I think it’s impossible to walk away from Avatar: The Last Airbender without a special
place in your heart for Uncle Iroh.
He’s the loving father figure to everyone’s favorite villain-turned-hero, a dedicated
tea enthusiast, and one of the most powerful benders in the show.
But what exactly makes him so memorable and loveable?
As the uncle of a character who only joins the main group in the final season, it would
be easy for his role to be simple and forgettable, but it’s definitely not.
In this video I’m going to run down just some of the reasons why I think we all remember
and cherish Uncle Iroh so much.
When you first watch Book 1, Iroh comes across as just a really chill uncle.
He’s supportive of Zuko, but he mostly just wants to drink tea and relax.
He’s a bit of comedic relief to Zuko’s constant angst.
But as the series progresses, we learn more and more about who he is.
We learn that his son died fighting in the war, and that he gave up being a General after that.
We learn that he just wants a humble life with his nephew and a tea shop.
We learn that he did not actually kill the last dragon, he only lied about that to protect the dragons.
As a part of that, we learn that he knows the true meaning of firebending, which many
in the Fire Nation have forgotten.
He knows that firebending is about life and energy, while many others continue to feed
their firebending with rage and hatred.
And we learn that he’s part of the Order of the White Lotus, an ancient secret society
with members from multiple nations that seeks to learn about the world.
The slow unveiling of all of this over the course of the series gradually gives Iroh
more and more depth.
That makes him an interesting character for sure, but there are two specific Iroh moments
that I think really have the biggest emotional impact on the viewer.
In Book 2, in The Tales of Ba Sing Se episode, Iroh goes around helping people.
First an infant, then some children, and then an adult.
It seems normal enough.
I mean, his role is kind of that wise old person dishing out advice and proverbs.
But the end of the episode really hits you hard and recontextualizes everything you just saw.
That episode takes place on his dead son’s birthday, and he had been gathering things
to have a memorial for Lu Ten.
This one line from Iroh is so powerful:
“If only I could’ve helped you.”
This changes the meaning of everything he just did.
He wasn’t just being a kind old man.
He was trying to help people in the same way he wishes he could’ve helped his son.
He feels like he failed his son, and he’s spending the rest of his life, in a way, trying to make amends.
There’s nothing he can do to bring back Lu Ten, but he can make the world a little
bit better by helping others.
Maybe through helping someone else, he can set them on the right path before a tragedy
befalls them or their loved ones.
It’s too late for him, but it doesn’t have to be too late for someone else.
It’s hard to express how much emotion and meaning is portrayed in this very short story.
Even the song he sings at the end has the lyrics about a solider boy marching home,
but his son never got to march home, and I just can’t handle it.
But there’s also the second Iroh moment I want to talk about, and that’s his reunion with Zuko
at the end of Book 3.
Iroh was absent from a good chunk of Book 3.
We saw him early on in a Fire Nation prison, but he escapes, and then Zuko goes to join
Aang and the others.
While they go on training and doing their Team Avatar thing, nobody knows where Iroh is.
Zuko is worried that Iroh will never forgive him, because Iroh had already believed in
him so much, and Zuko had betrayed him.
So when they finally do meet up with Iroh again, there’s a big question mark looming
over how Iroh will react to Zuko.
When he was in prison, Iroh had at first refused to even talk to Zuko, and then later tried
again to convince him that he still had good within him, so it could go either way.
At the very least, he would have every right to be mad at Zuko at first and forgive him later.
But what actually happens is that as soon as Iroh sees Zuko, he grabs him and pulls
him into a tight hug.
He’s just happy that his nephew has chosen to fight for what’s right, and has finally
managed to break away from Ozai’s horrible influence over him.
What mattered to Iroh wasn’t how long it took Zuko, or how Zuko had betrayed him earlier,
it only mattered that he had finally gotten to the place that Iroh had wanted for him.
And I don’t know how you don’t cry at that moment.
It’s such a pure, wholesome moment of love.
Iroh cares so deeply about Zuko that he’s willing to instantly, without hesitation,
forgive Zuko’s betrayal at Ba Sing Se.
He’s been a loving, understanding father figure for the whole show, but that’s really
the biggest gesture he could possibly make, and it’s exactly what Zuko needed.
I think it’s those two moments -- Iroh setting up the memorial for Lu Ten, and Iroh hugging
Zuko -- that really cement Iroh as a fan favorite character.
But it’s how those moments are connected that I think really makes Iroh a more interesting character.
My first reaction to learning about Lu Ten was that Iroh was trying to raise Zuko well
because he didn’t have the chance to keep raising Lu Ten.
Zuko was like the people in The Tales of Ba Sing Se that Iroh helped, he was someone who
needed guidance and love.
But I think there’s actually a lot more to it than that.
Iroh didn’t see Zuko as Lu Ten necessarily, but as Iroh himself.
Iroh used to be a General in the Fire Nation Army, next in line to the throne.
He bought in to all the Fire Nation’s propaganda and was fueled by anger and hate.
He was just like Zuko.
That is, until he lost Lu Ten.
After the death of his son, he was beside himself with grief.
He stopped his siege on Ba Sing Se and left to travel the world, leaving Ozai to claim
the throne in his absence.
We don’t know a lot about what happened during his travels; all we know is that he
changed a lot, since he had previously laughed at the idea of burning Ba Sing Se to the ground,
but was now happy to live in Ba Sing Se serving tea.
During his travels, he must’ve learned about the different forms of bending and became
friends with earthbenders and waterbenders, which we know because of his connection to
the other members of the White Lotus, and because of the importance we see him place
on the balance between the elements.
Zhao even mentions that Iroh has been to the Spirit World, which probably happened during those travels.
When Aang is in his Spirit form and no one can see him, Iroh somehow does, meaning that
he has a level of connection to the Spirit World that very few other people do.
I think his travels after Lu Ten’s death did a couple of major things for him.
First, it humanized the people outside of the Fire Nation for him.
The Fire Nation propaganda relied on the idea that the Fire Nation was spreading prosperity,
and that their war was necessary to share that prosperity with the world.
To make this argument, they had to position themselves as the superior nation.
According to the propaganda, the Earth Kingdom obviously couldn’t be happy without the
superior Fire Nation to rule over them.
But in his travels, Iroh must have seen that that wasn’t true at all.
He would’ve seen that people from the other nations got along just fine without the Fire
Nation, and in fact, they hated the Fire Nation and the war.
He had been so steeped in propaganda before that and only surrounded by other Fire Nation
people who were also steeped in that propaganda.
His travels allowed him to finally see outside of that limited worldview, helping him to
see the humanity in those who were different from him.
And secondly, it allowed him to incorporate aspects of the different nations into himself.
This is best illustrated in the episode “Bitter Work” in Book 2, when Iroh teaches Zuko
how to redirect lightning.
In this episode, he explains how knowledge must be drawn from different sources, and
that knowledge drawn from just one perspective is rigid and stale.
He explains that even a firebender can learn from studying
the ways of earthbenders, waterbenders, and airbenders.
This is directly at odds with the Fire Nation propaganda that fire is the superior element,
and so Zuko pushes back on this idea, but Iroh insists that learning about others is important.
He illustrates this by noting that he developed lightning redirection by studying waterbenders.
His connection to the Spirit World is also unlike other firebenders, since airbenders
are the ones who tend to be the most spiritual.
So the loss of his son was the catalyst for his change, causing him to come to terms with
the real and horrible effects of war, but it’s his travels after the fact that largely
set him on the path to becoming the Iroh we know in The Last Airbender.
I don’t think he’s completely changed by the time we see him in Book 1, but he is
a far different person from the militaristic General he used to be.
Instead, in Book 1, he’s mainly concerned for Zuko’s wellbeing.
Iroh might not be a big fan of the Fire Nation anymore, but he kind of goes along with them.
He’s not a full-blown traitor, but he’s clearly not 100% Team Fire Nation.
He sits by while Zhao attacks the Northern Water Tribe, solely because he wants to be
there to support Zuko.
But, when he sees how far Zhao is willing to go by killing the Moon Spirit, he has to intervene.
He knows how important balance is, how important the Moon Spirit is, even if the other firebenders
like Zhao can’t see it.
So he finally unleashes his fighting capabilities, not to capture the Avatar, but to turn on
his own nation.
From then on, in Books 2 and 3, it’s clear he wants a life away from the Fire Nation,
and he wants to guide Zuko that way as well.
Knowing all of that about him, you can see his actions through a very different lens
when rewatching the show.
What comes off as him just being a goofy uncle early in Book 1 can actually be seen instead
as him trying to waste his nephew’s time so that he loses track of the Avatar.
He knows that Zuko’s quest to capture the Avatar is not his destiny, but he also knows
that Zuko is so deadset on it that he cannot directly intervene.
So he does little things to put them off course, like pretending to lose his lotus tile so
that they have to make a pit stop at a nearby town, or taking so long in a hot bath that
he delays Zuko’s plans.
Not to mention that 99% of the time, he really puts in zero effort to actually help capture Aang.
Like when Zuko is literally fighting Aang right in front of Iroh, Iroh just stands there
watching, even though he’s a highly-skilled bender and could’ve probably captured Aang
at that point if he had wanted.
Iroh just doesn’t want Zuko to go down the same path that he did.
Iroh didn’t realize that he was on the wrong path until he lost his son; he’s just trying
to help Zuko come to that realization a lot earlier.
Even though at this point Iroh hasn’t completely turned against the Fire Nation, his priority
is definitely to keep Zuko safe and lead him away from his path of destruction.
As a part of that, we even see him try to teach Zuko about the true source of firebending early on.
When he’s first training Zuko, he insists that firebending comes from the breath, whereas
Zuko’s firebending comes from anger.
He refuses to teach Zuko more advanced firebending until he learns that.
Of course, Zuko does his angsty-Zuko thing and refuses, but Iroh is trying.
Iroh knows that firebending should be about life and energy channeled through the breath,
and he tries to impart that on Zuko.
We see on multiple occasions how Iroh’s guidance affects Zuko, not just in the obvious
way, that he was a father to Zuko in a way that Ozai never was, but also in what he taught him.
Iroh’s role as Zuko’s supportive father figure was important, but so was his role
in helping to unbrainwash Zuko from the Fire Nation propaganda.
Their travels throughout the Earth Kingdom helped to humanize non-firebenders to Zuko
in a similar way to how Iroh’s travels did for him.
And while Zuko didn’t have other benders to learn from, Iroh was able to give him some of that wisdom.
So when Zuko’s father attacks him with lightning, he’s able to redirect it.
And when he’s later trapped in a freezing-cold cooler in a Fire Nation prison, he’s able
to use an Iroh-inspired breathing technique to keep himself warm, showing that he’s
finally mastered his firebending coming from the breath.
There also might be some airbender influence there, since airbenders are able to keep themselves
warm through breathing, but I’m less sure about that part.
Iroh does a lot of other cool things in this series, like reconquering Ba Sing Se for the
Earth Kingdom or breathing fire at Azula.
He’s not just an old advice-giver -- although, he certainly fulfills that role, giving advice
to both Aang and Toph at different points -- but he’s also prepared to
dish out justice when it’s necessary.
Iroh wants to see the best in people, to help people even when most of society as turned
their backs on them, but he also realizes that at a certain point, sometimes you just have
to accept that some people won’t change, and you just need to deliver justice.
It’s that accepting, compassionate side, combined with the fact that he’s ready to
attack when necessary that makes him such a joy of a character.
All of his emotional moments hit you right in the heart, and then he’s there at the
pivotal moments in the series to protect or attack as necessary.
He might not be a main character in that he’s not strictly within Team Avatar, but he embodies
the heart and soul of the show as much as any other character.
He has a past he’s not proud of, he goes out of his way to help others, he tries to
find balance in the world, he loves a good joke, and he serves justice when necessary.
He’s the culmination of every other character’s story packed into one.
And that’s why we all remember and cherish him so many years later.
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