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Zuko - Blog Posts
So I haven't watched A:TLA in a hot minute (I mean years) so to realize that we were deprived of Zuko & Toph content more than I thought we were brakes my heart bc you can't tell me they wouldn't be best friends/adopted siblings!!
I'm praying we get more of the duo in the adult series (I don't even know if it's actually happening)
Azula always lies.
saw this post by @heavenly-dusk and kinda went insane thinking abt it so i drew it, i hope you don’t mind!
there are a lot of bad takes in the atla fandom (like, atla fandom may as well be a bad take generator) but something that has really been pissing me off lately is the assumption that you can categorize the fire nation royal family into good guys and bad guys. first of all, obviously, they're all bad guys. they are imperialists. but the idea that "sozin ozai azula bad" and "iroh lu ten ursa zuko azulon(?!) good" is actually insane.
lu ten died attempting to conquer the earth kingdom. lu ten was there because his father, iroh, was leading the siege. ursa laughed when iroh joked about burning ba sing se to the ground. zuko laughed too, mirroring his dear mother who taught him about the wonders of imperialism. and the fact that some people think that azulon was a good guy because he favored iroh is crazy. he favored iroh because iroh was the better imperialist, was more charming and tactically savvy as he bent the world to his will. people who think that azulon didn't like ozai because ozai was cruel literally have it backwards. ozai was cruel because azulon didn't like him. sozin shaped azulon, and azulon shaped iroh and ozai. azulon reigned for most of the war, and he was responsible for decimating the southern water tribe and colonizing the earth kingdom.
iroh only realizes the error of his ways well into middle age, after spending a majority of his life colonizing the world. he only stops to reconsider once he experiences the adverse effects of war for himself through the loss of his son. likewise, zuko can only gain empathy for the victims of the war by being one himself, as a refugee in the earth kingdom, and bonding with people who have been hurt by the fire nation. azula doesn't get that chance. ozai doesn't get that chance. azulon, lu ten, and ursa are dead, so they will never get that chance. but it's not like there is some ontological moral divide separating azula from zuko. zuko was a sensitive child whereas azula was better at embodying fire nation values of power and cunning. zuko was punished for his outbursts whereas azula knew how to keep her mouth shut. therefore, zuko experienced circumstances that led him to disavow fire nation imperialism.
but that doesn't mean that azula is ontologically evil. azula was the iroh of her generation to zuko's ozai, and iroh (eventually) disavowed conquest as well. there is no inherent divide between good and bad, monster and human. ursa was a warm and loving mother to zuko, just as iroh was a warm and loving father to lu ten, but they both laughed at others' suffering. their values were shaped by their circumstances and experiences. their ideologies do not make them less human, or less capable of change, just as their interpersonal behaviors do not negate their abhorrent ideologies.
Zuko having a connection to the spirit world but instead of it being something deep and profound, it’s just because he spent three years pre-finding the avatar running towards the first weird magical shit he saw.
See Zuko giving Mai a shell and getting rejected is stupid bc that was rlly cute of him and honestly I just think his love language is literally “anything that doesn’t involve words”. On the other hand, if Zuko gave a shell to Sokka, Sokka would appreciate the hell out of it and I think that makes them a lot more compatible
I love this
obligatory atla reference
although toph never really did get to go on her life changing field trip with zuko
Redesigned my Zukitty also WARRIOR NAME DROP‼️‼️‼️
When Seapaw returned to Shadowclan after the siege of Windclan, his father Hawkstar named him Seascorch to honour his loyalty to the clan of Fire. He didn’t know why, but every time someone called him by his new name, he felt a wave of guilt. That was until his confrontation with Hawkstar, when he finally knew why - that name carried the weight of his wrongs. He ran from Shadowclan to follow his destiny and help the Avatar stop Shadowclan’s reign of terror, and when he did, he renamed himself Seahaze (the name his uncle had always suggested) to atone for what he’d done. :33333
WOW lore drop????? COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH
“You will learn respect, and suffering will be your teacher.”
Another crossover au post but this time I’ve given them clan names
At the current point, Zuko is known as Seapaw (at 7 moons old), and Ozai is known as Hawkstar (like 60 moons??? Idk)
I’ll post some refs soon, I have a whole sketchbook worth of crossover content now so I’m gonna slowly translate a bunch to digital and post it lol
Basically their dynamic before S3 E16
Also they’re cats now bc I can’t draw people for the life of me :( this is a wc crossover now
When Zuko apologized to uncle Iroh in the tent cause he was so ashamed of his actions and what he’d done to the only person who unconditionally believed in his ability to do good >>>>>
THEY GOT MY BOY
literally just opened pinterest and
what
is
THAT????
okay foinee.
because someone revived my zk inanimate+animal kingdom au works on twitter 🌱
and here’s Zuko as well :^)
☆ art print
me after putting all of my effort into shitposts
zuko with a baby Druk, i'm probably gonna digitize this later
This quote specifically from Aaron Ehasz did smth to my psyche.
Have you noted that no one from Azula's family was shown to express love and affection towards her?
That is mostly true. Ozai's affection is clearly conditional (and full on manipulation at worse, like we see in the finale), Ursa canonically favors Zuko to the point that we never see her spending any alone time with Azula like she did with Zuko, and while Iroh gave her a toy like he did to Zuko the toy in question was so OBVIOUSLY wrong for a kid like Azula that it's comical AND show's he did not really know his niece at all.
But there is a constant exception.
Zuko's relationship with Azula is complicated. He clearly admires her strength and power, but he hates how she uses it. She lied to him many times, was seen apparently cheering Ozai on during the Agni Kai, tried to have him imprisoned and even said she'd celebrate being an only child - and then allows him to come home as a hero after Ba Sing Se, even though SHE had the control of the Dai Li and was not yet aware Aang could have survived, meaning she had nothing to gain from it.
And when she lets him know that if he's caught talking to Iroh people might think he is a traitor too, and explicitly says "Believe it or not, I'm actually looking out for you" Zuko drops his innitial suspicion that she wanted something and that's why she was helping him.
On The Beach, he just follows her when she say their old family home is depressing and they shouldn't waste their time there. When she's asking him who she is angry at, she mentions herself and Zuko explicitly says that is not the case.
He doesn't trust her and know she has a tendency to mock or full on lie to him... yet when he wants to know about Fire Lord Sozin he asks her about it, and lets it slide when she mocks him by saying he should make sure the royal painter got his good side - for a character as quick to anger as Zuko, that is a big deal. In Nightmares and Daydreams he also goes to her to find out if he'll be allowed at the war meeting.
More importantly:
1 - Iroh's infamous "She's crazy and needs to go down" line was only said because ZUKO, without anyone putting that idea in his head before, suddenly went "I know what you're going to say. She's my sister and I should be trying to get along with her"
2 - Zuko only jumped into the fight in Ba Sing Se when Azula was being cornered by Aang and Katara.
3 - Zuko looked genuinely shocked and even distressed when she was falling off that cliff. He just sounded so shaken saying "She's... not gonna make it..."
4 - In the writer's own words, Zuko felt no hate but only pity when seeing her breakdown. Katara tried to comfort him because, canonically, even though Zuko and Azula are enemies, this was never what he wanted because he still sees her as family. That's why the Last Agni Kai's music is not the epic you'd expect from a battle, but a tragic one.
5 - Aaron Ehasz, the lead writter for the show, probably the person with the most influence after Bryke, has REPEATEDLY said that he always felt Azula should have gotten a redemption arc, Zuko being an Iroh figure to give her advice and be the only one still by her side when all else was seemingly lost to her forever.
Even the comics (most of which I HATE, mainly because Azula's storyline checks nearly every box for "the mentally ill are inherently evil/less human, so it's fine if literally every other person on the planet mistreats them") didn't fully abandon their complex dynamic.
Zuko is not a perfect sibling, and for a long chunk of the story he seemed too focused on his own issues for Azula to ever be a factor in his mind (aside from the moments in which she was a potential/explict threat), but he DOES still feel a sense of obligation towards her, to the point that it made him do something no one else in their family had done before or since - actually look at Azula. Not the prodigious daughter/perfect weapon, or the problem child that is difficult to handle, or the pontentially deadly enemy that was in the way, but Azula.
His 14-year-old sister that got on his nerves a lot, was far from the kindest person alive, and that he had a ton of issues with, but that he could never fully hate or even be indifferent to. Because she's family. Because he remembers a happier time in which the gap between them didn't seem so big. Because if things had been slightly different he could have been her. Because he went from wanting to be her to seeing just how miserable her life ended up being - especially compared to the one he now had - and feeling deeply sorry for her.
Now if you guys excuse me, I'm gonna go cry in the corner. Have some wholesome/bittersweet fanart if you wanna cry too.
forever obsessed with this being an official illustration
Zuko as a Ballet Dancer Pt.2 Black Swan 🦢
