A sister piece to Sorrow Has Been Your Shame, which showed Zuko right before the fire hit him during the Agni Kai with his father, this one shows Iroh looking away during it.
Finished work will soon be up, along with the companion piece, on my Redbubble
we only get snippets of what iroh was like “back when he was a different man.” we know that he joked about burning ba sing se to the ground in a goodnatured manner; that azula referred to him as “his royal tea-loving kookiness” before his change of heart; that he learned from the dragons and respected the sun warriors, but lied about it to protect them as well as his own image. we know that he was azulon’s uncontested favorite, that ozai resented him for it, that he was once a mighty general, but still a charming tea-enthusiast who kept a level head.
before the death of his son, he viewed war as a game to be won—like pai sho—rather than recognizing the brutal reality, the senseless violence and devastation war truly is. he had a reputation—as a mighty general, a fearsome firebender, the dragon of the west, next in line for the throne, a charming, affable, tea-loving ladies’ man.
we don’t see lu ten, but we can vaguely infer snippets of what he was like from the way iroh attempts to raise zuko as his surrogate son. he is endlessly supportive and yet he still makes assumptions about what zuko would want and would like, and perhaps this is based on both his own proclivities as well as those of his first son. lu ten was a soldier. he was the heroic older cousin of zuko and azula. he was raised by a loving father as a doted-on only child, destined to someday take the throne in a peaceful exchange of power and continue to promote the fire nation’s conquest, their greatness.
iroh, and by extension, lu ten, do not wholly align with the typical image of the fire nation disposition that we are shown as embodied by ozai. yes, iroh conforms perfectly to standards of fire nation masculinity. he is a powerful firebender. he is a confident chauvinist. but despite his imperialist outlook, he does not view his family as mere pawns in his game. he is so self-assured in his position that he could never be so insecure as to not love his family. he cares about his son, his nephew and niece (despite not actually being around enough to truly understand them), his father. azulon might be a powerful, intimidating figure, but he clearly cares for iroh, and iroh cheerfully conforms to his standards and expectations without breaking a sweat.
what must it have been like for the great dragon of the west to knock down your gates and raze your village to the ground with a calm yet mischievous twinkle in his eye, pouring himself a cup of ginseng tea while he oversees the abject destruction of your life, your family, your people? he laughs merrily as he summons lightning effortlessly. he is just doing his job. this is fun for him, just another game at which he excels.
ozai is heartless, power-hungry, and deeply insecure. he has something to prove, and he cares about nobody but himself. he is exceedingly easy to hate. but what about general iroh, the dragon of the west, who is completely confident in his position, who genuinely loves his family, who cultivates hobbies, who charms, who takes an interest in the arts, who approaches every conquest with a carefree cheer that chills you to the bone? what then?
one thing you don’t see as a kid watching avatar is that iroh is, himself, growing and maturing over the course of the series. that he loved and cared for zuko in his own way at first but he also, without quite meaning to, put zuko in a position of having to parent him. iroh has never not been a beloved prince. iroh has never not had support staff. the first time iroh really lostatanythingwas when his son died, and it rocked him to his core, and it took him years to figure out what to do about it, and he didn’t really figure out what to do about it in time to be an effective parent to zuko until it was almost too late.
iroh was never poor. he was never despised by people who could actually deny him food, shelter, safety. zuko’s exile was something he took on as a game– a game he thought he was too clever to lose, a game he thought he could eventually turn to his advantage. season one iroh is still incredibly complacent! he was on tour, he was letting zuko grow up in a loving and supportive environment, he was getting him valuable experience in traveling the world and managing a crew instead of letting the poor kid get turned into Ozai 2 at court. he struggles a little with trying to connect to zuko past the boy’s frustration and impatience, but he’s still confident in his goals and methods.
but being poor, having to watch zuko steal to survive, having to fakelike he had all the answers, while not knowing what their next move might be, and realizing for the first time they might actually die, alone, unnoticed, in abject misery, and that the fate of the world was coming down to a bunch of scared kids because iroh had fucked up? fucked up a lot? and then iroh might still continue to fuck up? i think that really scared the shit out of him. i think he really had to do some growing up in a hurry. who was he when he wasn’t a prince? when he wasn’t even a firebender? was he still a good man? was he a good uncle? could he still say that?
iroh needed to do some serious work on himself! and he does! and the kids don’t notice because he seemed so damn wise the whole time. but it’s still cool., that he grew up too.
There was a movie tie-in graphic novel called Zuko’s Story that had live action character designs but was really good which I always gotta bring up. There’s a bit here that’s relevant!
wow tumblr turned the quality of the panels super crispy so I’ll just. show the whole page.
apparently early concepts had iroh going to betray zuko eventually? so some of the growth he goes through is accidental on the creators’ parts because they were having to adjust the character for a new purpose over the course of season 2. which is neat. organic.
anyway yeah i love it.
i think iroh didn’t sack villages, though. that’s detail work, grunt stuff. i don’t think he was someone who looked that kind of blatant injustice in the face and smiled, ever. he saw it occasionally and either treated it as a discipline problem to righteously sort out, if it was Not Necessary To The War Effort, or thought ‘how unfortunate,’ and looked away.
i think he’d been shelteredfrom all that ugliness, at the head of his armies. for iroh, right up until he lost lu ten and realized this was what it had felt like for everyone else the whole time–the awfulness of war was an abstract.
it was something he knew about, something he may have even thought he cared about. but it wasn’t real.
^That was exactly what I was going to say. In the Fire Nation, generals really didn’t get their hands dirty, at all. I don’t think Iroh ever really saw the people he was hurting, just faceless enemy troops.
In this way, I think the best character foil for Iroh is actually Katara and Sokka (combined).
Imagine Katara and Sokka as facets of a single person. Clever, headstrong, witty and charismatic, a natural leader and a prodigious bender.
Throughout the series, Katara and Sokka have absolutely killed people. Many people. Katara is fearsome; she can cleave battleships in two with icebergs and control people’s limbs with her mind. Sokka is a brilliant tactician who can devastate a whole battalion of Fire Nation soldiers with a back-of-the-napkin plan.
The main difference between them and Iroh is that they grew up face-to-face with the horrors of war, while Iroh was sheltered from it.
Of course, Iroh was raised deep in Fire Nation propaganda and had no reason to doubt that the war was just, but he was never cruel like Ozai. So of course he learned from dragons and Sun Warriors. Theyweren’t his enemies who threatened the peace and stability of the great nation; they were just wise teachers along his journey. Although he did know some of his peers could be more bloodthirsty than he, and thus he kept the dragons and Sun Warriors a secret, he didn’t believe that war itself was a bloodthirsty nightmare.
(And perhaps he have doubts about the war and their methods when he was a youth, like Zuko did. But because he was cleverer and more restrained, he didn’t have a similar outburst, and he made the difficult decision to quash these doubts inside himself, and double down on the justness of the cause—until Lu Ten’s death brought these doubts back out in full force, that is.)
So yeah, Iroh trained in firebending from a tactical and dueling perspective, and he trained in fine culture as well, but these skills were not brought onto a battlefield. His role was mostly in the palace war chambers, or at the very most, a lavish commander’s tent overlooking his troops. In terms of personality, I suspect he was a very high-minded, noble person. He would not lash out after losing an Agni Kai like Zhao did, and even when violence was needed, he would not be cruel.
