Btw Iâm not sure if I was supposed to find Suyin Beifong as terrible as I did. It wasnât because she was coded more feminine than her sister (that part was awesome), or even because of her past. Itâs just the rhetoric she used against Lin was a huge red flag for me. In real life, Iâm not okay with people who wrong someone, then mock them for being bitter or still not being over it - you canât blame someone for not moving on if you havenât apologized. Scratch that, you canât blame someone for not moving on even if you apologized, the choice to forgive or not always belongs to the wronged party. Su subtly and elegantly pulls the âhaha you are a loser for remembering how I hurt youâ card. And this behavior doesnât mean someone is necessarily hurtful or abusive, but it does mean that they are not above being petty assholes. (And just after reconciling with Lin and regaining her trust, Su publicly agrees with her about not letting the Avatar track Aiwei, just so she can go behind her back and send her out anyway - to me that means she didnât grow as much as she thinks she did.)
Also, Su either has the worst luck in history, or she never learned to be a better judge of character than she was as a teenager. She hung out with petty criminals as a young girl, and after she reformed and founded a city and find a nice man to marry, she still managed to put her trust into a man who was working for the Red Lotus all along. Aiwei was her second-in-command for years, and based on how she investigated the attack on Korra, she relied on his thruth-seeing ability to run the Zaofu justice system. The audience knows she made the right choice by harboring Varrick, but heâs still an escaped criminal who kidnapped politicians, organized acts of terrorism, stole ships and tried to incite a war that he could then sell weapons for. And then her eldest son ran off with her favorite protĂ©gĂ©e, and they became well-intentioned but terrifying (and deliberately Nazi-like) military dictators. Suâs track record sucks, is all Iâm saying. Sheâs not a bad character, not a bad person, but her grace and serenity are definitely a front for someone who still doesnât know what the fuck she is doing.
