelessly about it to twist the knife.

[lightdancer1]

So for those keeping score, the Ozai lives AUs I write are the following

1) By Fire and Water and Earth and Air, where he becomes a de facto Chaos Cultist in 40K terms, following a virus-like chaos-god down the slippery slope to destruction and with that world's enhanced (due to the Dark Convergence and due to the entity that did it transcending time and space and using this as a cheat code to fiddle with causation) firebending and thus Himiko/Katara's advanced healing, at his absolute worst as a human being.

2) The Omashu AU, where his survival and ascension to the throne take a very different place and where this is 'rational Ozai' who actually gets therapy and the kind of positive reinforcement he needed....making him an actually competent threat while still being that insecurity complex-ridden piece of shit people love to loathe.

3) The Sins of the Fathers AU where he gets to live and ascend to the throne by a path loosely similar to canon but going down a different path. As with the Omashu Arc, Ursa does not in fact bail after doing her canonical duty to give Azulon his swift ticket to the land of the dead. Unlike the Omashu AU this is straight up APD Ozai who has an even bigger complex and even more resentment and is thus 100% a dick.

[lightdancer1]

One entirely intended benefit of making Ursa a more complex person with that common backstory across all my Avatar AUs

Is that it gives her relationships with all of her children, though it is neither all of her life nor its singular driving force, specific dynamics that become much more nuanced. Outside the Canon Continuation-verse there is no equivalent of the Bastard Letter because she does love her son, and allows him to be a fully rounded human being. Ursa and Zuko is Ursa at her best because she not only raises her son, but allows him full expression of humanity *including flaws and bad days.* This is as much because Ursa's own ambitions lead her to want to raise a model prince and then when Zuko isn't one, quite, to accept that *his* imperfections are what makes him a person. And in treating him *as* a person to not so quietly flout Azulon's intent for her children.

Her second child, to whom she is invariably an antagonist (though only in the Azula Heresy AU a villain and that because she's the Fire Lord and the person who handles the 'how do I not create a chain reaction of one usurpation after another' by re-establishing a lot of old theocratic traditions) is a case of her projecting her own not always deeply hidden resentment of her life and her own fear that her slice and dice firebending makes her innately monstrous. At no point is Azula as a child different to any other child, and since children are capable at times of tremendous cruelty and still being otherwise normal *without* in-built fire powers and adding them to the mix makes it more complicated, she is given an inability to be flawed, to have bad days, or to simply be fully human from *Ursa just as much as Ozai.* To Ozai her less savory traits he tries to build up are a sign that she's like him and he's less alone (except that she doesn't develop APD because she has just enough good things in life to avoid having her negative traits be the only ones reinforced like Ozai did). To Ursa anything less than a ceramic doll of an ideal princess with her Firebending 'normal' was a sign of the monster waiting to happen.

Why? Because Ursa knows exactly how her own unique Firebending and grand heritage ended up for her and in her view she's trying to stop history repeating itself.....and ends up woefully mistreating her daughter and showing why 'the road to Hell is paved with good intentions' is a saying.

In the one AU where she's the straight up villain she goes beyond this to deciding 'Ozai and Azulon were doing it wrong, I can do it better and more wisely than they can' like Fire Lord Iroh in the Dragon-verse in a very broad sense. But lacking Dai Li technology she tries emotional manipulation that she's ultimately not very good at and manages to destroy things at the most utterly complete level precisely because absolute power and god-complexes smother any lingering elements of 'oh shit now I see what I did wrong.'

Azula Heresy AU Ursa is the one case where she's the outright villain *to Azula* as well as more broadly. The Dragon-verse version *is* a villain but not to Azula personally, neatly subverting one of the big elements of the canon's protagonist-centered morality. After her Damascus Road moment she changes her views and actions to Azula.....and is still an imperialist who ultimately sides with her son's bid for the throne and isn't very concerned about fighting the people fighting against the Fire Nation's war and still in her own eyes a loyal supporter of the bigger goals.

As for Kiyi, she doesn't exist in the Azula Heresy, mostly because the Fire Lord can't marry an actor, not that Ikem considers this that great a loss at a personal level.