superorangerobin:

silver-tongues-blog:

grim-reaping:

stuffingbuttsandstuff:

firelxrdazula:

them: thanos is the most built up villain of all time

me, an intellectual:

Honestly, no one can ever deign to assert that Azula is not the single most iconic female villain in the western animated canon if not the entire global literary canon.

most iconic villain period. the day of black sun? siege of ba sing se? military genius.

she wasnt even in ba sing se to seize control, she was there to retrieve zuko and the avatar. Seizing control was something that she did while she was there like going to the store to pick up bread and getting eggs while youre there.

Honestly, the Firelord Family Trifecta is a perfect example of how to make villains at the three major points of the redeem-ability/sympathetic spectrum.

At the the end of irredeemable monster and unsympathetic brute you have Ozai. He is a man willing to kill and send literal children to die to further his imperialistic, genocidal regime. He is utterly without mercy, remorse, or pity, even for his flesh and blood.

At the other end you have Zuko. He is introduced as a pretty straightforward villain until you learn more of his backstory, of his miserable childhood and unspeakable abuse. How he’s driven by a singular goal he probably knows in his heart isn’t going to make his father love him, but can’t pull away from because of his need to restore his honor. How he finally was able to pull away from his toxic family and find one that actually loved and accepted him, people he could actually call friends, and make a new future not only for himself, but for the entire world.

And then in the valley between these two ends we have Azula. She is every bit as ruthless and amoral as her father, with all of his cunning and prowess at bending, but there’s at least a part of her that not only knows she is the bad guy, but hates it. She knows that she’s a monster, and she knows that people recoil and withdraw from monsters, but she was never offered the alternative; her mother’s rejection of her poisoned any notion of kindness for her, and like Zuko, she probably knows that her father’s approval is an empty prize, but what else can she hope for? Her father’s cruelty set her on the path of evil, but her mother’s rejection drove her further down it. She’s eternally caught between the evil she knows she can never live up to and the good she knows will never accept her, and that, I think, is the most miserable place of all