i thought the narrative did allow for sympathizing with jet and hama? hell, the narrative structure with jet and hama has their sad backstories and motives placed first, then after that they do things that make katara more and more uncomfortable until it gets to something horrifying. jet even tried to make a new life afterwards and his death is nothing but tragic. azula was introduced as a terrifying sociopath and wasn't given sympathetic attention until season 3.
Weirdly this ties in to some of the themes from the Vietnam War ask I just answered! Let’s see what I can do.
The thing is. You’re allowed to pity Jet and Hama, but they aren’t presented to us in sympathetic terms, no. We aren’t meant to empathize too closely with them, or even see them as immense tragedies. Jet’s death is sad, but it’s also a relief; it isn’t framed to stick with the viewer as even a major story beat.
We are explicitly discouraged from identifying with both of them; their role in the story is as negative examples, warning the main characters away from senseless violence and extremism.
Putting their sad backstories first and then following it with a Dark Twist actually works against making them sympathetic, because it means the motion of the narrative is away from them--we start out with a positive impression that gets worse, which leaves a much more negative psychological imprint than starting with bad and getting even a little better. It draws the attention and the story away from what was done to them and toward what they did, while the order in which Azula is shown to us moves the other way.
So their traumas are provided as context for their actions, though in a very outline version in Jet’s case, but they aren’t dwelt on; we don’t get into their heads and feel their agony with them; the narrative’s engagement with their motives is restricted to explication, and the assertion that their suffering does not justify their actions.
Which isn’t exactly wrong--they both were targeting noncombatants in a way that wasn’t likely to be terribly helpful to anyone, and that really is something that deserves warning away from because it’s very tempting when you have a lot of pain, and the proxies for your real enemy are so much easier to reach with the strength you have.
(Lateral violence is born from this process of reframing, though what they were doing was not that--they both were managing to target the actual group they had beef with, which is better than a lot of people in real life manage rip.)
But that’s a specific narrative choice that was made with these characters, to create them and deal with them as dark-reflections-in-the-world of other people’s (mostly Katara’s) wounded anger, and nothing more.
While Azula got a whole episode wherein the emotional arc of the A-plot centered largely around her feelings about her own social awkwardness and relationship with her mother.
And like. This is, for the most part, a side effect of Azula’s centrality in the story and her relationship with Zuko!
And of the way the Fire Nation royal family is used as a narrative microcosm of how the ideology behind Fire expansionism is toxic and abusive all the way down, and has to be dismantled.
So it’s not bad, exactly.
But it does mean that we’re encouraged to engage far more closely and in a much more nuanced manner with the self-image and lived experience of the homicidal, consciously sadistic young fascist from the industrially developed expansionist empire...
...than we are with the experiences and decisionmaking of the oppressed people victimized by the system of which she is a leading part.
And that’s kind of a pattern in American media, and deserves to be pointed out and critiqued where it crops up. It’s kind of inevitable, but it would be better if it could not be an unmarked default.
The narrative, in part because of the perspective from (and to) which it was being written, can more comfortably engage with Azula’s experiences because they’re ultimately personal--they interface with the broader, institutional reality in terms of allegory and in terms of consequence, but they are built on and about, and can be discussed in terms of, the interactions of individual persons.
While otoh Jet and Hama’s formative traumas are institutional in nature--it was the Fire Nation as military power that took their families and their homes and the lives they should have had away from them; it was the Fire Nation as administrator of colonial-political prison that destroyed Hama inch by inch.
And how do you resolve that? How do you parcel that down and let that go and make peace within yourself, when the thing that destroyed you is still there in the world, still taking and hurting and still beyond your reach? It hurts and it expands as if to swallow the whole world, that question, that irreconcilable need.
Katara only comes to terms with her own, in-comparison contained, experience of being traumatized by that same institution by drilling down until it’s a grudge against a single human person, who isn’t worth it.
But of course it really was the Fire Nation that took her mother away from her. And that’s difficult. That’s beyond the scope of the children’s cartoon. So they lock it away.
And Azula is locked away in the end, too, but she’s locked away as a person, whom we came close to and watched very intimately as she broke. While Jet and Hama are to a considerable degree locked away as ideas, not allowed to escape the confines of their rhetorical roles.
Making Hama a serial kidnapper/torturer/maybe-killer and locus of horror, and sending her back to Fire Nation captivity in a community with every reason to hate and fear her, and abandoning the character there with no follow-up (except using her legacy as a characteristic of villains in the sequel series) was a narrative decision that the people writing Avatar made.
There were good reasons for it in terms of the plot and Katara’s arc and it was even good storytelling! It doesn’t Ruin Avatar and there’s not an easy fix for it.
But it was a decision, and it has reverberations in terms of the history of representation of institutionally wronged people and particularly indigenous people in American media.
Having Jet be first almost a straw man of a resistance fighter, then betrayed and victimized by his own people, and finally literally disposed of, and take his rage and struggle with colonial aftermath with him, was a choice that was made, and which also has implications and an impact on the worldbuilding.
It’s a children’s series, and it’s a plot that needs to be resolvable on Aang’s terms; there’s only so far they could pursue either thread, but those decisions--especially with Hama--carry a certain subtext, and stand in stark contrast to the depth Azula in all her glorious shattered monstrosity was permitted.
And it’s worth talking about!
I mean...Korra had a lot of writing issues, like the pacing and the horrible love triangle, but a major underlying one (at least in Season One I didn’t get any further haha) was that it tried very hard to get out of realistically engaging with the aftermath of colonial violence in any depth whatsoever, despite specifically choosing to set season 1 in a place founded on the aftermath of colonial violence.
You cannot have America without genocide and colonialism, and when you try to have expy-America without talking about the genocide and colonialism you already established in the setting...you’re shooting your narrative in the gut.
And this situation was created out of the same limitations that let Azula be more human than Jet or Hama, and dug into the ethical complexity of her situation with far more care than either of them merited.
