Don't waste your time or mine

Villains Contest Extra 10: Azula Vs Ozai

A father-daughter death battle. Everyone has its firebending. No Sozin's comet. Just a Agni Kai.

https://www.tumblr.com/zuko-always-lies/766526980525080576/i-really-think-more-fics-with-polygamy-would-be

What do you think about ships like Mai/Azula/Zuko, Ty Maiko, Ty Lee/Azula/Zuko, Maizulee, and Mai/Azula/Zuko/Ty Lee in the context of Fire Nation Royalty engaging in polyamory?

Also, if you have read fics dealing with each of the previously described ships, what are your thoughts on them? Are they anywhere near historically accurate, or they just smut fics?

Furthermore, how would you write the ships to be historically accurate?

Warning: I will be talking about incest here a bit.

Let's start with Azula/Mai/Ty Lee. There are a good number of good fics for that ship (for instance), but generally the social, cultural, and political implications are not a focus. The best way to make the ship a little more grounded is to present it as something that is going on in addition to fulfilling their cultural responsibilities for their families, not as a replacement for "conventional family life." As long as Azula and Mai (Ty Lee burned her bridges with her family long ago) are marrying the right men (thus making family alliances) and producing heirs, no one cares about them being involved with each other.

Another realistic way to approach this is to have Mai, Azula, and Ty Lee all be wives/secondary wives/concubines of the same man. I suppose that's where the other part of your ask comes in.

So, I'm actually beta-ing for a Azula/Mai/Ty Lee/Zuko fic right now. However, in general you are correct, most fics of this type are just smut. That's fine, of course, but not what you are looking for.

Let's deal with the incest aspect of this first. As far as I'm aware, this is not something any historical East Asian or Southeast Asian royal dynasty engaged in, but there have been many royal dynasties who have.

Any sort of Azula/Zuko relationship, at least an official one, only makes sense if the Fire Nation royal family has a tradition incest. Otherwise it's not going to be culturally normal enough for a marriage to happen. However, if there is such a tradition, then suddenly the marriage makes a tremendous degree of sense as a way to submerge and eliminate Azula's claim to the throne. As I'll discuss below, there is ultimately only one primary wife on top of the household hierarchy, and if this status is denied to Azula in favor of someone else, it would be as a deliberate slight or humiliation against Azula.

OK, now there are three or four purposes to the artifice of polygamy in East Asia:

As a babymaking machine, to ensure plentiful heirs (and the status of women inside the "harem" tends to be influenced over whether they've given birth to children).

As a status symbol; having many women marks you as wealthy and powerful.

As a source of pleasure and love.

As a way to establish connections and alliances.

The same trends can be seen up and down the social scale, with households of more modest means being smaller, but of course households needed to be of some means to support more than one woman, much less many.

Harems were also structured as a hierarchy, with the primary wife on top (although she would be below her mother-in-law), and then secondary wives/concubines and so below that. Imperial harems in particular had a ton of ranks and titles to them.

By the late Imperial period (Song/Ming/Qing, but not Yuan) the women of elite households were very cloistered and confined (although arguably in the Ming Dynasty that's also true of even the Emperor), but things were less like that in earlier dynasties and other East Asian societies, to a variable degree, and in the Shang Dynasty (which was more or less the dawn of Chinese history) palace women even seem to have regularly led armies in the field. I think that's a bit closer to how the Fire Nation would understand the institution, to say the least.

There are also some other things I should bring up:

For the Emperor, monogamy really wasn't possible, even if he wanted it. There's entire systems pushing him toward polygamy.

There's a huge reputation for vicious infighting between women over status in Chinese harems.

For many women, concubinage was a ticket toward upward social mobility.

Harems can be large, particularly for the emperor. Japan and Korea generally seems to have had smaller households, though.

A common trend (far from universal) is to have children born of concubines adopted by the primary wife.

A lot about this system might sound very depressing (and it was) but I just want to present one counterexample from the famous memoir Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu. Shen Fu was an intellectual of extremely modest (or worst means), and, beyond the struggle to keep going the book is largely about his very happy marriage with his wife Chen Yun and his grief over her untimely death. At a certain point, despite the couple having very little money, Chen Yu gets obsessed with finding a beautiful and charming concubine for her husband, an idea Shen Fu is cautious at best about. She eventually finds a younger girl, Hanyüan, that meets her standards, and basically seems to fall in love with her and become obsessed with her, a feeling that Hanyüan reciprocates (this is a 19th century Chinese text that I'm reading in translation, but what's going on between them seems very homoerotic). Chen Yun tries very hard to add Hanyüan to their household, but eventually Hanyüan was forcibly married to someone else, and Shen Fu blamed the grief over losing Hanyüan for Chen Yun's death.

Anyways, enough prattling. I know what you really want to know is my opinions on Zuko and polygamy. These are the points I think are worth hitting:

For FN society, Zuko's polygamy would primarily be seen as a babymaking machine (and perhaps as a reaction to the disadvantages shown by the monogamy of Ozai and Azulon).

The lack of heirs in the royal family might play into things.

Zuko's consorts would not have the same rank. Only one can be his primary wife.

The high-ranking consorts would have very high social status in the Fire Nation. And in turn (to a much lesser degree) Zuko might gain status by having high-ranking women in his harem.

There would be no reason that people would expect that Zuko would stop at two or three consorts. Especially if Zuko's "harem" was small, people would shopping their eligible daughters to him, and so on.

Attractions between women within the harem would be none of anyone else's business.

Zuko is already a reformer upending 100+ years of fire nation culture and the Fire Lord is already an Absolute Monarch on a level that's a mix of Louis the 14th and a Mandala God-King from the South East Asian islands. Just changing how his own wives are handled is a side quest in comparison.

And it's not like Zuko just grew up sheltered, never knowing anything outside the palace that would make him not even think about changing stuff like any IRL Emperor who didn't particularly like how their harems worked. His dad and grandad even practiced monogamy so Zuko going for a harem would come with no pre-conceived notion of what a harem even is (and even if Ozai had an offscreen harem, Zuko hate him and would very much change how the women in it were treated by the time he came to power.). He, just like Azula, Mai and Ty Lee are very knowledgeable and well traveled people who have the knowledge and agency to do things their own way if they want given Zuko's authority as Fire Lord.

Also attraction between the girls would very much get people talking if they notice Zuko isn't active / centered enough to it all, it could easily be taken as an insult against him just like you said Azula not being the lead wife could be taken as an insult against her (which isn't the case by default, as I said, there can be no lead wife or the lead wife can just be an administrative position with no further prestige or it can be Azula being spared the pressure of an official post).

But like seriously, nobody is even gonna try to tell the Fire Lord 'no' if he decide to change the rules of his harem and even if they did, do you really think someone as bullheaded as Zuko is even gonna hesitate if someone try to tell him how to take care of his women and the mothers of his children? Especially with how much of a Momma's Boy he is?

Zuko is already a reformer upending 100+ years of fire nation culture and the Fire Lord is already an Absolute Monarch on a level that's a mix of Louis the 14th and a Mandala God-King from the South East Asian islands. Just changing how his own wives are handled is a side quest in comparison.

I do not have any particularly strong knowledge of the Mandela system but what I do know suggests it is not a good fit for the modern Fire Nation at all. And the authority of Chinese Emperors was theoretically absolute as well, but not so in practice.

And it's not like Zuko just grew up sheltered, never knowing anything outside the palace that would make him not even think about changing stuff like any IRL Emperor who didn't particularly like how their harems worked. His dad and grandad even practiced monogamy so Zuko going for a harem would come with no pre-conceived notion of what a harem even is (and even if Ozai had an offscreen harem, Zuko hate him and would very much change how the women in it were treated by the time he came to power.). He, just like Azula, Mai and Ty Lee are very knowledgeable and well traveled people who have the knowledge and agency to do things their own way if they want given Zuko's authority as Fire Lord.

You are assuming that historical emperors were entirely OK with the existing practices. Some of them weren't, but were unable to impose their will. "Absolute" rulers were always far more socially and culturally constrained than people understand. And those rejected that did not tend to survive long.

I think this analysis has a flaw: It has many 'ought' that Zuko could and probably just...not do? Like the lead wife or concubines, he could just go 'No, they are all my wives and they're all equal / have the same status'. Zuko is already a reformer upending 100+ years of fire nation culture and the Fire Lord is already an Absolute Monarch on a level that's a mix of Louis the 14th and a Mandala God-King from the South East Asian islands. Just changing how his own wives are handled is a side quest in comparison. Also attraction between the girls would very much get people talking if they notice Zuko isn't active / centered enough to it all, it could easily be taken as an insult against him just like you said Azula not being the lead wife could be taken as an insult against her (which isn't the case by default, as I said, there can be no lead wife or the lead wife can just be an administrative position with no further prestige or it can be Azula being spared the pressure of an official post).

Ah, yes, Zuko, the guy who is always considerate about the feelings and needs of others and who always thinks things through.

Also attraction between the girls would very much get people talking if they notice Zuko isn't active / centered enough to it all, it could easily be taken as an insult against him just like you said Azula not being the lead wife could be taken as an insult against her (which isn't the case by default, as I said, there can be no lead wife or the lead wife can just be an administrative position with no further prestige or it can be Azula being spared the pressure of an official post).

In Imperial Chinese civilization, there was very little ever written about romance and sex between women, not because it didn't exist but because it was regarded as a rather unimportant topic. People just didn't care at all about it.

Also Manadala God Kings and Kaisars very much took part in polygamy and so did the Mongols.

And the ATLA Fire Nation is not really based on either of those cultures. There's a reason why I focused on China, Japan, Vietnam, and Korea when I was writing my post and didn't bring up, for instance, Islamic cultures that practiced polygamy.

Yeah, some chinese emperors were only absolute on paper so? Some chinese emperors were absolute in practice too and Zuko is clearly the latter if we HAD to compare them since King Kuei is the one clearly modeled after chinese emperors rather than the Fire Lord.

No, I am stating the fact that unlike those emperors who lacked either the means or the will or the knowledge to change it to their liking, Zuko possess all three.

We're really gonna pretend Zuko is somehow so dumb and uncaring (which he canonically isn't, he cares a lot, all the time, which is why he doesn't think things through and get stuff wrong), he can't get something as simple as 'It hurts when you're told you're just not as important and don't matter as much' for the people he loves? And yes, he doesn't think things through, which is why he'd bulldoze the system the second it displeases him before he even realize it could create issues and that's if he'd even care about said issues. Again, he upended 100+ year of Fire Nation culture singlehandedly, a palace eunuch isn't telling him no how he's gonna handle his wives, it's a RIDICULOUS notion.

'People just didn't care' No, people disapproved and thought the subject not proper for polite company and that mentioning this kind of stuff at all was crass and a loss of face, China wasn't uncaring or 'don't ask, don't tell' about it, we know several legal codes where it's mentioned as illegal, even if like all laws, some nobles could get away with it even if everyone knew. Add to that an air of disrespect / sidelining toward the emperor and people would *not* be shrugging their shoulders about it.

And? That wasn't the point, you said East Asian and South East Asians didn't really do that. I named two South East Asian cultures and one east asian culture who did it, the fire nation being based on any of them is irrelevant to that correction of a historical thing.

And I pointed out flaws in your answer that made it make no sense historically and in the context of ATLA and it's own history either. The fact you said things that were objectively wrong is very much your problem and so is the fact you were so incapable of defending your ridiculous take that you had to slide in a seething 'Y-y-your desires!' in there. I know it's frustrating when yet another one of your weird headcanon that's really just a barely disguised fetish of yours get taken apart but it's not reason to start being passive aggressive and start sneaking in personal attacks like that.

Your answer is historically just wrong because historically, a ruler in Zuko's position with his personality would just do whatever they wanted and what they'd want is not have a harem system like that, especially as it would obviously create issues on multiple levels for himself and the nation at large and said answer also ignore clear influence like the Mandalas or just the fact that East Asians and South East Asians very much practiced polygamie and had harems at MULTIPLE times during their history.

How about we don't 'believe' anything and just look at history, cultures, the characters and how the Fire Nation works, all of which are VERY objectives things and not faith based at all? Your beliefs do not change other people's cultures nor what actually happened in a cartoon not made by you, no matter how much trouble you have accepting it.

History doesn't just ignore a ruler's personality and situation to replace it with some vague half-understood template.