hyperfixating on a fictional woman who went underdeveloped in canon is literally FUN and the 80-90% of fandom people who only do the same for background character men have no idea of the degree to which they are fucking missing out
hour 1 of thinking about an underdeveloped woman: idk it would've been nice if she had more screentime
hour 100 of thinking about an underdeveloped woman: ok but despite having only eight lines of dialogue she is literally THE most interesting nuanced and tragic character in the entire series and these writers had no idea what they even had. how is no one else seeing this it's literally so objectively obvious
Azula (Avatar: The Last Airbender) vs. The Thirteenth Doctor (Doctor Who)
Azula
The Thirteenth Doctor
Remaining time: 5 days 14 hours
Propaganda below the cut:
Azula:
She is often given very little grace for her actions in comparison to her brother. I think people tend to forget that the only reason Zuko gets his redemption arc is because his banishment gave him access to an environment outside of his abusive home, as well as a support network who helped re-contextualize his experiences. Comparatively, Azula is younger than him, she's a girl in a patriarchal society, and she is systematically denied access to support and education that would inform her of the issues with how she is treated. Yes, the way she treats Zuko and her peers is often cruel, but she is also only 14 years old and lives under the constant threat of neglect and violence from a man who intentionally encourages competitiveness and conflates violence with authority. Any apparent delight she takes in Zuko's mistreatment is experienced alongside the understanding that if it wasn't him, it would be her. She does plenty of horrible things throughout the show, but I think her inability to understand the morality of those actions is more of a tragedy that people like to give credit for.
She is a child! Give her access to a support network, therapy, opportunities to learn about new people and places and the world outside of the bubble she has been kept in her whole life. She deserves a chance to deconstruct her experiences, to learn that how she was treated was wrong and that she deserves better, and that she has the opportunity to makes amends for her own actions and to break the cycle should she choose.
She's treated as an irredeemable war criminal and abuser at 14 while Iroh, a 50 something-at-youngest man who spent most of his life participating in a century of imperialism and besieged Ba Sing Se for 600 days before hanging up his hat as a general only after he personally lost his son and then proceeded to not actually take any steps whatsoever towards ending the war despite being the rightful heir, is a beloved fandom figure. People deny her humanity in every way they can at every chance they get and think she deserves to be psychiatrically abused and is incapable of being redeemed. Even a lot of the people who think she can be redeemed think more or less putting her on a leash so she can be Zuko's guard dog is "redemption." People won't even acknowledge that she's also a victim of her father's abuse.
Despite being a fourteen year old child soldier, she is adultified constantly. This usually comes in two forms - as an evil seductress or as evil incarnate, worse than even her father, Ozai. Some people even claim this fourteen year old girl SLEPT TO THE TOP. Or she is painted as evil and irredeemable despite her breakdown on screen. She is constantly hated on in order to prop her brother, Zuko, up.
She is clever and ambitious. She was able to restore her brother's honor, conquer Ba Sing Se, and kill the Avatar in one fell swoop. Evil actions? Yes but damn she did it well. She's been abused all her life and deserves a chance to heal from her trauma. She's the only one we see in the series wield blue flames, immensely powerful. She slays every outfit and scene she appears in. Insanely quotable. "Do the tides command this ship, or do I?ā¦Then I think you should stop worrying about the tides, which have already decided to kill you, spend more time worrying about me, who's still mulling it over."
I donāt know if this counts as Azula propaganda, but some people are using the actress who plays her in the Netflix remake as the face of NATLAās mishaps, such as using her exaggerated facial expressions in YouTube thumbnails. They hate her because sheās a bad actress and doesnāt look enough like Azula because she has a rounder, human face.
Azula is such a classic case of 'if she were a guy you would adore her'. She is a traumatised victim of abuse raised in an environment where the "affection" of her only remaining parental figure was conditional on her ability to achieve perfection in every aspect of her life (something that is both normal to want and possible to achieve, right?). She's isolated, intentionally pitted against her brother, obsessive, and is one of the (if not, THE) most skilled firebenders of her generation, despite being raised under a patriarchy that consistently devalues women. She's so wondefully complex, has some of the best lines in the show, and she's assertive and confident. But because she's never afforded the opportunity by the narrative to reframe the way she has been treated as abuse, to learn and grow and to form healthier bonds in the way that her brother is allowed, she's irredeemably evil and a bitch and we should all hate her (at least, that's how some people seem to think.) Her emotional breakdown at the end of her final fight with Zuko and Katara is one of the most harrowing scenes in the show, because it is such a painful and tragic example of a child who has been driven to the brink by an absusive upbringing and is now trapped completely alone with their pain. Why is it that Zuko's experiences and destructive reactions to trauma are given so much grace and he deserves the chance to redeem himself, but his younger sister is "getting what she deserves" when her trauma brings her nothing but suffering? Well, we know the reason. It's misogyny.
And this is just in reference to the animated show! The absolutely horrific things that have been said about the live action actress is genuinely disgusting. Fat shaming, a slew of abuse over her acting choices, the near constant commentary on her body (Mai's actress has also suffered a lot of the same treatment.) I remember when the first season came out and the amount of discussions going around about how she wasn't "pretty enough" to play Azula, as if these grown adults were genuinly offended that this ACTUAL CHILD wasn't attractive enough for them. There's so much commentary going around about the writing in this show and how the characters are being represented, but whenever Azula comes up it is an actual struggle to find any discussion about her role in the story that doesn't devolve into a poor-taste dissection of her appearence.
Free her!!!
Thirteen:
Despite being a great incarnation of the character, somehow she is uniquely bad. Despite having many of the same traits as the 'male' Doctors, somehow it is worse when she does it. She's constantly held up to greater scrutiny and one cannot help but see that misogyny plays a huge role here
Dared to be an incarnation of The Doctor who was played by a woman and all the needs and geeks were as normal about that as you'd expect
āJodie Whittaker (actor) killed the showā āthe Thirteenth Doctor sucks and is bad and new who sucks after her!!ā Etc holy moly. So much bashing of the show because of her and not because the writers just sucked for a while (which honestly is the case for most of the show)
She's literally the exact same character the Doctor has always been- hypocritical self righteous bullshit and all. But for sooooommmmeeee reason it's charming and compelling and adds great depth to the character when it's David Tennant but it's shallow and poorly written and inconsistent when it's Jodie Whittaker
She won the poll for Doctor most likely to bite someone even though Eleven bit someone onscreen. She's great
This may have already been said but BBC literally had to apologise for 13 not knowing how to comfort Graham at the end of Can You Hear Me. Which is completely insane because when a male doctor gaslights his female companion thatās allowed but sheās not allowed to be even just awkward?
Despite being the main character of the show this version of the Doctor experiences probably the most hate for no fault of her own. I have seen so many people criticize her for the same things they praise the other versions of the Doctor for. And while some of her actions are questionable, that is who the Doctor has always been- they are never in the moral right 100% of the time.
But also, she's fun! She eats dirt and ignores personal space, and so much more- she's just as brilliant as any other version of the Doctor and yet she experiences so much hate! And that just comes down to the poor writing choices that were made with her stuff, but even then she was such an interesting and compelling character!
She has a canon love interest who's a woman and so many people get pressed about that but don't care at all when they're a man who has female love interests! She's messy and runs from her past, she finds out the entire life she has lived is based of a lie! A lie that was quite literally built on the exploitation of her as a child!!! Thirteen is such a compelling character who makes complicated choices based off what options she has been presented with and they aren't always good choices- but once again, I point you towards every previous incarnation who have all at some point made bad decisions that made things worse for everyone. Thirteen is an incredibly nuanced character, and I wish more people could recognize that.
I've seen others add propaganda about how the atla fandom overall would treat Azula a lot better if she was a boy, which is absolutely true, so as a means of further highlighting that point, how about we do the reverse with Zuko, since he's a very convenient example and others have mentioned how he's treated much more favorably?
Well, as is, anyway. If Zuko was a girl and virtually everything about her character arc was the exact same (minus smaller, gender specific details like pronouns and gendered titles such as 'princess", and also the gender of the people Zuko dated since there's no way they would've gotten away with explicitly confirmed lesbians in the mid 00s), a lot more people would either mostly ignore her or very vocally hate her. They would make hating her a part of their online fandom persona.
She wouldn't get as nearly as much praise for her redemption arc. She wouldn't get the same grace and sympathy from fans. People would say that she should've had to do more to 'atone' or that (an also theoretically genderbent) Azula should've been redeemed instead.
A lot of fandomite types can barely handle female characters who are kind of rude every so often. Female characters that are consistently rude, just straight up mean, or even cruel like Zuko was at first, and who don't constantly try to make themselves seem as friendly and unthreatening as possible (often mostly meaning they don't smile a lot)? Hoo boy, a lot of fans REALLY don't like them (how convenient that Azula is perfect evidence for this, since she's also cruel and has certain traits that are often considered unacceptable or at least very undesirable in women but rewarded or at least tolerated in men, and she's one of the last few contestants in this tourney).
Even after Zuko went through her most significant character development and joined Aang et al to oppose the Fire Nation, her earlier actions would be held against her. Every 'lapse' where she isn't perfectly nice or cooperative or *insert trait that's excepted of women, who are then punished for not displaying it* would be tallied and brought out like evidence in court meant to prove that she 'didn't deserve' to be redeemed.
Source: I've been involved in fandom for almost 20 years and see the same patterns play out over and over and over again. You'd think people would be at least a little more creative, but I guess it's true that there's nothing new under the sun.
I do still like Zuko as a character, but it's much easier to like him in a vacuum where I'm not directly interacting with the fandom much, because his rabid fans truly do test me sometimes.
The trope where people don't recognize each other because it's been so long since they last interacted and they've both changed so much that they're basically strangers UNTIL one of them does their Signature Thingā¢ and the other just stops dead because oh. It's YOU. All at once it's so clearly you
supernatural had NOOOO business saying shit like āfreedom is a length of rope. god wants you to hang yourself with it.ā where the FUCK do they get off saying something that good? on cw show supernatural????
when i was a kid my Getting To Sleep technique was visualizing a child-sized shriveled up mummy with big piercing eyes that would stand silhouetted in the doorway & stare at me & probably attack if i so much as opened my eyes after getting into bed & this technique caused me to develop a lifelong nighttime-induced paranoia & it still takes me 2 hours to fall asleep. so i wouldnt recommend that
shout out to whoever said (in different words) āhating children is bad especially acting on that hatred but i also think people raised with the expectation of being mothers forced onto them are allowed to have strong negative feelings about it and vocally resist the pressure to be maternalisticā thank you for alleviating this contradiction within me
the thing about the concept of gendered socialization is that so many people use it as like another kind of gender essentialism. you know it's not an immutable trait right. you can literally overcome it.
"i'm like this because women are socialized to be shy and quiet and subservient" okay good on you for recognizing it, but that's only the very first step. the next few steps are that you Stop Doing It. feminist thought vs feminist action.
and when ppl see a trans woman being confident and unafraid to take up space and decide it's because of her evil evil male socialization, i'm always like "wait you're saying this woman was raised as a child to be loud and confident and take up space? that's awesome, i thought that's how we WANTED people to raise girls? why exactly is it a problem now? š¤"
like WHY are you telling trans women that they literally have to make themselves smaller and conform to the WORST gender exceptations of women to be seen as real women. since when is it evil and masculine to be confident, i thought we were supposed to be doing that. i thought that was feminism.
not doomed by the narrative but saved by the narrative. yeah i know you'd rather die than keep suffering but the story doesn't actually care what you want. you have to keep going, even when it hurts. even being erased from existence won't stop you from being salvaged from the wreckage of un-being. get up. keep pushing. keep bleeding. keep living.
