Talk:Azula/@comment-170.211.148.46-20120417150018/@comment-3338975-20120421192333

Azula is best understood as a tragic villianness. She stauchly identified herself with the particular moral claims enforced by the Fire Nation, and did not simply use it as an excuse to grab power for herself to satisfy her own ego as a corrupt imperialist would do (unlike what many people seem to think about her, and as Ozai definitely did), but was willing to hold herself to these claims even when other moral claims that she was beginning to sense were legitimate began to be advocated against her. It may have looked like a narcisstic power grab for its own skae with the Fire Nation's code as her convenient excuse, but in reality it was caused by an unresolved tension between the legitimate needs of others during her time and the polarization of the enforced moral of the "arbitrary reign of fear" which became part of her own make-up. Unlike Ozai, whose truly debased narcissm was restricted by no such concerns, Azula's concern for adhering to her nation patriotically through support of the symbol of its leadership in her father is deeply deserving of our pity, though not the support of our sense of morality. We are, after all, called to love our enemies in order to attain true spiritual maturity, which for the truly ethical person means nothing less than showing a real sense of pity towards those stauchly attached to a course of action considered to be morally wrong - we don't have to side with Azula to appreciate the forces bearing down on her that she wishes to be responsible for, and to hope for her ultimate redemption from her current pitiful situation.