M.Maurysiek

cygnahime:
“elkian:
“derinthescarletpescatarian:
“ilya-halfelven:
“This flashback in ATLA, Azulon becoming enraged with Ozai for disrespecting Iroh and the recently deceased Lu Ten, is usually interpreted as Azulon then ordering Ozai to kill Zuko. I...

Photo: cygnahime: “elkian: “derinthescarletpescatarian: “ilya-halfelven: “This flashback in ATLA, Azulon becoming enraged with Ozai for disrespecting Iroh and the recently deceased Lu Ten, is usually interpreted as Azulon then ordering Ozai to kill Zuko. I...

ilya-halfelven

This flashback in ATLA, Azulon becoming enraged with Ozai for disrespecting Iroh and the recently deceased Lu Ten, is usually interpreted as Azulon then ordering Ozai to kill Zuko. I disagree with this for two reasons.

1: We don’t actually hear Azulon say that, it’s only referred to by Azula (who was around seven or eight at the time and might have misunderstood what she heard) and by Ozai, years later, when he is taunting Zuko on the Day of Black Sun. Neither Azula nor Ozai are reliable narrators.

2: Azulon is, at the time of this flashback, the ruler of the Fire Nation who has just lost one of his only two grandsons and heirs. What kind of monarch loses one heir and then turns around and demands the death of another, especially when losing Zuko would hardly bother Ozai?

My interpretation of this situation is Azulon ordered Ozai to give Zuko into Iroh’s care, replacing Lu Ten as Iroh’s heir, neatly removing any argument Ozai had about Iroh’s line having ended. Ozai of course would never accept this. He either lied to Ursa, claiming Azulon wished Zuko dead, or outright told his wife he’d kill Zuko before seeing him get ahead of him in the line of succession, thus manipulating Ursa to help him assassinate Azulon. I think this theory makes far more logical sense than ‘Azulon ordered the murder of his nine-year-old grandson’.

derinthescarletpescatarian

#also I get the feeling that while Azulon was #not a nice person #he also wasn’t Evil #like #he was probably a bad dad but a great grandpa sort of thing #so he would have liked Zuko plenty and not want to kill him because who kills a kid they like?

It’s not even a question of being a good grandpa, he could hate his grandkids and it doesn’t matter – he’s a ruler who successfully held an empire together. He knows the value of heirs. Close relatives within a stable line of succession are inherently valuable no matter their likeability or even basic competence. If an heir is not actively trying to kill you or other people in the line of succession, they are too valuable to just kill off. It’s a basic question of stability. Zuko’s death would put the entire fate of the empire on Azula’s survival; the last grandchild dies and boom, civil war, end of the royal family, potentially even the collapse of the Fire Nation if it’s not sorted swiftly enough. It just would not make sense for a competent leader (Azulon seems competent, Ozai is definitely not) to weaken an already fragile line of succession through something so stupid and petty.

Having Iroh instead adopt Zuko is a much more reasonable response to this, whether he’s emotionally attached to his family or not. In this scene, Ozai is declaring himself an unstable and untrustworthy element in the family. They’ve just lost the heir, it’s at a critical point in a long war, the crown prince is away and grieving and this brat is trying to take advantage of his grief and the family instability to start shit for a personal power grab. He’s showing he has either no understanding or no care about the stability of the line, no sense of diplomacy or emotional awareness or restraint (he’s approaching his dad about usurping his brother while the man’s grieving for his newly dead son, nobody with any sense of diplomacy would have even tried this), and no respect.

Ozai is not a man who can be trusted to head a stable royal family or stable empire, and now Azulon needs to worry if this idiot will kill his own brother for the crown, or start a civil war after Azulon’s death based ont he logic of Iroh having no heirs. Giving Ozai’s eldest to Iroh solves the potential stability problem before it starts and has the added benefit of shutting Ozai up. Maybe Azulon likes Iroh and/or Zuko, maybe he doesn’t; that doesn’t affect the sensible decision here. In both cases, killing Zuko is a terrible choice and having Iroh adopt him is a good one.

elkian

Also given how things go in the main storyline (idr if they ever say exactly how far this flashback is but it seems like Zuko is in the 10-ish range so we’re gonna say 6 years), in like half a decade Ozai fucks up the Fire Nation so severely that world spirits are intervening, he’s tried to mulch his main heir and while he gives Azula the (now defunct and worthless) title of Fire Lord, it’s not a good move as a father OR leader. 14-year-old Azula, barely holding it together after the closest things she had to friends openly turned against her, immediately cracks under the pressure. It’s the exact opposite of what she needs, it’s bad for the Fire Nation (shit’s on fire and she’s ‘banished’ dozens of people in like a day and a half), etc.

Ozai never managed a major military victory and in fact the only time we see him not at the Caldera palace (I don’t think he’s even in an Ember Island flashback, that was Iroh) is when he’s flying off to set shit on fire - flashy, yes, but the actual strategic value is unclear. Nobody likes him! Nobody respects him! He commands fear and pretty much nothing else!

I’m not trying to do a full essay here (need more research for one thing) but my point is if that was the case Azulon was completely correct and justified in believing Ozai to be an unstable and deleterious element because that’s exactly what he is.

cygnahime

Ozai based his rule entirely around personal (firebending) power and capacity for violence, because that’s the only sphere in which he stood a chance of competing with his brother. (Even then, only a chance - he never would have challenged the Dragon of the West to an Agni Kai.)

Personal kickassery, and personal fear, is a terrible basis on which to try running an empire! There is a group size where it simply stops mattering, because no matter how good your firebending is, it can’t let you teleport across the continent to be directly involved in every situation. You have to delegate. The Fire Nation has the infrastructure for this already in place. But…Ozai gets to pick his generals, governors, and so on.

And Ozai’s delegates are people who rise high in his personal “violence is the only thing that matters” court. And, often, people who saw what he did to his own heir apparent, and thus are way more afraid of what happens if they tell Ozai something he doesn’t want to hear than of…any problems that actually exist, until the point of total collapse if that.

Ozai’s big win move was burning the whole Earth Kingdom. It did not occur to him, apparently, to wonder where the victors would be getting their food from next year. (It’s also evil to do, but rulers usually don’t care much about that.) And no one said, “Hey, uh, dead peasants and scorched earth fields can’t pay taxes,” because they were more afraid of him than of apocalyptic famine.

curium-killedthecat

i learned this fact a while ago, and it’s still one of those good ones i go back to and think about:

if you took all the matter in the universe (that is estimated to exist) and turned it into a black hole, the size of that black hole’s event horizon would be the size of..

our observable universe.

yep, that’s right. this is because the schwarzchild radius - that is, the radius of an event horizon of a black hole - is proportional to is mass. so we can figure out how large an event horizon would be using its mass - thanks to general relativity.

imagine our universe to be a fluid of constant density - which is a good approximation of our universe on a large scale, since matter is spread out pretty evenly.

if we take a sphere out of our universe with a radius, the mass inside it depends on its volume - this volume of a sphere is proportional to the cube of its radius. since density is constant, the mass grows with the cube of the radius.

so essentially, the schwarzchild radius grows faster than the actual radius of the sphere. because of this directly proportional nature, if you start with a small sphere of the universe, its schwarzchild radius is much smaller then a the sphere itself. but as you take larger and larger regions of space, the schwarzchild radius grows at a faster rate than the spheres actual size.

this means at some point, if the sphere is large enough, its schwartzchild radius can become bigger than the sphere’s own radius. funky, i know. but it gets weirder. our universe has a density very close to the critical density, which is the average density needed for the universe to gather enough force to halt its expansion. i digress.

for this critical density, the schwarzchild radius turns out to be equal to the size of the observable/visible universe.

so, do we live in a black hole? ….probably not. this thought experiments doesn’t take things like dark matter or energy into consideration, and we don’t have a special centre of sorts to form the nucleus of our supposed black hole.

also, this ignores that we live in a wonderfully expanding universe, where the only measurement of an observable universe is a classical, non accelerating one. if we did live in a black hole, we could only see in one direction which would be opposite to the singularity, and everything would be crunching towards the singularity.

alas, it is fun to think about on a late night. maybe we do live in a black hole.

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