The stupidest thing about Zuko's family or more specifically about Ozai is that his end game is to burn the Earth Kingdom to the ground. Lets not discuss the logistics about how the entire flight to Ba Sing Se is 99% desert. So Ozai's brilliant plan when taking full advantage at the max power coursing thru him is he is gonna light a whole bunch of sand that goes on endlessly for miles on fire.

Phoenix King.

>>153494706
I think it would've been neat if Zuko did kill Ozai on the day of the black sun.

>>153494784

Literally nothing was stopping him outside of the plot since everyone but Aang said it was morally correct to kill the psychopathic genociding madman.

>>153494706
That's the thing
If you developed Ozai more and had him be an active presence that'd just diminish Zuko and Azula's agency and presence as their own characters.
Aang vs Ozai was the spectacle but Katara and Zuko vs Azula was the emotional payoff

>>153494706
Darth Vader effect.

>>153494898

You really cant develop anything more with Zuko's family since all the stuff they did develop is comic exclusively and all it accomplished was telling us stuff we already knew how Zuko's whole family line is cursed with psychopathy and he was the only "normal" one of his family

>>153494706
Ozai's treatment by Bryke is weird considering ATLA was likely conceived with Ozai having SOME depth to him:

>Zuko speaks about how their family life WAS good until it wasn't
>the old ass Nick website's ATLA section specifically mentioned how Ozai and Ursa had a happy marriage
>the influence of Star Wars, Evangelion and plenty of other pop fiction series with complex/tragic dads

It's worth pointing out that if Bryke's blog means anything (see their review of Man of Steel), one (or both of them) has a real hateboner against authority but particularly their dad being boomers who tell them what to do. It's worth pointing out that Gene Yuen Lang allegedly clashed with Bryke over the storytelling in the comics (Gene had a messy relationship with his dad, but ultimately showed him empathy: see the autobiographical facets of Level Up)

>>153494898
I think the real problem is that in any other "normal" story, Azula would have been the morally complex/tragic antagonist with Ozai being THE Fu Manchu classic supervillain with some quiet depth to him. You can kinda see this bob up in the Zuko prequel comic to the Shymalan movie where Azula is a lot kinder to Zuko, even helping him get set up for when Ozai banishes him.

But the road to what we got basically dictated that that couldn't happen because Bryke's original plan was for Iroh to be SECRETLY EVIL and giving Zuko poor help on purpose while Azula was a boy (basically just Joffrey). Ehasz and Walsh pushed against this, so the compromise was that Iroh USED to be evil while Azula was ultimately a mess due to how Ehasz-Walsh and Bryke treated her very differently....

>>153494952
...and this is why the comics double down on Zuko being the only "good one" because Bryke had to get their way.

>>153494706
The big problem with Ozai is the same problem found with Aang in that both the Protagonist and Antagonist are Plot Devices with not much depth to them and that in a more tightly written and condensed narrative, they'd be significantly different or at the very least have more complexity/humanity to them.

>>153497205
>Bryke's original plan was for Iroh to be SECRETLY EVIL
avatar really was lightning in a bottle. it could have sucked so easily

>>153494706
I don't think the problem is that he's underdeveloped. It's that he's a blatant fucking retard.
>Be be Ozai
>Be bitch boy compared to your legendary brother the dragon of the west
>hang around the capitol showing off your prodigy daughter because you have no talent yourself
>can't bother to even manage a single battalion while your brother is about to take Ba Sing Sei
>have to threaten your son so you can get your wife to murder your dad who hates your guts
>take the throne from your brother while he's still grieving over his son's death
>get rightly shit on for your general's piss poor strategies by your son
>literally commit child abuse in an arena to make your 2 inch dick seem any less small
>your brother steals your son
>promote your loser buddy Zhao
>have him fuck up your siege of the north pole
>can't even break through Ba Sing Sei with uber expensive drill that could have fed your army 5 times over
>need to take credit for your daughter's victory overthrowing the Earth Kingdom's shadow government.
>still can't manage the Earth Kingdom despite overthrowing their king
>say fuck it and decide to yeet your new colonies in fire because who needs raw resources?
>get beaten by a little boy
>have bending taken away so you have no chance to redeem yourself
>have to live to see your "worthless" son take the throne and your precious daughter put in an insane asylum
>manage to lose 95 years of major conquest in less than 5

>yet another thread with ZERO new discussion

>>153497024
I noticed that too. Zuko even says "Maybe showing all his baby pictures will turn him good again" in the first part of the finale. with the "good again" part clearly not being the joke. Seems like it was said without thinking.
I wasn't a big fan of what the comics did with that story. It just felt like Misery Porn after a while.

I've been just casually brainstorming a fanfic about the life of Lu Ten. In it, Ozai was a bit of an insensitive and prideful child with an inferiority complex because of how much more proud his father seemed to be about Iroh. Ozai and Ursa's relationship was a more subtle kind of abusive. He doesn't even have to try for her to admire him. Just buying her expensive gifts so she feels indebted and grateful all the time. He gets distrustful and angry when she's spending time talking to Iroh, trying to guilt her into secluding herself. Eventually he ends up hitting her when Zuko can't start firebending quick enough, accusing her of infidelity.

>>153497750
>gets a granddaughter through incest of his own kids
The final nail.

>>153497778
The show is 20 years old, bro.
What do you want?

>>153494706
As history has taught us time and again, warmongering tyrants tend to be psychotic morons.

That said, it feels like they had other plans for Ozai, but then decided it didn't actually matter if he was complex or not.

>>153494784
Alternatively, have Azula off him. She ends up being the primary antagonist of the show anyway. Then again, she wouldn't be that much of a final boss, since she was always way less skilled and powerful than she likes to claim. Katara beat her, and frankly Zuko was about to beat her before the dumb bitch cheated.

>>153497205
>The big problem with Ozai is the same problem found with Aang in that both the Protagonist and Antagonist are Plot Devices with not much depth to them and that in a more tightly written and condensed narrative, they'd be significantly different or at the very least have more complexity/humanity to them.
Nah, Aang is a pretty well rounded and consistent character who gets some solid development.

>Bryke's original plan was for Iroh to be SECRETLY EVIL
I'm gonna need you to cite a source on that, cause that sounds like fucking shite.

He's basically FireHitler. His goals were pretty much just Pan-FireNationism because he felt like Fire was the superior element and was setting out to prove it.

>>153497960
Seriously, we don't need character development for not-Hitler. All he needs is to be a credible threat.

... Why did they hide his face for the first two seasons? Had they just not finalized his design, what gives?

>>153497960
No...
Thats not true.
Why do retards always wave around hitker as if just saying that name brings anything to the conversation.
Might as well bring up Old Scratch too.

>>153497960
He was almost right. Fire allowed them to industrialize faster than even the Earth Kingdom did, they were controlling metal by forging it before Toph discovered that Metal bending was a thing. Hell, they could even theoretically control lightning which gave them a potential pathway to electrifying their country.

>>153497995
You make an expy of Satan the big bad if you're an unoriginal person and/or a religious person trying to sneak religious imagery or stealth-evangelize their story, you make an expy of Hitler the big-bad if you're still unoriginal and want to pretend like your villain is more grounded and political but still unequivocally evil. Simple as

>>153494755
Yeah, well Hitler and Napoleon both thought invading a wasteland like Russia was a good idea too.

>>153497960
It’s weird how the entire war only happened because Sozin was mad that his crush(the avatar) rejected him (this is canon btw, it’s also why Sozin outlawed homosexuality.)

I watched through Avatar for the first time a month or so ago and I kind of agree.

He's more an obstacle then a character in his own right, he feels underdeveloped or at least underutilized. I don't think he needed to be a particularly morally complex character or anything, but it feels like we never get any actual look into his personality or his way of going about things before the final fight with him, aside from when Zuko confronts him

>>153498685
... Word?

>>153498129
Sub-midwit take.
Mythologizing dead people and events that may or may not have happened worse creating religions around it is peak retard. Worse, in thr context of telling a modern story, is boring.

>>153497205
>>153497560
I dunno about Evil Iroh but Trickster Iroh?

>>153497943
how new are you anon? the og show bible leaked on here years ago, this is common knowledge. hell it's even speculated that the reason bryke left Natla was because they wanted to pull off this garbage and were told no by netflix

>>153497205
No wonder they've not been able to redo their success, they only worked because of restraints and fighting to create something good.

>>153497818
You mean
>The final glimmer of redemption.

>>153497750
>manage to lose 95 years of major conquest in less than 5
Even worse! The show took place over like 10 months at absolute most.
Ozai went from legitimate threat for the world to locked in a cell and humiliated in 10 months.
The only reason he even was a threat at all was because all the other nations wanted to be isolationist instead of banding together to defeat the fire nation like they should have. Even with their superior fire power (heh), they wouldn't have stood a chance against a coordinated assault from the combined earth kingdom and water tribes.

>>153501557
Bro. The show is fucking stupid and poorly planned.
Youre thinking about it more then the creators and writers did.

>>153501557
>>153501606
It's almost like the one major factor that turned the tide of war was the Avatar. Hence why Sozin waited until Roku died, and planned a first strike on the Airbenders.
It would have been way easier for Aang to end the war if it was just a few years prior, before the mechanical advancements the Mechanist gave to them.