Avatar The Last Airbender S2 Episode 7 REACTION

For guys who spend so much time pausing the show every two minutes to overthink and speculate about a reveal that is about ten seconds from being revealed, it surprises me that you don't seem to have spent a lot of time thinking about the environment Azula grew up in. She grew up in exactly the same abusive situation Zuko did. It just manifested differently.

Think about it: Azula was born with natural talent for firebending. Zuko was not. Remember when Zuko said that his father Ozai said of them that Azula was born lucky, while Zuko was lucky to be born. What this means in the first place is that Azula didn't have to struggle and fight to win either her father or grandfather's approval. Zuko on the other hand had to fight and train a lot harder than she ever did to develop the same level of skill. That alone means that Ozai was disappointed in his son, who as the firstborn is meant to be the heir. So from the start, Ozai always preferred Azula, and thus gave her more positive attention. The whole time, Ursa (Zuko and Azula's mother) sees this and steps in to try to give Zuko the love and attention he's not getting from his father. Beyond that, Ursa is also an inherently decent and compassionate person, whereas Ozai was always inherently ruthless and unforgiving of perceived weakness. So from the very beginning, Zuko is despised by his father while his mother tries to make up for it; but the flip side is that Azula is showered with her father's approval, and not getting much positive counterbalance from Ursa because their mother is too focused on Zuko.

That's one of the core takeaways here: Azula received more positive attention from Ozai while Zuko received more positive attention from Ursa. Meanwhile, Ozai is hateful toward Zuko; and Ursa, while not hateful toward Azula by any means, at the very least doesn't give Azula the same amount or depth of attention that she does to Zuko. And all the while, what Azula SEES happening before her is that her father appreciates and rewards ruthless, cold behavior while scorning compassion. Specifically, she sees how Ozai treats Zuko for demonstrating the compassion that Ursa works to instill in him. And of course Azula saw their father permanently scar his own son's face in front of a large crowd of people - and for the sin of objecting to the heartlessness of deliberately treating fresh soldier recruits as expendable cannon fodder. When he was 13 years old no less - which would have made Azula 11. (The series opens with Zuko being 16 and Azula being 14, obviously). The girl has lived her ENTIRE life watching her father punish decency and reward cruelty. It's not exactly surprising that she's going to internalize the lesson that the only way to survive is to embrace cruelty for its own sake.

This is a mild spoiler from the comics, but one thing that comes out is that Ursa inadvertently triggered some of the abuse that Zuko lived with. She and Ozai had some kind of fight where she blurted out that she wished Ozai was not Zuko's father, and Ozai promised her that from that moment forward he would make sure to treat Zuko as if he WASN'T his father. We can all see how well that went for Zuko. There's also a VERY strong implication from the comics that Ozai was extremely abusive toward Ursa herself, which both Azula and Zuko would have seen.

All which is to say, yes, obviously Azula is messed up. She is profoundly messed up. But she's also a 14 year old KID and she didn't turn out to be a psychotic murderbot for no reason. She's just as much a victim of egregious abuse as Zuko is.