Why The Beach is the episode with the most interesting take on Azula’s character:
The first reason why I think so is because it’s the episode that finally humanizes her for good. Sounds funny since I just acknowledged she’s probably the instigator of a house-trashing, but I actually mean she was humanized by everything that happens beforehand.
So far, we’ve seen Azula constantly in control of everything. Whatever she wants, she gets. We’ve seen Azula on a mission, with goals in mind, being conniving and clever, but what haven’t we seen? Azula WITHOUT A MISSION. Azula with no goals in mind, no traitors to capture, no city to conquer. And what does Azula do when she has none of those things?
1. Takes her brother and friends on a trip to Ember Island.
2. Kicks down the sand castle of a pair of kids because SHE wants that spot in the beach, HAHA! (does it make me a bad person if I laughed at that scene? Okay don’t answer that…)
3. Sits around waiting for attention that won’t come, gets bored because there’s seemingly nothing to do until she finds a distraction: a Kuai Ball game! Which ends with:
Yep. When she’s bored she likes to find small battles and gain smaller victories than those she’d gained back in Book 2, but victories nonetheless :’D
In short, my point is: Azula doesn’t know how to have what anyone would call NORMAL fun. The mere idea is totally foreign to her. She will tear down castles and seize victories in small ways even in something like a ballgame. That’s Azula for you.
And as you can see, the same doesn’t apply to the others. Ty Lee attracts guys with ease, so she makes new friends quickly, Mai and Zuko are happily together (until he drops ice cream on her leg and tries to give her a seashell she thinks is dumb, oops). Azula, though? She’s at a loss. She’s alone. She came to this beach with her friends and brother, and ends up sitting by herself until she demands they join her for the Kuai Ball game.
That sets up a new theme, and sets up the tone or the entire episode: Azula wants to be able to attract guys and people the way Ty Lee does. She wants to have a relationship like the one Mai and Zuko have. She doesn’t understand why she doesn’t have those things and her friends do.
So this results in her making her way into Chan’s party, but doing so without revealing who she is. Without telling him how disrespectful he and his friend were by treating Zuko and her as they did. She doesn’t want him to know who she is because she’s as good as carrying out an experiment, which she states in the next scene: “But, for once, I just wanted to see how people would treat us if they didn’t know who we were.”
Azula wants to try her luck at making relationships without using her title to get away with it, but there’s also a factor that needs to be taken into account here: she’s not sure if people will like her if they don’t know who she is.
What this directly translates into: she fears that the people around her right now like her (if they do at all) only because she’s the Princess.
Zuko is her brother and he’s constantly antagonistic towards her (Azula is mean enough to him, true, but even then she shows certain signs of kindness to him that he NEVER reciprocates in the show), Ty Lee and Mai must have known her as the Fire Nation Princess first, as Azula later. So this episode marks the start of the doubts, the uncertainty about who she is and what she looks like in other people’s eyes: do these three really care about her for who she is? Or is it just her title that keeps them around her?
The idea that they only ever feared her would have meant her relationships with them are not genuine. And as I pointed out, none of her three companions was spending time with her and left her alone in the sand: from Azula’s point of view, they’re choosing to be by themselves (Mai and Zuko) or meeting new people (Ty Lee) over spending time with the very person who brought them to this trip!
So really, the signs are all over the place, and I seriously doubt Azula didn’t notice them. In fact, I think those signs are the very reason why she starts to wonder if she can make friends or even find a love interest without revealing who she is. This is experiment came both from second-guessing her current relationships and from genuine interest in discovering if she was likeable as she is or not. This also shows how deeply her loneliness was cutting at her in these stages of the show. The idea that she’d try to discover if people can like her for who she is, rather than for her position in the world, is a double-edged sword because of what it could reveal about her current friends.
I don’t like it when people erase this aspect of the episode because it’s basically erasing a part of Azula’s personality and character depth. It takes away her awareness of her imperfections, the realization that she has shortcomings that her father won’t care about, but they’re shortcomings that bother her regardless.
And this works with her breakdown, because she’d think her friends are still her friends, despite she’d suspect they’re mostly with her because of her title and not because they care about her. Because she’s always going to be Princess Azula, so if they’re just with her over that, she still gets to keep her friends nearby anyways. even if their friendship may not be as idealistic and sincere as she might have hoped it was.
When the certainty that they were her friends is pulled away from her, like a rug yanked from underneath her very feet, she loses her center and doesn’t understand what she did wrong. Being a Princess should have guaranteed that she’d keep her friends, right? It didn’t. And being herself certainly didn’t work either. In the end, Azula winds up alone because, as she had dreaded, none of the people she counted as her friends want to be around her for real. In the end, who’s to say they wouldn’t have acted like Chan if they hadn’t known she was the Princess? They probably would have recoiled from her since the very first moment all the same. And I have no doubt that’s one of the scars that cuts the deepest with the betrayal of Mai and Ty Lee: the realization that they would have acted just as Chan did if only her title hadn’t prevented that in the first place.
But back to the topic in question: her flirting with Chan is a genuine attempt of Azula’s to be likeable, nice… at least, that’s what she’s trying to be, the problem is she’s not very good at it :’D this is Azula out of her depth, making efforts to appeal to someone but for reasons unknown to her, it’s not working!
This of course results in her lashing out at Ty Lee, jealous that Ty Lee is successful in what she’s failing at “Come on, Ty Lee. You can’t be this ignorant. Those boys only like you because you make it easy for them. You’re not a challenge. You’re a tease. It’s not like they actually about you.” Azula’s apology here is genuine, but what a lot of people intentionally misplace is the object of her jealousy. Granted I can’t dictate what each person will headcanon, as I already said, but I think if Azula’s jealousy was OVER Ty Lee, she’d storm her way towards the guys around her and chase them away from her without a problem. She was just shown tearing down a sand castle to get the spot in the beach she wanted: would she mind Ty Lee’s feelings, or the feelings of the guys around her, if she wanted Ty Lee for herself? I think the evident answer is “no”, but I know the popular fandom theory says “yes”… can’t say I get along with most of the fandom’s popular theories anyways, tbh.
In any case, Azula wants help. In fact, she needs it. Ty Lee does what she can, we see more of Azula’s social ineptitude as she laughs crazily and everyone looks at her (poor dear xD). But in the end she does all Ty Lee advised her, despite knowing it sounds shallow and stupid, all for the sake of figuring out if this good-looking guy could be interested in her. Thing is, shallow and stupid is just not Azula, at all. She was happy to try out if that would work, and heck, it got her a kiss, so being shallow and stupid seems to do the trick decently! But that’s not who Azula is. And that’s why, I think, the next part of the scene changes the mood completely: Azula leaves behind the shallow stupidity and tries to be her badass, ruthless, Princess conqueror self before the guy she likes!
… Which results in Chan running away. As we know.
Azula didn’t seem extremely upset by this, but the point is, her experiment has backfired completely. It did not pay off, and in fact, it confirmed what she dreaded: she can’t attract people while being who she really is. If she acts like an idiot, sure, that’s going to pay off! But when she’s herself? Nope.
The scene in the fireplace didn’t come out of nowhere. Azula’s confession that her mother thought she was a monster? Maybe it’s not something that’s crossing her mind 24/7 ever since she first gathered that from her mother’s attitude, or since Ursa said she was a monster (whether Azula inferred it or Ursa really said it, again, is subject of headcanons). But it’s something latent, something that torments her, probably something that keeps her up some nights. Is she really a monster? Despite her constant striving for perfection, is she a monster?
When she sees her brother has a relationship with a girl who loved him since they were children, who remained loyal to him to that day, she thinks she must be one. She has no such love interest, nobody who will sit tight and wait for her for years. When she sees Ty Lee attracts men and friends with ease while she can’t do the same, she thinks she must be one. Ty Lee has to get VIOLENT with guys to send them away, while guys literally run away from Azula upon the smallest glimpse of who she really is. Tbh, all people, pretty much, run away from Azula: Mai and Ty Lee sacrificed their friendship with her in a heartbeat, choosing Zuko and prison over her without a second thought. Zuko leaves to join the Avatar, becomes a genuine enemy of hers with that decision. Her father takes off to the Earth Kingdom and leaves her behind. She banishes everyone who works for her, and every single one of them leaves without a hitch. Her mother left ages ago, too. Her uncle doesn’t seem to give a damn about her, from what we’ve seen even during her childhood.
The thing is, she sees everyone leaves her, but they don’t leave her brother. Mai and Ty Lee remain friends, too, and eventually make new friends and relationships with relative ease. There’s even people in the comics, like Ukano, who are utterly loyal to Ozai. But to her? Is there ANYONE who cares so much about her that they’d face prison for her sake? That they’d start revolts and try to dethrone a king for her? Anyone who cares enough to teach her better ways than those she’s known, so she can finally have real, sincere, lasting relationships?
Canon-wise… the answer is simply no. And that’s heartbreaking, because that’s why Azula thinks she must be a monster.
The Beach can be seen as two things: humorous and funny, since you get to see the Fire Nation group are basically social inepts, or heartbreaking to no end, because throughout the entire episode, Azula tries to see if maybe she’s not the monster she thought she was. But what does she say at the fireplace?
But basically… simplifying The Beach and taking away its importance for Azula’s character arc is something I can’t really understand. As her fan, this episode stands out for me beyond all others because of the insight it gives about how complex she really is. The Beach does a lot of great things for her character, but two of them stand out for me: it establishes that she accepts she’s a monster, but it also establishes she really doesn’t want to be one.
“My own mother thought I was a monster. SHE WAS RIGHT, of course, but it still hurt.”
The Beach is amazing, but at the same time heart-wrenching, because Azula simply decides to embrace that she’s a monster after the events of the episode. She’s done trying to fight what she’s assumed is her true nature: her mother must have thought she was a monster for a reason, and after that day, she probably believes she’s never going to be able to prove her wrong. Because she thinks Ursa must have been right after all.
This episode establishes the internal struggles Azula is going through: her loneliness (which she thinks is what she gets for being a monster), how deeply scarred she is by whatever her mother did or said to imply she thought Azula was a monster, and the realization that she cannot, for the life of her, be like any of her friends. She can’t get guys easily like Ty Lee. She can’t be in a relationship like Mai and Zuko. So she might as well just stop trying and embrace what she is, right? Surely it can’t be that bad to be a monster, since it makes her successful as she is, and it makes Ozai proud of her…
Anyhow, this is my take on this episode, and why I consider it such a key element to Azula’s character. Why do I say it humanizes her, when the conclusion is that she accepts being a monster?
Because the sole fact that she tried to prove her fears wrong, to ascertain that her friendships were deeper than they actually were, was all in hopes to say her mother was wrong. What she really wanted was to prove she wasn’t a monster because, ultimately, she DOESN’T want to be one.
And to tell the truth, this episode proved to me that she isn’t one. She did her own set of wicked things, no doubt… but what I got from it is that she has no idea how to be normal because she’s been submerged in the very toxic environment of the Fire Nation Royal Family since the day she was born. While I consider this to be such an Azula-centric episode, Zuko as well acts out several times in the episode, trying too hard for Mai’s sake when she didn’t need/want him to, and then getting rabidly jealous over the fact that Mai was chatting with another guy. Zuko gets kicked out of a party, ZUKO. Azula didn’t get kicked out, he did. Why? Because Zuko as well has had such a messed up life, such messy upbringing, that he can’t act like a normal person just as much as Azula can’t.
And no, this isn’t supposed to be Zuko meta? But I’d like to point out that his relationship with Mai, while something I think Azula envies, is soooo very distant from perfect. Azula wants to have that closeness with someone, the way Zuko has it with Mai, but think about it: out of the canon Maiko scenes in the show, at least on five Zuko gets blown off by Mai because he’s being too angsty (The Awakening), too shallow (gives her a seashell and she doesn’t like it because she just doesn’t like that kind of junk), too sweet + awkward (brings her ice cream, drops it on her leg), too jealous (snaps because Ruon Jian was talking to Mai), too selfish (he left her a letter and just took off to become a traitor to the Fire Nation), you name it. To them, this relationship is FAR from perfect. The vast majority of their interactions include or end up in arguments.
And why is that? Well… you can blame it on either of them, you can even blame it on both, but I’m trying to focus on Zuko here: Zuko, as good-hearted as he may be presented, has no real idea how to carry out this relationship. Add to this that pleasing Mai is harder than pleasing anyone else… Anyways, my point is that Zuko as well has some social shortcomings that make him act out, react excessively, even act with cruelty (I mean, that spiteful “circus freak” he throws at Ty Lee, which Azula finds hilarious, was spoken with the very obvious intent to hurt her), and I have next to no doubts that it comes from the same thing Azula’s own social ineptitude comes from.
In any case, Zuko had the title of “failure” hanging over his head. His arc, in a sense, manages to prove that he was no failure, and so he becomes the most powerful man of his nation, changing the world with the Avatar’s help. Azula’s? She has “monster” hanging over her head, and the show only drives the nail deeper into the wall until it shatters. Unlike Zuko, who gets to prove everyone that they were wrong about him, Azula gets no such opportunity. Still believing she’s a monster, still believing she can’t grow out of that, Azula needs to be proven wrong about how she’s seen herself all along. She needs to know she’s not a monster. But until she actually grows to believe that, what The Beach brought up won’t go away. Her wounds are still open, and they need healing. Only time will tell if she’ll be healed at all.
Proposition: when one person has to cover a shift that is normally done by two people, they get paid double. This is both to compensate them for working twice as hard, and to remove any temptation for management to think “hey, actually that wasn’t so bad, maybe we should do this more often.”
i like korras wintery look so i kept the baggy pants and fur !! her spider symbol is raava ofc and her webs are water based so that means she can freeze them too 👀👀
asamis outfit is more sleek/skintight to contrast w korras !! her spider symbol is gear shaped and she can electrocute her webs like her equalist gloves ! ALSO IDK HOW asami fits all her thicc gorgeous hair into her mask but she just can LOL
