Zuko (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
capthlock_rage) wrote2008-02-11 03:31 am
capthlock_rage) wrote2008-02-11 03:31 am
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ESSAY: ZUKO'S DYSFUNCTIONAL FRIENDSHIPS!
For some reason, I felt the need to essay on some of Zuko's more important relationships. Being Zuko, he doesn't have many. I made outlines! I planned this all out in my head! And then somehow I ended up with over 2000 words for three relationships and by god, I hadn't even gotten to Azula yet! So you know what, I'm going to split this up into sections, and the first section was the most fun for me to write because it didn't involve me smashing my head against a wall like analyzing those siblings will: people who Zuko probably shouldn't be associating with in camp for the sake of his own value system not collapsing horribly and yet he keeps doing it! Hooray!
Zuko's taken from the time when he's working in the tea shop, right before Lake Laogai. He's completely unsatisfied with things, he doesn't want to be stuck living a boring ordinary life when he should be off fulfilling his destiny, and if he sees a way out, he'll go for it, without thinking things through. That's kind of the way Zuko operates -- he sees a beginning and an end but is absolutely hopeless at visualizing the details in the middle. This causes him to do amazingly dumb things like dragging an unconscious Aang out into the middle of a snowstorm with no plan for how to get out of said snowstorm, or trying to break Appa out of bison-prison with nowhere to keep him in a crowded city and hoping that this somehow leads to capturing the Avatar. His drive is one of his greatest attributes, but it's also one of his worst, because he acts without thinking. Some people can be amazingly successful at carrying out spur-of-the-moment plans. Unfortunately, Zuko is absolutely terrible at winging it.
Which means he's dug himself into sort of a hole here in camp. He's accidentally getting close to people who, if he'd actually thought it through, he would know he should be wary of. Because, really, he's not used to having people judge him for being him and not the prince of the Fire Nation, or being forced to think about the things his country is doing instead of just accepting them. The convenient thing is that canon has confirmed this and taken his personality in a similar direction to what I've done with him in camp, but the difference is that in canon, he's completely shifted alignment, while in camp, his goal has stayed exactly the same as it was when he arrived, because he hasn't had that final push he needed to change. Which is incredibly confusing for Zuko, and it's turning into a spiral in which he's becoming more and more miserable and more and more frustrated, but instead of him doing anything to change he just keeps doing the same things he's been doing and blaming himself for things not working out.
In short, someone needs to smack that boy.
But I've rambled enough of an introduction! Without further ado, I present the ridiculously long relationship essays.
AVATAAAR!!1!
For the last three years of Zuko's life, the single most important thing in the world to him was capturing the Avatar. You can tell, because every third sentence out of his mouth was about capturing the Avatar, and the other two sentences were probably complaining about things resulting from not capturing the Avatar. To Zuko, the Avatar was his goal, the symbol of everything he was trying so hard to achieve... but never really a person, even after they finally met. Which... hadn't changed when he arrived in camp. And with Azula in camp, a constant reminder of exactly what he's been working for, that drive to capture the Avatar and return home to his father and restore his honor and live happily ever after only became stronger. There was one slight problem, though -- there's absolutely nothing he can do about any of that here. The Avatar is right under his nose, 24 hours a day, but even if by some miracle Zuko managed to capture him, there's nowhere he could go. So every time he saw Aang he felt more and more useless.
That in itself wouldn't have been all that much to get used to, if Aang hadn't been so... Aang. It's one thing to have an image of the enemy in mind -- it's another thing entirely to be around that enemy constantly when said enemy is just a twelve-year-old kid. A really genuinely nice twelve-year-old kid who gives him bison rides and maes him Christmas presents and really wants to be Zuko's friend. And for someone like Zuko, who's almost completely unused to affection in any way and isn't quite sure what to do with it when he has it... well, it's confusing. For a while he assumed that it was some kind of psychological warfare. But... no, that kid isn't capable of psychological warfare. And so, for some utterly mind-boggling reason (a reason which Zuko is trying very hard to chalk up to the kid being a monk, because Zuko knows that he certainly hasn't done anything for him that should earn anything but hate)... Aang likes Zuko.
And... though Zuko isn't ready to admit it... he's starting to think he just might like Aang a little bit too. There are more than a few problems with this, which should be immediately obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. But Zuko doesn't really think this is going to cause any issues. After all, that's what truces are for, right? And if it's good enough for Azula, it must be all right. And Aang was the one who said that when camp ends, there wouldn't be any hard feelings, which means that Zuko can go on thinking that this is just the inconsequential middle part of the story. The start and the end of this great plan are still the same.
So even though capturing the Avatar has now turned into sentencing this really nice twelve-year-old and his sort-of-friend to death, Zuko hasn't actually processed this yet. He's doing the mental equivalent of covering his ears and shutting his eyes and yelling "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU." And besides, they don't have to be friends anymore after they leave camp, because the Avatar said so. Zuko wants to believe this. He needs to believe this, despite it flying in the face of all logic and sanity. Fortunately, Zuko is very adept at convincing himself of things that aren't true.
IN SHORT: I - I WISH I KNEW HOW TO QUIT YOU, AVATAAAR :(
EUPHIE
... oh Euphie. Euphie is, without a doubt, the single most important person to Zuko outside of his canon, and holds a special place in his heart for being the first person in camp to actually manage to make friends with him, before anyone outside the Gaang arrived. Zuko's travelling around the Earth Kingdom in season 2 had a major effect on his superiority complex, but the fact is his I'm-a-prince-therefore-better-than-you attitude is ingrained pretty deeply in his psyche. It comes out the most when he's feeling angry and lashing out -- it's a sort of defense mechanism, one of his many many ways to keep from getting close to people.
So, shallow as it sounds, part of the reason he went from thinking Euphie was just a weird girl to actually listening to her was because she was a princess. A princess who is absolutely nothing like Azula, true, but a princess nonetheless, and so naturally he assumed that she would have a better understanding of who he is than a common ordinary peasant. What he didn't count on was the fact that this would make it a lot harder to write off her opinions! Which Zuko doesn't particularly like (though he's gotten used to it, now), because a large amount of her opinions are not only well-informed and difficult for him to argue with, but sharply contradict a lot of his own (read: Fire Nation) values. And Zuko's Fire Nation value system, though it's been with him for years, is really only held together with duct tape and a lot of hope. It can't take much more abuse.
Regardless of how she topped him into it, Euphie is the first real friend that Zuko has ever had. Zuko isn't quite sure what to make of this. While on one hand he's infinitely grateful to have someone here who is actually averse to tormenting him, he also has an amazing inferiority complex about the whole matter. He's convinced that, eventually, no matter how sweet and forgiving she is, he's going to do something stupid, and she'll realize what a screwup he is, or she'll find out about all the terrible things he's done while trying to capture the Avatar, or... she'll just leave. And he's fairly certain that he would deserve it, because he has no idea why someone as gentle and kind and decent as her would even want to be around someone like him.
And the more Azula points out Euphie's "shortcomings," the more Zuko likes her... for exactly those reasons. Yes, she's soft-hearted and likes kittens and would rather solve problems with diplomacy than setting people on fire. She's everything that Azula isn't, and Zuko's starting to wonder if maybe that's not such a bad thing after all. Not that Euphie doesn't baffle him. Frequently. He frankly never even considered the concept of being Zuko first, and Prince Zuko second, until she mentioned it to him. He still isn't sure how to do that, and he's not sure why she would want to, because being the prince is so much a part of who Zuko is and what he wants out of life that he just isn't sure how to be anything else. And yet, she seems so much happier than he is, so there just might be something to that.
And in a strange way, one that he doesn't acknowledge because that would raise all sorts of other issues that he doesn't want to deal with, her opinion of him matters more to him than Azula's or Mai's. She's become something like his conscience -- not in a way that he would consciously recognize, but Euphie is the one person here who can almost always make him pause and consider what he's doing. Not necessarily change his behavior, because Zuko is bullheaded and incredibly skilled at making stupid decisions, and more importantly he hates the idea that his country, everything he's been working for for the last three years, is wrong. But he knows somewhere in the back of his mind that it's possible. And Euphie is a lot like Iroh in her ability to give him advice that he listens to whether he means to or not. It doesn't exactly hurt that she's a master of wibbly puppydog eyes that tear at his soul, either.
JET
I mentioned earlier that Zuko, for the first time, is having people judge him and his actions in a way completely removed from any association with the Fire Nation. Which... is interesting, because it's slowly getting Zuko to a point where he's (okay, occasionally) thinking before he acts, because his title means absolutely nothing here, for good or bad. He can't whip it out and have it matter, but he doesn't have to hide it. People like or hate him not because he's Zuko, prince of the Fire Nation, but because he's Zuko, that kid with the scar. And then there was Jet, who... Zuko never thought should have liked him to begin with.
Zuko isn't a particularly altruistic person, obviously, even when he's helping people and doing good things. And so he really really wasn't sure why this random guy he met on the ferry thought that he was cut out to be the sexy rebel type, even if they did liberate some dinner for the refugees. The last time someone trusted him blindly like that (the farmers and the little boy in Zuko Alone), it ended... incredibly badly. So when the next time they met was in the tea shop at swordpoint, well, at least that made sense to Zuko. He deserved that. He didn't want to be found out, obviously, but being hated for being a Firebender makes much more sense to Zuko than being liked for being an outcast, or a good person, or... whatever Jet thought he was.
And then he showed up in camp again, and... somehow, somehow they managed to get back on good terms, which confuses the hell out of Zuko. He likes it and hates it at the same time, because -- especially now that he knows Jet's reasons for hating the Fire Nation -- he knows that Jet has every right to hate him. And yet, for some reason, Jet thinks he's a decent person. Which is far, far more baffling than Euphie thinking he's a good person, because Jet's from his world. The Fire Nation has hurt him personally. So Zuko's half-convinced himself that Jet has some weird alternate agenda, or he's trying to get him to switch sides, or -- something. Because it can't be as simple as Jet liking him. Because Zuko has never seen himself as a good person -- his goal is selfish and he knows it, and a part of him hates himself for it.
But he doesn't want to say anything and ruin whatever it is they have. Because, the weird thing is, there's something sort of comforting about having someone his age, from his world, around. Someone who knows Zuko's reasons for being the way he is, who he doesn't need to explain the things he's always taken for granted about life back home. Someone who isn't going to play horrible mind games with him like his sister. And Jet may be his enemy but -- well, only on a technicality at this point, right? Not like the Avatar. So he doesn't feel the need to worry about associating with him -- sure, Azula will say things, but Azula doesn't approve of anyone he likes, so what does it matter?
Of course, he still thinks Jet's annoying. What else is he supposed to think of a guy who sleeps in trees and hangs out outside his window far more frequently than he'd like and seems very unfamiliar with the concept of personal space? But it's hard to tell him off for it with the same seriousness he'd use on anyone else, because he's just so charming. Infuriatingly so. When Jet is saying things that make Zuko feel ... important, or good, or any of these things that he really isn't, it's very difficult to maintain the desire to punch him in the face for spying on him from that branch outside the window. And that's really the most irritating thing of all.
NEXT TIME ON FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP TYPING ALREADY: I essay on the Fire Nation and how much Zuko wants to set Wolfram's nightgown on fire (but not in a sexy way)!
Zuko's taken from the time when he's working in the tea shop, right before Lake Laogai. He's completely unsatisfied with things, he doesn't want to be stuck living a boring ordinary life when he should be off fulfilling his destiny, and if he sees a way out, he'll go for it, without thinking things through. That's kind of the way Zuko operates -- he sees a beginning and an end but is absolutely hopeless at visualizing the details in the middle. This causes him to do amazingly dumb things like dragging an unconscious Aang out into the middle of a snowstorm with no plan for how to get out of said snowstorm, or trying to break Appa out of bison-prison with nowhere to keep him in a crowded city and hoping that this somehow leads to capturing the Avatar. His drive is one of his greatest attributes, but it's also one of his worst, because he acts without thinking. Some people can be amazingly successful at carrying out spur-of-the-moment plans. Unfortunately, Zuko is absolutely terrible at winging it.
Which means he's dug himself into sort of a hole here in camp. He's accidentally getting close to people who, if he'd actually thought it through, he would know he should be wary of. Because, really, he's not used to having people judge him for being him and not the prince of the Fire Nation, or being forced to think about the things his country is doing instead of just accepting them. The convenient thing is that canon has confirmed this and taken his personality in a similar direction to what I've done with him in camp, but the difference is that in canon, he's completely shifted alignment, while in camp, his goal has stayed exactly the same as it was when he arrived, because he hasn't had that final push he needed to change. Which is incredibly confusing for Zuko, and it's turning into a spiral in which he's becoming more and more miserable and more and more frustrated, but instead of him doing anything to change he just keeps doing the same things he's been doing and blaming himself for things not working out.
In short, someone needs to smack that boy.
But I've rambled enough of an introduction! Without further ado, I present the ridiculously long relationship essays.
AVATAAAR!!1!
For the last three years of Zuko's life, the single most important thing in the world to him was capturing the Avatar. You can tell, because every third sentence out of his mouth was about capturing the Avatar, and the other two sentences were probably complaining about things resulting from not capturing the Avatar. To Zuko, the Avatar was his goal, the symbol of everything he was trying so hard to achieve... but never really a person, even after they finally met. Which... hadn't changed when he arrived in camp. And with Azula in camp, a constant reminder of exactly what he's been working for, that drive to capture the Avatar and return home to his father and restore his honor and live happily ever after only became stronger. There was one slight problem, though -- there's absolutely nothing he can do about any of that here. The Avatar is right under his nose, 24 hours a day, but even if by some miracle Zuko managed to capture him, there's nowhere he could go. So every time he saw Aang he felt more and more useless.
That in itself wouldn't have been all that much to get used to, if Aang hadn't been so... Aang. It's one thing to have an image of the enemy in mind -- it's another thing entirely to be around that enemy constantly when said enemy is just a twelve-year-old kid. A really genuinely nice twelve-year-old kid who gives him bison rides and maes him Christmas presents and really wants to be Zuko's friend. And for someone like Zuko, who's almost completely unused to affection in any way and isn't quite sure what to do with it when he has it... well, it's confusing. For a while he assumed that it was some kind of psychological warfare. But... no, that kid isn't capable of psychological warfare. And so, for some utterly mind-boggling reason (a reason which Zuko is trying very hard to chalk up to the kid being a monk, because Zuko knows that he certainly hasn't done anything for him that should earn anything but hate)... Aang likes Zuko.
And... though Zuko isn't ready to admit it... he's starting to think he just might like Aang a little bit too. There are more than a few problems with this, which should be immediately obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. But Zuko doesn't really think this is going to cause any issues. After all, that's what truces are for, right? And if it's good enough for Azula, it must be all right. And Aang was the one who said that when camp ends, there wouldn't be any hard feelings, which means that Zuko can go on thinking that this is just the inconsequential middle part of the story. The start and the end of this great plan are still the same.
So even though capturing the Avatar has now turned into sentencing this really nice twelve-year-old and his sort-of-friend to death, Zuko hasn't actually processed this yet. He's doing the mental equivalent of covering his ears and shutting his eyes and yelling "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU." And besides, they don't have to be friends anymore after they leave camp, because the Avatar said so. Zuko wants to believe this. He needs to believe this, despite it flying in the face of all logic and sanity. Fortunately, Zuko is very adept at convincing himself of things that aren't true.
IN SHORT: I - I WISH I KNEW HOW TO QUIT YOU, AVATAAAR :(
EUPHIE
... oh Euphie. Euphie is, without a doubt, the single most important person to Zuko outside of his canon, and holds a special place in his heart for being the first person in camp to actually manage to make friends with him, before anyone outside the Gaang arrived. Zuko's travelling around the Earth Kingdom in season 2 had a major effect on his superiority complex, but the fact is his I'm-a-prince-therefore-better-than-you attitude is ingrained pretty deeply in his psyche. It comes out the most when he's feeling angry and lashing out -- it's a sort of defense mechanism, one of his many many ways to keep from getting close to people.
So, shallow as it sounds, part of the reason he went from thinking Euphie was just a weird girl to actually listening to her was because she was a princess. A princess who is absolutely nothing like Azula, true, but a princess nonetheless, and so naturally he assumed that she would have a better understanding of who he is than a common ordinary peasant. What he didn't count on was the fact that this would make it a lot harder to write off her opinions! Which Zuko doesn't particularly like (though he's gotten used to it, now), because a large amount of her opinions are not only well-informed and difficult for him to argue with, but sharply contradict a lot of his own (read: Fire Nation) values. And Zuko's Fire Nation value system, though it's been with him for years, is really only held together with duct tape and a lot of hope. It can't take much more abuse.
Regardless of how she topped him into it, Euphie is the first real friend that Zuko has ever had. Zuko isn't quite sure what to make of this. While on one hand he's infinitely grateful to have someone here who is actually averse to tormenting him, he also has an amazing inferiority complex about the whole matter. He's convinced that, eventually, no matter how sweet and forgiving she is, he's going to do something stupid, and she'll realize what a screwup he is, or she'll find out about all the terrible things he's done while trying to capture the Avatar, or... she'll just leave. And he's fairly certain that he would deserve it, because he has no idea why someone as gentle and kind and decent as her would even want to be around someone like him.
And the more Azula points out Euphie's "shortcomings," the more Zuko likes her... for exactly those reasons. Yes, she's soft-hearted and likes kittens and would rather solve problems with diplomacy than setting people on fire. She's everything that Azula isn't, and Zuko's starting to wonder if maybe that's not such a bad thing after all. Not that Euphie doesn't baffle him. Frequently. He frankly never even considered the concept of being Zuko first, and Prince Zuko second, until she mentioned it to him. He still isn't sure how to do that, and he's not sure why she would want to, because being the prince is so much a part of who Zuko is and what he wants out of life that he just isn't sure how to be anything else. And yet, she seems so much happier than he is, so there just might be something to that.
And in a strange way, one that he doesn't acknowledge because that would raise all sorts of other issues that he doesn't want to deal with, her opinion of him matters more to him than Azula's or Mai's. She's become something like his conscience -- not in a way that he would consciously recognize, but Euphie is the one person here who can almost always make him pause and consider what he's doing. Not necessarily change his behavior, because Zuko is bullheaded and incredibly skilled at making stupid decisions, and more importantly he hates the idea that his country, everything he's been working for for the last three years, is wrong. But he knows somewhere in the back of his mind that it's possible. And Euphie is a lot like Iroh in her ability to give him advice that he listens to whether he means to or not. It doesn't exactly hurt that she's a master of wibbly puppydog eyes that tear at his soul, either.
JET
I mentioned earlier that Zuko, for the first time, is having people judge him and his actions in a way completely removed from any association with the Fire Nation. Which... is interesting, because it's slowly getting Zuko to a point where he's (okay, occasionally) thinking before he acts, because his title means absolutely nothing here, for good or bad. He can't whip it out and have it matter, but he doesn't have to hide it. People like or hate him not because he's Zuko, prince of the Fire Nation, but because he's Zuko, that kid with the scar. And then there was Jet, who... Zuko never thought should have liked him to begin with.
Zuko isn't a particularly altruistic person, obviously, even when he's helping people and doing good things. And so he really really wasn't sure why this random guy he met on the ferry thought that he was cut out to be the sexy rebel type, even if they did liberate some dinner for the refugees. The last time someone trusted him blindly like that (the farmers and the little boy in Zuko Alone), it ended... incredibly badly. So when the next time they met was in the tea shop at swordpoint, well, at least that made sense to Zuko. He deserved that. He didn't want to be found out, obviously, but being hated for being a Firebender makes much more sense to Zuko than being liked for being an outcast, or a good person, or... whatever Jet thought he was.
And then he showed up in camp again, and... somehow, somehow they managed to get back on good terms, which confuses the hell out of Zuko. He likes it and hates it at the same time, because -- especially now that he knows Jet's reasons for hating the Fire Nation -- he knows that Jet has every right to hate him. And yet, for some reason, Jet thinks he's a decent person. Which is far, far more baffling than Euphie thinking he's a good person, because Jet's from his world. The Fire Nation has hurt him personally. So Zuko's half-convinced himself that Jet has some weird alternate agenda, or he's trying to get him to switch sides, or -- something. Because it can't be as simple as Jet liking him. Because Zuko has never seen himself as a good person -- his goal is selfish and he knows it, and a part of him hates himself for it.
But he doesn't want to say anything and ruin whatever it is they have. Because, the weird thing is, there's something sort of comforting about having someone his age, from his world, around. Someone who knows Zuko's reasons for being the way he is, who he doesn't need to explain the things he's always taken for granted about life back home. Someone who isn't going to play horrible mind games with him like his sister. And Jet may be his enemy but -- well, only on a technicality at this point, right? Not like the Avatar. So he doesn't feel the need to worry about associating with him -- sure, Azula will say things, but Azula doesn't approve of anyone he likes, so what does it matter?
Of course, he still thinks Jet's annoying. What else is he supposed to think of a guy who sleeps in trees and hangs out outside his window far more frequently than he'd like and seems very unfamiliar with the concept of personal space? But it's hard to tell him off for it with the same seriousness he'd use on anyone else, because he's just so charming. Infuriatingly so. When Jet is saying things that make Zuko feel ... important, or good, or any of these things that he really isn't, it's very difficult to maintain the desire to punch him in the face for spying on him from that branch outside the window. And that's really the most irritating thing of all.
NEXT TIME ON FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP TYPING ALREADY: I essay on the Fire Nation and how much Zuko wants to set Wolfram's nightgown on fire (but not in a sexy way)!