I was thinking a lot about this moment. Somehow it feels like the agni kai was a watershed moment not only for Zuko, but also for Iroh.
I think this something that Iroh is intensely ashamed about – and is the source of all the patience he has with Zuko and his determination to make things right for him.
Because Zuko’s scar is not just a testament of Ozai’s cruelty as a father, but is a scar on the soul of the entire Fire Nation.
Their supreme ruler publicly mutilates on his own son, a 13-year old child, who merely spoke the truth about a nation that in a quest for power has lost perspective on the worth of human life – and everyone cheers.
The scarring and humiliation of the young prince (who should be really the symbol of the future to his people) is a grotesque public spectacle.
And Iroh, who was once next in line to leading these people, former great war hero, one of the most powerful benders, and still one of the nation’s leaders – all he can do is to look away.
The boy who spoke the truth, who stood up for kindness, who tries to do the right thing, who refuses to fight his own father, who begs for forgiveness – he faces completely alone his horrible punishment, and nobody speaks up for him.
And I think this is Iroh’s moment of truth – that disagreeing privately is not enough, he cannot look away anymore. He realizes that healing this boy could be the chance to heal the Fire Nation, that he is maybe destined to be their leader, but not from the throne of the Fire Lord. He has to get Zuko through this trauma and show him kindness, love and acceptance in a way he has never experienced it. He has to teach him that speaking up and saying sorry should not and will not lead to harsh punishment, that kindness is not weakness and cruelty is not strength; that honor is not violence, but doing the right thing.
it’s important too because iroh had at that point lived a lifetime of…looking away.
who knows when he first started to feel like there was something wrong with the war?
he knew his father’s persecution of the dragons was wrong. he went and found them when he was at least relatively young, and came back and lied that he’d killed the very last one, to protect them. he walked around known by a title based on a lie, and he seems to have tried to earn it on other merits but like. passive resistance much?
but if he ever disagreed aloud with his father, it was very very gently, because he remained the favorite son. he remained the top general. he besieged Ba Sing Se, at ludicrous expense and probably immense loss of life especially on his own side because that’s how sieges work even when the landscape isn’t attacking. all of this, already dissenting at least a little in his heart.
was he already with the White Lotus then? it seems like he ought to have been, since it was only like seven years ago and how do you make Grandmaster in a secret society and establish trust with hereditary enemies in just a few years, half of them spent shipboard? (idk what the canon is; the whole concept of the White Lotus is weird.)
but either way, he fought anyway.
he tried very hard to conquer the Earth Kingdom. he led his people to their deaths.
and then it was his son, his Lu Ten, and that’s where he broke, where he stopped, where he walked away. where he said I can’t anymore.
(which is the closest he ever came to no until that moment on Azula’s ship where he redirects the lightning.)
maybe he would have pushed harder at his father when he gave up on his quest to see lu ten’s ghost, pushed to end the war or at least fight it on gentler terms. except he came home to find his father was dead too and his sister-in-law vanished and his brother crowned Fire Lord and he didn’t fight that, either. he accepted it. he had spent so long suppressing his feelings of hesitation and disagreement and he probably didn’t want the responsibility or believe in his own leadership enough to start a civil war against his own brother, whom he didn’t even hate.
he was so used to not putting up a resistance. he was so used to the fact that no wasn’t a permissible sentiment.
Iroh spent a lifetime being to Azulon what Zuko was trying so hard to be to Ozai.
i think the horror of what ozai did made iroh confront the fact that even if zuko’s submission had been accepted, things wouldn’t have been okay. that he’d spent his entire life as one of the top enablers of a regime whose goals he fundamentally didn’t believe in, and he ought to be doing better, that he theoretically had a lot of power and the responsibility to do something for the world with it but he didn’t know how.
he’d never known how.
did he even have plans for what he was going to do when he became Fire Lord? I feel like once upon a time he decided to bide his time and not make waves and change things once he had power, and then his dad went and lived to be 100.
my take: iroh has his shit only slightly more together than zuko, because the main differences between them are that iroh’s father abused him much more gently (because he actually liked him), and that iroh is a competent liar.
whatever the gap in their natural bending talent is makes a difference too, but not as much, it’s mostly just the basis for having been the favorite instead of the unfavorite, and we see how that turned out for azula. iroh is a mess.
but he has decades of faking it under his belt, and the one thing he’s sure of is he can’t bear to fail zuko too.
tl;dr adulting is hard.
and fascism is bad. and child abuse tends to be generational.
@whetstonefires This is exactly what I find so fascinating about Iroh – he has so many controversial things about him – and yes, it’s totally not like he’s the wise old man who knows everything and has the grand plan to save the world. As much as he’s guiding Zuko on his journey (because he has the experience of growing up in that fucked-up, abusive family, and he’s made plenty of the dumb mistakes Zuko is making and knows the dead-end pleasing a crazy father is), he is also a fellow-traveller figuring out his own destiny; as in how to protect Zuko and how to keep that spark of goodness alive in him (when he couldn’t protect his own son) and the Avatar at the same time, how to redeem himself for the siege of Ba Sing Se – is it enough to look for a life peace as he tries in Ba Sing Se?
And the same way the Agni Kai was a defining moment, so was Zuko’s betrayal when Iroh can’t sit on the fence anymore and he needs to take sides and openly defy the Fire Nation and everything it stands for. We don’t know exactly when he hatches the plan to retake Ba Sing Se, but my money is on those prison months.
And also this complex history is what makes it believable why he won’t take the throne – he is too tainted with the war in a way Zuko isn’t.
QueerGalaxies 