Avatar: The Last Airbender

He only worked on the second season, and he was mostly an episode director there.

You know, as badass as Katara is against Azula, and as great a moment it is for Zuko to take the hit... I also kinda wanted to see him just kick Azula's ass.

Also, yeah, those two especially Ehatz were the reason Avatar was standout great. A lot of the Zuko, Iroh, Azula stuff was in Ehatz episodes. Bryke are pretty decent core concept guys but they dont have as much a grasp of how to tell an interesting story.

I mean, I thought he was handling himself pretty well, all things considered. I personally think he had basically won that fight, from what I could tell.

Oh, he was clearly winning otherwise she wouldn't have charged up an attack he could have potentially redirected.

Azula was pretty clearly forced to resort to a cheap shot in order to beat Zuko. What I really like is that even with her forcing him to panic and dive in front of her shot, he's still able to redirect most of it. We see him catch the lightning with his fingers just before it hits and, as he lands, the lightning shoots back out and flies off into the sky.

Azula's never had to charge up this much to channel her lightning, so we can assume this was a significantly more potent burst of lightning than she usually generates. Had he taken it full-force, Zuko probably would have exploded. But because he was able to redirect most of her shot, he survived.

Azula won only through tactical cruelty; at this point in time, Zuko is clearly the superior fighter.

edited 3rd Dec '17 8:38:22 AM by TobiasDrake

Still wasn't as viscerally satisfying for me as an actual victory for Zuko over her would be, but my primary problem is that I never really got an Azula V Katara rivalry, so while their fight is cool it kind of also feels like a waste when it's the final episode.

If I do remember right, in Crossroads Katara had Azula dead to rights before Zuko picked the wrong team, that could have been something to build on, but...

I can see how Zuko and Azula might be meant to parallel Sokka and Katara, respectively. They're the children of their nation's leaders, with the sisters being brilliantly talented and capable benders while the brothers are put-upon fighters stuck in their sisters' shadows, scrambling for relevancy and undertaking a long and arduous road to self-respect.

But the show doesn't highlight it very much. Azula's never presented as Katara's archnemesis; usually when she shows up, she's a team threat that requires a full response from everyone in the protagonist group.

edited 3rd Dec '17 2:12:16 PM by TobiasDrake

That's because Azula's Zuko's archnemesis, and really any attempt to build her up as Katara's instead would be very forced (and come off as Designated Girl Fight anyway).

Honestly Katara doesn't have a lot to do in the finale (she doesn't have a whole lot to do in season 3 as a whole in episodes that don't revolve directly around her either). She's a little out of step in the team dynamic by then since she started out as the Only Sane Man and the Team Mom but after Aang and Sokka wised up she kinda feels slightly vestigal.

Honestly if anyone should've gotten an assist against Azula, it should've been Suki. How, I don't know. At least she got a cool moment surfing on an airship she was crashing.

Why Suki? I'm pretty sure the complaints would have been much larger if Zuko was taken out and a tertiary character that's not actually part of the group had been the one to finally bring down Azula once and for all.

edited 3rd Dec '17 3:26:17 PM by TobiasDrake

I don't think Wanderlustwarrior is suggesting that Suki should have fought Azula, only that after Zuko and Aang she's got the most personal beef with her (after the whole "captured and impersonated" thing).

I think that fight's less about Katara going up against Azula than it is about Zuko regaining Katara's forgiveness, after having slapped her hand away in the previous season. It's about Zuko fully breaking away from the conquest and treachery that the Fire Nation had come to represent under his father, with no one better adapted to that system, and emblematic of its flaws, than Azula. You know, Azula, who could barely even conceive of any other kind of world, much less want to live in one.

What was most important about that final fight was to reject that worldview, for Zuko to be able to prove Azula wrong. Caring for someone other than yourself is not the weakness that Ozai would have them believe; the victory isn't so much in defeating Azula physically, but rather in showing that faith in others carries its own reward. Zuko's core of decency, his kindness and much-cherished honour— in short, all those parts of him that his father and sister spent his whole life trying to destroy— those are what save him, and Katara, and go on to redeem the Fire Nation as a whole.

edited 3rd Dec '17 9:48:45 PM by Unsung

Indeed. Also, Iroh had pointed out earlier in the finale that one sibling beating the other seems kinda petty historically.

That's pretty much it, yeah.
From an in-universe perspective, she and Azula actually have more of a relationship than Azula and most heroes, it's just Out of Focus. Also, minor detail - it's not like Suki is Smellerbee or someone super minor. By the time of the Finale, Zuko had spent only two more episodes as an official gAang member than Suki had, and that's if you don't count their alliance with Suki stretching back to season 1 (before they even met Toph), back when Zuko was still trying to capture or kill them.

Just saying, Zuko has already earned Katara's forgiveness definitely by the Southern Raiders (if not by the Boiling Rock). I can totally understand why it's more important that he save someone rather than take revenge and how important that is to the series; it's just that it's less viscerally satisfying than him outright beating Azula and it really just feels like an afterthought to have Katara fight her. I still really enjoy it all though - I enjoy almost all of the finale, except the cop out.

edited 4th Dec '17 4:05:52 AM by Sigilbreaker26

Zuko's earned some forgiveness from Katara before that final duel with Azula, but redemption's something you have to keep working at, not a one-and-done kind of thing. And there's a kind of symmetry to Zuko risking himself to save Katara from Azula, bringing things full circle after having betrayed Katara for his sister at the end of the last season.

Plus I like the moral that "best bender =/= best person". Maybe Azula is stronger as a bender, and maybe bending will beat a sword in a straight fight. That's okay. Because Zuko's greatest strength, the thing that will make him a great Emperor, isn't bending or swordplay— it never was.

edited 4th Dec '17 2:45:37 PM by Unsung

He's rescued her dad *and* accompanied her on her sort-of Roaring Rampage of Revenge, both at great risk to himself. He had earnt her forgiveness before that point.

Maybe I'm just a little sour about Katara being so openly hostile in The Southern Raiders after he just rescued her dad from an inescapable prison, but I digress.

Zuko was only with Aang and the others a short time longer than Suki, yes, but he has a significantly larger narrative role than she ever did. From literally the first episode, Zuko's been the show's Deuteragonist. Avatar The Last Airbender is as much Zuko's story as it is Aang's, with loads of screentime and some entire episodes dedicated to his journey.

That's why he got his own distinct climactic finale parallel to Aang's: to tie off his story, which we'd been following every bit as long as we'd followed Aang's, and see his development finally come to fruition.

Suki, by contrast, has no arc. She's Sokka's girlfriend. She shows up briefly in the early stages and then comes back late in the game to provide him with some drama, but at no point is she ever supposed to be a major character. She's awesome and gets some cool scenes here and there, but for a narrative event as major as finally taking down Azula, Suki has no narrative stakes in that. It's not her story. At most, she can claim to be one of the many minor or background characters to be f*cked over by the Fire Nation at some point.

She has as much business defeating Azula as Long Feng does.

edited 4th Dec '17 9:25:06 AM by TobiasDrake

You completely missed the point of the first part of that.

Her in-universe beef with Azula isn't that much greater than any of the more important protagonists and if you're going to have someone else tag along to defeat Azula, any of them (Katara, Toph, Sokka) work better just by the fact that they were all more important than her.

Like Tobias said, Suki has no arc, no story of her own. She's just a small (if still fairly significant) part of someone else's.

I'd argue that Suki has a greater reason to hate Azula than anyone who isn't Zuko or Aang but A. it's not *that* much greater and B. it's balanced out by her relative unimportance.

(though if we're going by who has an arc, Katara's main arc ended in season 1, though she's had mini arcs since then and Suki doesn't even have a spotlight episode in her whole career)

edited 4th Dec '17 10:03:48 AM by Sigilbreaker26

Quite. A lot of people have an offscreen beef with Azula, just as a lot of people have an offscreen beef with Ozai. They can't all be the one to beat her and, so far as narrative is concerned, defeating a major antagonist is a task that falls to a major protagonist.

How about May and Ty-Lee? Don't they have a major conflict with Azula to resolve? I don't think that got resolved, either in the movie or the comics?

That had a resolution without any actual confrontation - Azula's breakdown pretty much directly stems from their betrayal, and I'd argue that said betrayal is the ultimate resolution of their character arcs (barring their last scenes, of course).

Agreed. While also being a crucial element of Azula's gradual breakdown over the course of season three.

One thing I really love about Azula's arc in general is her f*cked up relationships. She is the product of her upbringing, but she's also a child. She's not out for power or money or ideology, though she has certainly absorbed her father's ideology and is more than happy to parrot it.

At the end of the day, what Azula wants is the respect and admiration of her family and friends. She'd burn Ba Sing Se to the ground just to get that thumbs-up from Daddy while Zuko, Mai, and Ty Lee stand behind her going, "Wow, Azula, you're so cool! We'd never neglect or abandon you like Mommy did!"

At the end of the day, she wants to be loved. But she's her father's daughter, so she pursues that objective with brutality. In keeping with her father's ideology, she's convinced that the only way to keep people in her life is through fear. And so she employs that ideology with Mai and Ty Lee, and eventually with Zuko.

She wants to be loved by the people who matter to her, but believes that she can control them and keep them in her life with the same iron fist that her father uses to control his nation.

I've mentioned this before, but I love the way her approach to Zuko changes after Mai and Ty Lee turn on her. Before, Zuko was just reclaiming his status as the wayward son. When Suki, Zuko, and Sokka are escaping the Boiling Rock, standard protocol is to cut the line and send them to a boiling grave.

They have the warden, but that changes nothing. This is the Fire Nation, and the warden even outright shouts to his men to cut the line as soon as he's free. Azula, of all people, is not prone to fits of compassion, and yet the thought of cutting the line never seems to occur to her. Even though it's standard protocol.

Instead, she flies out to the gondola to take them alive. She's not doing that for Sokka's benefit, and she's certainly not doing it because she respects the warden as a vital member of the Fire Nation's military and would never dream of sacrificing a loyal man for the sake of her goals.

No. She goes out there for Zuko, for the same reason she brought him back from Ba Sing Se and pretended he killed the Avatar even though Ozai had already given the order to treat him as a deserter and enemy. She goes out there because she wants to lock her brother in a cell and beat him until he loves her again.

And then she loses Mai and Ty Lee too, and at that moment, we see her withdraw from the people who matter most. The next time we see her, she's "celebrating becoming an only child". She's deranged, unkempt, and is trying to do what didn't even cross her mind back at the Boiling Rock. After losing Mai and Ty Lee, she gives up on Zuko, and that sets her on the collision course with her own fragile sanity that ultimately ends her career.

In this regard, there's another meaning to Katara defeating Azula. At the end of the day, Azula is a broken soul. She was raised in the shadow of a brutal man, dedicated herself to becoming a pale imitation, and then fractured when it cost her everything that ever mattered to her. It's not without reason that her final onscreen moments are not being beaten unconscious by force with triumphant music blaring over her downfall, but of her screaming and crying and roaring fire in the sky in a complete emotional breakdown.

Narratively speaking, Azula is not meant to be feared. She is meant to be pitied. In this regard, there is meaning in the fact that the element that defeats her is water, the element of healing, of compassion, of mercy.