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OOC INFORMATION
Name: Lex
Contact: email - evil_wild_lex (at) yahoo (dot) com, plurk - FightingSpirit
Other Characters: N/A

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Azula
Age: 15
Canon: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Canon Point: Season 3, episode 11
Character Information: here

Personality:

“Almost isn’t good enough.”

Azula is a perfectionist. She pushes herself to be the very best that she can be. She trains diligently, and she is attentive to details. She studies relevant information and commits it carefully to memory. From an early age, she showed signs of being a prodigy, and great things have been expected of her. Her father, in particular, preferred her over her elder brother Zuko due to her natural talent in firebending and her natural grasp of strategy. Thus, Azula is driven to push herself to being perfect not only due to her own natural compulsion toward it, but also because she ties it into receiving positive regard from her father. When Azula falls short of being perfect, such as when her elderly advisors Li and Lo remark “Almost perfect. Only one hair out of place” as she is practicing an advanced firebending technique, she becomes annoyed with herself and determined to keep going until she gets something right. She won’t even take “almost perfect” as praise, because to her, almost isn’t good enough. She must be perfect.

“Are you sure? I'm a pretty good liar. I am a 400 foot tall purple platypus bear with pink horns and silver wings.”

Azula is deceitful and manipulative. Being deceitful makes her perceptive about seeing through other people’s deceit and tricks while pretending not to be aware of them until just the right moment. It is difficult (though not impossible) to pull one over on Azula. Of course, this also means that she’s mistrustful of others. She ensures that even the people she calls friends fear her, because she’s worried that if they don’t fear the consequences that they will betray her whenever it’s convenient for them. In particular, she lies to Zuko, using him to achieve her own goals. It should be noted, though, that Azula will even lie to her father – the one person she truly respects and admires. Although she was prepared to capture her brother before, when he became useful to her, Azula offered him the chance to join forces with her. Knowing that his honour was deeply important to him, she told him that she needed him and that by the end of this day, he would have his honour back if he helped her. Later, after she struck what she believed was a killing blow to Avatar Aang, when Zuko worried about their father restoring his honour, Azula assured him that he restored his own honour. However, when she questioned him as they were returning to the Fire Nation if there was any chance that the Avatar could have survived, she noted hesitation before he said no. So she lied and told their father that Zuko killed the Avatar instead, thus making the potential failure Zuko’s problem and not hers.

“Don’t flatter yourself. You were never even a player.”

Along with being deceitful and manipulative, Azula’s talents as a prodigy shine through when it comes to strategy. She is excellent at adapting to her circumstances, and resourceful when it comes to turning her circumstances around and making them work for her. Even as a child, she studied military strategy and had an unusually good grasp of it. As a teenager, she’s capable enough that it was her, and not one of his Generals, that her father turned to when he wanted someone to find and capture her brother Zuko and uncle Iroh. Azula knows how to plan for the longer term and this is shown even in the people she chooses to keep around her. Li and Lo are capable advisors, and Ty Lee and Mai are very competent fighters capable of taking on benders despite not having bending abilities themselves.

Perhaps the greatest example of Azula’s grasp of strategy was when she fought and defeated the Kyoshi warriors with her friends Ty Lee and Mai, Azula realized that the Kyoshi warriors’ distinctive clothing and makeup would not only mask their identities and let them get into the massive Earth Kingdom city of Ba Sing Se – but that it would also let them get close to the Earth King and the Avatar. Upon learning that it was the secret elite force known as the Dai Li who truly held the power in Ba Sing Se, Azula realized they were the key to taking over the city. These disguises also enabled her to discover the plans to attack the Fire Nation during the Day of Black Sun (ie. A solar eclipse that would leave the nation’s firebenders powerless) months in advance, and to learn that her uncle and brother (at the time on the run as traitors to the Fire Nation) were in the city. Azula had Mai and Ty Lee “accidentally” talk about being in disguise where the Dai Li would overhear them, and thus Azula was brought to Long Feng, their imprisoned leader that they remained loyal to. He placed her in temporary command, and in the short time she was in command of them, she was able to inspire fear and loyalty in them – to the point that when Long Feng went to double-cross her, they didn’t make a move against her and instead stood back. When he demanded to know what they were doing, Azula calmly explained that they were waiting to see which of their two leaders would be sitting on the throne and which would be kneeling, but that she and Long Feng already knew. She took a seat on the throne and Long Feng declared that she had beaten him at his own game. Azula told him not to flatter himself – he was never even a player.

“We’ve defeated you for all time! You will never rise from the ashes of your shame and humiliation!”

Azula is highly competitive. She is exceptionally driven to win at anything she does – even if it’s a completely ordinary recreational activity like playing a game of kuai ball (a game similar to a combination of soccer and volley ball). Even for this simple game, when Azula decides she wants to play, she gets very serious about it, devises a strategy to win, and then gloats about her victory in an extremely over the top and downright bizarre way. She’s been so driven to be the best that she can be that she has never really learned how to socialize normally – especially not with people in her own age group. In fact, she’s downright awful at it and becomes jealous of all of the attention that boys pay to her friend Ty Lee to the point that she insults her and says that they only like her because she makes it so easy for them and isn’t a challenge. However, after Ty Lee gives her some advice on how to talk to boys, Azula is immediately ready to use that knowledge to her advantage. She interrupts another girl’s conversation with a popular Fire Nation boy, Chan, announces that she’s ready for a tour of the house and sets her drink on the other girl’s head. All goes well while Azula is following Ty Lee’s advice, but after she shares a kiss with Chan, Azula reverts back to her usual viciously competitive self. She announces that together they will be the most powerful couple in the world and dominate the earth. Understandably, things don’t work out between her and Chan and he was quite weirded out.

“Maybe you should worry less about the tides, who've already made up their mind about killing you, and worry more about me, who's still mulling it over..."

Azula does not suffer fools gladly. Not only does she expect perfection from herself, but she expects it from those working under her and she doesn’t take “no” for an answer very well at all. She learned from her father that failure is not something to be tolerated. She isn’t afraid to use violence and intimidation to coerce others into doing what she wants. She does not care about respecting her elders, unless they are capable enough to command her respect. When the captain of her ship tells her that the tides will not allow them to bring the ship into port before nightfall, she asks him if the tides command the ship and if the tides would think twice about smashing him on their rocky shores if she were to have him thrown overboard. When Azula wants Ty Lee to join her on her quest to hunt down Avatar Aang and Ty Lee tells her that she’s happy with the circus, Azula decides to attend the performance. While she’s there, she has the ringmaster set Ty Lee’s safety net on fire, and release all the dangerous animals. Then she stops in to visit Ty Lee after the performance and tells her that she can’t wait to see how Ty Lee will outdo herself the following night. Azula is very good at getting what she wants, and she will stop at nothing to do so. She is ruthlessly and possesses the single-minded determination necessary for bending lightning – an advanced firebending technique referred to as “the cold-blooded fire”.

"My own mother thought I was a monster... She was right, of course, but it still hurt."

Although does have sociopathic traits, Azula does have feelings and she does care about a select few others and what they think of her. She has been impacted by the way her mother treated her, and her feelings toward her mother are a key part of her insecurities. While her mother Ursa was never cruel to her, she was never anywhere as warm and encouraging toward Azula the way she was toward Zuko. At one point, when Azula expresses the opinion that Ozai would make a better Fird Lord than her uncle Iroh (the current heir to the throne), she is sharply reprimanded by Ursa, and Ursa asks “What is wrong with that child?” while Azula is still in earshot. Ursa says nothing about Azula’s firebending skills while praising Zuko’s despite Azula being more skilled. Azula’s mother and father valued very different traits, and thus Azula was favoured by her father while Zuko was favoured by their mother. This helped to foster Azula’s love/hate relationship with her brother. Despite Azula typically behaving more viciously toward Zuko than lovingly, she does have moments where she cares for him. When she discovered him secretly visiting their uncle Iroh in prison, she warned him out of genuine concern that he shouldn’t do that, lest he get people thinking he was a traitor. When he angrily left a party they were attending to go be alone in their family’s old vacation home, Azula was the one to go and find him and encourage him to walk down to the beach with her because she understood that memories of the past were depressing for him to think about. When she hurts Ty Lee’s feelings out of jealousy for Ty Lee’s popularity with boys, she manages a rare sincere apology and tells her she didn’t mean it. Azula is aware of Mai’s crush on Zuko and is the one to help arrange them getting together in a relationship. Azula does have the capacity to care about others. She’s just been raised in such a toxic, power-hungry and awful way in an already militaristic nation that her the tiny hint of a kinder side has been stamped down and supressed rather than nurtured.

5-10 Key Character Traits: Perfectionistic, strategic, manipulative, deceitful, competitive, intimidating, insecure, clever
Would you prefer a monster that FITS your character’s personality, CONFLICTS with it, or EITHER? EITHER
Opt-Outs: Wendigo, Harpy, Kelpie

Roleplay Sample: Test drive links - one and two

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Princess Azula of the Fire Nation

October 2014

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