He Showed Many Instances Of Genuine Care For Iroh In Return - Tumblr Posts
On the idea that Zuko is somehow at fault for “blaming Azula for being better than him” or “thinking she didn’t suffer”:
Zuko believes this because the idea that Azula was better than him and got (and deserved) everything he did not is a lie Ozai and Azula made him believe.
Him thinking this is not him wrongfully blaming Azula, it is him internalizing self-blame for being the imperfect child, and another facet of Ozai’s and Azula’s abuse of him.
When he responds sarcastically that Azula is “so perfect,” he is responding to how she uses the idea that she is perfect and he is worthless to hurt him. She had previously told him that his trauma was a “sob story” and a “performance” and that she didn’t actually care about their mother - someone who Zuko did care about and whose loss is deeply felt by him. Of course it’s not true that she doesn’t care, but her pretending that she doesn’t is a way to assert her superiority over Zuko yet again and he is NOT wrong for being angry and hurt by that.
Azula does not want Zuko to see how she is imperfect and how she suffered, Azula wants Zuko to think that she’s inherently superior to him and that that’s the natural order of things, because it gives her power over him, as well as power over her own narrative, because Azula doesn’t think and doesn’t want to think that she was abused as well. She doesn’t want to think that it could happen to her because the distinctions their father made between her and Zuko and who was worthy of love and care and who was not are entirely arbitrary.
Of course, deep down, Azula does want to be seen as more than the perfect princess, and wants to be known on a human level, but she never admits that to her brother because she wants to maintain the abusive dynamic, because it benefits her. We see this in how she interacts with her friends, too, in that every time she admits vulnerability it is offset by an affirmation that she’s above it all. In the end, of course it’s not true, but it is not Zuko’s fault that he doesn’t see that, because this is what his abusers made him believe and another facet of his trauma.
To twist this into Zuko “blaming” Azula for being resentful of being constantly told by her of how much better she is than him is victim blaming.
Of course it’s all a lie, but it’s a lie Zuko believes because his abusers made him believe it.
And of course, people who blame Zuko for this also want to try and argue that he somehow took advantage of her in the last agni kai, precisely because this is the moment when he has stopped believing those lies. Zuko says that he can take Azula because she’s “slipping,” but it’s more than just that. It’s that he’s able to see her as vulnerable because he no longer internalizes the idea that she is perfect and he can never measure up.
To frame Zuko as taking advantage of someone who abused him because he no longer believes the lies she has used previously to maintain power over him is abuse apologism, and because abuse is about power, abusers are always going to paint you as the real abuser for evening the playing field.
That’s why these conversations about how Zuko “needs to realize what Azula suffered” never include any suggestion that Azula should realize that her brother was ever hurt, despite Zuko being the only one of the two of them to realize that they were raised by an abuser and thus being more likely to come to that realization about his sister than she is about him.