Respect Princess Azula (Avatar: The Last Airbender)

[u/mikhailnikolaievitch]

[u/mikhailnikolaievitch]

It’s weird to me that you’d rank Aang so low when he should clearly be on the top. He beats Toph when he isn’t even at the height of his abilities in The Blind Bandit, and just by virtue of having mastery of all 4 elements alone I’d give him the edge over everyone else. In the Avatar State it’s not even a question.

I’d also put Iroh ahead of Azula and Katara. He developed the technique of redirecting lightning, which both shows a clear edge on Azula and just in general demonstrates a true mastery, and his signature move is breathing fire, something almost no character is shown doing in the series without amplification of either the Avatar State or Sozin’s Comet (Korra does it meagerly and briefly while tied up). He also implies that there’s at least a possibility he could beat his brother Ozai, who is demonstrably better than Azula (consider that he bends lightning more easily, and that he flew during Sozin’s Comet while Azula could only surf).

There’s a bit of a rock-paper-scissors quality to Avatar that makes tiers hard to establish though.

[u/MorbusGrav → u/mikhailnikolaievitch]

It’s weird to me that you’d rank Aang so low when he should clearly be on the top. He beats Toph when he isn’t even at the height of his abilities in The Blind Bandit, and just by virtue of having mastery of all 4 elements alone I’d give him the edge over everyone else. In the Avatar State it’s not even a question.

I agree with that, barring the comics.

I’d also put Iroh ahead of Azula and Katara.

I agree again, barring the comics.

He developed the technique of redirecting lightning

Well Azula learned it in the comics.

who is demonstrably better than Azula (consider that he bends lightning more easily

Azula became actually better than even him in the comics.

and that he flew during Sozin’s Comet while Azula could only surf).

Azula was actually flying against Katara, just not as high.

[u/mikhailnikolaievitch → u/MorbusGrav]

What are Azula's comic feats that her putting her so far above everyone else? I sincerely want to know--I don't recall there being anything, and if there is it needs to go in the respect thread asap.

redirecting lightning

As stated in the respect thread, I think her lightning redirection feat in the comics is tenuous as best. She only does it the once, it's not completely clear that that's what she's doing, and there's no explanation given to how she could have learned it or comments by the other characters on her doing it. If there is, again, please let me know.

Azula was actually flying against Katara, just not as high.

I think we're referring to the same thing when I say "surfing." She's no more than a foot above the ground and it seems to be more of an amplified run than anything. Flight is an extremely rare skill in Avatar, and the only true flight (self-sustained) we see in A:tLAS is during Sozin's Comet performed by Jeong-Jeong and Ozai.

What I'm trying to get at in contextualizing Azula's feats is that she was an amazing bender for a prodigy, and I'd love to see an incarnation of her as an adult. But, it's important to remember that in the original series we get very limited insights into what true adult masters are capable of. Flight is one of those insights, and while Azula could come close she could never fully manage it.

[u/mikhailnikolaievitch → u/[deleted]]

First of all, just thank you for sourcing these claims. Throughout my research I frequently went up against this argument about Azula from the comics being so extraordinarily better than her TV incarnation without virtually anyone explaining why. You helped put the redirection feat definitively to rest and showed how much better her lightning-bending became, and these are both factors I'll make sure to include when I update the thread.

For the most part I was discounting a lot of her comic-based lightning bending feats just based on the medium--speed is a bit harder to portray with stagnant illustrations, but you gave adequate points of comparison to help it scale into consideration. Apparently Azula did some serious training after her defeat, which completely makes sense given the story and her characterization.

I would be interested to hear the supporting arguments for the claim

Some people suggest Azula at 17 is already the most powerful firebender the Avatar's world has ever seen. It seems reasonable.

There are still certainly feats other firebenders have been capable of that she has never displayed. The main one (as I argued above) would be true flight, either comet-enhanced or not, but a more obvious example would be combustion-bending. While combustion-bending is likely not something she could learn without the required tattoo (and perhaps some kind of specialized training), it is a rare enough and powerful enough ability that I would still put P'Li ahead of Azula in terms of raw strength.

EDIT: I included some of your edits into the post, but will do more once I have some time. In general I need to clean up a bunch of the gifs for this RT, so whenever I do a bigger overhaul I can do things like analyze her fighting style.

[u/mikhailnikolaievitch → u/[deleted]]

No firebender displayed flight without the comet in the sky,

Part of my point though was that Azula didn't fly during Sozin's Comet while Ozai and Jeong-jeong did with ease. I suppose it's possible that she was simply choosing not to fly, but I'm skeptical that she would hold back during her final fight. Particularly against Zuko, where she grew desperate enough to attack Katara rather than continue fighting Zuko directly, it seems less likely that she would hold herself back from flying than that she simply can't.

[P'Li] is always solidly grounded when she shoots. This makes her combat rhythm pretty straightforward

P'Li is at least more versatile than Combustion Man who I'm doing some scaling off of for my assumptions here. What we saw with Combustion Man, repeatedly, was the entirety of Team Avatar incapable of overcoming his overwhelming offensive power. Aang has greater agility feats than Azula (and more bending-options) and was still overwhelmed by Combustion Man's repeated attacks.

With P'Li herself she was considered enough of a threat that she was prioritized during the infiltration of Zhaofu and again during the Red Lotus' attack on the Air Temple. These are circumstances where there more multiple opponents she was fighting against (with several Airbenders in the second example) and she consistently proved difficult to lay a counterattack on. What's more, these are examples where P'Li wasn't even fighting against benders she had a straightforward defense against--Azula's firebending will fall flat against an opponent who took a burst of dragon breath.

There's a couple different motivations for the rhetorical resistance I'm offering you here. The first is just out of a gut reaction against there being so many child savants in A:tLA. Aang was the youngest airbending master in history. Toph invented a whole new method of bending that changed the world forever. Katara even achieved water bending mastery while being self-taught in under a year on top of mastering bloodbending in a single night so proficiently that she overpowered the woman who invented the artform. A:tLA was relatively restrained in showing us depictions of true adult masters using their bending at full force and then LoK showed us several adult masters who delivered on the promise of what time to develop a skill can do. To say that Azula was the greatest firebender in all of Avatar not only adds yet another child prodigy to a series bursting with them, it diminishes the idea that bending is a skillset that improves over time.

The other reason I'm offering resistance is that I like for my mind to be changed, and you're so far consistently offering the best counter arguments on these points that I've seen. The more I can learn about a series I love the better, and you seem more intimately familiar with the canon outside the main series than I am.

[u/mikhailnikolaievitch → u/[deleted]]

Well, damn. I think you've largely convinced me. While I still wouldn't put Azula a significant degree of proficiency over Toph and Katara, it looks like she does indeed elbow her way past most other firebenders in terms of raw efficacy. While I would still assume that older more seasoned benders such as Ozai, Iroh, and Jeong Jeong are more skilled than her, the comparison is inherently complicated by the majority of their feats overlapping with Sozin's Comet and Azula's psychotic break. Anything they did during that time can be chalked up to the comet and anything she didn't do can be chalked up to her going bonkers.

It seems clear that Azula would stand somewhere in the same tier as Toph and Katara, and while I don't conceptually like the idea of kids exceeding the skill level of adults from a world-building point of view the bare facts available to us are pretty hard to contest.

This has been a tremendous help for the RT, and while I'd still ideally like to get around to cleaning up the gif formats one day I feel this discussion has really helped bolster the RT's overall quality. Thanks again. If you've enjoyed going through this or if you'd like to have a different discussion I'd greatly appreciate your taking a look at my Katara Respect Thread. These were both characters that were sorely missing from the RT ranks and since I'd never done any RTs before these I've been very welcoming of all the help I can get from the community.