zreytagif

[lightdancer1]

Azula's attitude to Kiyi is not fair and it's not meant to be fair

It's her biggest single flaw that she sees a person who's five years younger than she is, who ironically grows up under her own shadow and whose first interaction with her supposedly dead sister is seeing her come close to a relapse and then point blank storm out of the palace and having to essentially be all but dragged in an situation that turns an already-explosive mess into something that nearly touches off a reactionary camarilla-style coup of its own.

The irony in all this is that rather than being the simple 'replacement' sister, Kiyi grows up idolizing Azula as a war hero in the time when she thought her mother was Noriko and after learning that her mother forgot her earlier kids entirely and that Azula was less than relevant to Ursa has a new existential fear that Ursa already forgot one daughter, what's to stop her doing so with a second?

I do intend for Azula and Kiyi to reach a healthier relationship than Azula and Zuko, and for Kiyi to be a much more fleshed out person rather than 'replacement good sister' and for Ursa's parental problems to come back to haunt her in ways she never expected but really, really should have. Because the last thing that she should have been surprised by is daughter no. 2 realizing that daughter no. 1 didn't get much in the way of anything but pity and relief from Ursa and wondering if Noriko or Ursa were ever real and if she can believe anything her mother says at all.

Ursa *does* feel a deep soul-crushing regret but she also believed Azula died after a fate that was as cruel as she could imagine, so she resigned herself to failure on that score and since dead people don't resurrect themselves unless they've got Katara and her magic water, she expects nothing could ever change that for good reason.

Ensue the dead person in question showing up in the palace alive and well and then shit goes from pear shaped to '*THIS* close to burning down the Palace FOR the People's Will fuck all of you for doing this I hope you burn in Yama's Hells.'

Zuko also unlearned a lot of internalized views of Ursa watching how she handles Kiyi and Azula's memory, and realizes in the end that his sister may not have been who he thought she was, but he also thought she was dead and then BOOM! in comes that one letter....