Ozai: The Last Man
Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Big Bad and The Will to Power
In my last video I tried to explore the virtues held by the Royal House of the Imperial Fire Nation in a way that granted their humanity. They belong to one of the best-told stories in television history, after all. Shouldn’t we at least try to understand them to be well-written? So assuming we want to read the best possible story into our understanding of them, let’s try to understand Ozai a little bit better.
I’ve argued that our understanding of Azula could be enriched by analyzing her cultural context, and the same holds true for Ozai. Ozai is not essentially an abusive father or a megalomaniacal supervillain. He’s the apex of a political tradition spanning generations that has just about proven that enforced unity, brutally taking the power for yourself and denying it to others, makes life much more stable and society more prosperous. We would expect him to follow this logic throughout all parts of his life. For example, it is not an accident or a consequence of convenience that Ozai’s daughter conquors Ba Sing Se in a bloodless coup. The fact that it’s bloodless means it’s more efficient. The people who survived can accomplish things for the new conquerors, and the empire is less likely to incite rebellion if they don’t kill too many people.
Ozai is not a good person by our standards, but he wouldn’t consider our standards to be particularly meaningful. He’s been a good ruler by the standards that his family has proven to be successful for the ends they want. Even usurping the throne from Iroh has no value to an anti-social leech with only malevolent intentions. He must necessarily take power for himself because he believes he can do good with it.
Likewise, in this video, I want to invite you to politely set aside your most basic moral framework of the world. I don’t want you to forget your morals — that’s important stuff. But I encourage you to bear in mind that those frameworks are made-up and very contingent, and for the character we’re going to be trying to understand today, that framework might act more like a cage.
Alright? Alright!
In 1889, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had a nervous breakdown.
Like with most people who experience mental crises in the 19th century, no one knows exactly what caused this disorder. But sometimes, when someone so brilliant and illuminating is found plunging into the depths, we can’t help but wonder if their ideas themselves pushed them over the edge.
The Will to Power is an idea so big and sublime and terrifying, Nietzsche eventually abandoned the goal of writing it down. The book of that name was published by his Nazi sister after his death.
To summarize as best as I can, the will to power is the innate desire to progress. And I’m being intentionally vague with that word here. The thing that urges on all forward momentum is the drive to struggle forward to become something more than what you are. Frederick believed people should pursue that which makes them suffer. Humans must fearlessly embrace the pain of life, and that will inevitably lead to ecstasy, revelation… apotheosis. In contrast, seeking comfort is a shortcut, a waste of life. Through these intentional trials, people become more than what they are. There is no essential human spirit. To be human is to always be becoming more.
My mind is drawing a parallel between The Will to Power and The Theatre of Cruelty. Artaud’s goal was to put actors and audiences through painful trials in order to induce a kind of mystical experience, where inert energy was unbridled and the ennui of day-to-day survival melted into a dazzling, elevated plane of existence. A touch of death brings out the fine notes of euphoria in modern life.
Artaud once wrote the following on the work of Van Gogh:
“…I will tell you that Van Gogh is a painter because he has re-assembled nature, because he has, as it were, perspired it and made it sweat, because he has spurted on to his canvases in heaps, monumental with colours, the centuries-old struggle of elements, the terrible rudimentary pressure of apostrophes, stripes, commas and strokes, of which we must admit that, after him, natural appearances are made.”
I can’t pretend this deranged statement, appearing in an essay not 200 words away from an inexplicable description of a “vagina cooked in green sauce” and “penis of newborn child whipped and beaten to a pulp”, doesn’t make sense to me on a profound level. By the way, that mutilated genital imagery? It’s the first sentence in the essay. I wish Artaud could make my thumbnails.
Artaud contends that fiction must not be an escape from reality but a gateway into it. And the way through the gate is with pain. This elucidates Nietzsche’s point, I think. When Nietzsche describes the most influential drive in humankind, a person evolving and gaining power over themself, he assumes a self-craftsmanship that each person exercises in order to realize a kind of truth outside cultural conceptions of reality — in real reality.
The Will to Power also makes me think of Freud’s thoughts on the Death Drive.
“By its very nature, [happiness] can be no more than an episodic phenomenon. Any prolongation of a situation desired by the pleasure principle produces a feeling of lukewarm contentment; we are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.”
There’s something more important than survival: something that has to do with becoming something else through collision with that which is big, imposing, threatening, even fatal.
And so, I appear to have contradicted myself. In my last video, we talked about the sociological context in which the Fire Nation became so authoritarian. The impulse to control a violent country with a unified hand is sort of an act of cowardice. You want to end the violence, before it ends you. Everything Azula does, I argue, affirms the virtue of strength in a country constantly on the edge of explosive violence. Azula and Ozai are strong so that fewer people have to suffer and die.
So, we got two opposing thoughts. People grasp at power with shivering hands to protect themselves, and people crave power because to become more than what you are is to realize potential and seek the ultimate boon. So, which one’s right?
Like what you see? Check out the full video here!
