Double Standard

An Avatar the Last Airbender plotbunny

By

EvilFuzzy9

Princess Azula was nearly the perfect daughter, as far as Ozai was concerned. She was an honest-to-ancestors firebending prodigy, having already mastered a dozen more sets than her elder brother (who was in all honesty, himself, only a little below average in terms of talent for a member of the royal family), and she also demonstrated a ruthless cunning several orders of magnitude more refined than that of most children her age.

And she was indeed ahead of her age group in effectively every way that mattered. In most ways, this was good, particularly when it led to her outshining her brother, who was three years her senior and by no means incompetent.

Though Zuko was still a disappointment to Ozai, since he had been borne of the union of the lines of Sozin and Roku, which the sages had predicted would result in the birth of a firebender of unparalleled might. And while Ozai supposed that most of Zuko's weaknesses seemed to stem from a softhearted nature which the boy's mother did absolutely nothing to correct, he was not particularly inclined to repair the effects of Ursa's damnable coddling.

Not when the ancestors had seen fit to bless him with a daughter like Azula. No, the girl was everything he had wished his firstborn could have been, and while he supposed that, with judicious tempering and hardening, Zuko might eventually become someone worthy of the crown, Ozai simply did not see the need to bother.

Why waste time correcting the weaknesses of a mistake like Zuko, when he could be further honing and heightening the potential and talent of a natural like Azula? His brother, were he here, might have had some old proverb or aphorism about the virtues of patience and diligence at the ready, but then Ozai would not have been inclined to listen.

Iroh already had the ears of their father and every noble and courtier hanging onto his every inane, tea-soaked word. Ozai saw no need to give either of those old bastards – his father or his brother – the pleasure of that victory.

Not when he already had a perfect daughter, one who would surely outshine even that smug, self-righteous nephew of his.

Azula was a genius. A prodigy. Her inner flame burned as hotly and as brightly as the breath of a dragon, and Ozai had every intention of stoking and fueling that flame until it outshone even the sun in the sky.

She was the future of the Fire Nation, Ozai was certain. She would be everything her brother was not, everything a Fire Lord should be. Even if the crown was all but assured to go to Iroh and his line, Ozai was intent that his daughter be the one whom the people thought of as the epitome of Fire.

She would destroy everything in her path to make way for new life. She would burn down the old, antiquated notions of four separate nations, erase those inferior cultures from the earth to let new, better ones spring up from the fertile, ash-fed soil left in her wake.

He was sure of this.

His daughter was perfect.

...or.

At least.

Nearly so.

She did have one little, sort of a... quirk, he supposed you might call it.

See, Azula had often watched her father, and other men train their firebending, when she was younger, back before she had managed to manifest her inner spark upon the outside world. While reforms in the military structure, brought on by the necessity for more fresh troops, had led to a general acceptance of women being capable as fighters back before Ozai was even born, most of the highly ranked, powerful master firebenders were male.

Azula, of course, had emulated many of the mannerisms of these powerful benders. And while she was still suitably feminine for a girl her age, there were nonetheless one or two rather gender-inappropriate habits she had picked up.

Most of these, Ozai had been able to correct by foisting the girl off on her mother for an evening or two, after which Azula would swear to him that she would never repeat such behavior as long as he please never again forced her to be subjected to such humiliation as mother-daughter bonding.

But.

There was one thing, one quirk, one habit, that no amount of dolls and frilly dresses and tea parties had been able to correct.

This was unfortunate, and increasingly so as Azula grew older. In appearance, the girl took remarkably after her mother, and as Ozai had learned from the few times he had actually deigned to speak with his wife about her youth, Ursa had been a very early bloomer.

This was why Ozai grew increasingly desperate to nip this little... behavioral issue, had that Kunyo called it?...in the bud, before his little girl began to really blossom.

Now, you might be wondering, about now, what the correlation was between the probable developmental proclivities of Azula's genes and this apparent quirk of hers. And, well, it was not something Ozai very much liked to consider, but if Azula continued in this manner, what people for now remarked upon as cute or endearing, might with time (and unfortunately little time, if Azula took after her mother in that department) became a subject of controversy and scandal.

Ozai was not the Fire Lord, and loth though he was to admit it, once his brother finally broke through the walls of Ba Sing Se, he would likely never attain the crown. The Fire Lord was infallible, this much was self-evident, but as history had shown time and again, the same could not always be said for his family or siblings. If Azula kept this up, people would begin to murmur against Ozai, see him and his family as licentious, immoral, offensive, a disgrace to the royal line.

Azula only had one real flaw, but that little flaw could be the crack in the foundation which could lead to Ozai's final fall from grace. And that would be bad.

(Apparently)

So what was it, then? What could Azula possibly be doing that could potentially bring so much disgrace to her father?

Well. It's actually rather simple.

You see, Azula had often emulated the behaviors of older, more experienced firebenders, such as her father.

Most of these firebenders were male.

Most male firebenders trained shirtless.

So Azula trained shirtless.

And if Azula took after her mother, she could end up hitting puberty very young.

And Ozai really did NOT want to think about what would happen then.

A/N: (BO-BO-BOING)

lolwut.

Yeah, this was a random idea that popped into my head one day. And as amazing a sight as Azula firebending shirtless would be, it's probably for the best that Ozai eventually managed to correct that little quirk. (or did he?)

Because if he didn't, the Fire Nation probably would have won the war in short order. XD

Azula: I am here to capture you, Avatar.

Aang: *stare*

Sokka: *drool*

Katara: *self-conscious*

Toph: *doesn't get why everyone is just standing there*

Mai: *bored*

Ty Lee: *checkin' out 'Zula*

Also, for those who are following Unexpected Aftermath, I will get the next chapter done, eventually, but I have been a touch distracted with a side-project: Unexpected Aftermath (the Interactive!). Link's in my profile (which I should probably tidy up and update, one of these days), but FAIR WARNING, it is rated [18+] for canon divergent sex scenes and shit. So be careful what you click on, I guess, because there is a LOT of bad smut over there (and just offensive smut, too). Like, seriously. A LOT.

TTFN and R&R!

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