Earth, Fire, Air, Water! (AtLA and LOK thread :D)

Yeah, and the thing is that Jet actually did do things worse than Zuko (I'm ignoring the comics re: Azula, they're not canon in my heart), as a teenager in a war.

Zuko, in his position as a commander in war, generally avoided getting civilians involved. He wasn't perfect at this, yeah, but he did not actively target civilians. He got civilian towns as collateral damage a few times and was certainly willing to threaten them, but most of the times he actually used military force were either 1) against other military or similar forces (eg the pirates), 2) against the Gaang (which also kind of counts as the above! Sokka presents himself as a warrior at their first meeting, even if an ineffective one, and Aang and Katara are benders, who are militarized by default in Fire Nation society even if they aren't elsewhere). The main things he does against civilians are threatening the Water Tribe and the burning of Kyoshi Village when he thinks they're hiding Aang.

Jet? Absolutely targeted civilians and chose operations with a lot of civilian collateral damage. There's a scene in his introductory episode of him leading an attack against a civilian Fire Nation merchant. The dam had far more repercussions for civilians than anything Zuko did, including the burning of Kyoshi Village. And he didn't change once driven out of that region, because he was only less willing to bring violence against Zuko and Iroh because he would have gotten caught (and as far as he knew, they were Fire Nation civs).

This isn't to say that I'm against a Jet redemption arc - I think, frankly, that the possibility exists more for him than Azula, because he has the capacity to relate to people emotionally at all, which Azula never IMO really developed - but to say that he did the same things as Zuko is objectively wrong. Zuko engaged under the rules of war. Jet did not - he disregarded the distinction between military and civilian, which is a war crime in its own right.

 

I think part of why Jet gets so much hate is the Umbridge effect. not many of us personally know a Zhao or an Azula, people who did objectively much worse things than Jet, but pretty much everyone has had at least one run-in with an angry kid who targets their legitimate anger in needlessly destructive and harmful ways because the only targets they can actually hit are the wrong ones. *gestures at tumblr*

Jet did several things wrong, and you can kind of understand why, but they still would totally have been war crimes if he'd actually been affiliated with a military.

 

Disagree. While the degree of their actions and malice is fantasy tier, I would wager that most people have had an older superior (at a job; a teacher) who treated them like crap for the crime of caring about others, being younger and making mistakes as a result, etc., and you can't act against them for fear of reprisal so you can only hope they manage to get their commuppance. Zhao's treatment of Zuko is extremely relatable and part of what establishes Zuko as a secondary protagonist who can have a redemption arc that's meaningful (see this post for better meta on this than I can write here). Lots of people have had that boss, that teacher, and even if you haven't personally you know someone who has.

As for Azula, it's a really common thing for, when a narcissistic abuser has multiple children, the one who affirms their worldview is a favored child and the one who questions their worldview is a scapegoat. Again, the extremes of Ozai's evil go beyond the norm of that narrative - most people's abusive parents aren't the unquestioned rulers of their nation - but when you view it all through the lens of the Fire Nation Royal Family as a family with the kinds of dysfunction that a family might have, Zuko and Azula's relationship is... exactly what you'd expect it to be. In fact, there's a strong parallel in my father's relationship with his youngest sister (except my dad didn't have an Iroh so, that worked out as you'd expect re: him gaining healthy coping mechanisms from another source).

Zhao and Azula are exactly like Umbridge - they're the kind of people who hurt you on a day to day basis, taken to a fantasy extreme. It's just that in order to see them that way, you have to see them from Zuko's view rather than Aang's.

 

alright yeah, that's true. I haven't watched ATLA in a while so I forgot about the details of Zhao and Zuko's relationship, and I was thinking more of Azula's military actions than her interpersonal ones.

 

Completely agreed that Zuko is set up as a protagonist in contrast to Zhao and Azula from nearly his introduction, in ways laid out in the post. He's honorable about his combat & military methods, controlled in both the amount of destruction he causes and his selection of targets. Compared to Jet, it's easy to see Zuko as being on a redemption arc path from the get go.

Azula's introduction has a degree of deliberately and actively hurting those who defy her, using violence and fear to push them into doing what she wants. That's more like Jet's methods, with his targeting of civilians who have betrayed/defied his ideals by not fighting against the Fire Nation. Azula has the background of raised by Ozai to explain how she got that way; I don't recall Jet's childhood being expanded on in any such way. So it's more challenging to justify why he went about things in the way he did, and whether he had any deeper rationale for it.

My understanding is that, while Zuko gets a protagonist redemption arc, it's not the only sort; people can do better than they used to do, and heal, and whatnot, and that's the sort of arc Azula's set for. The bulk of it's happening in the comics, but from what I've heard, they had planned that for her from the get go, too.