I always interpreted the reason why Ursa was harsher on Azula was in part because she was Ozais golden child, so she was trying to “balance” it out by being the parent that was proud of and encouraged Zuko and the one the disciplined Azula, since Ozai was already doing the reverse. (And yes, probably in part because Azula reminded her of Ozai with her prodigious Fire-bending and tendency towards cruelty, which IS unfair to Azula)
(Also because Zuko alone is mostly about, Zuko, so it doesn’t really focus on Azula and Ursa’s relationship all that much lol)
Obviously that is NOT how you deal with a situation like this, and obviously clear to the viewer that it’s not. Being the golden child is not actually a great position to be in, and by focusing so hard on trying to encourage and care for Zuko due to his more obvious, overt abuse, she ends up overlooking the more covert abuse Azula is going through and throwing her to the wolves. Again, I do agree that Ursa failed Azula.
Buttt, hindsight is 20/20. It’s not like Ursa has parenting novels on how to raise children or a modern therapist in the palace. To your point about Ursa not explaining to Azula why what she was doing was bad, I counter with, “I sometimes punish my children without explaining why, because Im so caught up in wanting to discourage the bad behavior that I forget to interrogate the root cause” is a common issue for modern parents in like normal, non crazy evil houses to have, in 2025. Let alone in a house hold hundreds of years removed from our modern context, that is also headed by abuser man. Let alone when the child your punishing without explaining why is being actively favored and ENCOURAGED to be cruel by abuser man and you have to try and navigate that in your parenting.
I always find it funny when people are so 100% confident that they would have done better in Ursa’s postion, from their phone screens in 2025. Honey if you were in Ursa’s postion you wouldn’t even know what a “golden child” like, was. You would have probably been raised in some family in the fire nation that thought imperialism was super cool, that had extreme expectations of you to be perfect and feminine and never act out in a manor that disgraces the family(if you were a noble) or be a dirt poor girl thrown into a world of political intrigue and psychological violence (If you were a peasant girl). That had to deal with Ozais abuse of you, your child, and Azula while probably not even fully understanding how the dynamics of abuse like, work, only that what Ozai was doing was wrong on some level.
And even under all of that, and the threat of your scapegoat child being murdered, Ursa still manages to
1. Keep her Scapegoat child alive and give him affection (a miracle as far as im concerned)
2. Leave Azula DEEP DOWN knowing that you did in fact love her (that is how I interpret Azula’s hallucination in her breakdown episode, that to despite all the grievances and GENUINE, LEGITIMATE failures of Ursa as a mom, deep down at her worst Azula knew that Ursa loved her and didn’t actually see her as a monster)
Was that enough? No. But frankly I don’t think Ursa being the most perfect, flawless parent in the world would have been enough to save Azula. Because ultimately no matter how good Ursa was or was not to Azula beforehand, her impact is doomed to be cut short, she was always going to have to leave Azula behind. Behind with Ozai, who would probably exploit the genuine failures of Ursa’s parenting towards Azula to poison the well against her and make her seem even worse in Azula’s eyes.
Yeah anyway “you could of done better if-“ I’ll stop you right their, I would of done worse, I would of done worse because I am a lot weaker than Ursa and to autsic to be able to intuit this fucked up family dynamic. Away into the library to escape the horror of my life I goo, where’s my parenting? Nobody would know-
