#she is a villain in the Dragon-verse but it's not her relationship to Azula that makes her one

[lightdancer1]

As the eugenics experiment is at its most front and center in the Sins verse, it's worth noting something blindingly obvious:

It is why Azula and Zuko exist in each and every one of these AUs, hence why things only turn out better for them if both Azulon and Ozai end up removed as active factors in their lives. As long as one or both of the people who 'benefited' from the experiment are around, it will continue to make people suffer.

Ursa is an antagonist but not a villain because up to a point the experiment does destroy her life. She's taken from her home, from the person she truly did and does love, to become half of a bioweapons program. One of the contributing factors to her relationships with Azula and Kiyi is that she has a deeply buried fear she can't even speak of to herself, or admit is there.

Namely that her own life was ruined by virtue of her heritage and her power, and she has a subconscious fear that the more Azula is like her and a wild child with vast power she doesn't have it in her to control any more than she does *that Azula's future could see history literally repeat itself because why not, it happened to her.* The sheer thought of that happening to Azula is the dark mirror of her ideal dream of what she wanted her daughter to be.

The guilt that she feels over how these subconscious fears fucked things up contributes to problems with Kiyi, whose life is lived in the shadow of her older sister, with varying interpretations on that (but Azula and Kiyi themselves go out of their way to end cycles and not to perpetuate them with each other). She doesn't stay in the antagonistic cycle forever, something invariably breaks it by virtue of one or the other of them actually being removed from the environment that creates it. At which point Ursa, absent the conditions that created the problem has the realization of what actually did happen because, and this is equally important, she is not Ozai.

She is a person drawn into a horrific situation who makes very poorly guided decisions from misplaced anger and subconscious fears. In some universes the situation is far more reparable than others, in three timelines it's completely broken. In the Fire Lord Ursa timeline her treatment of Azula is motivated entirely by the fears she can voice to herself, and does so openly that she refuses to have her daughter's life become as miserable as her own did prior to the ascension.....and never bothers to tell Azula this and the way she goes about it basically toys with her emotions until there's a snapping point.

In the other four, the situation is either reparable or just not the biggest single problem Azula faces, to a point that Ursa and that part of her family drama becomes something of an afterthought and more like a kind of sitcom arch-nemesis factor. But there are no contexts in which Ursa of Hira'a is brought into a eugenics experiment to produce bioweapons and where she comes out of that entirely mentally stable and without a degree of antagonism with her children, as the bastard letter is one of the few cases of that antagonism existing with Zuko and how it does affect him and isn't non-existent, just overcome where she makes no effort to do that with Zuko.

Ursa is a woman with complicated motives who got fucked over by having Avatar heritage and a vast amount of power to go with it, who has children who get the brunt of her life before her children. Her parenting is not the sum total of her focus in arcs. Her role as a more antagonistic character also reflects that the stories I tell are all Azula POV in greater and lesser proportions. The Fire Lord, whichever figure in the family that individual is, is the villain of the setting. Azula's relationship with Ursa is never without some elements, to greater and lesser proportions, of hostility.

If, like the setting, these were more Zuko-centric stories Ursa would come across much more sympathetic and her kinder traits would be in more of the forefront. Just as Ursa is far kinder to Zuko than to Azula in all seven of these different AUs.

[lightdancer1]

One thing to always keep in mind with any version of Ursa in my stories:

She is a complex fully rounded character who in an Azula-centric story is almost always an antagonist (she moves into villain territory in the Dragon-verse and in the Fire Lord Ursa AU but in the former case it's not a role directed at Azula personally and this plays deliberately with the protagonist-centered morality of the original setting). This is because Azula very clearly did want to be loved by Ursa, and very clearly in each AU save the Fire Sage one never was and didn't actually know what love was supposed to look like until she left the toxic environment she was exposed to.

She is not, however, a character defined by her relationship to her children. She has a full history and life of her own before she gets drawn by Azulon into the tangled web of conquest and family dysfunction that is the House of Sozin and equal complexity after she has them.

Her children might not perceive this any more than most children do about their own parents. Katara and Sokka don't exactly figure this out about Hakoda, let alone Kya (though Kya being horribly murdered in front of Katara rather does have a lot to do with that for Katara) for a very long time as well. But it is true all the same.

Ursa's own arcs are defined by her pre-existing hate and anger and resentment of her own circumstances....and the awareness that her Firebending is predisposed to combat, to destruction, and in combat to being an instantantaneous kill if she used it on the human body. She can literally slice and dice with the equivalent of lightsaber beams that cut clean through steel and do horrible things to human flesh.

In some ways it works to give her a view of her own Firebending not entirely dissimilar to that of Jeong Jeong but with far better reason for it, as even if she did switch to a new source her Firebending *still* has that aspect, because that's what she chooses to see in it and how it could be wielded.

And then when she has her first daughter that child begins to develop uniquely colored fires of her own and even the earlier versions had sui generis properties that didn't work quite like other Firebending did before the color-change and she has this horrifying vision that her adult children could end up reliving her own life....and quietly sets out to protect her child from phantoms she projected onto them and thereby blows up a relationship thinking she's literally doing a good and necessary thing.

Which is why the relationship is that of the antagonist, not the villain. It's not merely the 'everyone is a hero in their own story' factor, Ursa sincerely thinks she's sparing Azula a horrible fate and that Azula is too young to understand but would understand and accept when she's older. Her motives, in terms of her emotions, really are good ones and grounded in the harsh realities of her own life. The not so minor context problems Ursa ignores is that her daughter isn't living her life and that she's coming across as a stifling emotionally abusive figure to whom even Ozai, who never bothers to hide malice and abusiveness of both emotional and physical kinds to everyone in his family, is at least willing to manipulate by crumbs of phantom approval.

It creates a vicious circle that only gets broken if one, the other, or both get taken out of the environment that shapes it and then, finally, both of them start to realize that 'wait, what the Hell?' and then go on from there.

And for Zuko and Azula, their lives thus incorporate mirror abuse cycles, albeit the Ozai-centric version physically abuses both of them and the golden child brand of emotional abuse afflicted both Zuko and Azula from different parents. There's far more similarity with Azula and Zuko as children than either are ready to admit for a long time, though where they have their healthiest relationships they do.

[lightdancer1]

I always like looking smarter than I actually am, LOL

I realized that the way the AUs are being written out in different parts neatly flows into inversions of different facets of each other. In the first AU Himiko, the Carlisle School-ified Fire Nation Katara who fully internalizes Fire Nation Imperialism and serves as a deconstruction of 'Azula is the worst evil of them all' is where these AUs started. The entire premise hinged on showcasing that a character filling Azula's same niche with similar elements shaping her background, cosmic horror story or not, would get a sympathy that Azula doesn't even when her deeds are quite literally worse (as Katara's Bolodbending takes elements of the canon and takes them further).

In the Dragon-verse there's a Water Tribe Azula who's as unambiguously heroic (if still having a bit of a Mr. Hyde from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen factor due to the Dai Li mind-whammy) as Himiko....isn't, Iroh rules as a competent and tyrannical Fire Lord rather than Uncle Hedonist the Tea Expert....and instead of cosmic horror the villains are all too human and their consequences are the same. Instead of internalizing keeping a disastrous secret and having it cause her to crack under the stress, Azula exposes secrets and her family's secretiveness becomes an antithesis to its function in the prior story.

In the Continuation Verse Ty Lee goes from being the person for whom Azula flees the Fire Nation and sets canon on fire to being the moral heart of the story, with her role as a spymaster set against her 'target of an active ongoing genocide bailed out from being caught in that' narrative in the previous story. Azula in this AU is straight up from the Fire Nation POV unambiguously heroic and outright terrifying to the heroes, as per her canon self done for actual original flavor. Iroh, instead of being the central menace and driving force, is as per canon flavor relevant but in some ways offscreen in parts and very onscreen for others.

In the Sins verse the eugenics experiment that underlaid elements of the canon is front and center. Instead of being removed from the center of the Fire Nation as far as she can get and growing, Azula is squeezed into a situation she didn't want when her entire world falls through in front of her, and where she has to face the man for whom she was named. Azula and Iroh bond over the memory of Lu Ten and in contrast to the Continuation-verse where she finds an actual stable parental relationship only outside her family, she finds one she never expected with Iroh. Zuko, instead of being one of the major antagonists, is a straight up heroic figure who far from sentencing his sister to a murder by accidental Henry II phrasing is an overprotective big brother who wants his sister back to get her to a safer place absent any controlling vibes at all.

[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.

[lightdancer1]

My rule with the Azula/Hoelun relationship is that it is in its own way a mirror of how far on the grimdark scale any given AU is

The Continuation-verse, the Sins-verse, and the Dragon-verse are all pretty high on that list. So that means with the Omashu-verse and the Azula Heresy that there will be versions of the relationship that emerge in each, though each one will be a path that evolves down a line of actually evolving and getting to a point where it's earned by both. Hoelun as a child soldier recruited early on and surviving in an equivalent of the Dirlewanger Brigade in the Fire Nation does not happen in the relatively lighter and softer AUs.

The only grimdark AU she doesn't show up in is the Fire and Water and Earth and Air AU but there Azula and Toph are married, so... *shrugs*

For the lighter and softer Fire Sage AU there will be a new character Azula falls in love with there, reflecting that it's a best-case scenario and that AU Fire Nation never raises the mass of child soldiers to begin with, so Hoelun's particular arc is avoided due to her being too young for military service.

I admit to using different iterations of the relationship not least because Hoelun as a bit of a mirror to Azula and someone much more like the Comedian to her Captain America works very well as a foil to her, and it basically offers an established brand of queer visibility and centering a butch lesbian when butch characters are not that frequent in media.

Hoelun also serves as a 'lower deck' protagonist showcasing the effects of the various grimdark Fire Nations and how they affect rank and file people. I will say that in the Azula Heresy AU she gets one of the most blatant 40K shout-outs as she becomes the equivalent of a Commissar/Politruk and at least initially starts off the most directly villainous of any of her AU versions by virtue of also embodying the older iteration of 40K where she's entirely aware the God-Empress thing is a scam but it gives her power over people who hurt her and she *enjoys* it. And then she gets given the order to hunt down the arch-heretic....

In the Omashu AU Hoelun's arc is intended to be something of a surprise element when it does show up so I intend to have that one held close to the chest until that moment happens in the specific chapter there.