Holy Crap This One Was Hard To Finish

Holy crap this one was hard to finish

Fire Regent Ursa

follow up to this piece

Fire Regent Ursa takes the throne, remodels the palace (using a lot of the gold on the walls to make reforms in a post-war economy), including the throne room so that it looks nothing like Azulon’s throne, and trains Katara and Zuko (who found her, who she loves a lot, and who are both acting as ambassadors) on how to make it in politics. Zuko takes the throne as an adult, when he’s ready, thus avoiding a nervous breakdown.

ozai is mysteriously dead after the end of the war, before they find her, but the investigators don’t try too hard on that one

jason's death was inevitable from the moment he went against zeus in boo. there was no other way it could have ended. ouranos was a tyrannical king who was overthrown by his youngest son, kronos. kronos was a tyrannical king who was overthrown by his youngest son zeus. zeus is a tyrannical king. he knows he will be overthrown one day. fate cannot be escaped, not even by gods. not even by fate itself. zeus knows he cannot retain his power forever. that his youngest son might be the one to take the power away from him. and his youngest son questioned his decision. without hesitation. his youngest son had the power to go against gaea herself. of course zeus wanted to dispose off him. jason had performed his part. he saved the world, fulfilled the prophecy. there was no other reason for keeping him alive. of course jason died after doing his part. jason is the proof that you can do everything right in your life but still not get your happy ending. that you can try everything and still fail to survive. i cannot stand people completely ignoring the fact that he died. he did not just die. he died for a cause. his death has meaning. and erasing is death also erases that meaning.

He definitely called Kiyo ‘Hanako’ by accident on multiple occasions, right

I think about Azula shooters often and their common refrain of "if Azula hadn't had a mental breakdown, she would've won" and I'm here to tell you that no, she wouldn't have.

There is no universe in which Azula was winning that fight with Zuko (or Katara, for that matter).

Azula spent so much of Book 2 being built up as this deadly terrifying force against whom the heroes are badly outmatched that it can be difficult to catch exactly how quickly Zuko is advancing.

Back up a bit to Book One. For the fearsome exiled crown prince of the Fire Nation, Zuko's not that impressive a firebender. He's not bad by any stretch, and he's able to lay the untrained Sokka and Katara flat pretty easily. Then he gets in the ring with Aang, who is an airbending master, and the difference between a regular bender and a master becomes apparent when Aang literally puts his ass to bed:

People have attributed this to the fact that no one's fought an airbender in 100 years, but I think it's also worth noting that Aang (a 12 year old from a pacifist nation) has probably never fought anyone before. Like, ever. And yet the second Aang thinks "okay, I'll attack back", the fight's over.

Zuko's got the same genetic predisposition for firebending talent that Azula does, yet it never seems to manifest because of his mental blocks. At the beginning of the series, he's already so beat down that all he really has is conviction, pride, and anger, so even with training from Iroh (the firebending master, thank you very much), he struggles. Yet throughout Book 2, when he has no time to train because he's on the run, he actually seems to advance faster. The fact that his bending is literally tied to his character arc (as his morals become tangled and he has to fight off aforementioned mental blocks) is pretty brilliant. Like, by the time of the Crossroads of Destiny, Zuko getting his ass handed to him by Aang is a pretty consistent feature of the show--he just can't match wits with him.

Hell, at the beginning of the series, he and Iroh (again: the actual firebending master) launch a combined power surface-to-air attack...which Aang casually swats away into a nearby ice wall. Come the Crossroads of Destiny, however, and Zuko by himself launches this bigass fireball that blows through Aang's defenses.

Zuko advances so quickly that it's scary. That prodigious talent is in him even if it doesn't come through as cleanly as with Azula. Who, by the way, was busy about to get flattened by Katara some few dozen feet away, until Zuko took over and then effectively stalemated her himself.

All of this in retrospect makes it abundantly clear why Zuko's firebending seemed to skyrocket so much when he learned true firebending from the Sun Warriors: it was really the only thing left. He's hard a hard road learning how to fight waterbenders, earthbenders, and airbenders, and even if unconsciously, he's applying the philosophy Iroh taught him about augmenting his bending style with aspects of other styles (see also, the waterbending-like fire whips he uses in the above gif). Once he actually understands fire and how it works, he's got it mastered. Hence why any gap between him and Azula effectively disappears as soon as their next fight--before her friends have betrayed her and her stability goes out the window. There's no real sense of urgency to their fight at the Boiling Rock prison. True, Sokka's presence with the sword helps, but Zuko doesn't look remotely worried and he counters Azula's every attack perfectly.

All her life, Azula only ever learned fire. She was taught by the best people the fire nation can employ, so she knows all the cool tricks, but she's still poisoned by the corrupted firebending practiced in the modern ATLA timeline. Unlike Zuko, who managed to get the basics if nothing else from Iroh (fire comes from the breath, and can be used to survive as much as to kill), Azula has always used fire as a weapon and a means to hurt others. She has no true knowledge of the craft, meaning she's got the same weaknesses as Zhao, she's just better disciplined to the point she can make up for it.

Zuko's victory was a given considering Azula's complete loss of control by the time of Sozin's comet, but even had she been in a perfect mental state, she'd have lost, because in many ways Zuko is simply the better firebender.

And that's the truth of it.

Pilot Azula is such a vibe I love her (⁠っ⁠˘⁠з⁠(⁠˘⁠⌣⁠˘⁠ ⁠)

Blue fire version under cut

In another life 🩷💚