#100 years of war leave plenty of angry soldiers willing to join a variety of extremist movements

[lightdancer1]

I mean if we really want to go there

Canon makes a single exception for 'Zuko the true root of all morality and being nice to Zuko makes you too pure and perfect and good for this world.' That would be the point where his little sister overheard his father and his grandfather plotting his murder, warned him, warned his mother, and saved his life.

She is given a perfect license to kill him with the full sanction of her state and culture, brings him back in honor. She is rewarded for this with the loss of her friendship, her family, and her sanity.

Anyone with a halfway functional logical approach, post recovery to the breakdown, would reason that the one thing not to do under any circumstances is to repeat something that backfires on them this badly, in this specific way.

I do not understand how ATLA fanon convinced itself Azulon, the guy who perpetrated a second genocide, was just bluffing on the 'kill the kid' bit. The canon openly shows that he wasn't in the show. For the sake of her brother his sister saves his life and the comics demonize her and the show demonizes her for the heinous offense of......not letting daddy and grandpa kill her brother.

The second time she helps him, it goes from bad to worse.

Any post-canon Azula written like an actual human being would go full Diogenes and let Zuko alone to the mess he inherited and have a very deep fear that doing anything good for Zuko from past escalation would end in him rewarding her with actual death because how dare she do anything for him at all.

That is the logic of a show and a fanon where an empire unleashes a century of genocidal war but the true evil is not the army on the speartip of the genocide, nor the autocrats who set all this into motion and run it for all the same reasons as their real life counterparts...but instead it's a 14 year old who was mean to her brother a few times and halfway killed a physical god who got better.

So you tell me, why would anyone halfway human or logical, let alone fully so, operate on that basis postwar to go 'doing nice things for my brother has worked out so well for me before that clearly I should do more of it'.

Zuko has plenty of valid reasons to dislike Azula but she wasn't punished for any of those reasons, she was punished for DOING GOOD THINGS for him. Twice. That would be the major barrier to any postwar reconciliation and as written in the show, let alone the comics, it is by design nearly insuperable unless Zuko somehow finds in himself a self-awareness that his youth and reality rewarding him at every possible level and evading any actual facing of his own bad actions makes, shall we say, somewhat unlikely.

Autocrats who take thrones as teenagers and got away with attempted murder do not learn from this that this is bad, and they are surrounded by courtiers and the trappings of power in a way that would be hard to resist. The basis from here of 'family reconciliation' runs very hard into Zuko's hunger for throne and power in the actuals how, and it is something that would only change if given a sufficiently big hammer.

And that, in short, is why my post-canon scenarios have his rule of the Fire Nation blow up in his face in a decade as he's sixteen at the time he takes power and facing a situation an omniscient deity would find challenging and he's.....Zuko. Literally nothing about that postwar situation is sustainable and the way it would be all too probable to explode in everyone's faces would finally force Zuko to realize there is more to the universe than his own personal self-gratification and to examine everything canon shied away from because the ball of rage and resentment has become a singularity drowning the entire series in a paen to the redditbro mindset.

#avatar: the last airbender #zuko #man am i on a rant roll today #azula #ATLA canon has made very bad choices #its continuations have backed itself into a corner of being unable to admit they exist #if the characters are written as human that postwar 'happy ending' blows up in ten to twenty years max #teenagers picking apart the legacy of 100 years of war are guaranteed to fail #the consequences of that failure would be bloody #100 years of war leave plenty of angry soldiers willing to join a variety of extremist movements #these are the stories they could have told #instead you get a dollar store Batman tale with Azula as a poor man's Ra's Al Ghul meets the Joker