My name is Emma and this is a multifandom mess. You've been warned. Stucky, Sebastian Stan, Malec, Shadowhunters, Tyler Hoechlin, Sterek, Friends, Parks, Office, Brooklyn 9-9, Destiel, Misha Collins, Merlin, Merthur..
I have chosen to put this essay under a cut, because it got really really long. Also, below lies frank discussion of child abuse and its effects. Reader discretion is advised.
I love Zuko Alone. This episode is a masterclass in writing flashbacks and weaving them into the narrative. None of these flashbacks are flashy, or too on the nose, and we have a good reason for Zuko to be flashing back. He is alone and failing to handle the present, and getting drawn into his memories of the past. And each of the flashbacks is mundane, and realistic, and builds on the one before, and paints a subtle and tragic picture of a deeply abusive family.
The flashbacks never feel like an exposition dump, or like a cheat to let us know things we otherwise couldn't, and yet it's exactly there to give us an intimate picture of the Fire Nation Royal Family, and just how completely screwed up it was, and how this will contextualize both Zuko and Azula's actions throughout the rest of the show. Almost everything we know about the Fire Nation Royal Family, we learn right here. It's efficient, engaging storytelling, and it's done with tremendous subtlety.
As with all subtle storytelling, it relies on the audience to put the pieces together for themselves, which is both beautiful, and deeply frustrating. Deeply frustrating, because a story that requires an audience to put the pieces together for themselves is always going to have some members of that audience decide to ram the pieces together in the way they want to. I have seen some absolutely terrible takes on this episode, and I have talked about them at length. For this essay, I want to stay away from what I think this episode doesn't show, and talk about what it does, specifically what a specific scene, a favorite hobby horse for people writing terrible takes, the scene where Zuko and Azula receive gifts from Iroh, who is besieging Ba Sing Se, shows us.
The scene opens with Ursa and her children reading a letter from Iroh, He talks about the magnificence of Ba Sing Se, and talks about the possibility of burning it to the ground. We see a smoking hole in Ba Sing Se's outer wall, and Iroh's voiceover, reading the letter laughs. As the scene comes into focus on Ursa and the children, they are laughing too.
This scene is a gut punch, set as it is in an episode where Zuko wanders through a war torn Earth Kingdom, and because of how it contrasts with the Iroh we have met so far over the course of the series, an Iroh who would never laugh at burning a city to the ground.
After this, Ursa reads out the gifts Iroh has sent to his niece and nephew. Zuko gets a knife, which he likes, and Azula gets a doll, which she does not. After making a face, Azula says cheerfully:
"If Uncle doesn't make it back from war, then Dad will be next in line for Fire Lord, wouldn't he?"
After both her mother and brother express horror at this idea, she finishes with:
"I still think our dad would make a much better Fire Lord than His Royal Tea-Loving Kookiness."
It's only after this exchange that she sets the doll on fire, an explicit rejection not only of her uncle's gift, but of her uncle himself.
I've talked before about how the doll and knife reinforce the picture this scene give of how Iroh used to view the Fire Nation imperial project: [Link], but looking at this scene, especially the gifts and Zuko and Azula's reactions, solely for what it tells us about Iroh, misses a lot of the substance of this scene.
Most obviously, this scene tells us about how Zuko and Azula see their uncle, Zuko affectionately, and Azula with scorn, something that will have profound effects on how they will respond to Iroh in the future, including how much or how little he can influence them: [Link]. But it also, more subtly, expresses volumes about Azula's relationship with her father. Because those are not Azula's own opinions that Azula is voicing here. Those are Ozai's.
How do we know those are Ozai's opinions? There are two ways. The first is that Azula has absolutely no reason to come up with this opinion on her own. Not only is this not the kind of opinion any child, no matter how clever or ruthless, would come up with on her own, but this scene starts by showing us Iroh at the height of his glory, the Dragon of the West, on the cusp of conquering Ba Sing Se. There is probably no one in the entire world, other than his jealous little brother, who sees Iroh as his royal tea-loving kookiness. Even Ozai's cronies probably have a very different take on Iroh than that of Ozai, recognizing him as powerful and dangerous. But Ozai, the disfavored younger son to his father's perfect Prince Iroh, has a lot of jealousy toward his brother, and a lot of resentment. He has a strong psychological incentive to be saying to himself, "Iroh isn't even that great anyway, he's just a kooky tea lover. It would be better for everyone if I were the heir."
Ozai as the source for Azula's view of her uncle is backed up when later in the episode, Ozai makes a similar, if less obviously nasty, argument to his father as to why he should be the heir to the throne in place of his older brother.
Just as a side note, Azulon's reaction to this argument does a fabulous job of implying years of abuse on Azulon's part toward Ozai, showing that he learned how to be an abusive father who plays favorites from his own father, and that he had been the unfavorite. This episode does so much heavy lifting with regards to characterizing the Fire Nation royal family.
But anyway, when Ozai makes this argument, it clues the audience in to where Azula got her opinions on Iroh, and tells us to expect to hear Ozai's words coming out of Azula's mouth. This is in fact actually a reenforcement of a moment in the first episode she is introduced, where she throws Ozai's opinion of Zuko in his face to hurt him after he has seen through her attempt to deceive him into becoming her captive. This allows the writers to characterize Ozai through Azula's words, without him needing to be onscreen.
But I want to talk about what this means for Azula, psychologically. Because along with the narrative utility of being able to use Azula to characterize Azula, this scene speaks volumes about Azula's relationship with her father, and what he's doing to her.
And it occurs to me that this is an extremely long time for me to get to the point. I don't care. This is all necessary background information. It's important to know how we know something.
One of the things that we see in this episode very clearly is that he is sharing these things with Azula that he is not sharing with Ursa or Zuko. This indicates two things, one, he is not willy nilly saying these things to anyone, two, he specifically chose Azula as the person with whom he wants to share his thoughts and feelings. He specifically chose a small child as his confidant. Adults who choose children as confidants and intimate companions do so because for some reason, adults are unavailable for the purpose. Sometimes this is because social or societal or family forces make it so that the adults seeking a companion can't get an adult companion, but sometimes adults are unavailable for the purpose because they are unsuitable, because what the adult wants in a companion and confidant is someone under their control. Ozai picked Azula because she was his child, and he had control both over her, and over her perceptions of him. She wasn't coming to the table with baggage, context that might help her understand what he was telling her, and he could fill her head with his own ideas in peace.
In short, as a child, Azula lacked the kind of perspective that would help her understand that the confidences Ozai was sharing with her we're based in resentment and insecurity, and that what he wanted from her was to reflect his own self aggrandizing lies back at him, to be his mirror, to give him reinforcement and validation. The important thing to understand here is that Ozai doesn't even completely believe his own bullshit, consciously he does but unconsciously, he is deeply deeply insecure and afraid that he is worthless. So he desperately craves somebody to reinforce the worldview he created, in which he is actually better than everybody else, and his brother is stupid and weird, and his father is a demented old man, and it would be better if Ozai were the ruler anyway. As time went by, this worldview gained new facets, about Ursa being not good enough for him, about Zuko being worthless, about the place of the Firelord and their moral right to absolute power, But ultimately all of it is a castle of air, built out of the lies Ozai told himself to mask his own insecurity, all of which he relied on Azula to parrot back to him, so that they would feel more real, and he wouldn't have to face his fears.
Ozai chose Azula because of a complicated cocktail of his ability to identify with her, and her receptiveness to his self-aggrandizement. For one reason or another, Ozai deemed Zuko unsuitable for the role of mirror. Because of his insecurities and self-absorption, Ozai picked the child who best reflected what he wanted to see about himself, and then used her awe of him, and her childish trust to puff himself up.
Ozai did this with no regard to Azula's mental wellbeing, or even really her physical safety. People like Ozai are intuitively able to judge who they can use, and what they can use them for. While they might consciously believe their own self-aggrandizing lies, they understand, at least on an unconscious level, who they can share those lies with, who will respond positively to them, and who they need to guard against. But while this knowledge is unconscious and intuitive, it is still learned, and Azula as a young child has not learned any of it yet. We actually see her repeating her father's dangerous worldview in front of people who are most certainly not receptive to it. Fortunately for her, her mother and brother are not inclined to go tattling to her grandfather about her treasonous words, but this incident does an excellent job of highlighting just how little Azula understands of the context of her father's worldview, and what other people's reactions are likely to be. Ozai sharing it with her puts her in danger.
This isn't surprising, given that we are shown several times throughout the series that Ozai does not care about Azula any more than he cares about Zuko. He does after all send her to war at fourteen years old, and discards her as soon as she is no longer useful to him. But it's important to remember that even when he is seemingly very close to his daughter, letting her into his confidence, and giving her lots of positive attention as a child, all of this is because of how it benefits him, and if it hurts his daughter, so be it. He doesn't really care.
Nothing comes of this danger. Ozai takes power soon after, and Azula is a clever, observant child, who quickly develops the same kind of intuitive understanding of who she can use, and who she can tell what to. But it's important to remember that this danger did exist and Ozai didn't care.
It's also important to remember that though this danger passed, the harm Ozai was doing to his daughter did not. What Ozai was looking for in Azula was someone who would absorb and reflect back his own self-serving worldview, and to ensure she continues to do that, to hold his lies as true, he has to control her and sabotage any chances she has to start building her own separate identity. He needs, in other words, to erode the borders between herself and him.
This phenomenon, in which the natural process of a child's identity development is inhibited so that they can better serve the emotional needs of an adult, is unfortunately very common, including with parents and caretakers far less destructive, uncaring, and cruel than Ozai, and even with very loving and well-meaning parents. Because of this, it's a fairly well studied phenomenon, and in which we can describe some of the characteristics of children who have gone through it. It's also a phenomenon that has a name. Several, in fact.
When I first entered this fandom over a decade ago in my Livejournal days when I first talked over what I saw in Azula in comments and private conversations with friends, the favorite term for this phenomenon, or at least the one that had most thoroughly permeated a popular layperson's understanding of the phenomenon, was emotional or covert incest. The idea was that the parents involved were treating their children as surrogate spouses and the term seemed especially useful because many of the effects of parental incest seem to line up well with the effects of this kind of sabotaging of a child's identity. This is probably because an adult molesting a child is by definition using a child to fulfill their sexual and usually also psychological needs, so the process is going to necessitate the same kind of eroding of psychological boundaries of identity.
The terms emotional and covert incest, extremely loaded as they are, fell out of fashion, when a new theory of it was popularized in lay circles, in which it was supposed that these adults are particularly immature and looking for a parent in their own child, and this was dubbed parentification, a term that has since gained a second meaning, to when a child finds themselves in the role of parent to another child, usually a younger sibling.
It's perhaps fitting that this is the picture of the phenomenon, and the language I had to talk about it, when I first started trying to tease out Azula's character, since at the time, it was common for particular fans of Azula to assert that Ozai must be molesting her, as a means of making her more sympathetic, and often, explicitly, as a way for Azula to outcompete Zuko in a suffering contest. I found this extremely annoying at the time, though in retrospect I like it better than what replaced it, (mostly accusations that Ursa, Iroh, Zuko, etc. abused Azula) because at least it credits the proper person with Azula's suffering, i.e. Ozai. I have always found it worth an eye-roll when people go looking for some hidden reason for why Azula, when, as I have been arguing since the first day I stepped into this fandom, what we see on screen of her relationship with Ozai and his treatment of her is more than enough to explain her behavior throughout the show, and her subsequent mental breakdown: [Link].
Now there is a widening understanding that the adult may have many motives, and many emotional needs, that they are using a child to fulfill. The important part is that they are using a child to fill emotional needs that the child is not equipped to handle, and they are eroding the borders of identity between themselves and the child. This phenomenon is now generally called enmeshment.
Children who are enmeshed in a parent or caregiver reflect what that parent or caregiver wants out of them, but common behaviors to exhibit are unexpectedly adult mannerisms, and seeming maturity, often coupled with and utter lack of experience with people their own age, and the social skills needed to interact with their peers. This is because the adult using them doesn't want to be constantly reminded of the fact that they are a child, and because they are too busy looking after the emotional needs of the adult using them, to practice socializing with their peers. They also are frequently obsessive perfectionists, focused on meeting the standards of the adult living through them, and are often painfully anxious, secretly very insecure, and lack a self-awareness of their own emotions, because they're too busy managing the emotions of the adult they are enmeshed with.
I don't know about you but that sounds a lot like Azula to me. Her adult mannerisms throughout the show mask her terrible social awkwardness with her peers and outside of a command structure until the episode "The Beach". She is introduced to us by asserting that: "almost [perfect] isn't good enough," and her deeply held insecurity, that she is unable to acknowledge to herself, is what leads to her mental breakdown.
The process of enmeshment in this case is shown mostly through implication, through the way Azula talks about her father, and the way Zuko talks about them both. This is to be expected, because Ozai just does not have all that much screen time, much less with Azula. But again, "Zuko Alone" gives us a scene in which Ozai performs some of the process for us. In the family audience with Firelord Azulon, Azula performs some impressive firebending before her grandfather. Ozai tells his father that she is a true prodigy, just like her grandfather.
The explicit implication that both Azulon in the story, and the audience are supposed to pick up on, is that to Ozai, Azula is a prodigy because of him, that her talent showcases his greatness. This ties her identity to his, and tells her that everything she is, is because of Ozai. And it shows she gets praise and affirmation when she does something useful to her father, something that makes him feel good. And this praise is structured in such a way that Ozai is also praising himself.
This ties Azula's identity to Ozai's. She is worthy because Ozai is worthy. She is special because Ozai is special. It's also, in the simplest terms, praise, and praise feels good. And Ozai makes himself a reliable supply of praise for Azula... so long as she keeps performing, keeps identifying herself with her father, and keeps making him feel good by proxy. This keeps her coming back for more, and deepens that identification further. This becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
The best thing an abuser or abusive system can do to maintain control over a victim, is to become simultaneously the source of their anxiety and pain, and their source of reassurance and comfort. You see this with individual abusers, as well as in larger groups, such as high control groups (also known as cults) and hate groups. By feeding Azula a steady diet of self-serving praise and affirmation, Ozai makes himself her source for reassurance, and by expecting Azula to manage his emotions, and feed him affirmation and confirmation of his worldview, he makes himself the source of her anxiety. So when he makes her anxious, she works all the harder to please him and manage his own anxieties, so that he will give her the praise and reassurance she so desperately needs.
What this does is put Azula on the emotional equivalent of a roller coaster. The highs of not only relief, but elation, when she successfully pleases her father are followed inevitably by the lows of anxiety and dread of having to do it again. But this is complicated further by the fact that because Ozai has tied Azula's identity to his so thoroughly, she can't ever admit to herself that she's afraid. If she acknowledges her fear, that means she has to face the danger she's in, face the fact that she might fail, that she isn't necessarily a perfect reflection of her father's glory, that she might not always be worthy in his eyes. She can't face that fact, both because being her father's perfect worthy daughter is entirely foundational to any sense of identity she has, and because her father has shown her through his treatment of Zuko what happens to children of his who aren't worthy. She is terrified, and can't ever admit it, especially not her herself.
I's impossible to overstate just how afraid Azula is, just how insecure she feels, because it's this fear and insecurity, which she cannot admit to herself that leads ultimately to her breakdown and psychotic episode in the finale.
So how does Azula cope with this? With the constant strain of it all? How does she hold back that fear that she can't possibly face? She spreads the pain. She finds herself two victims, who she can coerce into helping her maintain a sense of control.
People who abuse others don't do it because they are bad evil abusers. They abuse other people because it gets them something, often something psychological, often something the abuser desperately needs, and sees no other way to get it. This means that many abusers have incredibly sympathetic motivations. They are trying to assuage a terrible pain, or cope with a terrible fear. But none of that negates the damage they are doing to their victims, and that pain and fear doesn't give them the right to use somebody else to manage that fear and pain for them. Azula's own pain and fear arises out of her father's use of her to manage his own pain and fear, and in doing so, he "gifts" her both that pain and fear, and a means of managing it, by finding victims of her own.
We see this process play out in the first and second episode of Book Two. After Azula fails to capture her brother and uncle, she seeks out and establishes frankly brutal control over her two childhood victims, Mai and Ty Lee. As we will see later in Book Three, failing against Zuko hits very close to the core of Azula's hidden insecurities, so when Zuko and Iroh escape her, she looks for a way to reassure herself she is perfectly in control.
There is some complication to the abusive system Ozai has taught Azula to function within and to perpetuate herself. Ozai has more than one kind of victim. Azula is useful to him, because, as described above, she reflects his self-serving worldview back at him, while his other victims, his wife, brother, and son, serve a different purpose. They function as blame sinks, people whose perceived incompetence or malice serves as a justification when something goes wrong. This is how Iroh becomes his Royal Tea-Loving Kookiness, for example.
Ozai would have first developed his use of blame sinks as a way to deal with his father's constant favoring of Iroh. He didn't deserve to be treated the way he was being treated by his father,he was as good as Iroh .no he was better than Iroh. He was the better prince, the worthy prince, worthy of being Firelord. But if he was superior, why did he keep failing? Why indeed? It was because of his brother. His brother was lucky, and he doesn't deserve that luck, and he's holding Ozai down, and it's his fault no one can see Ozai's innate superiority. It's all Iroh's fault.
This doesn't of course hold up if you think about it from more than a second, but it doesn't have to. That's the point. The only person Ozai has to convince is himself. And of course, Azula, but for Azula, he imparts his views to her beginning when she is far too young to question them, and by the time she is old enough to have that kind of cognitive ability, they are already too deeply embedded in the way she views the world for her to even think they need to be considered.
Iroh is Ozai's first blame sink, and the one he patterns all his future blame sinks onto. This accounts for some of his more obviously stupid choices, as I argue here: [Link]. However, it also means we can use Ozai's treatment of Iroh, and one of his future blame sinks, Zuko, to draw some conclusions about how he treats the third of the blame sinks, Ursa. With both Zuko and Iroh, we hear Azula repeating her father's scornful pronouncements about them: His Royal Tea-Loving Kookiness, for example, or in this quote from Book Two, episode one, "The Avatar State:
"You know, Father blames Uncle for the loss of the North Pole, and he considers you a miserable failure for not finding the Avatar. Why would he want you back home, except to lock you up where you can no longer embarrass him?"
From this we can surmise that Ozai would speak similarly about Ursa. But for Ozai, Ursa is merely his unwanted former wife, while for Azula, Ursa is her mother. This leads to one of Ozai's most profound incidental cruelties with regards to his daughter.
When Azula was young, and Ursa was still around, Ozai's dismissal of his wife as unimportant and unworthy, served not only the psychological function all of Ozai's blame sinks did, but also helped separate Azula from her mother, thereby making it easier for Ozai to be the only shaper of his daughter's mind. However, after he banished Ursa, Ozai is hardly likely to let up on his scorn and denigration of Ursa. Perversely, the fact that she was responsible for putting him on the throne, would have made him even more vociferous in his resentment of her. For someone like Ozai, the fact that he owed his position to someone he considered so unworthy, and who shared the same opinion about him, would have been intolerable to think about, and so his resentment would grow, and with it, his attempts to verbally cut her down to size in front of his daughter.
Her daughter as well of course. The castigations of Ursa must have poured out of him and into their daughter's ears. She didn't understand his vision. She couldn't comprehend their greatness. She valued worthless things, like kindness and compassion, and worthless people like Zuko. She thought they were monsters. She was pathetic and unworthy of them.
Even if Ozai never used the words "we" or "us" with regards to how Ursa viewed him, Azula, so enmeshed in her father, and so completely identifying with him, would have heard them anyway. And so, without her mother there to contradict such an idea, it took root so deep into Azula, that it became simply a fact of the universe to her, that: "[her] own mother thought [she] was a monster."
Ozai doubtless didn't notice the pain he had caused his daughter, or that she had internalized this belief so thoroughly, but he also doubtless wouldn't have cared.
But if Ozai's choice of one of his blame sinks damaged Azula because she had an entirely different relationship to her, it was the choice of another of Ozai's blame sinks that would ultimately spell Azula's downfall: her brother. There are many and complex reasons for profound effects of this choice on Azula's psyche, and its contribution toward her eventual breakdown, much of which I discuss at length in my three pillars theory of Azula essay: [Link]. In brief, Ozai's use of Zuko in this way would have shown Azula that this was a role open to a child of Ozai's, which she might potentially fall into, that it was the price of failure in her father's eyes. This was a prospect that as discussed above, terrified Azula, and which she was far too scared of to even admit the prospect, or her fear of it, as a possibility.
The other reason for the fateful consequences for Azula or Zuko's status as blame sink, is that unlike her uncle or her mother, Azula could have power over her brother. Indeed, with Ozai's approval, Azula was able to wield considerable power over Zuko, to bully and belittle him, much as their father did: [Link]. Azula's tendency to parrot her father's views is on full display here, in her relationship with her brother. And because Ozai holds Azula up as perfect and worthy, in contrast to unworthy imperfect Zuko, Azula is none-too-subtly encouraged to use Zuko as her own blame sink. And boy does she need one, with the intense psychological pressure she is under to be perfect, both in her father's eyes and in her own. Having someone around on whom both she and her father can blame any and all imperfections, is really really useful to her. And if Ozai learned growing up that having his blame sink far away made it much easier to make up a version of them that was useful to him: [Link], Azula learned that having her and her father's mutual blame sink around, meant it was a lot easier to remind herself and her father how worthy she was in contrast to Zuko. So ultimately, if Ozai keeps banishing his blame sinks, Azula wants to keep hers close at hand.
After failing first to capture her brother, and then on several occasions, to capture the Avatar, something for which, by Azula's own admission, Ozai considers Zuko a "miserable failure", Azula needs not only her "friends", Mai and Ty Lee, and the affirmations and sense of control they give her, but also Zuko, to soak up their father's displeasure and her own insecurity. And to get him home, she lies to Ozai.
When Ozai finds out about this lie, he discards her. I think we can say it's not Azula's misjudgement or failure that causes Ozai to cast her aside, but the fact that she lied to him. She has become a threat.
And here is the last sting in the tail of Ozai's relationship with his daughter. This moment was inevitable from the beginning. Ozai was always going to throw Azula away. He cultivated a relationship with her initially, because as a young child, she didn't have the experience and context to see through the self-serving lies he told himself, and she could, through her belief of them, reinforce his fragile self image. But no matter how much damage he did to Azula's ability to build an independent identity for herself, she was still a separate person, and she was always going to grow up. And when she did so, she was always going to move from perfect little mirror of Ozai's greatness, to threat. And whatever individual event was going to be the catalyst, this change was always going to happen before Azula was ready for it, because Ozai was always going to discard her at the first stirrings of independence. And for Azula, thoroughly enmeshed in her father, this rejection by him was always going to shatter the foundations of her whole world.
now, how to get over the fact that arthur grabbed merlin by his neckerchief and pulled him so close that their noses almost touched, and merlin looked immediatly to arthur’s lips and did that face in the end?
Gilmore Girls 20th Anniversary Week
↳ Day 6: Favorite relationship
“It’s like it’s not even real to me. It’s like my life isn’t even real to me unless you’re there, and you’re in it, and I’m sharing it with you.”
pixelskylines
vaporwave
kianamaiart
titsay
izzy806
kaledo-art
