(no subject)
I love Avatar: The Last Airbender, but if, as one review suggested, Bryke were trying to make a point about the potential for good or evil in everyone and the importance of moral choice with Zuko and Azula's stories, they kind of weakened their case by giving Azula a possible personality disorder.
We see in the finale that by that point, Azula's genuinely mentally ill - not "their actions are incomprehensible to conventional morality so I'm gonna assume they're crazy" like some interpretations of the Joker, but having an honest-to-the-Moon Spirit psychotic break. Which can happen to someone of any alignment.
But even earlier when she's lucid and on top of her game, the girl's got issues. And a few of them (like the fact that she's a lot worse at connecting to people than she is at manipulating them) seem to bother even her.
Even assuming that some of Azula's sociopathic traits are innate, that in itself doesn't mean she was doomed to be evil. BBC Sherlock's take on Sherlock Holmes has some of the same tendencies (super smart, high risk tolerance, good at manipulating and reading people but kind of crap at socializing and feelings, trolling) to lesser degrees, and he's one of the good guys. But Sherlock wasn't raised to be the right hand of an abusive dictator-supervillain and John Watson is a more effective moirail than Ty Lee.
People with Antisocial or Narcissistic Personality Disorder (two hypotheses I've seen for what's up with her) aren't Always Chaotic Evil, but these conditions do tend to make it more challenging to conduct yourself constructively.
I love Zuko and Azula's characterization and I think they make good foils to each other, but if the show was, as the review I recently read claimed, trying to depict how our moral choices shape us, maybe they shouldn't have made Azula a sociopath.
We see in the finale that by that point, Azula's genuinely mentally ill - not "their actions are incomprehensible to conventional morality so I'm gonna assume they're crazy" like some interpretations of the Joker, but having an honest-to-the-Moon Spirit psychotic break. Which can happen to someone of any alignment.
But even earlier when she's lucid and on top of her game, the girl's got issues. And a few of them (like the fact that she's a lot worse at connecting to people than she is at manipulating them) seem to bother even her.
Even assuming that some of Azula's sociopathic traits are innate, that in itself doesn't mean she was doomed to be evil. BBC Sherlock's take on Sherlock Holmes has some of the same tendencies (super smart, high risk tolerance, good at manipulating and reading people but kind of crap at socializing and feelings, trolling) to lesser degrees, and he's one of the good guys. But Sherlock wasn't raised to be the right hand of an abusive dictator-supervillain and John Watson is a more effective moirail than Ty Lee.
People with Antisocial or Narcissistic Personality Disorder (two hypotheses I've seen for what's up with her) aren't Always Chaotic Evil, but these conditions do tend to make it more challenging to conduct yourself constructively.
I love Zuko and Azula's characterization and I think they make good foils to each other, but if the show was, as the review I recently read claimed, trying to depict how our moral choices shape us, maybe they shouldn't have made Azula a sociopath.