Azula, Zuko, and the Myth of the Psychopath 🔥
New video essay on Avatar: The Last Airbender is out
Joseppi Klonopin Rowling has many bad qualities, but by far the worst is her inability to write a coherent magical world. In 2018, Rowling responded to a tweet calling her out for devising an utterly stupid magical game, called Quidditch. In Quidditch, you have a bunch of people flying around getting points in intervals of 10 or 20, and these points are wracked up by throwing the balls into the goal.
YAY! SPORT-BALL!
The broken part is that there’s a crazy little guy with wings called the Golden Snitch, which darts around the stadium, and whichever team grabs the Golden Snitch first gets 150 points and the game ends. They don’t win the game, the game just ends. So, if you’re 160 points behind, succeeding in catching the snitch loses you the game. There are several times in the books where teams losing by more than 150 points catch the golden snitch to lose with honor. You know, like teenage jocks often do.
In response to someone telling her that the scoring system makes no sense, Joseppi responded:
“It makes total sense. There’s glamour in chasing an elusive lucky break, but teamwork and persistence can still win the day. Everyone’s vulnerable to blows of fate and obstructive people, and success means rising above them. Quidditch is the human condition. You’re welcome.”
Whu — Uh — bu — Huh?
No. No no no no no. They weren’t saying that it doesn’t symbolically make sense. They were saying it doesn’t make practical sense. And that means all quidditch matches in the books feel like a boring waste of time. “I love sport ball. Particularly the way it reflects the metaphysics of the incarnate soul, am I right, fellas?”
Joanna Kobana Rowling is both the creator of the game of quidditch and also doesn’t understand how quidditch works. This to say, I am a die-hard Death of the Author extremist. Not only does a writer’s intention not matter once their work is released to the public, the writer can straight-up be wrong when their intentions undermine the utility of the story’s literary devices.
There are times when writers deserve the utmost devotion to sincere analysis on the part of their readers. And other times, when they deserve an inquisition. You find yourself asking if the story has successfully convinced you to follow in its emotional logic, or is there a troubling dissonance keeping you at arm’s length?
Today, we’re going to ask which of these paths a proper analysis of the character of Azula ought to take, and how an in-depth reading of Zuko can inform our understanding of Azula. They naturally demand comparison: two siblings of exact opposite temperaments, one of who rises against great odds and the other a paragon of royalty brought down to her lowest low. We’re being invited to compare the two: we’re tempted to investigate how their paths diverged.
It’s been almost 20 years since Zuko’s pretty face made its grand debut to the world, and he is still spoken of with reverence throughout the fandom. We automatically compare any redemption arc to his, as if he was the standard. But not only is he a compelling character, people also just like him. He has to fight to be good: fight both himself and the world he was born into. And I think that because his trials seem so much more insurmountable than the other characters, the temptation so great and the right path so punishing, we trust his goodness absolutely. By Crossroads of Destiny, we’ve gotten a good glimpse into how good-hearted he can be, and it when we see he hasn’t achieved his redemption yet. By the finale, we have seen him successfully put in the work to show that this transformation has stuck. So, when we’re trying to get our anime-repulsed friends into Avatar, we tell them about Zuko.
On the other hand, Azula can be sort of difficult to talk about, because there’s just such a deep and cutting tragedy to her. A child, younger than most of our main cast, indoctrinated and held to unreasonable standards throughout her short life, yet also a dangerous political agent. If we mention her at all, it’s to talk about what a ruthless, entertaining villain she is.
Azula seems almost entirely irredeemable, with just a small handful of moments alluding to the possibility that she has any capacity for goodness. She interacts kindly with her friends and brother approximately twice throughout the run of the show. She’s given plenty of time to show some sort of humanity, she just doesn’t.
But in the final hour of the story, we are shown that in fact…. She was a human being the whole time. Things in her life actually have affected her, and she has goals beyond the here and now that we had not yet been invited to consider. And, we’re given our first and last glimpse into “where she went wrong.”
This is the only indication we’re given to suggest that she could have become someone else.
And it’s… you know… the finale.
We’re going to talk about who Azula is, but before we get into that, I want to talk a bit about who Azula is not. This is important groundwork, so stick with me.
I am often frustrated with the common fan interpretation of Azula as… for lack of a better term, “psychopathic.” (We will get back to that word: you can hold me to that). The idea seems to be that Azula is obsessed with power for the pure hedonistic pleasure of it and she doesn’t care who she has to screw over to get it, or may even enjoy that aspect. What follows from this are implications that she has a sort of 1-dimensional lack of empathy, inherent shallowness of feeling, no forward vision, no human complexity.
Like what you see? See the full video here!
