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.
And this is part of why I loved Frozen (and for that matter Airbender) so much. They showed recovery as messy, which is pathetically rare in media.
"Azula was abused, and her capacity for evil was encouraged and amplified by Ozai, and it excuses nothing."
Oh yes, Ozai certainly shaped and gave direction to Azula's existing impulses. She wasn't born genetically programmed to conquer the world instead of say conning old ladies out of their life savings, or becoming a captain of industry and tormenting her brother in her days off. I had a conversation with water-soter in which I said that good people aren't always from good families and really awful people aren't always from bad families, but family always has an effect. How we were raised, what happened to us or what we were exposed to in childhood helps shape how we interact with the world. Azula would have been a psychopath without Ozai, but that would have manifested in a different way had she been raised differently. In other words, she's evil independent of Ozai and his abuse, but he helped determine what kind of evil and gave her the resources to realize her worst impulses on a global scale.
One of the affects Ozai's raising has on Azula is very subtle, but to me shows the absolute lack of humanity Ozai displays towards his favored child. You talked about how Azula feels that desperate need to control and how it does not compute for her when people throw everything away to side with her brother, and this reminded me of something else. We never see Azula manipulate through affection after Ursa leaves, only through fear. When she's a child, she plays the sweet little girl for her mother, at least briefly, but during the main timeline, she very briefly dangles the promise of their father's love in front of Zuko, and that's it. Most psychopaths are very adept at manipulating affection. It's part of what makes them so miserable to have in a family. But Azula doesn't have very much practice manipulating someone else's love for her after Ursa leaves, because Ozai doesn't love her. She doesn't understand love, not only because she doesn't feel it herself, but because after her mother abandoned her, for Zuko, no one except maybe sometimes Zuko, who's also terrified of her, shows her any love. It's a very nuanced and realistic version of the "Evil cannot comprehend good" trope.
Interestingly, she does understand that threatening people's families and friends can be used to control them, which I think is because she relies so heavily on her father's opinion of her to maintain her own self esteem. This is also probably how she perceives Zuko's wish for their father's love. But she does not understand what love actually is, and she doesn't seem to realize anyone can love her. While being loved wouldn't make her a good person, or able to feel love in return, it's still profoundly sad, and says a lot about her relationship with Ozai.
I think one of the contributing factors for her breakdown may also have been Zuko's banishment. Not only was this the ultimate signal of the price of imperfection, but it was also the loss of the only person left who loved her, and so a source of self worth for her external to her father and her ability to control, as well as someone who could unwittingly help her hone her skills at manipulating affection. She was left all alone with Ozai, who had total control over her. He controlled all information she received, all ideology. She had to adapt it or risk being out of favor (and we saw what that led to when it finally happened). It must have been terrifying, and also, since she admired her father so much, and all of his attention, mostly positive attention at that, was all on her, absolutely thrilling.
no subject
And this is part of why I loved Frozen (and for that matter Airbender) so much. They showed recovery as messy, which is pathetically rare in media.
"Azula was abused, and her capacity for evil was encouraged and amplified by Ozai, and it excuses nothing."
Oh yes, Ozai certainly shaped and gave direction to Azula's existing impulses. She wasn't born genetically programmed to conquer the world instead of say conning old ladies out of their life savings, or becoming a captain of industry and tormenting her brother in her days off. I had a conversation with water-soter in which I said that good people aren't always from good families and really awful people aren't always from bad families, but family always has an effect. How we were raised, what happened to us or what we were exposed to in childhood helps shape how we interact with the world. Azula would have been a psychopath without Ozai, but that would have manifested in a different way had she been raised differently. In other words, she's evil independent of Ozai and his abuse, but he helped determine what kind of evil and gave her the resources to realize her worst impulses on a global scale.
One of the affects Ozai's raising has on Azula is very subtle, but to me shows the absolute lack of humanity Ozai displays towards his favored child. You talked about how Azula feels that desperate need to control and how it does not compute for her when people throw everything away to side with her brother, and this reminded me of something else. We never see Azula manipulate through affection after Ursa leaves, only through fear. When she's a child, she plays the sweet little girl for her mother, at least briefly, but during the main timeline, she very briefly dangles the promise of their father's love in front of Zuko, and that's it. Most psychopaths are very adept at manipulating affection. It's part of what makes them so miserable to have in a family. But Azula doesn't have very much practice manipulating someone else's love for her after Ursa leaves, because Ozai doesn't love her. She doesn't understand love, not only because she doesn't feel it herself, but because after her mother abandoned her, for Zuko, no one except maybe sometimes Zuko, who's also terrified of her, shows her any love. It's a very nuanced and realistic version of the "Evil cannot comprehend good" trope.
Interestingly, she does understand that threatening people's families and friends can be used to control them, which I think is because she relies so heavily on her father's opinion of her to maintain her own self esteem. This is also probably how she perceives Zuko's wish for their father's love. But she does not understand what love actually is, and she doesn't seem to realize anyone can love her. While being loved wouldn't make her a good person, or able to feel love in return, it's still profoundly sad, and says a lot about her relationship with Ozai.
I think one of the contributing factors for her breakdown may also have been Zuko's banishment. Not only was this the ultimate signal of the price of imperfection, but it was also the loss of the only person left who loved her, and so a source of self worth for her external to her father and her ability to control, as well as someone who could unwittingly help her hone her skills at manipulating affection. She was left all alone with Ozai, who had total control over her. He controlled all information she received, all ideology. She had to adapt it or risk being out of favor (and we saw what that led to when it finally happened). It must have been terrifying, and also, since she admired her father so much, and all of his attention, mostly positive attention at that, was all on her, absolutely thrilling.