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Essay - The Two Ursas
Ursa.
Zuko's mother.
The biggest loose-end in the entire Avatar franchise.
For years, the creators of Avatar couldn't give an interview without being asked about what happened to her, or when the fans would find out. It even got the point where they incorporated a joke about it into the premiere of The Legend of Korra, a joke that actively angered about a quarter of the fandom. (Warning: statistics cited in this essay are completely made up.) A whole genre of fanfiction rose up to collect theories about her history, and/or her whereabouts after ATLA's finale. For such an important character, though, she seemed to be a cipher, a unknown quantity onto which fans could project all kinds of personalities and histories. It was said that when her story was revealed, it would never satisfy the general fandom, because they had built up such a varied collection of perceptions of Ursa that the majority would inevitably have their "head canon" contradicted. And we all know how nerds can get when you contradict their headcanons! ;)
In October 2013, the finale of The Search- the ATLA comic series that revealed both Ursa's history and fate- was published. Inevitably, there was disappointment. There were also fans who were happy with what they got. In my own experience, there were also a surprising number of people who had no opinion of the actual story, but who were simply glad that a story about Ursa had been told, officially, and they could at last move on from wondering.
I myself was among those disappointed by the story, but that's not what I wanted to discuss here. Unlike The Promise, The Searchwas a coherent tale, but rushed and unfocused, never mind that stupid cliffhanger about Zuko's parentage that eclipsed almost all worthwhile discussion about the story. More than anything, though, I wish I could just be satisfied that Ursa's tale has been told, but I'm not.
That's because I don't feel that Ursa's story has been told.
We got a story about a character named Ursa, but she was not the Ursa we saw so briefly in the ATLA cartoon.
She was a second Ursa.
People have expressed interest in why I feel this way, so I've typed up my thoughts here. Most of this essay is copied from a post I made on the AvatarSpirit.net forums, but I've adapted it to stand alone outside of the wider discussion. (Naturally, spoilers for The Search follow.)
The crux of the matter comes down to a concept I'm going to label "negative space," and the nature of Character itself...
First, let's list what everyone knows about Ursa. She's mother to Zuko and Azula, and wife to ATLA's big bad, Fire Lord Ozai. Over the course of the flashbacks seen in the popular episode Zuko Alone, Ozai's latest attempt to be named the crown heir to his father, Fire Lord Azulon, results in an order for Zuko's execution. Ursa becomes involved in some mysterious plan to save Zuko, and as a result, she is exiled from the Fire Nation, Azulon is found dead, and Ozai is crowned Fire Lord in spite of his father's previously stated wishes. It's very little, summarized like that, but summaries like this don't tell us anything about character.
Writer Ron Friedman recently said in an interview, when talking about his job creating scripts for cartoons based on Hasbro toy properties:
If you can get a hold of some old GI Joe figures in their original packaging and read what’s on the back, it’s not a character. As a writer, those are not characters any more than saying, “he’s got white hair, smokes a pipe, brilliant with mathematics, and comes from Germany.” That’s not Albert Einstein.
My job was to take that limited information and create characters somebody cared about. Characters with a particular way of speaking, a particular sense of humor if they had one, and a body language that went along with their dialogue so they became like living beings. Those descriptions mean nothing. It’s like reading the ingredients on a package of Twinkies. If you’re a writer your job is to make characters out of partial recipes and bring them to life. What you read on the back of the toys isn't going to make anything come to life.
I've described the difference between writing about something and writing something that can be produced, acted, and put on a screen that an audience can connect with, be interested enough to have feelings for and want to see what happens next.
People often say that the Ursa of the cartoon has little or no character, since we never get any of her backstory and all her most dramatic actions occur off-screen, but based on how Mr Friedman describes the concept, I think it's clear that she has more than enough presence in the story for the audience to get a sense of her. Her character is defined as much by what she doesn't do as by what she does. Backstory, in many cases- and especially in Ursa's- is completely unnecessary to a character.
Let me illustrate how what we saw of Ursa that made her come alive. The first time we see her, in Zuko's memories, she's sitting with her son and feeding some turtleducks at a pond:
At first, it seems like this is nothing more than a setup for one of Ursa's most famous lines ("Zuko, that's what moms are like. If you mess with their babies, they'll bite you back."), but there's a lot more to read from this scene than simple foreshadowing that she'll be doing something drastic to protect Zuko. For example:
In this screenshot, Ursa is a feeding a turtleduck while letting her sleeve dip into the pond. (The dipping is more apparent in motion, but trust me, it's happening.) Let's even ignore the obvious turtleduck, which is meant to show that Ursa is kind and nurturing to small, vulnerable things that she has control over. Let's just go off of what the sleeve in the pond reveals. Obviously, Ursa will not let messiness get in the way of nurturing something. If she has to get her sleeve wet to feed a turtleduck for Zuko's viewing pleasure, then her sleeve gets wet. Moreover, Ursa does not place great value on her nice clothes. She apparently has access to replacements if she desires them, and doesn't consider mere material possessions to be worth being upset. At the same time, she values the clothes she wears in some way- even if it's because she's expected to wear them as a Princess- because she made the choice to wear them despite knowing that she was going to the pond where she could possibly get them wet or messy.
That's character.
A reasonable conclusion from the scene is that she's a kindhearted noble, who is used to clothes like that and doesn't worry about ruining them. It's possible, now that we have the comics and her backstory, that the reason she doesn't value the robe is because she cares nothing for the trappings of wealth, given how miserable it has made her life. However, the rest of this scene shows her being happy with Zuko's company, so the intent of the scene is obviously that she is content at this specific point in time. One might argue that we're viewing Zuko's imperfect memories, and so we can't be sure that this is how Ursa truly was, but the details of all the flashback scenes contradict that notion. Even though Zuko is present in every scene, at several points the focus of the "camera" is on actions and dialogue that Zuko explicitly didn't witness or hear, despite being in proximity. These aren't meant to be unreliable memories; these are windows into the past for the audience that are meant to illustrate what experiences are driving Zuko's thoughts and reactions. So I think we can take a happy Ursa as being accurate enough for our analysis.
As revealed in the third part of The Search, Ursa decides that all of her memories of Zuko (and Azula) are too painful to keep, and so she makes a deal with a Spirit to give up her memories in exchange for a new life. Certainly, it's not out of the realm of possibility that Ursa is simply too burdened by the bad memories to care about the good ones, but that suggests a certain characterization, one who is overwhelmed by the trauma of her life. As depicted throughout the flashbacks of The Search, Ursa's life since her marriage has been one of slavery and loss, to such a degree that it built up to unbearable levels of emotional pain. It wasn't just being cut off from her children that broke her, it was the steady loss of everything she had. Does that seem to match a character who could be so carefree and happy in that scene, the very first scene the character ever gets in the story?
There's also a scene in the The Search where Ursa smiles at Zuko and seems to enjoy his presence, but then it's revealed that this incident is directly connected with Ursa's plan to strike back at Ozai for his years of abuse by making him think that Zuko is the son of another man. That's quite the subversion. Why was the scene constructed that way? Well, perhaps it was meant to be a ham-fisted way of saying, "You think you know Ursa, BUT YOU DON'T!!" It might also be because, according to the comics, Zuko wasn't really a source of meaningful contentment for Ursa. I'm not sure which I would prefer, honestly.
We also have to ask why the turtleduck scene was constructed the way we see it. Everything in that scene was a deliberate choice by someone on the creative team. Someone wanted Ursa's sleeve to dip in the water but be ignored, and someone wanted her to appear happy in this scene. The fact that we don't see her being stressed, being upset by some aspect of life or trappings, is significant to her character. The only time we ever see her upset, throughout the entire episode, is on occasions where people talk about her members of her family dying: Azulon, Lu Ten, and Zuko. (Two out of three were mentioned by Azula, incidentally.)
But to expand more on that, we need to discuss Negative Space. It's a term usually applied to visual arts, but as the Wikipedia article mentions, it can also refer to deliberate silence (AKA a "rest") in a musical piece. I think, on an abstract level, the same concept can apply to storytelling and characterization. So analysis becomes looking at both what was included and what wasn't.
The most obvious bit of negative space around Ursa in Zuko Alone is, of course, her backstory. Ursa stands mainly in contrast to Zuko's other parent, the utterly irredeemable abusive father, but that doesn't mean she isn't a character. Most of the adults on the show actually lack backstory, so I don't think that makes Ursa lesser than any of the others. She isn't meant to be a woman of mystery, with a past full of questions and shadow. When Zuko learns that Ursa is a descendant of Roku- in the episode The Avatar and the Fire Lord, we still aren't given any reason to believe that her past is a mystery meant to be unlocked. Zuko doesn't ask his uncle, "How could that be?" He asks, "Why are you telling me this?" We the audience, of course, are free to wonder how Roku's descendant wound up marrying Sozin's descendant, but the matter is quickly dropped by the narrative. On the other hand, Ursa's current whereabouts and her actions on the night of Fire Lord Azulon's death are both brought up again, multiple times.
Negative space as characterization can also apply to smaller scenes. Take this one:
In this scene we see Ursa try to comfort Zuko after his bad Firebending performance in front of Azulon, while Ozai frowns at Zuko appearing pathetic and so possibly ruining his own good standing with the Fire Lord. This is a very interesting and telling contrast, but partially because of what we don't see. This is the only scene that Ursa and Ozai share in the entire cartoon series, but we don't see:
Ursa so much as looking at Ozai.
Ursa appearing stressed or upset by anything but Zuko's anguish.
Disapproval or dislike- even so much as a silent, unnoticed grimace- towards Ozai or Azulon.
Do those missing pieces sound like they go with a woman who was effectively kidnapped from her home by Ozai and Azulon and forced into marriage by threat to her family? Who was told by her husband that he had the true love of her life murdered purely out of spite? Who used Zuko as a pawn against Ozai's machinations- faking evidence that Ozai wasn't Zuko's father- to the result of having Ozai contemplate Zuko's murder in front of her? Who lived a life of such pain that all her memories of her children are hurtful?
It seems to me less that Ozai and Ursa are the mortal enemies we see in The Search, and more that their marriage is cooled and they prefer not to be involved with each other when possible. This matches up with what Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko said about Ozai and Ursa's marriage in an interview with AvatarSpirit.net:
MDD: I imagine they are arranged, but we have not talked about it. We have talked in general about the Fire Nation and that arranged marriages would be more common, especially in the royalty.
BK: Also, there was a time when it probably wasn't such a bad marriage. I think they probably started okay. Certainly better than it ended up.
Thus, yes, it's true that none of the "facts" in The Search contradict the facts about Ursa as directly shown in Zuko Alone, but the intentions and presentations are starting to look completely contradictory. We have behaviors for Ursa in the cartoon that don't match up with the situation as shown in the comics' flashbacks.
I, personally, take it even further in regards to Ursa's flaws. If Ursa was a heavily abused woman who was so on the edge of despair that as soon as she's separated from her children- and keep in mind, the only thing keeping her from ever going back was Ozai, and he's certainly not immortal- she feels the need to purge all memory of them in order to avoid sinking into complete, possibly life-ending despair, then how could she also be the woman who- upon hearing that there is a plot in her family to kill her son- takes decisive action to arrange Azulon's death and give Ozai the throne, consequences be darned?
I personally don't think those two aspects are consistent. They sound like two different people to me.
And that's why I say that the Ursa of The Search is a new character. There were presentations, behaviors, and negative spaces that form the view of a certain character with certain flaws. Think about this scene:
Ursa joins in with her children at laughing at the idea of burning a beautiful foreign city to the ground as part of a war of conquest. So she seems to support the War, right? Well, we see two kinds of people in the Fire Nation throughout the entire ATLA series: people who support the war, and people who are more concerned with their own lives. The people who support the war are all nobles, and/or people in the military. There's no hint whatsoever that Ursa has any military experience, and so that negative space implies that she's a noble. Now, what do the Hotmen who aren't enthusiastic supporters of the war look like?
Ursa certainly isn't an Old White Lotus Man, but her backstory in The Search does show her as a poor peasant. Moreover, the Fire Lord and his family swoop in and ruin Ursa's life. They threaten her family, steal her from her home, essentially rape her as part of a eugenics experiment, and then claim to kill the love of her life.
What part of that sounds consistent with someone who would laugh at the wacky antics of those crazy Royal Family members, running around and burning cities down? What part of that implies she would be visibly saddened when she hears that Prince Lu Ten died fighting in the war? Notably, the comic makes use of negative space itself, in that it pointedly doesn't have Ursa mention the war at all. And before anyone complains that the comic didn't have time, it spent two whole pages showing Ursa mixing and delivering the poison that would be used to kill Azulon. It would have been very easy to use one of those pages to have Ursa discuss with Ozai what was going to happen after the Fire Lord's death. Something as simple as Ozai saying that he knows of a way he could become Fire Lord, and he plans to win the war before Zuko would have a chance to inherit, would have allowed Ursa to at least give a facial expression hinting at her opinion of that.
But the comic give us nothing. It's almost like a pro-war Ursa, or even an Ursa who takes any notice of the war, would be inconsistent with how she's characterized in the comic...
Again, we've not run into any contradictory facts, but we have conflicting elements, presentations, and psychology.
Speaking of the night Azulon died, let's go back to the matter of what Ozai says in the episode The Day of Black Sun, Part 2: The Eclipse. His exact words are: "Your Mother did vicious, treasonous things that night." Ozai takes no credit for himself there, and that's negative space that informs us. We know Ozai is a self-glorifying egomaniac. We know that he's already broken ties with Zuko by that point, and is using this information merely as a distraction to keep Zuko in the room until the eclipse is over and Ozai can immediately attempt a lethal attack. So why wouldn't Ozai claim some credit? Why wouldn't he glorify himself at Ursa's expense? Why wouldn't he torture Zuko with the knowledge that Ozai manipulated Ursa into ensuring her own defeat, as seen in the comics?
Well, probably because Ozai didn't have anything to do with the plot, when that dialogue was written and performed. The "vicious" thing that Ursa probably did was the actual murder, and Ozai merely approved and went alone with the plan.
We come to learn in The Search, though, that all Ursa did was supply a poison that she handed over to Ozai. How does that fit with the word "vicious?" Why wouldn't Ozai have taken some kind of credit if that's what went down?
Again, we're looking facts that don't precisely contradict each other, but once you examine all the implications of the story and characterization, things don't really line up. We have a single name, but two completely different characters.
This begs the question of why we essentially have two Ursa's, and why all the hints we got in the cartoon seem to suggest a different story than what was revealed in The Search. I think it's probably a mix of two main causes.
The first is that Ursa had no backstory prior to the planning for The Search, and the events surrounding Azulon's death had similarly not been fleshed out until after the cartoon was over. This is supported not only by the subtle incongruences, but also the interview I quoted above in which DiMartino and Konietzko admit that they never figured out the details of Ozai and Ursa's marriage.
But the other major cause is that a lot of these hints, subtle characterizations, and negative spaces were created by people other than DiMartino and Konietzko. The full script for Zuko Alone was written primarily by Elizabeth Welch Ehasz, and the episode was directed by Lauren Macmullan, with storyboards done by Lauren Macmullan, Chris Graham, Kenji Ono, and Dean Kelly. Likewise,The Day of Black Sun, Part 2: The Eclipse was written by Aaron Ehasz, directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, and its storyboards were drawn by Joaquim Dos Santos, Ian Graham, Lauren Montgomery, Kenji Ono, Sang Jin Kim, and Tomihiro Yamaguchi.
Naturally, DiMartino and Konietzko contributed as the general showrunners and part of the scripting team, but it's notable they credited themselves only in secondary roles for the storytelling in the only two episodes where Ursa is shown and discussed.
Personally, I found the Ursa we got in the cartoon to be more intriguing, because I feel that she actually had more characterization to her thanks to the subtitles of her scenes and the negative space in her presentation. She had interesting flaws because some of them might have been difficult for Zuko to deal with, such as his mother being a pro-Fire Nation racist, or her being destructively impulsive. (After all, she made Ozai ruler of the most powerful nation on the planet, and left her kids in his care to boot. Sure, she saved Zuko's life, but she also kind of ruined it in the process.) Instead, the Ursa of The Search is a lot more ham-fisted, with no subtitles. She's a victim, plain and simple. Her flaw is that she just wasn't strong enough to handle the abuse or its legacy on her mind. That's it. She also doesn't seem particularly imaginative or smart, considering that a Spirit was offering her a new face, and she didn't think to use it to go back and find a way to free her children from Ozai's control. I'm still trying to figure out from whom Azula inherited her smarts.
So yes, that's why I was completely dissatisfied with The Search. There was the possibility of a good story, but it was squandered, and in doing so we wound up with two different contradictory characterizations for Ursa. This is the kind of thing that makes people look down on "franchise fiction" and "expanded universes," and that's especially disappointing when we are constantly told in advertising that DiMartino and Konietzko are involved in creating the comics. If they can't even work with Gene Yang to capture important characterization, what hope do we have that the stories will capture the emotion and intelligence that made ATLA so good in the first place?
Images courtesy of Piandao.org
no subject
it skipped a generation...or two.
so, in other words, better to buy one of the other Avatar comics, than The Search; yes?
excellent essay. it made for great reading and thinking.
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As far as the other Avatar comics go, I'm not thrilled with any of them, honestly. I think The Rift is the best of the lot, and the only praise I can give it is that it's fairly harmless. Now that Dark Horse has seen that Avatar comics can be popular, I'd really like it if the fandom stopped buying them altogether, to prompt a change in creative teams.
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harmless is good.
if I may...I never realized that Dock lived in the Fire Nation - I'd thought his community was in Earth Kingdom (yes, I realize clothing is color-coded according to where one lives, but I'd thought Dock's clothes were brown, like soil)
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