Dear Muffin, I Love Both Your Writing And Azula As A Character But As A Survivor Who wasn't The Golden

dear muffin, i love both your writing and azula as a character but as a survivor who *wasn't* the golden child my views on her redemption arcs boils down to "no one you hurt has a duty to save/help you even if they shared an abuser" so, if that's okay, i'd like to have an idea of what i'd be dealing with in your azula redemption fics before i decide to risk them, either way thanks for writing!

Completely agreed that abuse survivors are well within their rights to avoid their abusers, and have no compulsion to help them, even if they change later in life.

That being said: Zuko and Azula's dynamic fascinates me, I love exploring it, and I don't see it as "Zuko is being forced to help her".

From what we see in canon, my take is that they were pitted against each other, but were rarely each other's abusers. Everything we see in the Zuko Alone flashbacks is just... fairly normal sibling interactions, especially between two young nuero-divergent kids with zero (0) good examples of How Siblings Work. Like, their examples are Mai, who has no siblings yet; Ty Lee, who is trying to actively distance herself from being similar to her sibs; and Ozai and Iroh, who are another essay entirely.

What we see in those flashbacks is a Zuko who is fully comfortably being his Drama Boy self in front of his sister, and a sister who hears the adults in her life talking about murdering her brother and immediately finds a way to warn him. That she has had no appropriate role model for "how to warn your only brother that your father is gleefully flipping through Ways-To-Murder-Your-Son Monthly" isn't really her fault, and the way she delivers the warning is pretty Peak Trauma Response for a girl used to successfully hiding behind a cruel front to Make Sure Murder Dad Loves Her.

Seasons Two and Three Zuko and Azula interactions read to me like two siblings re-learning each other after three years of no contact, and one of them has been primed by Daddy Dearest to view her brother as someone she can and should kill if the opportunity presents itself, both to make Ozai pleased with her and secure her place in the line of succession. So on their first encounter, she gleefully tosses lightning his way.

In their second encounter, she chooses to target Iroh rather than him.

In their third, she shows how clever she is by trapping him and tosses him in jail to taunt more later, really Zuzu, she had more important people to belittle.

Then she tries luring him to help her with promises of home, and he does, and she brings him home as the heir apparent. She does not need to do that: she could have brought him back in chains, fulfilling the original mission Ozai gave her. Instead she risks her father's displeasure and spends some of her own social capital to return him as a prince and her brother. And if course there's a lot of caveats to that, but over the course of the season she went from "capture or kill, either is grand" to "this is my idiot brother, it is acceptable to share just a little of my radiance with him". That is a BIG change, which hints to me of actual care between them prior to his banishment, because they sure as heck didn't have time to start loving each other in just Season Two.

So "they love each other but are disasters who their abusive father pitted against each other" is the basis of my writing for them, not "Azula was Zuko's abuser". In my stories, they reach out to eachother, as a brother and sister who understand what life under their father was like, and who are just learning to move past it.

As for Azula's redemption: the girl is an abused fourteen year old who bloodlessly took a city. Not an irredeemable, hardened war criminal. She doesn't need a redemption, she needs socialization.