Talk:Azula/@comment-69.181.22.236-20130618011406/@comment-3338975-20130623024406

I'm well aware that they could have done so, but obviously they have had their reasons for not doing so as of yet. And I'm not stupid; I'm well aware that taking Ba Sing Se won them the war. I was simply correctly the anon's incorrect statement that Ozai never took part in any significant battles. Simply because they were not mentioned, doesn't mean that they weren't supposed to have been significant to the war effort; we really only get a spattering of details on the battles which took place during the war, and I doubt the creators thought we're so dense as to believe that those were the only major battles, and simply left the nature and significance of such battles a mystery so as to streamline the writing process and keep it concentrated on the main characters. So you've missed my point entirely.

I'm not sure what dragging Iroh's exploits into the equation has to do with the relative power levels of Ozai and his daughter Azula. You seem to have completely glazed over my point that Azula managed to take Ba Sing Se when Iroh could not simply through luck of the draw; she just so happened to stumble upon the Kyoshi Warriors soon before Team Avatar happened to have arrested the leader of the Dai Li. If circumstances had been different, and Long Feng had still been in power, he would have had no reason to barter with Azula, and the Kyoshi Warrior probably would never have been allowed into the city to begin with (they're kind of evidence of the Hundred Year War, you know). Yes,  Azula handled the situation brilliantly, but she was hardly trying to make a concerted effort to break into Ba Sing Se as Iroh was when she stumbled across the KW, and even on the off-chance that she was she wouldn't have been able to make it in without Team Avatar's mistakes.

I'd also like to point out that one's relative level of cunning really has nothing whatsoever to do with one's Firebending prowess. It's not conquering Ba Sing Se simply consists of burning it down, after all. Azula is consistently shown as having a significant amount of time charging up her lightning, whereas Ozai is able to Lightningbend within about a second or two. Blink, and you miss it. So if we're talking about how powerful their Firebending is, it's pretty clear that Ozai has greater power, if only because he's older. "Azula is the best Firebender because she could create flames just as big, and even more hotter." Funny how you say this, anon, and ignore the fact that you had to argue for this claim in the previous paragraph, and forget that (since we never saw her flames that large onscreen) it's always possible that her flames must be smaller because they're hotter as sort of an elemental pay off, per Azula's preference for precision (where she does hold the advantage over Ozai) over brute force. I'm not saying that it necessarily is this way, but I am saying that you cannot arbitrarily make Ozai's flames seem weaker when we lack any standard of comparison and lack full knowledge of how Firebending works (especially when Ozai's stronger abilities with Lightningbending say otherwise).

And the anon mistakes Ozai's position during the war. 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. (Of course, he turned out to be wrong about this, but that says just as much about Azula's weaknesses as it does Ozai's.) While Fire Lord, Ozai's freedom of movement was necessarily much more restricted, as preserving his rule over the homeland was the highest priority; he need not directly take part in battles to be an effective commander-in-chief, and it's almost certain that the giant drill project was conducted on his orders and was long in the planning (as Zhao obliquely remarks on it well before it was actually conducted). It's certianly a more creative and sneaky approach than besieging the city directly, as befits Ozai and his daughter; how Ozai was supposed to have predicted that the Avatar would return the year this project was finished, is beyond me.

Azula was also almost certianly watching over the drill project on Ozai's orders, and had this project not been conducted, the situation in Ba Sing Se would have been far less favorable to Azula. Of course, the failure of this project shows that this was an important enough matter that perhaps he should have been there himself, but the creators wanted to hide his face and continue to set him up as the puppetmaster behind the scenes, so this was out of the quesiton plot-wise even if it does make more sense in the real world. But once again, this can partially be attributed to an over-weening trust in Azula's capacity's as an agent of his will, and says just as much about her weaknesses as his; this really wouldn't matter so much, if the Azula-biased didn't mistake his role as political  puppetmater for mere inactivity and arbitrarily absolve Azula of her status as his most trusted agent and thus automatically attribute any weaknesses in her performance to him, rather than sharing the blame more appropriately. (She's not perfect, not matter what you think.) Personally, I'm also under the impression that the Kyoshi Warriors stationed themselves near the Serpent's Pass to try and gain intelligence on "The Secret of the Fire Nation" among other ways of contributing to the war effort; if this is true (though I can't prove that it is), then 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. The whole take-over of Ba Sing Se was really just an attempt by Azula to regain her honor after having failed to ensure that the drill project of her fathers ran smoothly;  Ozai was certianly correct in thinking he could trust his agent to ensure the fulfillment of his plans, even if it was via a much more circumcircatous route than preferred. Yes, of course, he could have used fear tactics, but I'm not entirely sure that the Drill breaking through their wall wasn't largely intended to have the same effect anyways, and it's not as if the oppurtunity to use such tactics even existed before the drill project failed.