letícia

1966 Grinch? Now that was a mean, scary bastard. He was a crusty old fuck who hated society so much that he only came off his shitty frozen mountain to commit crimes and terrorism out of spite.

Bennyhoo Cumberland Grinch comes down from his mountain to buy groceries.

You can round the edges off a character to make them more “relatable” or whatever, but you also run the risk of losing what defined them in the first place. The end result is bland and generic.

Zuko, trying not yell out of anger and confusion:

He actually can’t, at this point, fight without yelling if he’s using firebending. In The Firebending Masters, he says he’s been relying on anger and rage to fuel his bending, so yeah, in every firebending fight, he’s drawing on rage and hyping that up by yelling. Someone has pointed out that after he finds the original source of firebending, he stops yelling all the time - I haven’t checked that personally but it does seem accurate.

Seems like something he must have picked up after his exile, but he’s so prideful and so obsessed with “proving himself” to Ozai, I can’t imagine he’d dare to experiment with that on his own. Maybe Iroh introduced it to him? Practicing sword forms or sparring would have been a good way for him to build back muscle after what had to be a long convalescence from the burn, but without the trauma of firebending again so soon.

https://www.tumblr.com/atlaculture/718240438095593472/cultural-weapons-fire-nation-swords-pt-2?source=share

The consequence of them basically being the McDonalds of swords is that they were popular with all different kinds of poor people. The most interesting ones being… theatre troupes! Because these swords were relatively affordable, they were often used for stage and street performances. (And because the tropes of theatre carry into modern cinema and TV, you also see the niuweidao overrepresented in most kung fu-inspired media as well.)

Anyways, I bring this up because Zuko is very much a theatre kid, so maybe his sword skills actually come from observing actors using the sword and imitating them? Better yet, maybe his mother secretly taught him to use the niuweidao to boost his self-esteem? After all, she is a former theatre actress, according to the comics. It would certainly explain why it’s a skill he possesses but not Azula/Ozai/Iroh.

@falconfate

I agree. While I think Ursa taught Zuko the basics and showed him some really flashy moves, I think his combat abilities were really refined during his banishment. Like I mentioned earlier, Zuko’s swords were historically popular among the lower levels of society, such as actors and criminals/rebels. Zuko spent three years on a ship full of sailors and probably spent a lot of time docked in seedy port cities where pirates hung out. He basically got to experience the full spectrum of what dual broadswords (niuweidao) were capable of.