Im Up Early Putting The Last Pieces In Place For My Lecture At RISD (tonight, 10/14/13 At 7:00 In The

I’m up early putting the last pieces in place for my lecture at RISD (tonight, 10/14/13 at 7:00 in the Main Auditorium) and I came across this forgotten gem that I inked in 2007. I always imagined Mai kept giving the royal portrait artist the same note, over and over: “More black.”

The way they did this in the same episode to show two different displays of emotion that still connect together beautifully

So, I don't want to antagonize the person whose post made me think about this, but Azula redemption arc discourse popped up on my feed again recently, and while I had some thoughts on the matter, they clearly were not expressed well, given how they and a number of other people reacted to what I had to say.

Setting aside Ozai, we have three other members of his family portrayed in ATLA: Iroh, Zuko, and Azula, and all three of them are guilty of war crimes. Iroh already regrets his actions at the start of the series, but we are still asked to view him sympathetically and forgive him, because hey, he lost his son and he's totally sorry. Zuko commits war crimes right in front of us, we get to see him all but destroy an entire village, reducing homes to ash and cinders, but we're asked to view him sympathetically and forgive him too, because another war criminal (Iroh) nudges him away from further escalations and he gives up on being a 'villain'.

Azula is the youngest of the three and her crimes are certainly no greater than theirs, but she remains cast in the role of 'villain' until the very end, so she is viewed without any sympathy at all. Indeed, I saw multiple times people bring up that she encouraged her father to commit genocide - an action he planned to take anyway, that she had no power to command him to perform, and which she herself never took part in. Definitely worse than burning a village to the ground, right?

But here's the problem: whether intended or not, this sets up a message that children are already going to be getting from most other media. When men or boys commit heinous crimes but apologize, we must forgive them and even allow them to take on positions of great responsibility and power. (Zuko's war crimes don't disqualify him from becoming Firelord, because we certainly can't suggest that maybe hereditary monarchies are a bad idea!) Meanwhile, those same actions from a woman or girl just mean that she's 'crazy', she's dangerous, she needs to be put in a straitjacket and secluded away from society, not treated with the love and compassion she's lacked for much of her life with even her mother writing her off while Zuko displayed similar proclivities towards cruelty.

My previous post pointed out that in terms of narrative, there is no room to redeem Azula, and that ATLA would realistically need a full 5 seasons to even attempt including that story, which ideally would have been an added arc about decolonization and repairing the wounds of generational conflicts. That didn't happen, so sure, there's an argument there, but that's separate from the question of whether Azula deserves redemption, and the answer must always be that no child is beyond saving. I don't want to give up on adults either, but to give up on a child and say 'this one is too far gone' would be to abandon my humanity, and I cannot do that. And girls deserve to know that they can get redemption arcs too, that it's not just for boys, that they're not just stepping stones for some man to achieve undeserved power.

All that said, while I believe that Azula deserves a chance at redemption, she doesn't exist in a vacuum. Hama is the victim of colonial violence, abducted from her home and tortured for decades before managing to escape. I'm not going to argue the morality of her one-woman campaign against the Fire Nation, but like Azula, she's given no chance for redemption, and even worse, is handed back to the very people who kidnapped and tortured her. It's the same message as with Azula, except here there's at least enough grey in the morality to argue justification. But no, women who do war crimes are crazy and have to be locked up. Indeed, the comics even show that Hama is the *only* prisoner that the Fire Nation (initially) refuses to release, framing her crimes as somehow 'worse' than those committed by the Fire Nation itself.

Azula needed a better ending to her story, even if only in the comics or some other media, because otherwise Avatar tells a story in which Sokka learning to not be a misogynist still exists within an extremely patriarchal lens where men will be forgiven for crimes that 'crazy' women will be locked up forever for.

MAIKO WEEK DAY FOUR: PARENTS

SPY x FAMILY au!!!

AAAHH MY ARM HURTS BUT I FINALLY FINISHED IT

cooking another oneshot (actually a late Maiko Week submission that I never got to finish on time)