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every cartoon deserves a bad end friends story i guess

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Chloé d'Apchier ☾ The Silver Witch

“I am a terribly jealous woman.”

Happy Birthday Hân ♡ @keikuns

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Azula was not power hungry

A common misconception about Azula is that she was power hungry. But she wasn’t. Everything she did, she did for her father and for the Fire Nation. When she conquered Ba Sing Se, she said, “The Fire Nation has conquered Ba Sing Se” not “I have conquered Ba Sing Se.” She categorized it as a group effort. She definitely thought that she’d make a better Fire Lord than Zuko, but she didn’t actually want to be Fire Lord. If she did, she wouldn’t have brought Zuko home as a hero instead of as a prisoner. Azula seemed perfectly okay with Zuko being the new heir to the throne. All Azula desperately wanted was her father’s approval and affection, and she also was terrified of ending up like Zuko (the disfavored child of Ozai).

She also did what she genuinely thought was best for the Fire Nation. Azula did like to be in control in most situations but she wasn’t after a greater power, like being Fire Lord. She only wanted the throne at the very end because it was all she had left. She no longer had her father, friends, mother, or even Zuko. Azula was terribly unhappy when Ozai gave her the Fire Lord title instead of allowing her to come with him to destroy the Earth Kingdom. As messed up as it is, destroying the Earth Kingdom was Azula’s idea of father-daughter bonding time. At her core, what Azula craved the most was real unconditional love, not power.

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cannot stop thinking about how good the fabrication of consent in squid game was… like yeah, the participants consent! over and over, from agreeing to the slapping game to ringing up the number of their own accord to meeting at the location to signing a separate sheet once more upon arrival… they can even disband the game if the majority decrees it. but this is all performative. because of course they’ll agree - of course they’ll come back.

the second episode is even all about addressing this ‘consent’, and that potential audience superiority: “so why don’t they just leave???? if they can??? why did they even do all this to start with?? it’s so extreme, to do all that just for money, i would never”

because, the show says, look at what they’re returning to. look at the life that’s offered as their alternative. debt up to their ears, money-brokers beating them up, poverty at its worst. do you see? do you see how yeah, joining that game is optional, but it’s optional in the sense of choosing to be stabbed or shot: theres consent, but not actual desire. that theres agreement, but under exploitation. there’s a reason only poor people are chosen to compete and it’s so obvious but i fucking love how the show handles it and addresses any audience superiority anyway

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Do you mind expending on your headcanon of Azula being fundamentally a good person?

It's a new perspective I hadn't considered yet.

The thing with Azula is that the perspective of her as a bad person is largely a result of protagonist-centered morality. From the perspective of the Gaang she’s a villain, and therefor she’s presented to the audience as a bad person.

Except if you stop viewing her as The Antagonist, and instead just view her as a teenager raised in an environment of extreme propaganda and parental abuse, she stops being a villain and starts being a person trying her best to do the right thing. She just has been raised with a warped idea of what “the right thing” is. 

She believes that serving the Fire Lord, and by extension the Fire Nation, is fundamentally moral. She’s a dyed-in-the-wool patriot. We as the audience know that the Fire Nation is on the wrong side of this conflict, but then people take that a step further and decide that any actions taken in support of the Fire Nation are wrong (at least, when Azula does them). 

But if you reject the idea that supporting the Fire Nation means someone must be fundamentally evil (which is necessary to accept the redemption of Iroh and Zuko) then there really isn’t a whole lot of reason to think Azula is a bad person. She fights the Gaang, but it’s a war and they’re the enemy. She conquers Ba Sing Se, but it’s a war and she does it without bloodshed. She almost kills Aang, but it’s a war and he’s a walking WMD on a mission to kill her father. 

Azula can certainly be mean, but so can Zuko, and nobody suggests that he’s fundamentally a terrible person. There’s absolutely no reason to think Azula wouldn’t change her behavior if given the kind of mentorship that Zuko got.  

And none of this even gets into the fact that she’s raised by an abusive father, or the psychological impacts of being a child soldier, both of which make it even harder to look at Azula’s actions and conclude that she’s fundamentally a bad person. Not to mention the huge issue with declaring a fourteen-year-old to be irredeemably evil. Nobody is finished developing and maturing at age fourteen. If Iroh can have a redemption as a fully-grown adult and former warmongering general, then surely we can accept that a kid is capable of growth.

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A lot of “you’s” and a lot of “he’s” in here. A lot of shifting the blame onto his child with the language he uses, both in the most recent flashbacks and in previous ones.

Obviously, there’s a reason Endeavor does this, whether consciously or not – he’s distancing the blame from himself by placing that burden on Touya. 

If only Touya didn’t have a defective quirk, Touya could’ve “smashed the ugliness in [his] heart” and made his father’s dream come true. If only Touya wasn’t born with his mother’s constitution, Endeavor wouldn’t have had to create more kids to find a new successor. If only Touya understood that he had to stop using his quirk, even though he was created solely to become a hero, but since that can’t happen now he has to look elsewhere for meaning in his existence?

As reprehensible as it is, it makes sense that Endeavor does this to justify his own actions. My main issue is that with the framing and prioritizing of his viewpoint, it runs the risk of readers inferring that Touya is to blame.

To be fair, everything in the chapter aside from Endeavor’s words show that he’s wrong and at fault, so it only takes a minimum level of critical thinking skills to see this. A doctors advises him to stop recklessly engineering his children, since it’s taboo and potentially dangerous to the child, but he has Natsuo and Shouto in spite of this. Rei expresses her reservations, since Touya has already caught on to what he’s doing and it doesn’t seem like she’s enthused to have more children, either. He disregards her concern and pressures her into it, anyway.

And it doesn’t matter what he said to Touya or how caring it sounded when all of his actions directly contradict this. If he cared for Touya, why not spend his free time with him, even if they can’t train anymore? Because he spent time with Touya not to bond with him as a son, but to train him as his legacy. If he was concerned for Touya’s safety, why did he have 2 more children, knowing they could be born with the same detrimental quirks? Because it was never to protect Touya, it was to replace the child who was supposed to be his successor.

Everything Endeavor did as a father taught Touya that he was not good enough and thus he was not worthy of his father’s attention. His language places the burden of that on his son and that’s how he internalized it a as a child. Telling Touya to stop without providing the unconditional love he’s vying for is useless and shows a blatant lack of awareness for his child’s needs. Endeavor created an environment where he pays attention to his kids based on their ability to be a hero that could surpass All Might – no amount of talk was going to convince Touya to cease his self-harming behavior unless Endeavor changed his behavior as a parent first.

Now compare the more recent flashbacks to the last one listed above, which is from Shouto’s perspective. There’s no denying the way Endeavor treats his children as objects for his own gain is wrong when he makes this remark about Touya while he’s literally beating down his five-year-old. And he does this for the same reason he abandoned his firstborn. The point of this scene is to show that Endeavor holds his ambition above all else — even his family.

And there’s no issue per se with giving nuance to his character. He should have regrets and he should be remorseful for what he’s done, but that doesn’t automatically mean he’s deserving of forgiveness or sympathy. 

The problem is when this “nuance” is prioritized above the not-so-subtle and far more important suffering that his victims endured, and are still enduring, particularly in the case of Dabi. And it shouldn’t be obscuring the unequivocal truth here, which is this: Touya’s self-harming tendencies and inability to regulate his emotions as a child doesn’t negate the fact that he was neglected to the point of self-harm and his father is as culpable in that as he would be if he had burned his son with his own flames.