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Avatar: The Last Airbender is full of complex characters and interesting parallels between
those characters, but one of my favorite comparisons is between Katara and Azula.
Because the first time you watch the show, you might not see too many connections between
them, but if you rewatch it, you can see how the show uses them to contrast each other,
and that gives a lot more nuance to all of their interactions, especially making their
final battle together even more meaningful.
So, let’s start from the beginning.
Katara and Azula are the same age in the series, both of them lost their mothers when they
were very young, both of them grew up with a dad and an older brother, and both are highly
skilled benders who learn a specialized bending technique in bloodbending and lightning bending.
But after they lost their mothers, their lives massively diverged based largely on how they
were raised and how they dealt with their mothers’s death.
First, let’s talk about how they were raised.
Azula was always encouraged by her father Ozai to dislike her mother Ursa.
She was fed lies about how her mother thought she was a monster and hated her.
We learn about this when she’s sitting around the fire and makes this kind of off-hand joke
about how her mother was right to believe she was a monster.
But, importantly, there’s no evidence in the series that her mother actually ever said that.
The biggest glimpse we get into how Ursa felt about Azula is at the end of the series when
Azula is having her breakdown and sees her mother in the mirror.
At this point, Ursa tells Azula that she loves her, even though this isn’t really Ursa
it’s just a figment of Azula’s imagination.
But still, I think it’s telling that Azula’s subconscious in this moment is trying to tell
her that her mother never actually hated her, because deep down, Azula knows that’s true,
even if she doesn’t want to admit it or believe it because the belief that she is
a monster has already driven her so far down her angry path.
Quick note: I’m only going to talk about the Last Airbender TV show in this video because
I don’t want to spoil anything specific from the comics, but suffice to say that The
Search comics give even more evidence that Ursa loved Azula.
So anyway, from a very young and impressionable age, Azula was basically encouraged by her
father, the person she looked up to the most, to hate her mother.
And after her mother disappeared, she was never able to get any kind of closure over
the course of the TV show.
Nobody was ever able to convince her that Ursa actually loved her because up until the
very end, she was loyal to Ozai, and nobody really knew what happened to Ursa.
Katara, on the other hand, seemed to grow up in a very supportive household where her
parents loved each other and didn’t use their kids as pawns against each other.
Katara knew that her mother loved her very much, and towards the end of the series, she
even learns that her mother knowingly sacrificed herself by claiming that she was the last
waterbender in the Southern Water Tribe.
So both of these characters were loved by their mothers, but Azula had no idea, while
Katara knew very well that she was loved.
Now real quick, before we dive any deeper into Katara and Azula’s stories, I want
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Now, back to Katara and Azula.
So even before Azula lost her mother, Ozai was encouraging the worst aspects of her.
He taught her that violence and aggression were to be praised, and that weakness and
emotions were to be hidden and locked away.
But without Ursa there to even try to counteract some of Ozai’s teachings, Azula went fully
down the hateful path that Ozai designed for her.
She knew nothing else in her entire life except being rewarded for being cruel, and being
punished for being kind, so that’s what she did.
But for Katara, her father Hakoda seems to be a nice person who encouraged Katara to
be a nice person as well.
Katara was raised with love, and allowed to be who she wanted to be, without a strict
punishment-rewards system to guide her down a narrow, hateful path.
What happened with Katara, though, was that she felt a pressure to be maternal because
of the absence of her mom.
Her dad, nice as he might be, seemed to be more of a warrior than a caretaker, and so
she kind of assumed the role of mom figure.
Sokka talks about this with Toph at one point, saying that when he tries to picture his mom,
all he can see is Katara’s face.
So even though Katara wasn’t abused like Azula was to go down one specific path, the
trauma from her mom’s death kind of pushed her down a specific path anyway.
She adopted this kind, nurturing, motherly role to take care of Sokka.
Azula didn’t have that option, because Ozai would not have tolerated Azula behaving in
any kind of nurturing or motherly way.
So despite both of them losing their mom at a young age, the circumstances of their lives
drove them in very different directions.
Their parents and upbringing even defined their relationships with their siblings.
Azula always felt like she had to be better than Zuko because Ozai pitted them against each other.
He made them compete against each other and fight for his attention and respect.
And Azula, as a firebending prodigy, often did much better than Zuko, which led to Zuko
feeling a lot of jealousy, and led to Ozai treating him worse, because he exhibited signs of weakness.
As a result, Azula also hated Zuko for showing any weakness because she learned from the
only role model she had, Ozai.
Zuko was undoubtedly abused by Ozai, but so was Azula.
While Zuko was physically abused and abandoned, Azula was emotionally manipulated into
becoming a weapon for Ozai.
He used her to further his own interests, and never cared about actually doing
what was best for her.
Katara and Sokka, unsurprisingly, weren’t pitted against each other in the same way.
They have sibling squabbles, like any siblings do, but their relationship is a lot healthier
because of the way their dad raised them.
And because there’s no royal title for them to fight over, there’s no pressure or competition
between them to be better than the other one.
So Katara’s able to have a much better relationship with her brother than Azula was able to.
And when talking about Azula, I’ve seen people try to say that she was evil from the
beginning, because even in the flashbacks we see of her as a very young child, she has
cruel tendencies where Zuko has nicer tendencies.
But I think that’s still very much her being a product of her environment.
Zuko tries to be cruel as well, but his mother reprimands him and tries to show him another
path, which she’s able to do because Zuko doesn’t feel super close to his father.
Whereas Azula is so greatly praised and, in her mind, supported by her father, that she
won’t listen to her mother telling her anything different.
So from the beginning, because Ozai chose to praise Azula and not Zuko, Azula never
really had a choice in how to behave.
Sure, I guess she could’ve stood up to her father and said, “No, this is wrong,”
but what small child does that?
At that age, all you know is what your parents tell you.
And even if Azula was a bit more violent as a child, good parents and a loving household
could’ve helped her work through that, but instead, Ozai just encouraged
and fostered that behavior.
It’s difficult to know if any aspect of a person is nature or nurture, but I do think
that if Azula had grown up in a more loving, supportive environment, like Katara, she could’ve
turned out much differently.
Like, Katara obviously went through a lot of trauma losing her mom, but she was still
raised by her dad and gran-gran and the rest of the Southern Water Tribe community who
all seem to have encouraged positive traits in her.
If you can’t imagine Azula being raised to be nice, try imagining Katara being
raised to be mean.
For example, imagine if she was raised by Hama.
If the only parental figure Katara had ever known was Hama, who raised her to be a bloodbender,
do you think tiny 5-year-old Katara would put her foot down and say,
“No, that’s unethical, I refuse to do it”?
I highly doubt it.
If Hama was the only parent she had, the only one who fed her and took care of her, she
would look up to her and want to earn her praise.
And in that alternate universe, we might have a bloodbending Katara determined to take out
firebenders and exact revenge for Hama.
Now that’s not what happened, obviously, but that’s because of the environment Katara
grew up in, and if there’s anything these parallels between Azula and Katara can teach
us, it’s that the environment you grow up in can have a massive impact on who you are
when you’re older.
And the point of that isn’t to say that if you grow up with bad parents, you’ll
be a bad person, because that’s not the case at all.
I think the point is just that it’s important to realize *why* people behave a certain way
so that you can offer them the support they need.
Like Zuko is a great example of becoming a good person even when raised by terrible people,
but that’s because he had Iroh to believe in him and then later had Aang and
the others to support him.
Azula never had an Iroh, and the “friends” that she had didn’t, and probably couldn’t,
offer her a better path.
Katara isn’t *only* good because of how she was raised, and Azula isn’t *only* bad
because of how she was raised, but it’s important to recognize how someone’s upbringings
can drive them in a certain direction.
And that brings me to my second main point of comparison between Katara and Azula: How
they dealt with the loss of their mothers.
The answer, unsurprisingly, relies a lot on how they were raised.
Katara is given the space to talk about her mother and her emotions, and so she does,
and therefore is seen by a lot of viewers as a very emotional character.
I’ve seen people say that this is a negative aspect of Katara, like they’re tired of
Katara bringing up her mother all the time, even though Zuko does the exact same thing
with his honor constantly and everyone loves Zuko.
I mean, I love Zuko too, but I think both him talking about his honor and Katara talking
about her mother make a lot of sense.
In fact, Katara’s ability to be very openly emotional about her mother is a really good,
positive thing about her character.
It allows her to cope with the loss of her mother and express her emotions without bottling them up.
She’s still traumatized, but she’s dealing with it, and that allows her to heal and move on.
Azula, on the other hand, is the queen of bottling up her emotions.
Ozai did not like anyone expressing their emotions, and so Azula is never allowed to
grieve the loss of her mother.
She’s never allowed to talk about it or express any empathy for her mother or even
say that she misses her.
It’s the complete opposite of Katara, and it hurts her immensely.
Unable to express her emotions, she never deals with that loss, and it eats away at her.
When her friends betray her, it begins an unraveling of her mental stability because
she’s never gotten over her mother’s disappearance.
She starts to think that everyone will leave, just like her mom.
So she banishes everyone and hallucinates seeing her mom, and ultimately, she’s defeated
by Katara, and only then, when she’s lost everything, does she finally allow herself
to cry and feel her emotions.
But by then, it’s too late.
She bottled her emotions up for too long, and they destroyed her.
And now all she can do is cry.
I think writing-wise, it was a really interesting choice to have Azula lose to Katara instead of Zuko.
I remember when I first watched the show I was a bit confused by that choice because
it was supposed to be this big showdown between Azula and Zuko.
But now, thinking back on it, it makes so much sense.
Azula, being powered up by Sozin’s Comet, probably should’ve won, but she didn’t.
She might have been more physically powerful in that moment thanks to the Comet, but mentally
she was a lot weaker because she never processed the loss of her mother, which led to this
whole downward spiral she had of not trusting anyone.
But Katara was calm when facing down Azula.
She had dealt with her trauma and she knew exactly who she was and what she had to do.
In the end, Katara’s ability to talk about and freely express her emotions helped her
save the world, and Azula’s inability to do the same was her downfall.
And a part of Katara dealing with her trauma wasn’t only talking about it, but also confronting
her mom’s killer.
I’ve made a whole video about why that episode is so good, but in this context, it’s important
because Katara has the opportunity to become like Azula.
She has the opportunity to become the person Hama wanted her to be.
She could kill the person who killed her mother and become fueled by rage and hate.
But she chooses not to.
Not because she forgives the man who killed her mother, but because she doesn’t want
to become the type of person who kills a helpless old man in the street.
It’s an important decision for her, and one that she’s able to make because she’s
processed what happened to her mom and knows who she wants to be, rather than just being
consumed by grief and rage.
I do wonder what Azula’s path could’ve been like if she, likewise, had been given
a path to becoming more like Katara, if she’d had an Uncle Iroh or someone to guide her
in a better direction.
I think The Beach episode with the Fire Nation kids shows that Azula wants to get along with
people, she just doesn’t really know how.
But regardless, as her story is, it’s a really good contrast to Katara’s character,
showing how these two people from relatively similar backgrounds can grow up
to become so very different.
What did you think of the parallels between Katara and Azula?
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