I feel like I see ppl say that ozai is dumb (and I totally get why, because he’s extremely shallow to the point of looking downright foolish) but honestly..... is he?? is ozai dumb, is zhao dumb, is zuko dumb, or all they all just men from the fire nation who were taught to embody a certain aggressive, active, prideful, impulsive, violent, reckless, singleminded mode of masculinity that praised them for certain behaviors and virtues such as strength and power and condemned any man who didn’t align with these values?
ozai is smart enough to seize and maintain power over the fire nation, which is his life’s primary goal. zhao is smart enough to invade the north pole, which was impenetrable for the past century of war, and while destroying the moon obviously is not a sensible thing to do, it does carry out his intended effect, which is to debilitate his enemies and demonstrate the sheer force of his power.
zhao’s lack of accounting for the spirits can be attributed directly to the fact that a key aspect of fire nation propaganda is denying spiritualism to the point where he finds iroh silly for respecting their status in the ecosystem whatsoever. he’s not unintelligent, he’s just ignorant due to his cultural upbringing. of course he has massive blindspots, he was fed fire nation propaganda his whole life, but he would never have risen through the ranks of the fire navy just through ozai’s favor alone.
furthermore, the idea that ozai’s reliance on the women in his family to do his dirty work (ursa killing azulon, azula capturing zuko & iroh and taking ba sing se) is a sign of weakness doesn’t actually hold water. if anything, ozai using women for his own ends and then discarding them once they are no longer useful to him demonstrates his strength as a patriarch.
additionally, the way he banishes zuko by giving him an impossible quest with the promise of return on its completion incentivizes zuko to remain loyal to his nation and his father, instead of simply banishing him with no hope of return, at which point zuko would have nothing to lose in attempting to usurp ozai, which is clearly an anxiety for ozai considering that zuko was banished for threatening treason in the first place. (and note that zuko only does resist ozai once he returns to the fire nation, something azula orchestrated without ozai’s approval. if zuko had stayed in ba sing se as a fugitive it is highly unlikely that he would have ever participated in the avatar’s revolution, but azula wanted her brother to come back home and found a way to make it so.)
ozai is very good at manipulating people, he is a very powerful firebender (think of the way he is able to summon lightning instantly, underground, moments after an eclipse is over, without any sort of warning), and he was very close to winning the war for good only six years into his reign. he is myopic, shallow, egotistical, and generally wrong about many things, but that doesn’t actually make him dumb.
i think he mostly seems dumb because when put next to azula (or iroh, or ursa), he is far less subtle in his intellect. azula is shrewd, calculating, clever, and far less image-obsessed than ozai is. she is completely willing to sublimate herself for the sake of serving her empire, whereas ozai is the empire and therefore must project absolute power at all times. zuko, especially in book 1, is far more like ozai than azula is, which is what makes azula such a threatening villain: the fact that she is a girl is crucial to her character. so many of her traits that make her so much more threatening than anyone else in positions of power throughout the show are directly born out of the fact that despite being raised on the same values, she was socialized differently.
her feminine behaviors and the expectations placed on her as a girl are what make so her anomalous among the myopic, egotistical, prideful, power-hungry fire nation military. she doesn’t care as much about projecting power, so she’s able to get rid of her fancy fleet and recruit mai and ty lee, she’s able to disguise herself to enter ba sing se instead of laying siege to it and successfully takes it over when iroh could not after nearly two years. she does not rely on brute force, but rather “feminine qualities” such as manipulation, calculation, and subterfuge. same goes for mai and ty lee, hence why they are also so powerful despite merely being two non-bending teenage girls. by not being forced into performing those restrictive masculine behaviors, she is able to beat the men at their own game.
similarly, ursa uses poison to kill azulon, an act she does for the benefit of the men in her family (ozai and zuko), through a traditionally feminine weapon. a fire nation man would never think to poison their enemy because that is not how men kill other men. but use a woman as a proxy, and this becomes a sufficiently masculine act through the way in which the man exerts his power over a woman.
iroh uses brute force and projection of power as his primary tactics before his reckoning (see his siege on ba sing se), and manipulation, scheming, disguise, and sublimation to achieve his ends only after he has unlearned fire nation propaganda and gained a broader perspective. sokka is similar in this regard, in that it takes him learning feminine strategies from women warriors (the kyoshi warriors technique is about using their opponents’ force against them) to understand that he needs to prioritize his intellect over brute force if he ever intends to win a single fight. zuko’s blue spirit persona demonstrates his capabilities for being smart in battle, but when he is not inhabiting the blue spirit (his mother’s values), he is channeling ozai, and thus loses fights due to his aggression and impulsivity, which is always used against him.
zuko’s growth involves him improving as a fighter when he sheds the fire nation model of masculinity that values blind rage and aggression, and instead embraces the feminine values of warmth, healing, gentleness, and understanding, which allows him to go toe to toe with azula as someone who has internalized feminine values by virtue of being born a girl: being calculating and precise instead of powerful, manipulative and scheming instead of blunt, and patient instead of impulsive. the final agni kai sees azula prioritizing sheer power as she suffers a nervous breakdown, which zuko and katara are able to use against her in a way that they otherwise could not since she is uniquely impulsive and reckless in this fight (although she is still able to strategize as shown when she points her lightning at katara instead of zuko).
the reason azula seems so much smarter than ozai is because she wasn’t raised to prioritize her own ego above everything else; no, she was raised as a girl, and this social disadvantage also proves to be her greatest strength. the reason iroh seems so much smarter than ozai is because he is willing to embrace multiple ideas about the world, instead of just one. to his credit, ozai is very good at implementing his idea; it’s just that said idea sucks. ozai isn’t dumb, he just has an incredibly limited perspective. he’s great at what he does, which is projecting power. but he has no reason to do anything else, so we really shouldn’t expect him to.
ozai isn’t stupid, he’s just wrong. and yes, there is a difference.
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