A Poor Man’s Tyrant: Autonomy, Identity, and the Case for Azula

With the recent announcement of Avatar Studios and the expansion of the Avatar Universe, it’s time to take a moment and revisit one of the Avatar universe’s most polarizing, layered — and as yet, incomplete characters.

There is no redemption for Azula.

The point at first seems contrary to an analysis of her character. Substantive looks into her motivation and psychological state almost always come to the same conclusion: that the princess of the Fire Nation, the child prodigy, the sibling who was “lucky to be born,” was in fact born profoundly unlucky. A product of her environment, she senses early on that her father, the domineering Ozai, is the parent whose favor matters most, in contrast to his gentler wife, Ursa. Compound this with the favored status given by Ursa to Azula’s older brother Zuko, and it’s only natural that Azula would align herself with her father. To gain her father’s affection, though, requires becoming like him, becoming cruel and manipulative, seeing others as pawns in one’s own game and caring little for the feelings of others. Ever the perfectionist, Azula seems at first to succeed in modeling herself as her father’s model subordinate, to the point that she’s awarded the title of Crown Princess after her brother’s banishment. She becomes her father’s eyes and ears, the hand to carry out his will, faithfully executing his orders to find her brother and her uncle, General Iroh She even exceeds his expectations, conquering Ba Sing Se, capital of the enemy Earth Kingdom — and simply because she was in the neighborhood.

All of this, though, isn’t enough to keep her father’s favor in the long run. When the day of Sozin’s Comet comes, and the Fire Nation gains sufficient strength to conquer the Earth Kingdom once and for all, Azula — whose idea it was to “burn it all to the ground” — is left behind. Her luck has finally run out: her father has decided that he no longer needs her in his grand design and designates her the new Firelord, all so he can supersede her himself as the Phoenix King. Thus abandoned by the last person she kept active ties with — her brother a traitor, her uncle and mother scorning her, her friends Mai and Ty Lee betraying her — Azula, already unstable from Mai and Ty Lee’s abandonment, spirals into psychosis. Paranoid and irrational, Azula banishes her servants and guards, and just after, slices off her hair in a fit of rage. Disheveled, visibly exhausted, and seemingly beyond all reason, Azula even holds off on her own coronation to accept the challenge of an Agni Kai, a fire duel, from Zuko, freshly arrived in the capital and there to reclaim the throne from his sister. She accepts — and loses. Bested by Zuko and the compassionate Katara, Azula snaps, having lost everything: her friends, her family, even her worldview that love is to be scorned and fear to rule the day in her relationships. She collapses into incoherent rage, spitting blue flames and sobbing bountuous, hysterical tears.

Here, then, previous analyses end. “She was never loved,” say her defenders, “she was a product of her environment. She deserved better. She deserves redemption.” But a tragic upbringing and downfall doesn’t mean that one is “deserving” of “redemption.” Abuse breeds abuse, and trauma breeds trauma; the victim becomes the perpetrator, continuing the cycle of violence down to the next generation. Azula seems the exemplar of this truth, as she turns from the victim of her father’s emotional abuse and mother and uncle’s emotional abandonment into the perpetrator of manipulative, Machiavellian behavior: she threatens and bullies her friends Mai and Ty Lee into joining her on the mission to catch Zuko, and keeps them walking on eggshells whenever they’re around her. Beyond this, though, Zuko himself takes the brunt of Azula’s abusive behavior, having to contend with a sister quite openly and viciously out to get him in order to win Ozai’s favor. “You’ll never catch up,” she tells him; he’s seemingly nothing to her, little more than a sack of flesh to be pushed aside to achieve the ends of her mammoth ambition. “So what?” the argument goes. “Of course she’d end up that way, being raised how she was. It doesn’t matter. She deserves better.”

And yet, it is this very lack of autonomy given to Azula that quashes arguments for her redemption. Redemption is defined as “the action of being saved from sin, error, or evil.” “Redemption” then implies an outside force, a saving figure, to come in and show the way forward to a wrongdoer. The wrongdoer must make the choice to follow their saving figure, but there’s someone on the outside setting a better example. Zuko was clearly redeemed in this manner, following the example of his morally upstanding uncle in abandoning the creed of his nation and joining the Avatar’s group to stop the war. Azula, however, has no such saving figures attached to her. Her uncle says that “she’s crazy, and she needs to go down;” her mother and brother are now distant from her, her brother’s few attempts to reach her always ending in fire, both spoken and thrown. “Redemption,” then, as offered here, implies that Azula would somehow renounce her violent, heartless ways with a snap in the air, a magical guiding light that could draw the princess away from a ruinous path. Nevermind that Azula is clearly mentally ill, and in dire need of proper assistance to regain her own lucidity before embarking on a character journey; nevermind that the very conditions she was raised in are the ones most likely to be the hindrance to her ever changing as a person. In Azula’s world, absolute control and unfailing rigidity keep one safe. Change, however slight, is poison. As the narrative goes now, Azula can’t change simply because she “deserves better.” There is no redemption for Azula.

But there is the chance for growth and healing.

“Growth” and “healing” aren’t words that convey anything as epic as “redemption,” anything as monumental as switching sides at the crux of a century long war to bring a tyrant and his empire down to his knees. But there’s nothing epic where Azula is now. The war’s over, replaced by the grind of diplomacy and geopolitics. The empire must be dismantled. The Fire Nation must heal, its wounds of militarism and nationalism coated with the salve of peaceful, multilateral patriotism. De-escalating a nation gone off the rails isn’t glamorous — and neither is healing from the traumas of one’s youth. Azula, however, can heal, if she so chooses to take the first step. Doing so requires overcoming a massive hurdle, though: the specter of her own self-loathing, and the resistance to change it’s embedded within her.

To understand how such healing would be possible, it is first necessary to establish that Azula’s traumas haven’t run so deep that the unloved child is entirely incapable of love — that the princess molded in her father’s image isn’t her brutalizing father. And, as shown in Azula’s response to gaining power, this is true: it’s the very act of attempting to become what is little more than a carbon copy of her father that strains her so deeply. Unlike her father, Azula is aware that she’s in the wrong, and that conventional morality dictates that manipulating and abusing one’s friends is near unforgivable. We know this due to the exchange that Azula has with the hallucination of her mother:

AZULA: I know what you really think of me. You think I’m a monster.

MIRROR URSA: I think you’re confused. All your life, you’ve used fear to control people.

AZULA: Well, what choice do I have? Trust is for fools. Fear is the only reliable way! Even you fear me.

MIRROR URSA: No, Azula. I love you. I do.

As others have mentioned, while this interaction reads like a dialogue, it’s really Azula’s own internal deliberation, as “Mirror Ursa” is but a hallucination. What she represents — Azula’s subconscious, her battered conscience, her sanity — isn’t important. Azula’s word choice, however, is. “Trust is for fools. Fear is the only reliable way.” Here, we see not an unthinking scourge akin to Ozai, who takes unadulterated pleasure in causing others pain. We see instead a character with a weak moral compass, yes, but who took no joy in becoming the monster she assumed her mother saw her as. Fear is reliable to keep others close, but it takes a psychological toll not only on the manipulated, but on the manipulator, as the weight of the manipulator’s actions press down on their shoulders. For Azula to have such internal conflict requires she possess at least some hint of empathy for those she’s hurt — and, contrary to popular perception, she has this in droves.

“Empathetic” certainly isn’t the first word most would use to describe Azula, and it’s not hard to see why: Azula is callous and cold, having no qualms about manipulating others, or even shooting the Avatar down with lightning. But, empathy doesn’t merely mean caring about others, or showing kindness toward them. Empathy comes in multiple forms, and one of these is cognitive empathy: the ability to understand what others think and feel. This isn’t affective empathy, in which one literally feels another person’s emotions, and their emotional state aligns with those of others. Cognitive empathy is the ability to accurately read other people, and gain a sense of what motivates them or how they communicate, and Azula is indeed adept at reading others. (Although, as Mai puts it just before she betrays Azula, “you don’t know people as well as you think you do.”) Azula knows that her brother is motivated chiefly by a desire to please Ozai, and also seems to know (based on her exchange with Mirror Ursa) that Mai and Ty Lee don’t particularly like her, let alone love her. She’s also able to tell when people lie, such as when she ascertains that a guard at the Boiling Rock prison was telling the truth when he said that he didn’t help in an escape attempt; in doing so, she actively stops the prison warden from torturing the guard. Here, Azula’s stopping the torture of an innocent man likely wasn’t borne out of compassion for him. Instead, she knows that torturing the guard wouldn’t be useful in finding the rat in the guard ranks. “Good” is defined to Azula as what is most useful and practical, and where it may be useful and practical to stop needless torture today, it will be practical to nearly kill the Avatar tomorrow.

Defining “good” as what’s immediately useful to oneself is certainly a selfish worldview, and Azula is a selfish figure. However, this isn’t all there is to Azula’s worldview. If it was, she wouldn’t have cared when her friends abandoned her — they were going to in the end, as no one can be truly trusted. They served their purpose. It’s time to move on. Azula, however, can’t move on, for she needed Mai and Ty Lee, needed to keep them near her to prove to herself that she can have friends, that she isn’t about to fall off the deep end, that she might not be the monster she so fears. Indeed, it’s fear that cripples Azula, and it’s not fear of her father. She fears herself — and this inability to accept herself, to find any comfort from her own validation, is her greatest obstacle.

In short, Azula is insecure. This doesn’t mean that she’s absolved of any of her wrongdoing: insecurity lurks at the heart of every manipulator, abuser, and tyrant, with the insecure and morally lacking using their putdowns of others to justify themselves and their own self-hatred. What is needed to overcome insecurity is self-respect, and Azula has very little of this. Cynical and with a dim view of human nature, Azula believes that in the end, fear trumps love, and most others can be easily manipulated. This clashes with her emotional intelligence and empathy, though, as in understanding the feelings of others, we observe that Azula, however tepidly, feels the feelings of others. When Zuko gets burned at the hands of Ozai, Azula smiles, knowing that she’s securely on her father’s good side — and when Ozai casts her aside, we observe Zuko’s same expression of fear on Azula’s face, sister and brother put into the same state of helplessness. Azula’s affective empathy for Zuko doesn’t end there, though, as when she finds her brother mulling around their family’s old summer home, she shares in his melancholy, telling him that “I thought I’d find you here,” and “Come on. Come with me. This place is depressing.”

Such, then, is her emotional state throughout the series, that of a cynic trying — and in the end, failing — to repress the emotional attachments and empathy she holds toward others. Ozai is shameless in his cunning and ruthlessness: he is cartoonish in his villainy. Azula is not, and her internal conflict between loving and trusting others or using fear to manipulate them fatefully extends to whether she can love and trust herself or instead fear what she’s become, and convince herself that there’s no way forward for a monster like herself. For Azula, “Almost isn’t good enough.” Either she’s unequivocally a monster, or unequivocally like the “weak” people who love others. Failure isn’t tolerated in her world, and since she wasn’t good enough for Ursa, she must not be good enough for anyone. Her breakdown reveals that she accepts that she’s failed as an individual, and consigned herself to whatever fate is down the line.

Fatalism, though, isn’t quite the ethos of Avatar. Destiny is spoken of frequently: it’s Aang’s destiny to restore balance to the world, it’s Zuko’s destiny to help Aang restore that balance by defeating Ozai. But, these were destinies actively chosen by Aang and Zuko, with both deciding that they have a responsibility to others to bring the war to a close. Character arcs in Avatar mean that characters make choices, and choose who they want to be. Azula isn’t at all who she wants to be: her arc is incomplete. She fears and loathes herself, viewing herself as a monster who can’t do anything right, whether it be fitting in at a houseparty or keeping the Firelord’s crown. She doesn’t believe in her own autonomy, that she had no other choice other than to follow her father’s example, and suffer the consequences for it. In her world, everyone is weak and stupid — and that includes herself.

This black-and-white fatalism isn’t the thought process of someone mentally healthy, and we know that Azula isn’t well in the head. Nevertheless, for all of her poor choices past, some have still shown that she’s able to grow beyond the monster she sees herself as. These choices are, rather ironically, borne out by something she had little control over: ascending to the throne, a move engineered by her father. Indeed, her “promotion” reveals her as a poor man’s tyrant, a pale imitation of a true authoritarian leader, and perhaps illustrates the path forward.

The word “tyrant” has been mentioned before, and not without reason. The tyrant is a special breed of leader, an authoritarian who rules through fear rather than trust, who uses others to achieve their own ends, and who will do anything necessary to maintain their position. Sound familiar? It should. Unlike literary tyrants past, though (Richard III, Macbeth), Azula isn’t on the throne of her own accord. She’s there by accident, placed there by her father, the real tyrant in the room, a man who in true Shakespearian fashion murdered his father and claimed his brother’s birthright to win the crown. And once she’s supposedly in a position of power, she doesn’t go in for the role’s full effect.

When a true tyrant gains power, they’ll kill those they fear as disloyal, as Macbeth and Richard III do. Azula, however, banishes those she fears. At first, banishing the disloyal doesn’t seem anything but tyrannical, and perhaps it would be a bit too grim if a fourteen-year old girl suddenly gained a high body count; but, Avatar is no stranger to darkness, with the entire air nation explicitly the victims of genocide, while Azula herself very nearly had blood on her hands when she struck Aang with lightning . It wouldn’t be too great of a character extension for her to decide to electrocute everyone around her. But she didn’t, a bar that’s pitifully low, but nonetheless present. She kept everyone alive, perhaps to even come after her later. Such, then, is Azula’s experience as the Firelord-to-be, yet to have been crowned and attempting to flex some of her new powers. The mere proximity to the throne is enough to push her over the edge, with all the favor she accumulated under her father being for naught. Yet again, we see the daughter trying to be like her father, even given all of her father’s old power and supposedly his old authority — and yet again, she’s just not up for the task.

What, then, are we to make of this? Azula is a restricted character, whose intellectual development goes far beyond her immature emotions, and whose worldview is that of someone with deep self-loathing. Self loathing and inner conflict don’t mean that one is capable of choosing to grow and heal; indeed, self loathing seems to be the end result for the tyrant and manipulator, and acts to reinforce their poor behavior. But, Azula has also seen her autonomy, her ability to grow and make her own choices, be significantly limited by the world around her, first as the Firelord’s daughter, and then as little more than the prisoner of a Fire Nation mental institution. The question is this: given more autonomy, could Azula overcome her self-loathing? And in doing so, would the self-respect she gain allow her to realize that she’s able to do better, be better, and can be more than the monster she thought she was?

The evidence doesn’t seem promising. In her most recent appearance, the continuation comic Smoke and Shadow, Azula’s escaped from Zuko and Team Avatar, and resurfaced as an agent of chaos behind the scenes, resorting to her old tactics to keep Zuko on his toes. This, however, isn’t character development. It’s character stagnation, with Azula rather explicitly using her manipulative behavior to keep her untreated psychosis at bay. The first steps to allow her to heal, then, would have to involve the work of an outside force of some sort, to help manage her mental illness. Beyond that, though, lies the question of whether she has the mettle to do the work and overcome some of her self loathing, and the answer to give is a tentative yes. Azula, after all, isn’t satisfied with who she is, a monster reduced to the lowest survival instincts to stay alive. With the war over, though, and her father no longer in her life as a major influence, the chance is there for the princess to act on her fractured realization that trust isn’t just for fools — Zuko trusts and loves others, and he’s on the throne, while she isn’t.

If there’s anything that Azula hates, it’s losing out, being a weakling and a dupe. She has the emotional intelligence to know that she’s wronged others, and the ambition to win out in the grand game of life. Smoke and Shadow at least reveals that Azula isn’t after the throne anymore. What’s necessary for her, then, is to reconcile her intellectual state with her emotional state, to release herself from the conformity and fear that’s kept her on a path to hurt those around her, and accept the vulnerability that comes from trusting in others so as not to manipulate them and keep them in line. She knows better. The great question for her, then, is whether she’s willing to believe that she’s worthy of respect, that she can trust herself, that she can, somehow, do better — for herself, and the people around her.