Can we talk about how Mai literally didn't care if her brother lived or died. Like atleast Ty lee's introduction introduces her as sympathetic from the beginning -only joining because Azula threatened her, but Mai's 2 year old brother is kidnapped and her re-action is thank God you arrived Azula its so boring here let's NOT trade this politically important person for my BABY BROTHER.
Yeah, Mai’s not allowed to care about anything, including her own family, because that’s her whole schtick - being bored and unmoved by anything around her.
Mai and Ty Lee were clearly conceived as a duo of sidekicks for Azula with fundamentally opposite temperaments - Ty Lee bright and bubbly, Mai gloomy and dour. Like, that’s the starting point for writing these two characters, so to some extent it’s natural that the episode which introduces them presents them as such in a rather flat way. And in that basic way, they work. The problem comes in book three, when they take this one-note character that is Mai and put her in the role of love interest to the show’s most complex character - without giving her any more depth. And on top of that, the one note she’s got is completely wrong to complement Zuko. Ty Lee barely has any more personality than Mai, but as I’ve previously discussed, even she would work better in that role, given what traits she does have.
