Talk:Azula/@comment-69.181.22.236-20130618011406/@comment-3338975-20130701015501

Since you've gone out of your way to denigrate me as a troll, spat in the face of the apologies I made for any possible transgressions on my part, and then went on reject my request to bring this off the wiki's comments sections and into the message boards by continuing to lambaste my position, I believe I at least have the right to defend myself from the accusation of being a troll who engages in deliberate self-contradiction simply to mess with people.

First to deal with the speculative portion, in which I believe there was no self-contradiction. The statements "Yes, Azula was surprised when they came across Appa without Aang, which obviously indicated that she thought she was on the trail of the Avatar," and ""it would also be because of Ozai's orders that the Kyoshi Warriors were conveniently stationed where Azula could make good use of them after she failed to make the drill project go as planned," do not contradict each other as I intended them, so obviously somewhere along the lines my meaning was lost. My meaning with those points was the following, "(P1) The Kyoshi Warriors were trying to gain intelligence on the Secret of the Fire Nation. (P2) If P1 is true, then the KW were where they were as an indirect result of Ozai's orders for the placement of the drill's construction. (Never did I mean that the Kyoshi Warriors were following Ozai's orders, as you seem to think I intended to mean.) (P3) Azula thought she was on the trail of the Avatar when she was following Appa's fur trail (P4) There, she found the Kyoshi Warrior conveniently stationed where she could make use of them, a happy accident which was an indirect result of Ozai's own plan for taking over Ba Sing Se." Is this all speculation? Yes indeed, everything above was - but it was not self-contradictory speculation as you claimed. Nothing about the Kyoshi Warriors being there as an indirect result of Ozai's orders for the drill's construction contradicts the fact that Azula was surprised to find them there - unless we're to understand that Azula has full knowledge of the enemy's intelligence gathering strategy at all times, which is a quite ludicrous assumption to make.



"At the time, when Azula arrived in Ba Sing Se, we still didn't know what happened to Suki. The scene where Azula and Suki were fighting was cut off and wasn't finished just so people could speculate." And hence your justification for beginning to speculate counter-factually yourself, while still pretending to have the support of the facts. Yes, at the time we didn't know, but that does not change the fact that the plot ran the way it did. Bryke themselves mentioned in the DVD commentary for "The Earth King" that although arresting Long Feng felt right, it was probably not a smart plan on Team Avatar's part. By doing so, they put Long Feng in a position where he'd want to claw his way back up to power, thus putting him at the mercy of Azula's skills of manipulation. Had he been still been in a position of power, he would not have cared whether the Kyoshi Warriors were real or fakes; either way, bringing in soldiers from the outside would indicate the city's residents that a War was going on, something he wished to suppress at all costs, and so he would not have let them in without a very good reason for doing so, Team Avatar's reccomendation would not have been enough, especially when Long Feng still considered them to be enemies of the state. Azula took advantage of a situation that she was lucky enough to find that Team Avatar had created for her, a situation which only came into being because they were able to prove the existence of the War by using the Drill (Ozai's plan for take over) as the smoking gun. Whether or not we knew the Kyoshi Warriors identities at that point or not was completely irrelevant; the fact remains that Azula took advantage of a situation that a combination of Ozai and Team Avatar created for her, handling it with great intelligene and finnese but still in large part contingent on her father's original plan. This remains true regardless of whether or not my preceding speculation about the Kyoshi Warriors was true or not, and yet you harp upon the latter as if the rest of my argument was entirely contigent upon it, when in reality I only mentioned it as a possible way of driving home my point. I'd retract it now, and it still would have no effect on the entire argument I presented within this paragraph.

"You fail to remember that Ozai doesn't care if he squanders his own militia in order to win battles. He doesn't care if he destroyed acres of trees, or deprive the world of the moon, resources means nothing to him and are very disposable." Here your points are at least semi-legitimate, but you forget that in the earliest years of his reign Ozai would have had to build up a sense of legitimacy for his rule given the frankly suspiscious circumstances under which he took the throne. The best way to appear a better ruler than his brother could have been, is to not immediately proceed to repeat his mistakes; in addition, the Drill project was plainly meant to have a sense of granduer behind it which fits Ozai's out-sized ego entirely, and which the Fire Nation could get behind as a way of furthering their interests without the needless waste Ozai's "weak brother" made them go through. Given the fact that we do not know of Ozai's other exploits, we do not know of what other plans might have been considered but dropped in the middle of the planning stages due to not having enough of an effect, nor do we know what he may have had to do to consolidate his rule in the homeland which may have taken his attention away from conquering Ba Sing Se. Conquering a foriegn nation means little if you are toppled from power in your own....and that goes for Miss Azula, as well.



'''"If I left the impression that Ozai was rule-bound to stay at the throne room, I can only say that wasn't my intention." '''Here is a statement that you posted that also contradicts yourself. "The only reason he was able to evacuate the throne during the finale, was because he had made a new positon for himself as an international ruler (the Phoneix King)" 

^ It's funny how your apparent rules of fair play allow you to use hyperbole, but prohibit me from doing so, even when the lines succeeding my hyperbolic statement indicate the conditions for my previous statements. You entirely ignore the fact that my full statement was the following, "The only reason he was able to evacuate the throne during the finale, was because he had made a new positon for himself as an international ruler (the Phoneix King), and thought he could trust Azula to the subordinate position of simply ruling over their home nation as Fire Lord during his relatively short excursion." What I meant by this, was that because of the suspiscious manner in which he took the throne, Ozai did not believe that it was in his best interests to evacuate the throne and leave it in the hands of a subordinate, as he could easily risk the country turning to ruins during his absence and thus felt that a firm grasp over the homeland was best held directly in his own hands. (And just look how right he was; he was able to mantain his rule all the way up until the day he left the homeland and left the throne in the hands of Azula.) This situation changed during the eve of Sozin's Comet because Ozai and his generals felt that the continued rebellions in the Earth Kingdom were enough of a disproof of the standard Fire Nation propaganda that the War was the Fire Nation's way of sharing their greatness with the rest of the war (with the implication that the areas under their control would quickly realize how good they had it and cease resisting) that it presented a potential risk to Ozai's control over the homeland as well as potential evidence of the illegitimacy of his rule. Thus, Ozai manuevered Azula into a place where she'd be willing to become the nominal Fire Lord, despite the fact that the position was now stripped of most of its meaning by the creation of the position of the Phoneix King. By doing so, Ozai intentionally put Azula into a position where she'd be even more reliant on his good-will towards her than before, by giving her nominal political power she had no experience in dealing with before while simultaneously making that position subject to his personal caprice as Phoneix King. In this position, he plainly thought he could trust Azula with the simple task of ruling over the Fire Nation as "daddy's little girl" during the short time he was away, as now (and only now) he had a regent who would be subject to his every whim and would have no thought of trying to replace him. This was what I meant when I said the creation of his new position was "the  only reason" Ozai was able to evacuate the thrown; I was referring to pragmatic reasoning, as I have been throughout this entire argument, rather than a codebook of rules that the Fire Lord supposedly must follow (which neither of us has ever seen). The very fact he was able to create the position of Phoneix King, shows that he never felt himself to be bound by the rules; this was a piece of personal caprice and arrogance without prescendence in tradition, while simultaneously re-investing the hopes of the homeland in his personal being during his destruction of the world which was plainly reprobate for its rejection of their (his) grandeur.