🌔🎨🌿🎻📚

I understand her “going crazy”, she essentially had a mental breakdown in the season finale and portraying her as okay after that would be unsettling. But all it cumulates in is Azula running away, which gives off this vibe that there’s not happy ending for her. Which feels stupid, because she’s even younger than Zuko. What, because she did the same sort of stuff as Zuko before his redemption but scarier and more efficiently she’s not deserving of a second chance?

I think it’s because they kind of didn’t know how. Like most people would say “redemption arc”, because there’s no way she could still actively antagonize the main cast in the same way as she used to (she can’t bring her father back to the throne. the world is changing. what she she going to do, coup? Again, she’s fresh off dealing with mental issues). But I think that even with how crazy people are going with redemption arcs these days, people know Azula enough to get a (typical) arc like that wouldn’t work. Redemption arcs often go bad because 1 the character feels unredeemable and the only way the writers can try and fix it is give them a weak sad backstory that doesn’t justify anything/and you feel bad for them AT ALL, 2 they’re extremely boring to watch and don’t take anything unique about the character’s personalities into account, 3 all of their interesting traits come from them being antagonists and now that you’ve made them “good” they’re boring characters.

I think the best redemption method for Azula would’ve been to give her a friend she bonds with because they’re similar. Maybe they’re a noble kid that was raised with the Fire Nation’s conquering ideology, they hate all the change happening in their home, they’re never lived in a time where the world isn’t at war, etc. They can even start seeing her because they view her as the “true” Fire Lord, the last dying ember of the old world. Then, because they have support Azula didn’t in her life, they start to change. They get used to the new normal. And as they slowly show more and more of this, Azula repeatedly gets angry with them, but realizes that if she wants to keep her only friend she’ll have to put up with it. She’s already attached oh no.

And then over a very LONG time she starts to truly change.

At first you can tell she’s just tolerating it. She’s still mean, still psychologically manipulates people. But she’s kind of aimless. This is very Regina George of me, but I actually think she would do great in sports? We saw her dominate at volleyball, and she’s love ordering around a team. An example of her slowly changing would be her becoming captain, treating everyone like she used to do to her old friends (habit) but they realize she can’t execute them or whatever if they tell her to stop being an ass, so they do, and Azula’s livid. They argue back and forth to the point it’s exhausting, and Azula eventually concedes because she realizes it’s easier and if they don’t get back together soon they’re going to lose an upcoming game. It’s not real progress. But they she kind of gets into the habit of being a little more decent to people; she’s shitty and snide about it, but it’s a tweak, and that’s basically the whole thing. She tries to boss around people at home, but since she doesn’t want to be under Zuko’s watch “home” is her friend she’s crashing with, and again, no one’s catering to her every whim anymore. It’s not even defiant. People just have things to do, and since she’s not truly royal anymore she’s just not a priority. So she has to get used to not filling her time “at home” playing mind games with servant or getting ready to enact some highly strategical war plan or training for battle. Maybe she picks up another hobby. She doesn’t think it’s wrong to act as she once did exactly, she just falls out of it. Maybe she decided to learn other fighting styles from the other nations as a hobby, that’s another thing she can compete in. Etc, etc.

In the end, you’d have an Azula that doesn’t mentally torture those she’s close to or complete strangers anymore, but is still pretty verbally brutal to people she hates. Maybe she finds small ways to ruin their days behind the scenes — petty. She’s still intense with a dominant personality. She still loves to win, loves to be in charge. She still loves to fight. She’s snide whenever she sees any of the old characters from the series but it’s slightly less bitter. She keeps all of the traits that made her fun to watch without her still being the “villain”. But we see more of what we saw in The Beach episode; she goes after people when they’re to check in and attempts to get them to feel better, she psychoanalyzes their issues, and she helps formulate plans to help her friends get what they want. She’s whatever Riverdale and every other show that tries to make a “good Blair Waldorf” is actually trying to achieve.

I’d imagine on top of her new hobbies, professionally she’d be a sorta-socialite or a psychiatrist. Azula still has a a lot of tactical/diplomatic training and being someone whose just well off and socializes with powerful people sounds like it would fit her as long as it wasn’t shallow. She gets her money from being the head of committees or or having stakes in organizations or leading community initiatives or whatever. She’s always the most intense when it comes to meetings. Her passion isn’t really there but it gives her excuses to mess with people so there’s that. She gets along well with old politicians that are still grumbly about all the radical changes. Azula being sort of a bored well off power broker sounds like it would be really funny and would present a bunch of chances for her to socialize like she did in the beach episode when she was trying to be normal. It would also neuter her in a way. She’d come up with these intense plans to accomplish goals for her job she barely cares about only to discover she’s like 10x more hyper competent than everyone around her.

The psychiatrist idea is almost entirely a joke on my part. Like she can still use the socialite thing I suggested for character development. But this is 1000% gag fodder. Since she’s so used to psycho analyzing people in the series, it turns out she’s also really good at pinpointing people’s issues and telling them what do do about it — even if she ends up being a little harsh and her plans for improvement are a tad too intense.

At the end of the day, she ends up forging a new life. She still runs into the cast a lot, but I can’t imagine her ever pulling them into her life the same way eventually Zuko eventually did. I can see her apologizing to Mai and Ty Lee, but I actually don’t like them being friends again? Even if she’s better, it feels like putting two people back into an abusive relationship. It’s not like they never suffered from her either, but I can only see her forging a deeper bond with Zuko (he asserts in the comics he’s willing to be there for her, so it feels less like he’s being forced to do it and more like he acknowledges the risks) and Iroh (which I feel would be incredibly interesting. I have my own thoughts about their relationship in the series that has to do a lot with the way Azula’s mom seems to have treated her but this is getting long). Overall:

The word "faith" does not mean "Christianity."

The word "spirituality" does not mean "Christianity."

You have got to stop equating all of these things. You have got to stop doing shit like saying "all religion is bad" or "all faith is destructive."

You have got to understand that you can't truly support Jewish people and Indigenous people and immigrants and refugees and marginalized communities if you're looking down your nose at their cultures.

“Yay, there’s a cure!” says the girl with depression.  “Cure for what, motherfucker, I’m not sick,” says the person with autism.

“Yay, there’s a cure!” I say, with my fibromyalgia and random bad pain days.  “Yes, because it’s easier to talk about eliminating us than talk about teaching sign language in school,” says the Deaf person.  “‘Cure’ is violent rhetoric.”

The problem is, of course, that a vast number of things have been aggregated under the label of “disability,” and many of them don’t even resemble each other.  Depression sucks in an objective fashion, whereas autism is just a way of being (which, like many ways of being, may suck at some times, and generally sucks worse when not accommodated).  Similar deal with chronic pain versus the Deaf community.  These things really should not be grouped together, but they are.  And since they are grouped so haphazardly, they will often be at cross-purposes.

It is ridiculous, in the X-men universe, to classify all “mutants” as one group.  You have ridiculously powerful people with little downside, you have powerful people with a major downside, you have people with very limited powers but few drawbacks, you have people with limited powers and massive drawbacks, and that’s not even getting into other divisions, like whether you look like a baseline human all the time, part of the time, or none of the time.  “Realistically,” if you can apply that word to a fantasy universe, Storm and Rogue belong to completely different minorities which should require completely different approaches.  But society has grouped them under one umbrella, or forced them to group themselves for self-protection, and thus you have conversations like the one above.

Put another way:

“They can cure us?” asks the autistic person who struggles to think clearly, can’t form full sentences, is overstimulated at the drop of a hat and misses out on a lot of things they’d otherwise like to do because for them, autism is literally crippling.

“No, because there’s nothing wrong with us,” I say, as a person with autism who has a job, car, excellent communication and coping skills and a relatively normal life, because for me, autism is a thing I’ve adapted to and worked around.

(And yes, autistic people in the first category do exist. I’ve encountered a few right here on Tumblr and seen more than one say “don’t forget us in your autism activism because we aren’t ‘just a little different,’ this is a genuine problem for us.”)

Or perhaps:

“They can cure us?” asks the amputee who has never fully adapted to the loss of her arm below the shoulder, and gets by okay most days but very much misses being non-disabled.

“No, because there’s nothing wrong with us,” says the person who was born with only one arm and has never considered it any kind of deficit because it’s just how things are.

Different people will experience the same disability in different ways. It may have to do with how they were diagnosed, or how they came to be disabled; it may have to do with complications related to the disability (not to use the same metaphor twice, but someone whose arm was crushed and experiences terrible phantom pains daily probably feels a lot more negatively about their lack of an arm than someone who was born without it and has no phantom limb to feel sensation in). It may even be because of how other people around them treat the disability! A blind person treated with dignity and appropriate accommodation is probably going to feel very differently about their disability than someone with the same kind of blindness, but also a bunch of condescending pricks who want to make it into a terrible tragedy.

she’s a little too easy to love #1