tellhulla

[tellhulla]

“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”

— Ruth Hubbard, “The Political Nature of ‘Human Nature’“ (via gothhabiba)

Yes.

[tellhulla]

I’ve seen a few K@taang fans say that Aang telling Katara to forgive Yon Rha in The Southern Raiders is a parallel to Katara helping Aang leave the Avatar State. I really don’t like this take, for a simple reason:

The Avatar State is a supernatural uncontrollable rage. Katara’s anger is not.

On multiple occasions, Aang states that he regrets his actions while in the Avatar state, and he doesn’t like feeling out of control in that way. We even see his rational spirit’s reaction to the Avatar State when it detaches from Aang’s body to speak to Roku in “The Avatar State”.

Aang wants to be stopped when he is in this state. When Katara reaches out to him, she is not trying to change his mind, she is trying to allow his rational mind to regain control. She is giving him agency, not denying him agency.

By contrast, while Katara is angry in The Southern Raiders, we’re never told that her rational faculties aren’t still operational. She’s determined. Not possessed.

At no point does Katara say that she regrets acting in anger. Instead, we see her exercise judgement and mercy even when face to face with the man she saw kill her mother.

This is not someone who is out of control.

(Not that she necessarily would have been out of control if she did kill him.)

The fact that Katara wasn’t out of control and didn’t need to be stopped is further reinforced by the fact that, unlike Aang who agonises over his actions in the Avatar State after the fact, Katara doesn’t express regret at her actions or relief that she didn’t kill Yon Rha. Instead she re-states her initial position that she will not forgive him.

All of this makes Katara’s anger at Yon Rha very different from the Avatar State. She is in control of her actions and does not want or need to be stopped. Trying to stop her isn’t helping to reassert her own control over her actions, it’s questioning her active decisions. It’s denying her agency instead of enabling it.

An emotional woman is not the same thing as an irrational or out of control one.

[tellhulla]

Nothing about Ka/taang precludes Katara being Chief of the SWT…

which is why it pisses me off even more that Katara didn’t get to have a role of any political importance whatsoever. It wouldn’t change anything about LOK’s storyline, and it would be fully in line with her character.

There’s a common anti-Zutara argument that Katara wouldn’t want to be Fire Lady, because she would want to rebuild and lead her own culture. I am sympathetic to that. Based on her canon characteristics, she might want to be a United Republic Councilwoman, Chief of the SWT, or just generally the Waterbending Master / Matriarch of the her tribe, which would be easier (though not impossible) if she weren’t married to the sovereign of another nation — I get that.

but the thing is…she didn’t get to do any of that, even though “wife of the Avatar” doesn’t contradict those roles. All the things that would be difficult for her to do if she were married to Zuko, she still didn’t get to do as Aang’s wife. She didn’t get to have a career the way her husband, or her brother, or her friends did.

so it’s extra hypocritical when Ka/taang shippers are like “but being Fire Lady would disempower Katara!” when Ka/taang canonically disempowered her! And KA fans are fine with that: they bend over backwards to justify why Katara doesn’t have a statue, or why she wasn’t there to protect Korra from the Red Lotus, or why she wasn’t at Yakone’s bloodbending trial. Yeah she got to live in the SWT — eventually, I assume, because in the comics she just follows Aang around — but what else did she get to do? Fucking nothing, apparently. Because to some people, the greatest honour for a woman is to be the hero’s wife.

[tellhulla]

Sam Wilson’s appearances in the MCU (inspo)

[tellhulla]

Mythbusters have 3 categories of myths

the general public doesnt know how physics works

the general public doesnt know how lying works

oh crap this ones real

[tellhulla]

Horniness is not intrinsically less pure than any other human motivation

[tellhulla]

Yes I’m an Azula apologist—she deserved better; she deserved therapy and love and support and patience 🫶

[tellhulla]

Read "Suki, Alone". Liked it in general. But can they please, please hire someone who knows both the show's actual events and how to follow through on a character arc? Because guys. Guys. That comic is not implying about Suki what they meant it to be implying, and all because of literally one line.

So like. From a writer's standpoint:

What they meant to do: show Suki as a community-oriented person who cares for her people, and believes in everyone succeeding together.

As opposed to (spoilers): the thief girl they set her up in contrast with, who's pretty upfront and consistent on primarily looking out for herself. She betrays Suki for one (1) corn chip to improve her own life at the prison, no surprise.

But the problem is: they give Suki an inspirational line to the effect of "we're all working together and we'll all break out together"

You know

The thing she does not do in the show

So if both the show and this comic are canon, then instead of setting up a compare/contrast with the thief girl, they've just set up a comparison. One were Suki is arguably worse, because she's been leading a significant number of prisoners on with her "we'll all fight and win our freedom together!" business, only to straight up cut them out of the escape loop and abandon them, whereas the thief is only leading Suki on in the sense that Suki keeps telling her what it's morally correct to think and confuses snide replies with agreement

My dudes. My fellow writers. You people actually being paid for this. There were so many ways to fix those awful implications against our girl's character, the simplest of which would be to not include that line. Or they could have, you know, made it canon compliant with what actually happens in the show, so that this comic doesn't set Suki up as a betrayer instead of a community builder. Like... just send all her good prison buddies off to other prisons in the wake of the warden finding out they're colluding. Have it timed to be right before the next new prisoners arrive, thus setting it immediately before the Boiling Rock episodes, so Suki didn't have anyone left in the prison she'd want to take with her on a breakout. For bonus points, include a page or two of her and her Kyoshi warriors opening up the cell of one of her prison friends post-war, thus implying she's tracking down and actually fulfilling her promises. Maybe even show her doing the same with thief girl, who was established as being imprisoned on false charges anyway, and also showing that Suki is A) the bigger person, and B) willing to acknowledge her own role in mistakes (because I cannot emphasize enough how much thief girl was not hiding her own priorities, and it was Suki who approached HER with all this, not the girl ever doing anything special to weasel her way in) (this would also open up an opportunity for paralleling Suki's earlier in-comic mistake of not listening to one of her friend's very valid thoughts and feeling, which lead to the girl leaving their island alone pre-canon; a "seeing people as they are, not what you want them to be" moment)

Anyway yeah enjoyable enough for a quick read but another one for the "this can't be canon or the characters are So Much Worse than they were in the actual show" pile

At least Aang didn't promise to murder anyone in this one

[tellhulla]

I find it infinitely fascinating that Dany - even outside a purely Targaryen context - follows the footsteps of her female ancestors and is married far too young, is pregnant with a prophecy baby, and would have likely died giving birth to a deformed stillborn half-dragon fetus. A disposable vessel for a flawed incarnation of war and conquest, given no room for her own desires, her own inherent worth.

And a healer saves her from this fate. She helps her survive the traumatic birth even though she is in conflict with Dany and her people, has been victimized by Dany and her people. Dany is allowed to escape the cycle of birthing a conqueror. Is allowed to escape the cycle of dying for men's ambition.

And then she turns that healer into a vessel for her weapon of war, burns her alive to birth herself a conqueror. Mirri screams in agony to give life to Dany's ambitions. The maternal sacrifice to Dany patriarchical consummation of her body and life.

Dany could have chosen a painful lesson and freedom. She chose to uphold the oppressive cycle, with herself at the top now. The half-human dead child fully replaced by reptiles that will kill for her within a year.

Mother, she calls herself.

[tellhulla]

The Awakening is one of the most underrated episodes in the series.. this episode was such a turning point for aang

Aang first ran away in a storm to avoid his duty, and now he’s running away in a storm to do his duty. Poetic!

Love also Roku and Yue in this episode

yes! the way this episode establishes so many of the central tensions for the final season and parallels basically every character so deftly is perfect. the chiastic storm symbolism, the storm inside aang of crushing responsibility and guilt and grief and rage…. and in both cases, whether it’s to run away or to attempt to face his problems head on, leaving behind his loved ones (like he tried to do in the crystal catacombs) is always the wrong choice, he needs to rely on his friends. and his friends need him too. katara’s speech about how aang thinks he has to do everything alone kind of seems out of left field considering aang has always valued and cherished forming deep bonds, especially with katara. but then you remember that katara’s last memory of aang, that has been haunting her for the past however many weeks she’s been on that boat desperately trying to save him, was aang (unintentionally) martyring himself. and that would be traumatizing for anyone to witness, their best friend literally dying in their arms, but it’s especially triggering for katara because it’s happened before. kya died for her. hakoda left her. sokka emotionally abandoned her in his promise to die for her.

being a waterbender, the last waterbender, is such a complicated role for katara, because on hand she must feel immense guilt over the way her entire family and tribe prioritizes her life, and is especially motivated to become the world’s greatest waterbender specifically to prove that her mother’s sacrifice was not in vain. but it’s also that drive to be the best that awarded her the spirit water, that gave her the ability to heal aang when history repeated itself. katara couldn’t save kya, she couldn’t make hakoda stay, she couldn’t heal jet, but she can with aang. she literally brings the avatar, struck by lightning while in the avatar state (thus effectively ending the line of avatars were he truly dead) back to life. katara revived him as the inciting incident of the entire narrative, and then she revived him again in their darkest moment. because katara will continue to bring back hope to the world, resoundingly, through sheer force of will, with nothing but her bare hands and overflowing heart.

i do love aang’s arc in this episode, the narrative parallelism, the tragedy of him burning his glider, his last physical relic of his past and his people. i love the way he is so determined to perform the duty he has shied away from for so long due to the shame and humiliation of actually trying, and failing. of course aang was already motivated to perform his duties to the world, because guilt is a hell of a motivator, but the existential terror of actually being killed adds tenfold motivation. instead of running away from his problems, aang is now running towards them, equally as thoughtlessly and hastily. because he is too ashamed to care about tact, he just wants to rectify his devastating mistake. and that’s why he says that he needs to regain his honor. scarred and humiliated and lost, he finally understands how zuko feels.

zuko acts as the third side of a prism through which he, aang, and katara, are all refracted and reflected in one another. this episode makes use of that parallelism both in the contrast between zuko “finally regaining his honor” (illusory, of course, but he gets to come home and see his father again, and that’s all he’s wanted all along) while aang has lost it, and zuko confronting his father for the first time in three years, just like katara does. katara is angry at hakoda, her anger exacerbated by her grief over aang. she’s angry that hakoda left them, even if logically she doesn’t blame him for it. and she doesn’t mask her anger (i don’t think she’s even capable), and hakoda, for his part, receives it, listens to her, treats her with love and affection, holds her, acknowledges his own pain. it’s an incredibly beautiful scene; the episode is excellent if only for that scene.

it’s also immediately followed up with its opposite. zuko walks into ozai’s chamber, no anger only fear, kneels before his throne while ozai circles him like a predator (a move that both zuko and azula picked up from him). even a few episodes later, in “the beach” when azula asks, “are you angry at dad?” zuko’s face falls open and vulnerable, almost afraid at the accusation, and goes, “what?? no!!” even though it’s a perfectly fair question. ozai banished zuko for three years when he was still a child, whereas hakoda left katara for three years when she was still a child. katara resents hakoda for leaving against his will whereas zuko doesn’t even feel like he’s allowed to resent ozai for anything. ozai never once actually touches zuko, but zuko still flinches. zuko kneeling on the ground while ozai circles him like a hawk. hakoda and katara holding each other, both in tears, both open and vulnerable. zuko katara parallels always make me go crazy, of course, but this is one of the most insane juxtapositions in the entire show to me. i just love the katara hakoda reconciliation scene, and all the more for its narrative impact as it precedes zuko and ozai’s.

the ozai face reveal is also pretty incredible imo. for the past two seasons, ozai’s face as been obscured by shadow, framed only at angles that made him unknowable to the viewer. he is a larger than life villain, to both aang and zuko, not simply a man but something far greater and more terrifying. except no. he is just a man. zuko returns home, and immediately sees that. the ozai of looming shadow from zuko’s faulty memory is in fact just some guy. a uniquely powerful guy, of course, but he’s not gargantuan, too great to be comprehended by mortal eyes. zuko was just a child when he left, but he has since grown, in many ways. and while ozai still terrifies him to his core, because how could he not, we see, as zuko sees, that he is just a man.

as the image of aang’s goals becomes clearer in his eyes, he too, learns to see ozai as just a man. in the following episode he even crafts his likeness out of noodles (“impressive, i admit”). ozai is not some fantastical godlike being. no, aang is the fantastical godlike being in question, and it’s his literal god-given right to humble that man playing god who claims that aang has no place in his world. to obscure ozai’s face is to illustrate the sheer magnitude and terror of the power he wields. and to show ozai’s face, and then over the course of a season, continually undermine him and mock that face and depict it as noodles, or pantsless, is to take away some of his power, his cultivated, dictated, arbitrary power.

the awakening is a fantastic episode as it sets up the central internal conflicts for book 3, especially for aang and zuko, but also for katara, acknowledging the weight of her grief as it culminates in “the southern raiders.” (also her waterbending progress as it’s demonstrated in that one scene is incredible, i guess being at sea helps in one’s waterbending, who’d have thunk!) it’s basically a microcosmic encapsulation of the entire season, appropriately ending on a loving gaang hug as they promise to help one another through this. the heart of the show lies in that hug. it’s a fantastic episode.

[tellhulla]

Towards the Sun, Chapter 44: How to (Not) Make a Martyr

Katara takes Yon Rha for prison walksies.

Latest chapter || Read from the beginning

Summary:

Zuko botches his escape on the day of the eclipse and sits out the war in prison. What will the Gaang do with a new Fire Lord they can't trust? Season Four "Zuko never joined the Gaang, and he's really bad at being good" AU. Featuring Azula's extended field trip, Jun not signing up for this, and Sokka's increasing desire to scream. Come get your international politics with a side of baby dragons.

[tellhulla]

do you have a masterpost of "ty lee comes from crypto-air nomad" posts? I'm fascinated by this idea and want to read everything I can but I can't find where it started 😭

i feel like this is a question better posed to @kyoshi-lesbians, who, at least in my book, is the leading expert in ty lee studies (among other things). that said, i can definitely synthesize the argument (and why i find it cogent and persuasive), even if i don't actually know from where the theory originated (but i'm sure that if you look up "ty lee air nomad you'll immediately be directed to an old reddit page or fan forum from years ago; it's a "theory" that goes way back).

firstly, ty lee's appearance is distinctly "air nomadic" in a way no one else's is. save for aang, of course. she and aang do bear an uncanny resemblance. everyone else in the fire nation has yellowish brown eyes, for example, while ty lee, like aang, has charcoal greyish brown eyes. and they also have similar (round and cute) facial features, similar expressions, similar vibes. similar dispositions...

ty lee does not "have the personality" of a ruthless fire nation soldier, despite acting as the princess's right hand who takes out more opponents than pretty much everyone else put together. ty lee acts like an airbender, flirty and flighty. her relentless optimism and goodwill and cheer is decidedly a mask, but it is a mask she adopts adeptly. even if she is performing, she nonetheless performs the "aang" function of her respective group.

ty lee presents herself as more spiritually attuned than other people in the fire nation, who outright disrespect the spirits and spirituality. her constant talk of auras is likely a calculated move on her part, as nearly everything is, to make her seem silly and trivial, because she thrives best when she goes underestimated. but her talk of auras also has to come from somewhere, and seeing as literally no one else mentions auras once throughout the entire show, ty lee's sources are clearly scarce.

ty lee also fights like an airbender. despite generally taking the offensive, ty lee nonetheless exhibits a graceful, acrobatic quality when in combat. she never kills anyone either, merely incapacitates them momentarily. and when she is faced with stronger than typical opponents, she usually relies on her skills as an acrobat by taking the aerial advantage. note her ability to jump incredibly high, such as in "the chase," or her ability to run along a moving cable wire in "the boiling rock." ty lee's skills go beyond merely being a good acrobat. she's incredible. and perhaps even exhibiting some latent airbending skills she inherited from her ancestors.

ty lee's air nomad ancestry coheres really well with her arc as a character. imagining that her family of genocide survivors hid in the heart of the fire nation and assimilated into the imperialist culture that sought to exterminate them makes her own role that much more impactful. there's already a beautiful parallelism to the fact that ty lee is an acrobat and performer who contorts herself to suit the desires of others and performs obsequious loyalty for her own survival, but an extra layer of depth is added if she's also assimilating into the royal court by reducing herself and hiding her true feelings and motivations, just as her family did.

i see ty lee's ancestors as having assimilated into the imperial core out of fear, but over the generations, genuinely being subsumed into fire nation culture, with the desire to social climb a natural extension of their patriotism. but there are also still facets of ty lee's ancestry, whether genetic or otherwise, that have remained in traces. the generational trauma, for example, definitely reflects why her parents had so many children. and the fact that she's constantly torn between two worlds, as a genocide survivor who also directly serves the imperialists who murdered her ancestors, represents her internal struggle as someone who desires freedom of expression and the choice to assert her individuality, but is also forced through circumstance into lying and deflecting and manipulating (which, to be honest, is also the air nomad way) for the sake of survival.

surviving is ty lee's number one priority, in a way it just isn't for mai. mai and ty lee both come from social climbing families (although i've always assumed that mai's family is far wealthier than ty lee's) but mai is also depressed and frustrated and bored out of her mind. and even though she was raised in a family that forced her to don a mask and reduce herself and perform a passive model of femininity, she also has no problem stating aloud how she's feeling and what her limits are (with the exception of when azula gives her a veiled command as a test, and mai has no choice but to obey).

mai has the privilege of knowing that the stakes don't really matter, which she all but states when she claims that she grew up in luxury and opulence, and always had everything handed to her. which isn't to say that she led a perfect, easy life. she wouldn't be as depressed and repressed as she is if there weren't factors actively harming her, but she still chooses to join azula by choice, even if it's really only the illusion of choice between two awful options, whereas ty lee has to be coerced through violence.

mai kind of has a "fuck it we ball" attitude and doesn't really seem to care about her own safety (if anything, she's more concerned with comfort), whereas ty lee would do anything to ensure her survival. and that kind of mentality illustrates how she differs from most of the fire nation elites, who were inculcated into imperial privilege and never really considered what prioritizing survival even entails (zuko learns that lesson the hard way). ty really exhibits the mentality of the genocide victim/colonized subject through her prioritization of survival in the face of what to mai is a problem, but to ty lee is an existential threat.

whether or not ty lee even recognizes that her desperate desire to live comes from a place of generational grief and trauma is another story, but i do think there is something to be said for the fact that descendants of genocide survivors can feel that grief as it has been passed down to them. i think ty lee feels it, and i think that it motivates her to do whatever it takes to live, because above all, she is a survivor. and even if she has to assimilate and manipulate and cut away every part of herself that's real and authentic and true, she will do it (until she doesn't). and that's also, incidentally, what makes her such a great foil to aang.

[tellhulla]

dear muffin, i love both your writing and azula as a character but as a survivor who *wasn't* the golden child my views on her redemption arcs boils down to "no one you hurt has a duty to save/help you even if they shared an abuser" so, if that's okay, i'd like to have an idea of what i'd be dealing with in your azula redemption fics before i decide to risk them, either way thanks for writing!

Completely agreed that abuse survivors are well within their rights to avoid their abusers, and have no compulsion to help them, even if they change later in life.

That being said: Zuko and Azula's dynamic fascinates me, I love exploring it, and I don't see it as "Zuko is being forced to help her".

From what we see in canon, my take is that they were pitted against each other, but were rarely each other's abusers. Everything we see in the Zuko Alone flashbacks is just... fairly normal sibling interactions, especially between two young nuero-divergent kids with zero (0) good examples of How Siblings Work. Like, their examples are Mai, who has no siblings yet; Ty Lee, who is trying to actively distance herself from being similar to her sibs; and Ozai and Iroh, who are another essay entirely.

What we see in those flashbacks is a Zuko who is fully comfortably being his Drama Boy self in front of his sister, and a sister who hears the adults in her life talking about murdering her brother and immediately finds a way to warn him. That she has had no appropriate role model for "how to warn your only brother that your father is gleefully flipping through Ways-To-Murder-Your-Son Monthly" isn't really her fault, and the way she delivers the warning is pretty Peak Trauma Response for a girl used to successfully hiding behind a cruel front to Make Sure Murder Dad Loves Her.

Seasons Two and Three Zuko and Azula interactions read to me like two siblings re-learning each other after three years of no contact, and one of them has been primed by Daddy Dearest to view her brother as someone she can and should kill if the opportunity presents itself, both to make Ozai pleased with her and secure her place in the line of succession. So on their first encounter, she gleefully tosses lightning his way.

In their second encounter, she chooses to target Iroh rather than him.

In their third, she shows how clever she is by trapping him and tosses him in jail to taunt more later, really Zuzu, she had more important people to belittle.

Then she tries luring him to help her with promises of home, and he does, and she brings him home as the heir apparent. She does not need to do that: she could have brought him back in chains, fulfilling the original mission Ozai gave her. Instead she risks her father's displeasure and spends some of her own social capital to return him as a prince and her brother. And if course there's a lot of caveats to that, but over the course of the season she went from "capture or kill, either is grand" to "this is my idiot brother, it is acceptable to share just a little of my radiance with him". That is a BIG change, which hints to me of actual care between them prior to his banishment, because they sure as heck didn't have time to start loving each other in just Season Two.

So "they love each other but are disasters who their abusive father pitted against each other" is the basis of my writing for them, not "Azula was Zuko's abuser". In my stories, they reach out to eachother, as a brother and sister who understand what life under their father was like, and who are just learning to move past it.

As for Azula's redemption: the girl is an abused fourteen year old who bloodlessly took a city. Not an irredeemable, hardened war criminal. She doesn't need a redemption, she needs socialization.

[tellhulla]

I just need a scene where Fire Lord Zuko has been kidnapped and taken to sea. Katara shows up to save him and beats up the baddies, then walks slowly over to Zuko, leans down by his ear, and

Katara: don't worry

Zuko: stop

Katara: I'll rescue you from the pirates

Zuko: please leave me here to die

[tellhulla]

First of all how dare you

Second of all: AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH

Katara: *after Zuko takes the bolt* I love you.

Zuko: No, you don’t. But thanks for saying it.

#zutara #spuffy #katara #zuko #buffy season 7 #parallels

[tellhulla]

That makes sense considering the beach episode, Zuko and Azula spending the weekend at their aunties beach house and being allowed to bring two friends while their dad is busy with an important meeting sounds a lot more normal than Zuko and Azula plus two friends spending the weekend at their teachers/town criers beach house (and wow, of all the things the Fire Nation royal family can be accused of you wouldn't think acting like a normal family would be one of them)

It also explains why Li and Lo even have a vacation home in Ember Island when it's stated this is where the uper rich and the nobility vacation, how would a random servant or teacher own a house there however small? (And it's a beach front place too!)

(Also the painting of them as young women looks a lot like Azula)

Since they are confirmed to be non benders in the finale, my theory is that they aren't Azula's firebending teachers but her chaperones and they are accompanying her to her mission to pick up Zuko and Iroh on the Fire Lord's orders, to make sure her behaviour is up to her father's standards, so the moment where they are coaching her on the ship is more akin to a babysitter helping a child with their math homework and not having a maths degree or teaching experience all they can really do is check if the answers are right or not whereas an actual teacher can properly assist a student with understanding new knowledge and processes it on a deeper more permanent level

They are coaching her not teaching her a new skill, they are not there to help her, they are another of her father's tools to control her which adds an extra layer to their choice of telling Azula to ditch the royal procession and go alone with only the people under her personal control, essentially giving Azula as much of her agency back as they can give her while remaining within the parameters of the mission Ozai gave her

They are older women who have learnt to find small pockets of freedom within the confines of their own gilded cages, something Azula has yet to learn (can't learn without first admitting there's a cage at all) and they are trying to pass that knowledge to her, trying to give her the kind of advice that will help her survive life in court (like maybe postpone the coronation until she feels a little less on the verge of a stress induced mental breakdown) but when Azula snaps back at them they fall into place because they also have learnt that their voices don't matter, that their experience is less important than Azula's rank

i’ve always kind of assumed that lo and li are azulon’s younger twin sisters and that’s why they were foisted off on azula, because she’s also a younger sister to the crown prince. but the fact that we never actually see them firebend is strange, because it implies either that nonbenders are instructing one of the greatest firebenders in the world, or that they are firebenders who simply do not firebend. and i think that the latter is more interesting, because it reflects how their position as elderly women devalues any firepower they might provide to the empire, passive and subdued even as they train ozai’s favorite weapon.

they are the ones to most overtly illustrate azula’s precarious relationship to femininity, after all. for example, noting the position of her hair after she successfully lightningbends in “the avatar state,” or emphasizing azula’s beauty when they introduce her in “the awakening.” and it’s clear that azula doesn’t really like them, dismisses and avoids them whenever she gets the chance. she can’t even tell them apart. their very existence is almost a humiliation. a reminder to azula that this is who she is destined to become once she lives past her usefulness. not the imperious azulon, her namesake, raised above on a fiery dais, but his sisters, insignificant and functionally powerless.

so of course “almost isn’t good enough,” of course “one hair out of place” is a failure. the only way azula can prove her worth to the empire she has devoted her entire self to in a way that matters is, perhaps, by being perfect, by being better and stronger than the discarded women who came before her. but that, too, is a delusion, that any amount of excellence will reward her in a way that compensates for the erosion of her very humanity. and yet, it’s all she has to cling to. so she gives it her all to excel within a system that will never really care about her because she has deliberately been made incapable of imagining an alternative. of simply recognizing the system for the failure that it is, conceptualizing a world beyond the bars of her gilded cage, and leaving.

#princess azula #fire nation #atla

[tellhulla]

the crucial fact of zuko and azula's relationship that makes it so insanely compelling is not the tried and true facets of siblings on opposite sides of a war, sibling rivalry turned murderous, or siblings who are divided by their parents' favoritism; it's the fact that despite being the older sibling, zuko is the one who doesn't care about azula while azula cares about him even when it goes against her best interest to do so. i think this makes a lot of people who want to see zuko through the fanon lens of this awkward turtle duck who's just doing his best and isn't super angry and volatile deeply uncomfortable because it so directly contradicts that reading of him unless they completely strip azula of her sympathetic and human traits. but that reading is not only unsupported by canon, it's boring.

the truth is that azula cares about zuko (in a very distorted way given how her upbringing and trauma restrict her ability to express it in a way anywhere in the area code of healthy) to the extent that because she chooses him over herself in bringing him home (because it is an insane retcon that implies she is near omnipotent to say she knew for certain the avatar was not really dead and was just going to scapegoat zuko, not to mention it makes very little sense and is, again, boring), she loses everything. and zuko cares so little for azula that he only feels anything remotely close to grief about it all when he sees just how badly she's hurting.

as much as i think his redemption arc leaves to be desired in terms of the political implications of it, zuko does have a good heart. he does want to do the right thing. it's just that azula has always been his blind spot, and that makes their relationship so much more interesting.