💚✨💚

because here’s the thing. i’ve harped before on how fucking dumb it is to take the character whose central line in the og show was “no matter how things may seem to change, never forget who you are” and have them immediately afterwards 1. actually somehow just not leave the country they were banished from, and 2. deliberately and knowingly choose to have their own memories wiped. like ???????!!?

and yeah, that then leaves the question, when it’s revealed in late s3 that she was banished and is possibly still alive: why didn’t she ever come back for her kids? why didn’t she at least seek out zuko, who was also banished and therefore at least theoretically accessible to her? why didn’t she try to intervene when she presumably learned about the agni kai and her son’s disfigurement? and if she never learned of it, how could that be without her either deliberately forgetting she had kids or choosing to actively ignore any opportunity to get information about them?

and my friends, this is where the silliest part of the whole kerfuffle is. because there was ALREADY a built-in, solid, well-explored piece of worldbuilding that could very easily have answered all of those questions in a way that wouldn’t fundamentally violate the basic foundations of her character’s nature. that piece of worldbuilding? the city of ba sing se.

As a writer, this solves so many of your problems. If Ursa ends up in ba sing se (which there’s decent reason for her to do, given that it’s entirely reasonable that she’d be worried about ozai changing his mind and deciding he needs to tie up loose ends, and that the city just repelled iroh, making it about the most secure location she could get) then once she makes it inside the walls she discovers there is no war in ba sing se. suddenly, trying to get information about anything to do with the fire nation, let alone the royal family, becomes extremely difficult and dangerous. she has a plausible reason not to know, or have very little and extremely delayed awareness of what’s happening to her children.

also, the city is fucking massive and packed to the brim with refugees. even with zuko and iroh getting all about the lower and upper ring, it’s completely plausible for her to have even still been there without amnesia and just. never happened to cross paths. big cities are like that. you could see a million people in a day that you’ll never see again and they’ll only be a tiny fraction of all the people there that you’ll never catch a glimpse of. plus, once you’re lucky enough to get in as a refugee, it’s probably not so easy to leave again, especially if you want to have a chance of being able to come back.

if you really want the amnesia plot, the dai li/joo dee worldbuilding is already set up there too! all you have to do is have ursa keep trying to find out about her kids, maybe even discover zuko’s banishment and try to either reach out or leave the city in response, and have the dai li catch her in a sting to crack down on citizens promoting awareness of the war.

badabing, badaboom, ursa gets joo dee’d and now you have an amnesia plotline without ursa deliberately abandoning even the memory of her kids.

I also thought it was far more tragic to work off what Zuko said, that they were a happy family once, but Ozai had a bigger love for power than family.

I know as a kid he could've not realized how things actually were, but it just hits me harder to think that they were a happy once, and from Ozai's lust of power, his family fell apart, it broke, it grew weak and divided. Conflicting.

And it just added to the lesson of pursuing absolute power is a loss of love, a collapse of your house, a weakness in your foundation.

How the higher you climb, the farther you are from the roots that held you up and together, and it makes the fall far more devastating.

His want of power over family, he sent away the wife he once loved.

Turned an older brother against him to plot in secret.

Banished the son that would help lead to his defeat.

Broke his most loyal and effective daughter and soldier as he left her behind.

And all it left him was being alone and overconfident. No one to come to his aide as he faced the wrath and mercy of the Avatar.

Cat without gf

Cat with gf