Well Aang's taking away Ozai bending seemed like a battle of wills which he almost lost. So Azula might find solace in having a chance to overpower him and retain her bending.
Arsonist's Lullaby: An Azula Timeloop Quest
- Thread starter Magery
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Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
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I mean, honestly, it wasn't even multi season tension? It was an issue that was only really introduced at the end of the Southern Raiders and only really was present for the finale, and which was in turn solved within the finale.
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Umm. I'm not sure how strong her current will is with all her issues plaguing her. Either way, that was a really cheap cope out on the productions part. Aang doesn't kill Ozai, but Zhao is fine, cause he didn't have this cool energy bending? Yeah, I'm going to state that energy bending was some incredibly weak story writing that takes a lot of the impact out to of the finale. I honestly don't consider the final confrontation worth writing if you plan to use energy bending.
Nicholas Brooks
Redeemer and Destroyer
- Location
- United States
Also Aang let the ocean spirit possess him in order to drown the Fire Nation's fleet attacking the Northern Water Tribe. So it's quite a blatant retcon in a show where retcons are mercifully rare.
- Location
- Te Ika-a-Māui
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- She/Her
I mean, the Koizilla stuff is a lot more arguable wrt responsibility than him tossing FN tanks off the side of a mountain in The Northern Air Temple.
I think authors justification for Aang killing Zhao and untold number of Fire Nation Soldiers is that It wasn't actually him who did it it was all Water Spirit fault who was possessing him. But Aang did let the spirit possess him tho, walked into the pond and all that, so personally I think he still at least partially responsible for that.
Honestly it kinda feels to have similar issue as energy bending. Aang being pacifist instead of finding solution to the crisis that would coincide to his moral values himself gets the solution handed to him and all the dirty work done by some higher entity just so Aang could have his conscience untroubled and his hands clean.
ColdGoldLazarus
Contrary Quester, Spreadsheet Queen, Pink Flamingo
- Location
- Challenger Deep
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- She/Her
I will never be mad at energybending, because thematically it gives Aang the chance to win over Ozai without having to give up on his teachings and values - one of the few last things he has left of his people. I am not a stickler for "heroes should never kill" or something, but in this specific case, if Aang was forced to kill Ozai, that would become another facet added to the genocide of the air nomads.
Also, the lionturtle theme kicks ass, and I refuse to hear otherwise.
Also, the lionturtle theme kicks ass, and I refuse to hear otherwise.
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Yeah. Aang basically starts this whole thing by running away because he can't handle the big hard realities involved in of being the avatar, and he ends the story being saved from responsibility of avatar duties again. It's essentially a Harry(Aang) and Voldemort (Ozai) scenario, where magic shenanigans introduced last minut means Harry doesn't have to kill Voldemort to defeat him because wand magic(energy bending).
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I think we are suppose to believe that no one actualy died that time. At least I think authors wants us too.
The same possibly could be said with the Airships. Like they spend time showing Gaang safely droping the crew in the water of the 1 airship but didn't bother with all the rest. Tho maybe this time they didnot care that much. Tho it is telling Aang caring about life of the possibly most evil person alive but not sparing a thought about lives of hundereds mooks who hardly had much of the choice in their service to Fire Nation.
He could have crippled him the old fashioned way. Ozai would probably feel regarding it the same way as him removing his bending considering a lot of benders and almost certainly Ozai consider bending is integral part of oneself same way any part of the body is if not more important. Tho I guess energy bending serves to make him look clean for the audience while he cripples the person.
- Location
- Canada
Aang suddenly happening across the lionturtle and discovering energy bending at the eleventh hour is a bit of a Deus Ex Machina
And one that I just kind of shrugged and rolled along with at first
Without giving it too much thought aside from "Yeah that was probably there to preserve the age rating or something"
But I have recently come across something that gave me a new perspective on the matter
View: https://youtu.be/tPLaGs-q0qk?t=1246
I mean it's still probably there to preserve the age rating, but that doesn't mean it can't have deeper significance than it's usually given credit for within the story as well
And one that I just kind of shrugged and rolled along with at first
Without giving it too much thought aside from "Yeah that was probably there to preserve the age rating or something"
But I have recently come across something that gave me a new perspective on the matter
View: https://youtu.be/tPLaGs-q0qk?t=1246
I mean it's still probably there to preserve the age rating, but that doesn't mean it can't have deeper significance than it's usually given credit for within the story as well
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Funny it makes Gaang look to have much higher kill count than Azula ever had.
I think this explanation falls flat considering Air Monks had no problem with killing Fire Nation soldiers taking into account the amount of non monk bodies surrounding Gyatso when Aang found his corpse.
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I've always felt there were circumstantial exceptions to air monk pacifism they simply don't learn before an age higher than 12, that combined with the influence of the other nations cultures, explains why the past incarnations could be unified in the necessity of Ozai's death. Aang hasn't truly become the avatar, has mastered the bending but rejected the culture of his bending masters because of his trauma guilt over the airbenders being wiped out causing him to reject conflicting teaching to his original ones.
- Location
- Canada
The main thrust of Red's argument is that
1. Aang's decision to avoid taking a life if given any alternative has significant meaning and weight to it, because he is The Last Airbender, the absolute last remnant of his people's traditions and culture. So if he allows the Fire Nation to push him into abandoning those principles then they succeed destroying the last remnants of that culture entirely
2. Were Aang to just blenderize Ozai once he has him at his mercy then, thematically, he'd prove the Fire Nation's might makes right attitude correct. That the ultimate solution to the problem was just a bigger stick. And by instead putting himself in a situation where he literally tested his resolve to hold true to himself against Ozai he won a more complete thematic and moral victory
(The wording of energy bending was "To bend another's energy your own spirit must be unbendable")
Neither of these things are actually undercut by the implication that some of the Airbenders were willing to put aside their pacifism and fight back
The weight is completely put on Aang's position specifically
Also it's more notable to me now than it was before that the Air Temple is surprisingly lacking in battle damage for the supposed site of a battle, like the temple is virtually untouched, no siege damage or scorch marks or anything
There's a single Fire Soldier helmet by the ball game, and then there's the one room with Monk Gyasu's body surrounded by soldiers he implicitly went down fighting
Which suggests less a battle and more that a select few Monks, possibly even just Gyasu, staying behind and sacrificing their spiritual wellbeing (and lives) while the rest tried to flee and were presumably hunted down
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- Location
- New Zealand
In this vein, I noticed it more glaringly in LoK than A:tLA, but I think as the show got bigger they got hit with executive meddling pretty hard and it forced them to change some plans.
Not saying the team who made Avatar was perfect by any means, but I don't think that fans having to go into this level of rationalizing or justification to make plot points like Energy Bending make sense is entirely the creators' fault.
EDIT - one more point: Luckily, as fans we can do whatever the hell we want, potentially including disregarding canon if we don't like it.
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ReignTorrential
Save Your Crown for a Rainy Day
Aang should have turned his old iceberg into a prison for Ozai. The show could have ended where it began 
The final episode title could have been "The Man in the Iceberg"
The final episode title could have been "The Man in the Iceberg"
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Nicholas Brooks
Redeemer and Destroyer
- Location
- United States
Oooooor... banished Ozai to the spirit world. Aang has always been established to be deeply connected to the spirits, so if for whatever reason the show kept the decision to make lethal force a deal breaker for Aang, they could have done something like that instead, which would have been far less of a Deus Ex Machina because that sort of otherworldly power was already known to be within the Avatar's purview.Aang should have turned his old iceberg into a prison for Ozai. The show could have ended where it began
Flairina
Least Omnipotent Goddess
- Location
- The next infinity over
Someone recommended this quest on a discord channel I'm in, so I decided to give it a look, and- jesus, I'll just post the quotes of me waxing poetic there.
Sometimes I see fics that make me go "Wow... I don't think I could write like that, and I'm not sure I'd even want to for most of the things I personally do write, but boy do I wish I knew how to write like that all the same." This is one of them. There's a certain stateliness to the narrative that just generally isn't present in most fiction. Every single sentence has impact and weight in both where it's placed and how it's phrased, and I don't understand how anyone can write like this without having to carefully consider each and every single sentence's precise wording and structure for hours on end. The amount of time I'd spend on determining where each paragraph begins and ends alone would take me out.
It's amazingly clever in how it phrases things — I find myself looking at just, a snippet of a single paragraph and finding myself unable to think of any more perfect way to phrase it for maximum effect. It's like every single scene was "that one scene" that the author really wanted to get to, which has consequently been polished to a mirror sheen. But this is a quest, where the narrative isn't predetermined, and the updates are basically weekly thus far. How.
It even has, dare I say it, perfect formatting. The exact right amount of italics and bold to emphasize and lend the reader to "hear" the words with the exact correct tone. Meanwhile I'm over here re-editing my chapters repeatedly because I realized like half my own emphasis was completely unnecessary and largely distracting. And god damn it even in non-story posts the author manages to be so poetic about the situation that I have to actually stop to process it for a moment.
To sum up, this quest has barely started, and it already contains literally some of the most effective, poetic, and clever prose I've ever read in my life. My hat's off to you, and I expect it will stay that way.
Sometimes I see fics that make me go "Wow... I don't think I could write like that, and I'm not sure I'd even want to for most of the things I personally do write, but boy do I wish I knew how to write like that all the same." This is one of them. There's a certain stateliness to the narrative that just generally isn't present in most fiction. Every single sentence has impact and weight in both where it's placed and how it's phrased, and I don't understand how anyone can write like this without having to carefully consider each and every single sentence's precise wording and structure for hours on end. The amount of time I'd spend on determining where each paragraph begins and ends alone would take me out.
It's amazingly clever in how it phrases things — I find myself looking at just, a snippet of a single paragraph and finding myself unable to think of any more perfect way to phrase it for maximum effect. It's like every single scene was "that one scene" that the author really wanted to get to, which has consequently been polished to a mirror sheen. But this is a quest, where the narrative isn't predetermined, and the updates are basically weekly thus far. How.
It even has, dare I say it, perfect formatting. The exact right amount of italics and bold to emphasize and lend the reader to "hear" the words with the exact correct tone. Meanwhile I'm over here re-editing my chapters repeatedly because I realized like half my own emphasis was completely unnecessary and largely distracting. And god damn it even in non-story posts the author manages to be so poetic about the situation that I have to actually stop to process it for a moment.
To sum up, this quest has barely started, and it already contains literally some of the most effective, poetic, and clever prose I've ever read in my life. My hat's off to you, and I expect it will stay that way.
It probably helps that most, if not all readers are familiar with Azula from the show and as long as the writing invokes her *enough*, the writer gets to borrow some of her phenomenal performance in their reader's head.
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This could have been very fun. While Korra is battling Unalaq and convergence is going off, a slightly more crazy but not any older because time works weird in the spirit world Ozai sneaks back into the natural world.
Yeah. Azula is up there near Darth Vader in iconic and captivating villain performances in my opinion. Kinda Ironic Mark Hamill is the voice of Ozai in that regard.
Magery
Life blooms like a flower, far away or by the road
- Location
- Australia
This is the sort of reaction to my writing—and particularly my prose—that I have been working towards since I was seventeen, fresh off reading Patrick Rothfuss for the first time and thinking I wanted nothing more than to learn to write a sentence half as beautifully as he could.
It's been twelve years since then, and while my tastes might have evolved significantly, that feeling, and that moment, has never quite left me.
So thank you.
Comments like these are the things I hold tightest in those quiet moments when the words are slow and the frustration sharp and I start to wonder if maybe I should have spent a little more time learning how to produce the substance rather than the style.
- Location
- New Zealand
To vocalize something I've been thinking while reading this quest:
There's something special in your writing. It grips at the lapels and pulls me in, in such a way that's best described as mesmerizing. Rarely do I end up rereading quest posts, but this one has me coming back all the time. I think I've read it in it's entirety two to three times so far.
The way you write makes me think, in a good way. About life, about myself, about perspective, the way the world does or could work. And it leaves me eager for more. That's not to say I'm desperate for updates or want you to rush them out or anything, of course. (I've been fishing for other Avatar and Azula related fic to scratch that itch between updates.) But your words have a certain staying power, in my mind.
As someone who's main source of literature has been fanworks for the better part of 15 years, after developing an adversion to properly authored books by one too many terrible YA novels in my youth:
Thank you for writing the good shit. I hope you can feel the appreciation of your readers more often, because it's very much deserved.
There's something special in your writing. It grips at the lapels and pulls me in, in such a way that's best described as mesmerizing. Rarely do I end up rereading quest posts, but this one has me coming back all the time. I think I've read it in it's entirety two to three times so far.
The way you write makes me think, in a good way. About life, about myself, about perspective, the way the world does or could work. And it leaves me eager for more. That's not to say I'm desperate for updates or want you to rush them out or anything, of course. (I've been fishing for other Avatar and Azula related fic to scratch that itch between updates.) But your words have a certain staying power, in my mind.
As someone who's main source of literature has been fanworks for the better part of 15 years, after developing an adversion to properly authored books by one too many terrible YA novels in my youth:
Thank you for writing the good shit. I hope you can feel the appreciation of your readers more often, because it's very much deserved.
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- He/Him
I'm mostly a lurker in here but even I have to say that your writeing feels like that of a poet that manged capture the feeling of every character in this quest
i might not be qualified enough to wax poetic about your style of writing. what i will do however is praise the substamce of the text if not its form.
id start by expressing how fresh the character of azula feels. The trope of being raised a weapon/tool has been done to death, but this particular variation of a self-possessed weapon is incredibly engaging. i suppose that every good villain written is the hero of their own story, but the clarity with which you have managed to show that azula is not a monster but has convinced herlsef of it is a wonder. in fact the lessons she has taught herself on how to be a monster run so deep, she doesn't understand why others dont see the world as she does. its nice to see the prelude when so many other stories focus on the part that comes after (the realization of seeing something wrong with your worldview) rather than the more philosophically interesting aspect of someone who sees nothing wrong with burning half the world to ash and dust so long as its in the persuit of something as trancendental as the glory of conquest, clashing directly with the cold calculating logic of the economic benefit of ruling a wasteland. all of it neatly interspersed with a deeply held but obviously repressed/misunderstood need to be loved by her father.
this has been genuinely a beautiful read so far and i cant wait for more to come
id start by expressing how fresh the character of azula feels. The trope of being raised a weapon/tool has been done to death, but this particular variation of a self-possessed weapon is incredibly engaging. i suppose that every good villain written is the hero of their own story, but the clarity with which you have managed to show that azula is not a monster but has convinced herlsef of it is a wonder. in fact the lessons she has taught herself on how to be a monster run so deep, she doesn't understand why others dont see the world as she does. its nice to see the prelude when so many other stories focus on the part that comes after (the realization of seeing something wrong with your worldview) rather than the more philosophically interesting aspect of someone who sees nothing wrong with burning half the world to ash and dust so long as its in the persuit of something as trancendental as the glory of conquest, clashing directly with the cold calculating logic of the economic benefit of ruling a wasteland. all of it neatly interspersed with a deeply held but obviously repressed/misunderstood need to be loved by her father.
this has been genuinely a beautiful read so far and i cant wait for more to come
Azula: I've been trapped in this endless cycle, constantly reliving my past failures with no change I make ever lasting beyond the current moment.
Aang, the current reincarnation of the Avatar: That's rough buddy.
Aang, the current reincarnation of the Avatar: That's rough buddy.