So I find myself in the very small "Azula was abused, and she's evil unrelated to that and it excuses nothing!" camp.
Your nuance, it's breaking the internetz! :D I'm in the same camp myself, and I absolutely agree on the horrible, awful implications of thinking that abuse turns you evil--it was one of the reasons I couldn't stand LoK Book 1.
Of course, some of the terrible ideas with real staying power are a twist and a step away from valid and supportable ones. "Abuse turns you evil" is one of those ideas, being a gross and hurtful simplification of the fact that abuse marks a person in ways that may take a long time to recover from, and the damage can take the form of hurting others as well as one's self.
Now, I don't think the core of Azula's manipulative and amoral personality was formed by Ozai's upbringing, so in that sense Ozai didn't turn Azula evil. On the other hand, I don't think her breakdown can be neatly separated from the evil she did. She may always have had the capacity to hurt people without batting an eyelid, but Ozai had a large part in teaching her she could do so without consequence, and also in creating her driving need to gain absolute control. Nothing absolves Azula for the choices she made, but it's also true that she would have been a very different person if Ursa had been the primary presence in her childhood.
So I guess my position is more or less: "Azula was abused, and her capacity for evil was encouraged and amplified by Ozai, and it excuses nothing."
I think it's really significant that Mai and Ty Lee left Azula for Zuko
Oh, absolutely. It was a DOES NOT COMPUTE situation for Azula, I imagine. While the thought that Zuko was somehow "better" than her and "beat" her at the own game would have been unbearable in itself as you outlined, I think the alternative explanation was even more unthinkable--that people cannot always be controlled by fear, and act on motivations other than self-interest and self-preservation, meaning Azula cannot control everything no matter how much she browbeats and terrorizes those around her. Hence the mass layoff back at the Fire Palace, because no one was trustworthy anymore--as in, no one was a dependable automaton who would always and mindlessly do her bidding.
I can't help but feel sorry for Azula because the situation with Mai was Ursa all over again, yet another person throwing away everything to abandon her for Zuko, seemingly defying reason and sanity. I don't doubt that the central emotional underpinning of Azula's need for control was the trauma of losing her mother. No doubt she took the lesson that in order to avoid ever being hurt or rejected again she had to keep an absolute hold on people. Well, it didn't work, and thus she was left in this terrifying void where she had no hold on the world, because Ozai had helped cut away every tendril other than absolute dominance she might have used to reach out to the world. Once that last string was cut, she had nothing she could use to deal with life. Hence madness.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2014-04-06 03:38 pm (UTC)Your nuance, it's breaking the internetz! :D I'm in the same camp myself, and I absolutely agree on the horrible, awful implications of thinking that abuse turns you evil--it was one of the reasons I couldn't stand LoK Book 1.
Of course, some of the terrible ideas with real staying power are a twist and a step away from valid and supportable ones. "Abuse turns you evil" is one of those ideas, being a gross and hurtful simplification of the fact that abuse marks a person in ways that may take a long time to recover from, and the damage can take the form of hurting others as well as one's self.
Now, I don't think the core of Azula's manipulative and amoral personality was formed by Ozai's upbringing, so in that sense Ozai didn't turn Azula evil. On the other hand, I don't think her breakdown can be neatly separated from the evil she did. She may always have had the capacity to hurt people without batting an eyelid, but Ozai had a large part in teaching her she could do so without consequence, and also in creating her driving need to gain absolute control. Nothing absolves Azula for the choices she made, but it's also true that she would have been a very different person if Ursa had been the primary presence in her childhood.
So I guess my position is more or less: "Azula was abused, and her capacity for evil was encouraged and amplified by Ozai, and it excuses nothing."
I think it's really significant that Mai and Ty Lee left Azula for Zuko
Oh, absolutely. It was a DOES NOT COMPUTE situation for Azula, I imagine. While the thought that Zuko was somehow "better" than her and "beat" her at the own game would have been unbearable in itself as you outlined, I think the alternative explanation was even more unthinkable--that people cannot always be controlled by fear, and act on motivations other than self-interest and self-preservation, meaning Azula cannot control everything no matter how much she browbeats and terrorizes those around her. Hence the mass layoff back at the Fire Palace, because no one was trustworthy anymore--as in, no one was a dependable automaton who would always and mindlessly do her bidding.
I can't help but feel sorry for Azula because the situation with Mai was Ursa all over again, yet another person throwing away everything to abandon her for Zuko, seemingly defying reason and sanity. I don't doubt that the central emotional underpinning of Azula's need for control was the trauma of losing her mother. No doubt she took the lesson that in order to avoid ever being hurt or rejected again she had to keep an absolute hold on people. Well, it didn't work, and thus she was left in this terrifying void where she had no hold on the world, because Ozai had helped cut away every tendril other than absolute dominance she might have used to reach out to the world. Once that last string was cut, she had nothing she could use to deal with life. Hence madness.