attackfish

The actual headcanon I have for her comes in after she's married to Ozai and has Zuko and Azula, but before she kills Azulon, and to it, I'm bringing a lot of what I saw as a child interacting with the family of my first stalker, which was a lot like how I imagine Ozai, Ursa, Zuko, and Azula. In her family, her father, looking back on it, was cold and at the very least emotionally abusive to her mother and the oldest son. He favored my stalker, the middle child and one of two daughters heavily, and ignored the existence of his youngest, the other daughter. Her brother had Tourette's, and I think undiagnosed Aspergers, which not only made him the family's "problem child" but also made him much more vulnerable to his little sister's constant lying. He was also very angry, defensive, and resentful, which I now realize was because of the abuse he suffered, but at the time scared me, because he was so much bigger than I was, and also because his sister lied to me constantly about how dangerous he was. These were also blamed on him by the rest of the family, and seen as one more way he just wasn't good enough. Good children didn't get angry. Her mother was extremely sweet and kind, but unlike Ursa, also saw her son as a problem, ignored her youngest daughter, and thought her middle child, a budding sociopath, could do no wrong. This is why I tend to get very angry at Azula apologists who think that Ursa was somehow evil for thinking there was something wrong with her child, or that she must have been favoring Zuko as much as Ozai favored Azula. It certainly never did my stalker any good to have her mother unable to see what she was doing, and it left her siblings utterly without protection. I had my parents. They had no one.


I don't think Ursa was the perfect mother, as Zuko clearly saw her. He lost her when he was ten, and with her, the only parent who loved him or defend him. My headcanon for Iroh is that he was so sunk into grief when he came home, that he didn't really snap out of it until the Agni Kai, and so Zuko was left for three years to fend for himself, which understandably colors his memories of his mother. I do however, think that she was married into an already deeply unhappy and deeply unhealthy family, and had to find a way to survive and raise her children within it with very little power and no support. I'm not sure she ever realized what a monster Ozai was, or she might have tried to kidnap Zuko and Azula, and anyway, younger sociopaths don't usually have the experience to hide it as well. I think she was afraid for and of Azula, and had nobody to turn for help, and I don't think there was anything she could have done.