They showed recovery as messy, which is pathetically rare in media.
It is! It might as well be a training montage set to the Rocky soundtrack. Either you recover quickly and easily, or you're Evil and thus unsalvageable. I don't deny that either of these things could happen (though I don't know of any RL case of easy recovery), but it seems such a disservice to ignore the vast muddled space in between where people struggle forward with a lot of false starts and backsliding, through airless nights and leaden days punctuated by unpredictable bursts of grace.
I think this erasure of the reality of abuse is insidious because people might very well conclude they're beyond hope unless they're insta-fixed, kind of like how people are led by media and social expectations to think a relationship must be unsalvageable if it has any problems (gasp!) that require honest conversation (horror!).
or becoming a captain of industry and tormenting her brother in her days off
I am reminded of Dagny "I'm so proud of sleeping with a married man which is totally OK because I want him and I'm a heroic businesswoman!" Taggert. Then again most of the so-called heroes in Atlas Shrugged are similarly sociopathic.
We never see Azula manipulate through affection after Ursa leaves, only through fear. . . . she does not understand what love actually is, and she doesn't seem to realize anyone can love her.
I never thought of that. Wow, that's chilling.
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.
With guidance and boundaries she could have learned to value the people around her and engage with them in less exploitative ways, if only for her own self-interest. While that's not strictly being a good person, it would have made her at least socially functional. Ursa seemed to be grasping for something like this in "Zuko Alone" before everything was shot to hell.
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.
German psychologist Alice Miller in her book The Body Never Lies compared this association between terror and thrill in the child-parent relationship to the dynamic of sexual abuse. That's sort of an explosive thing to say and Miller isn't known for moderation in her writing, but I can see her point that it is abusive to make a child associate the fear of being violated with the excitement of connecting to a parent. My theory is that this association broke Azula's already tenuous grasp on consequence, and ultimately caused her to crash all the harder when consequence, like gravity, reasserted itself.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2014-04-08 07:13 am (UTC)It is! It might as well be a training montage set to the Rocky soundtrack. Either you recover quickly and easily, or you're Evil and thus unsalvageable. I don't deny that either of these things could happen (though I don't know of any RL case of easy recovery), but it seems such a disservice to ignore the vast muddled space in between where people struggle forward with a lot of false starts and backsliding, through airless nights and leaden days punctuated by unpredictable bursts of grace.
I think this erasure of the reality of abuse is insidious because people might very well conclude they're beyond hope unless they're insta-fixed, kind of like how people are led by media and social expectations to think a relationship must be unsalvageable if it has any problems (gasp!) that require honest conversation (horror!).
or becoming a captain of industry and tormenting her brother in her days off
I am reminded of Dagny "I'm so proud of sleeping with a married man which is totally OK because I want him and I'm a heroic businesswoman!" Taggert. Then again most of the so-called heroes in Atlas Shrugged are similarly sociopathic.
We never see Azula manipulate through affection after Ursa leaves, only through fear. . . . she does not understand what love actually is, and she doesn't seem to realize anyone can love her.
I never thought of that. Wow, that's chilling.
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.
With guidance and boundaries she could have learned to value the people around her and engage with them in less exploitative ways, if only for her own self-interest. While that's not strictly being a good person, it would have made her at least socially functional. Ursa seemed to be grasping for something like this in "Zuko Alone" before everything was shot to hell.
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.
German psychologist Alice Miller in her book The Body Never Lies compared this association between terror and thrill in the child-parent relationship to the dynamic of sexual abuse. That's sort of an explosive thing to say and Miller isn't known for moderation in her writing, but I can see her point that it is abusive to make a child associate the fear of being violated with the excitement of connecting to a parent. My theory is that this association broke Azula's already tenuous grasp on consequence, and ultimately caused her to crash all the harder when consequence, like gravity, reasserted itself.