#azula redemption

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The palace was always quietest at night.

No council meetings. No guards announcing arrivals. No heavy expectations pressing against his shoulders for a few fleeting hours. Just the candlelight mixed with the moonlight, and you beside him.

Zuko should have been asleep.

Instead, he lay awake with his head resting against the pillow, watching you breathe softly beside him while his fingers traced absentminded patterns along your cheek. Gentle. Careful. Like touching something sacred.

You stirred slightly at the touch but didn’t wake, only leaning unconsciously closer into his warmth. His chest tightened. Because all he could think about was her. Azula.

Not the version the world feared. Not FireLord Ozai’s perfect daughter. Not the girl sharpened into something cruel and dangerous before she even had the chance to become a child.

Just his little sister… he wondered; painfully, endlessly - if things had been different… would she have loved you too? The same way Sokka loves Aang as his own brother?

Would she have sat with you during dinners, making dry comments that only you seemed able to answer without fear? Would you have made her laugh? Real laughter, not the sharp-edged kind she used like a weapon. Would she have trusted you enough to let her guard down? Would she have seen you as a sister?

Zuko’s thumb brushed beneath your eye softly. You were everything warm in his life now. Everything patient, kind, safe. Sometimes he mourned the fact that Azula never got the chance to know softness without suspecting weakness. That she couldn’t have the growth he had with his real friends.

“She would’ve liked you,” he whispered quietly into the darkness, almost like a confession. “I think… maybe she would’ve hated how much she liked you.”

You shifted slightly in your sleep, your hand finding his instinctively beneath the blankets. Zuko looked down at your intertwined fingers and swallowed hard.

In another life, maybe the three of you could’ve sat together beneath the palace gardens without fear or politics or cruelty poisoning every moment.

Maybe Azula would’ve teased him for the way he looked at you. Maybe she would’ve rolled her eyes every time you defended him during arguments. Maybe she would’ve called the two of you disgustingly affectionate before secretly lingering nearby anyway. She’d know became a third wheel yet refused to change anything about that.

Maybe she could’ve been happy. The thought hurt too much to hold for long.

Zuko leaned forward, pressing a lingering kiss against your forehead before closing his eyes beside you.

Somewhere deep inside him, the little boy who once chased after his sister despite everything still hoped that one day, somehow, she’d come home too.

azula is one of my favorite characters of all time idk if ive said that before

(sukis first dialogue is a callback from the ‘suki alone’ comic, where azula says that to her before putting her in the boiling rock)

i’m tired of the way most of the fandom still act as if she’s a uniquely evil irredeemable monster even though she’s not any worse than Zuko or Iroh before their redemptions ( and they’ve arguably done worse than her )

i feel like the fact that iroh openly admits he does not care for her like when he said “she’s crazy and she needs to go down” has a part to play in the way people view her since iroh is a god in the fandom and his word is gospel to people so they take that as like confirmation that she’s irredeemable ( which is ironic coming from mr dragon of the west )

something else that annoys me is when people try and bring up the comics to “prove” that she doesn’t want a redemption / rejected the opportunity ( even though she does show baby steps towards redemption ) but zuko did too, couldn’t him betraying iroh even after Katara was like “i thought you changed” also be see as him “rejecting his redemption”? but it still happened for him so why isn’t it possible for her?

I just genuinely HATE how Azula spending time in a physically and sometimes even sexually abusive asylum is just treated as the basic "starting point" for many Azula fics, as though it's what's 'supposed' to happen to her. In my head, after the finale, Zuko does remove her from the palace - because "banishment set me on the right path" era Zuko would say 'she needs to be removed from this environment to find the right path' - and place her on a guarded island run by the Fire Sages where she receives her own spiritual healing - the Fire Nation equivalent to mental health therapy. Occasionally Zuko visits her, he tries for a regular schedule but government duties often hold him up. And maybe (insert girl of choice) visits Azula because she needs a break from the world and they end up becoming each other's point of stability and romance ensues... Or Ty Lee becomes Azula's guard in a role-reversal of the power dynamic they had and they grow closer.... As far as what Zuko does with Azula, he's not an idiot and would be able to recognize that "if I don't try and get her on the right path there will be a lot of people in the Fire Nation that want her to sit on the throne instead of me. So I should make sure I keep her in a safe and secure environment, maybe guarded by the soldiers and guards she's talked down to in the past because they won't listen to her or get swayed by her into turning on me, and I should make extreme care that she's treated well because she's mentally fractured."

Forgive me a moment while I go on a rant. (who am I kidding? No one reads my blog.)

But I've been thinking a lot about Azula lately and how canon treats her. Hell, how fandom treats her and talks about her and why, exactly, it just rubs me the wrong way.

I've read maybe one depiction of Azula that addressed her mental illness in a somewhat realistic/respectful way? Everything else either writes her off or just kind of hand waves her issues away and it bothers me.

Putting that aside though, and just looking at Azula in canon there's a very specific issue that rubs me the wrong way when it comes to how Bryke treats Azula as a character- and it's similar to how other stories treat villains. Where they just write them as 'evil and crazy' and don't give a reason beyond 'well they were born as a sociopath/without a soul/they're just a psycho'.

And that's offensive. It is, and I'm not really one to get offended about things but this kind of writing when it comes to legitimate mental illness is very offensive.

Don't get me wrong ATLA is a work of art, and intentional or not the depiction of Azula's trauma and mental breakdown was really well done. It's specific scenes of her as a child in the show and the comics (god I hate the comics, don't even get me started) that just give me the ick becuase it feels like they're retroactively attempting to write her as having ASPD, or Antisocial Personality Disorder which is a very specific disorder.

So for context, I work in Behavioral Health. I worked as a crisis youth peer counselor and I currently work in Advocacy specifically for people in psychiatric institutions. Behavioral health, mental illness, these aren't vague things for me. They're not just 'crazy' there's something specific going on and it can't just be written off as 'well their dad was abusive so now they're crazy'.

What's worse though is that in canon they give us very specific behaviors with Azula that point to a very specific kind of mental illness and trauma.

On the surface level, yes, ASPD could fit her; she's aggressive and manipulative and seemingly lacks all empathy. And if you took her out of context then yeah, that would fit an ASPD diagnosis. But you can't take Azula out of context. Her behaviors are specific to her culture and trauma and background.

We're shown that growing up she was specifically rewarded for using her firebending in destructive ways. Hurting things/people/places, displaying power over others was how she gained her father's love/approval. It was probably the first lesson she ever learned. And given the family dynamic of Ozai exerting power and influence over others, their mother specifically, Azula rightfully identified Ozai as the more powerful parent and the one who's approval she needed to earn. So she did in the only way available to her; hurting people/places/things, hurting her brother. It probably hurt and confused her a great deal that her mother was so horrified by this behavior. Behavior she specifically engaged in because her father had shown her that this was the Correct Way to Be. Zuko was the stupid one who didn't seem to get it.

I won't even get into how harmful it must have been that Ursa showed such obvious preference and affection towards Zuko. And yes that was likely a machination on Ozai's part, but Azula wouldn't have understood that at the time.

Looking at her behavior later shows us a very specific and alarming pattern. Azula hurts her dolls. In extreme and disturbing ways; she cuts their hair off, their heads off, burns them, pulls them apart.

Even later than that we're shown that Azula doesn't like looking at herself in the mirror. She explicitly avoids it at all times, and then during her breakdown when she attacks her own hair...I mean that alone is such a raw, visceral display of her internal world. Her desire for her mother's approval, but deeper than that her desire to be saved.

She doesn't have language for it. She doesn't know how to ask. But Azula is a character who craves connection, who craves safety and belonging but has no context for how to go about it. So she uses fear. She uses the tools her father gave her. Control, possess, dominate.

The Beach episode is such an important episode when it comes to Azula's characterization. We see that she does care. She cares about her friends. She cares about her brother. She cares how she is seen and percieved by others. She cares that her mother didn't love her.

I'm not a therapist so I'm not going to try and diagnose her but from what we see in canon Azula is a character who was a victim of CSA, and I can and do say that with confidence as a victim of CSA. She's also, looking at that Beach episode, probably some flavor of neurodivergent. She struggles to relate to others, and she uses scripts in all her interactions. She plans out everything meticulously, her appearance, her speeches, how people should react. And when people don't react the way she anticipated she crashes out. Hard.

Azula deserved a redemption arc. She deserved a soft landing and room to heal in the narrative. The line that Iroh gives when he's like 'no, she's crazy and she needs to go down' was always so odd to me. Iroh, the character who is so wise and caring and empathetic...is writing off his own neice. She's fourteen. She's destructive and dangerous yes, but she's obviously not okay and Iroh more than anyone should have seen that.

I personally headcanon that Iroh is a very calculating character. He's a pai sho master, he manipulates people a lot. Perhaps for altruistic goals, sure. But I think it's deeper than that. He see's in Zuko a reflection of his own failure to save his son - and further to save his brother Ozai before Ozai was twisted by Azulon. Azula though, Iroh see's himself at his very worst. All his worst mistakes, his worst qualities reflected back at him.

I think people forget a lot that Iroh was Ozai's older brother. He was the heir to the Fire Nation, he was the Conqueror of Ba Sing Se. He was not a good guy. He became a good guy, sure, later. We meet him as a dotty old man, someone who manipulates his nephew out of love and regret. Someone who takes advantage of his circumstances at every single opportunity. He's a deeply flawed man and that makes him so, so interesting at a character. I'm so disappointed we never got more of him and Azula interacting with one another.

redeemed!azula becomes zuko’s advisor