I See You Worked Things Out With Your Girlfriend

The cool thing about being an artist is I can draw literally whatever I want lol I just wanted to draw him looking absolutely needy .__.

Ursa with her daughter-in-law and grandbaby :)

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.

For example: in Sozin’s Comet pt. 1, Zuko and Toph are walking the length of the beach trying to find Aang, and since Toph sees this as her ‘life changing field trip’, she opens up to him about the abuse she felt with her parents, confessing that she never felt loved by them. Zuko ignores her and finally groans in frustration, turns to her, and asks her to stop talking. Zuko, the boy who has bonded with Toph and feels a deep kinship with. Zuko, the boy who would be there in an instant to support his friends, no matter the danger. Zuko, the boy who also suffered severe emotional abuse from a parental figure and knows more than anyone what it feels like not to be loved by their father. 

Don’t try to tell me Zuko would’ve done that. Please, Sozin’s Comet and Aang’s disappearance be damned. The moment Toph told him about her issues with her parents you KNOW Zuko would’ve dropped everything and gone to the Earth Kingdom right then and there and yelled at them. 

Bonus example