Zuko vs Azula: Breaking Down the REAL Best Fight Of Your Childhood

Come check out the writing behind the final Agni Kai!

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[savagebooks]

This was SO MUCH FUN TO MAKE! Let me know what you guys think and if this helped at all with understanding fights scenes or appreciating the agni kai!

[kenrenkerish]

Zuko and Azula was truly the emotional finale while Aang vs Ozai was the resolution of the plot

[adamgrogory]

God this show was so good. Taught a whole generation how to build a great narrative without us even realizing.

[riotdancesquadleader]

A big character thing about this fight: Zuko uses the "basics" that Iroh was drilling into him in the first few episodes. Azula darts around the field doing big flashy moves but Zuko almost doesn't move from his position until he leaps to take the lightning bolt. Plus he even uses that same spinning stance-breaking move from his first on-screen Agni Kai to throw her off. She's a prodigy but he has incredibly strong basics thanks to Iroh, and the self-control to not feel the need to compete with her theatrics thanks to his encounter with the Old Masters

[DourFlower]

I really love how when Aang is betrayed by Zuko, the scar left by Azula is on his back, but when Zuko protects Katara, the identical scar left by Azula is on his front

[qwynnthotland]

In my opinion, Zuko does straight up overcome Azula. In the moment Azula shoots lightning at Katara, she admits that she couldnt win against Zuko in their most honorable form of combat. The 1v1. She had to resort to underhanded means to come out "victorious"

[alanareynolds]

I love that azula’s blue flame has very little practical use beyond fighting (eg. The throne room being almost completely dark when lit with her blue flame), while zuko’s red flame can be used as a source of light: it just solidifies the idea that azula is purely a warrior and used bending only to that end, while zuko has a much deeper connection to the element

[presidenttogekiss]

I mean, Ozai is pretty much just a placeholder. Even in Avatar lore, his presence is minimal. He was only fire Lord for 5 years (compare with his dad, Azulon, who ruled for 75 years, and was responsible for most of the war), and even some of the greatest feats of his reign, like his conquer of Ba Sing Se, were done by his daughter, not him.

[axis]

I feel you missed some other aspects of the Agni Kai itself. The Agni Kai itself was a character driven fight, but it also goes to show how Zuko and Azula's techniques have differed. To that, I point you to examine Zuko's very first Agni Kai, where he dueled Zhao. Zuko was on the disadvantage, being reckless at first, and wasting his energy on big attacks, overall running out breath easily. And Azula is always calm, focused, and always in control of the fight. She wastes no movement, and keeps her momentum going.

But the fight here is basically Azula recklessly trying to overpower and beat Zuko, and Zuko fighting smarter, using his attacks to mostly deflect or divert. One moment is when we return to their Agni Kai and they have a fire clash going, and you can see the attacks diverting, and Zuko nearly losing his footing. This is evidence that Zuko made the attack be at an angle that would divert the attack, as he is not trying to brute force his way to Azula, but rather trying to keep her attacks off of him.

And Azula ended up being out of breath, which is when Zuko finally launched his assault.

It's a great way of showing how Zuko has really come through as a Firebender, having grown strong enough to take a mentally unstable Azula using every lesson he learned.

I bring back the very first lesson of Firebending that Iroh teaches:

"Power in firebending comes from the breath. Not the muscles. The breath becomes energy in the body. The energy extends past your limbs and becomes fire."

[tylerbradfield]

It's also my favorite detail that zuko uses air, earth, water, and of course fire bending techniques. Shows that his soul is balanced, unlike azula, who uses her palms to firebend instead of her fingers like she usually does.

[kaksspl]

Something I noticed when I watched the show last time was how those characters, in a way, swapped places. Zuko started off with an explosive personality lead by anger, focused only on his target and nothing else could get in his way. Azula was calm, precise and through hard work she aimed for perfection. When hit the limit of how powerful she could become she lost her goal and became obsessed with keeping her position, quickly falling into madness. In the meanwhile Zuko had found friends and new meaning to his life. Episode with dragons showed he was no longer lead by anger but by the will to make world a better place. Accordingly in their final battle, Azula loses control, her attacks become more flashy and massive while it's Zuko who stays cool and precise. And while Azula only cares to destroy him at all cost, Zuko throws himself into the lighting because he values protecting Katara more than defeating Azula. And this way this fight finished arcs of those two characters.
Or at least that's how I felt about it.

[twistedlegacy]

Something I'd like to add to your analysis, is the exact thing Katara does to beat Azula.

First she freezes Azula in ice, which was the first water bending move Katara ever successfully preformed against the fire nation. This alone could just be a coincidence, but notice how she manages to unfreeze herself by breathing out through her nose. Sound familiar? It should.

Back when Zuko and Katara had their first big confrontation/fight near the end of Season 1, Zuko was able to beat Katara through a bending move he learned called "Breath of Fire". Zuko breathes through his nose via fire/heat bending to unfreeze himself from Katara's ice. Here, Katara is preforming the same exact feat through her water bending to preform the finishing move on Azula.

So not only did Zuko's new outlook overcome Azula like you said, but so does (what is essentially) his own bending technique through Katara's actions.

[lordodysseus]

This really is the best scene in the entire series. It trumps all other scenes. It's beautiful and quiet and the lack of sound is what makes it so fucking loud. It's like base boosting something at minimum volume with a subwoofer the size of a football field.

[christianbryan]

"What, no lightning today? Afraid I'll redirect it?" assumes that his dad told Azula offscreen about how Zuko turned Ozai's lightning back on him in the eclipse episode.

[rotisseriepossum]

I’ve never been able to articulate why but azulas defeat/breakdown has always felt so... *crushing* to me, for lack of a better word. She stands out from every villain I can think of in every way. Whenever I see her writhing and wailing on the ground for the last time my heart can’t help but break a little

[ILoveAnime]

Man, that shot of Azula crying just breaks my heart. She has been abused and manipulated her entire life, pushed away all of her friends and family, and had a mental break down, and she just broke. Everything she was lead to believe about herself, about Zuko, about everything, has just been completely shattered.
She's a terrifying villain, responsible for a lot of pain in our main characters, but in that moment, she's just a scared and angry kid.

[domc]

If I remember correctly, aren't these two fights spliced into each other in the episode? Switching back and forth between them? I think that also adds to both of these scenes. The Aang fight keeps you in the feeling that this is a fight for the fate of the world, while the Zuko fight amps up the personal stakes that they're fighting for simultaneously.

[PowerMatrixAnime]

We appreciate you sacrificing your time, effort and intellectual property even though you know you won't make a penny out of your creation.
- Stay Savage.

[ChefSandwichboy]

Something else to talk about in terms of why the scene works so well from a film making perspective. The sound design masterfully matching and fueling the tone of the scene. A tone that, for the first half, is established right before the fight by Zuko himself when he tells Katara that he can beat her because "Something's off. She's slipping." The entire first half is scored almost like an elegy, mournful and understated as is the sound design accompanying the action. Despite how much tighter the visual focus and how much the flames dominate the screen, the clash of the two fire bending effects is dramatically muted in comparison to previous fights, especially in contrast to Aang and Ozai, letting us focus on the two characters and their emotional responses to each sequence of attacks and counters. It's telling (audio) AND showing (visual) us right from the get go that Azula has already lost. Where she is erratic, fearful, all aggression and a raw nerve of emotion, Zuko is calm and focused, easily countering everything she throws at him. We saw him overcome his demons and grow at the same time that Azula has become more and more unstable as she continued to isolate herself, and this has taken that and sharpened it to a fine point. The turn is when a bit of the old Zuko comes out and he makes the Oberyn Martell mistake of goading his opponent because he has just proven that she can't beat him in a straight, honorable fight completely forgetting that she has never displayed any intention of playing fair at any point in the show. Like Zuko, the audience is fooled into thinking that both adversaries were fighting by the same rules. It's only when Zuko realises his critical miscalculation and sacrifices himself (briefly shifting to a normal sound level before his moment of sacrifice only to then revert to the subdued tone at it's most muted) that the sound shifts to match the change from character driven to story driven narrative. Suddenly everything is louder, the music changes pace and tone to one of immediate dread and danger. Whereas we the audience went in believing (and had it initially visually confirmed) that Zuko could ultimately defeat Azula, that's not the case for Katara and the change in music and sound design amplifies the sudden shift to a much more tense and uncertain confrontation. This buildup continues until just after Katara figures out how to trap Azula, the strings rising to a crescendo of tension before once again changing back to a more somber tone as Azula is defeated, amplifying the visual message of how pathetic and broken she has become. All of this is sharply contrasted to the audio choices of Aand/Ozai, which opens with a literal roar of sound from Ozai's firebending and retains that aggressive bombast throughout the fight.
Had this been scored in a more traditional way like both the Aang/Ozai one simultaneously taking place and the vast majority of duels within the show, it would have lost SO MUCH of the impact it ultimately landed with. Both fights compliment and contrast each other, displaying a master class in film narrative on every level. Ultimately both big duels in the finale are a combination of Character and Story driven conflicts, but inverted. Where the fight between Zuko, Katara and Azula starts as a character conflict and then shifts to a story conflict, the one between Aang and Ozai does the exact opposite. As you pointed out in the other video, from a metatextual standpoint the audience already knows that Aang will win somehow. The fight as a story conflict is the text, but the real meat is the subtext, the focus on the uncertainty of HOW Aang will ultimately defeat him. The dual narratives of Aang defeating Ozai without betraying his principles and displaying that the differing directions of isolation/regression and empathy/growth are how Azula defeats herself, are the complete package and why the whole finale remains one of the best of all time in any visual medium.

[LvHebel]

You forget the styles of bending. Zuko was always agressive like Azula. But in the end he was completely still and stable, to the point of not even moving a single step while Azula was unstable and agresive. Azula represented the new fire nation, destroying all, whil Zuko was like the two dragons, stable and warm, the ancient way of fire bending. It was character driven yet story driven at the same time.