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"When the comet last came, my grandfather, Fire Lord Sozin, used it to wipe out the Air Nomads. Now, I will use its power to end the Earth Kingdom... permanently. From our airships, we will rain fire over their lands, a fire that will destroy everything and out of the ashes, a new world will be born: a world in which all the lands are Fire Nation and I am the supreme ruler of everything!" |
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Some men just want to watch the world burn...but Ozai wishes to be the one to ignite the flame!
Only the Avatar can master all four elements and bring balance to the world. These are the very worst of those who try to upset that balance.
Canonical Works[]
- Avatar: The Last Airbender (original animated series):
- Pictured above: Fire Lord Ozai is a genocidal, child-abusing fascist dictator who seeks to Take Over the World and has dedicated weeks at a time and large portions of his national army to hunting down and killing a twelve-year-old and his friends. Perhaps best exemplified in the first episode of the four-part finale, where his reaction to news of rebellions in the Earth Kingdom is to try to incinerate the entire continent. While the aforementioned heinous act is his crowning achievement of irredeemable abomination, he's also manipulated his wife into murdering his father to usurp the throne from his grieving older brother Iroh - and then thanked his wife with banishment from the Fire Nation - and physically abused his son Zuko, by burning his face for speaking out of turn, and shooting him with lightning when he decides to join Aang. He also cruelly manipulates his daughter Azula into becoming his perfect little villain, to the point where she completely wrecks her emotional and mental health from the pressure, only to reveal that he doesn't care about her at all, and will discard her as quickly and easily as everyone else. He doesn't regret any of those moments and feels no remorse for the consequences.
- Even after his downfall, he stills tries to manipulate his son Zuko into being a tyrant like himself in the graphic novel miniseries, The Promise, only giving up in rage when he deemed him too weak and beyond hope of being changed. The following graphic novel miniseries, The Search, makes him even worse, if that was possible. It's revealed he never had any true lover for his wife Ursa, seeing her as a possession to covet rather than a romantic partner. The reason why he treats Zuko so horribly? It was because he discovered that his wife Ursa hated the fact that Ozai was the man who fathered her children, so he told her that from that point on, he would treat Zuko exactly as Ursa wished (She wished that Zuko wasn't his son), which means that his treatment of Zuko throughout the series was purely out of spite and pettiness towards Ursa. And if you were still convinced that he loved Azula? He dashes that to the ground by saying that he'd be perfectly willing to kill her along with Zuko and Ursa if she took them with her into exile.
- In the early Book 1 episode "Imprisoned", the Fire Nation's Earth Prison Warden is the cruel overseer of the Fire Nation prison rig on the Mo Ce Sea, who is dedicated to crushing the spirits of his captives. Rounding up any earthbenders among various villages, the Warden imprisons and enslaves them, forcing them to build Fire Nation warships while keeping them in miserable conditions to destroy any hope they have. The Warden is so temperamental and petty that he throws a prisoner into solitary confinement for a week as punishment for coughing in his presence; in another case, the Warden flings his own Captain overboard just for not answering a question clearly enough. When Katara manages to convince the prisoners to fight their oppressors, the Warden tries to kill them all with no mercy.
- Pictured above: Fire Lord Ozai is a genocidal, child-abusing fascist dictator who seeks to Take Over the World and has dedicated weeks at a time and large portions of his national army to hunting down and killing a twelve-year-old and his friends. Perhaps best exemplified in the first episode of the four-part finale, where his reaction to news of rebellions in the Earth Kingdom is to try to incinerate the entire continent. While the aforementioned heinous act is his crowning achievement of irredeemable abomination, he's also manipulated his wife into murdering his father to usurp the throne from his grieving older brother Iroh - and then thanked his wife with banishment from the Fire Nation - and physically abused his son Zuko, by burning his face for speaking out of turn, and shooting him with lightning when he decides to join Aang. He also cruelly manipulates his daughter Azula into becoming his perfect little villain, to the point where she completely wrecks her emotional and mental health from the pressure, only to reveal that he doesn't care about her at all, and will discard her as quickly and easily as everyone else. He doesn't regret any of those moments and feels no remorse for the consequences.
- The Legend of Korra:
- Book One: Air: Yakone is a particularly nasty bloodbender from the Water Tribe who factors heavily into the story of Book One as it's Bigger Bad. The backstory shows him as a feared crime boss of Republic City in it's early days, one who used illegal bloodbending to control and harm others. His bending was so strong, he could bloodbend without need of the full moon and planned to use this power to Take Over the City until Avatar Aang had him brought to justice. But he simply bloodbended the entire coutroom in order to make his escape, and when Aang tried to stop him, he bloodbended his body with the intent of snapping his neck. Fortunately, Aang overcame him and took his bending away. A few days later, Yakone's gang broke him out of prison and gave him plastic surgery so he could escape the city and go start a new life elsewhere. Back home in the Water Tribe, he met and wed a woman, having two sons by her: Noatak and Tarrlok. When the boys were discovered to be gifted waterbenders, Yakone's greedy, power-lusting and vengeful old self reawakened in him and he took his sons out in the wilderness to give them secret training for developing special bloodbending like he used to have. Not only did he psychologically, emotionally, and physically abuse his kids, pushing them in their training and putting the younger son Tarrlok down as a weakling for not having the stomach for bloodbending, but he flat out told them that using their gifts to help him take his revenge on the Avatar and Republic City was the reason they exist: that they were born and live to be his tools for vengeance! He finally crosses the line when he orders the brothers to bloodbend each other. Of course Tarrlok refused, and Yakone was about to savagely beat him before Noatak bloodbended him instead to protect his brother. (Even here, Yakone roars "I made you! YOU'RE MINE!") Noatak ran away and Yakone was unable to find him, sending him into a Villainous BSOD because his hopes of revenge were dashed. He died shortly afterwards, having lost the will to live. The worst part of all this? His abuse of his sons shaped them into becoming the successors to his hateful legacy anyway, since Noatak became the Big Bad Amon who was dedicated to wiping out all forms of bending, while Tarrlok became the Big Bad Wannabe who used his political power to oppress non-benders.
- Book Two: Spirits:
- Unalaq, the Holier Than Thou chief of the Northern Water Tribe, is Korra's Evil Uncle who serves as the Big Bad of Book 2. Beneath his self-righteous spiritual preaching, Unalaq craved nothing but power, and would do anything, no mater how deplorable, to get it. He is a Hypocrite of the worst kind, shown clearly when he arranged for a habitat for spirits to be desecrated all to set his brother Tonraq up for a fall. He had more resentment towards his older brother than Ozai did for his, having been responsible for getting said brother banished from the Northern Water Tribe all so that he could take the mantle of chief that was his brother's birthright, and more disregard for his two children than Ozai did for his too: he treats them as disciples to carry out his wishes and when his son Desna is nearly fatally injured in an attempt to open a Spirit Portal, he expresses no concern and advocates leaving him to die in favor of focusing on getting the portal open. Unalaq later forces Korra's cooperation in opening the portal by attacking and threatening to destroy the soul of Jinora, a young girl. When Korra caves in, he nearly kills her anyway and tries to destroy Korra's own soul. Unalaq later assaults the Southern Water tribe and delivers a decisive and near fatal beating to his brother Tonraq, sparing his life solely so Tonraq can see him win completely. He ultimately wanted to become a new Avatar by merging with Vaatu, the spiritual embodiment of darkness and chaos, in order to ravage the entire planet so that the world may be reborn into a new age of humans and spirits co-existing as slaves in a ruined world, with him as the all-powerful spiritual ruler in a thousand years of darkness. After he succeeds in merging with Vaatu, Unalaq battles Korra and tears the spirit of light and order, Rava, out of her, brutally attempting to obliterate her. He very nearly succeeds, and does succeed in breaking the Avatar cycle, cutting off Korra's ties to her past lives for good! Upon returning to the material world, he instantly sets out to destroy Republic City and all within it, declaring his rule has begun. When he's destroyed, no one mourns his passing, not even his kids! And in Book 3, it's revealed that he's the reason why Korra grew up in an isolated security compound for most of her life. He was a member of a secret group called the Red Lotus and had plans on abducting her, which he would follow up with by brainwashing her so she could be a tool for his ambitions. He sent four members named Zaheer, Ming-Hua, P'li, and Ghazan after her, only for them to fail and be captured. Having no intention of saving them, he allowed the four of them to rot in four different prisons with ghastly living conditions and in fact covered up his involvement with the group and the kidnapping attempt, showing that even trusted allies of his are nothing but disposable pawns for him.
- Vaatu, the Great Spirit of Darkness, is a primordial being who has threatened humanity for eons. Since the beginning of time, Vaatu has battled his counterpart Raava, the Great Spirit of Light, for control over the world in an event called the Harmonic Convergence, so that Vaatu could enshroud the world in 10,000 years of darkness. Vaatu also broke the barriers between the physical and spirit worlds, allowing spirits to overwhelm humanity and nearly wipe them out, with Vaatu routinely corrupting spirits into dark spirits to slaughter even more humans. After having been imprisoned in a tree by Avatar Wan, Vaatu eventually forms an alliance with Unalaq where Unalaq would free Vaatu at the next Harmonic Convergence so the two could merge and become the Dark Avatar, and they could then reshape the world in eternal darkness, starting by trying to destroy Republic City.
- Turf Wars: Tokuga is a young, viciously ambitious up-and-coming mobster who kills the Triple Threat Triad leader, Viper, along with anyone else who might think of challenging him. While selling his services as a mercenary, Tokuga is injured by a dragon-eel spirit and becomes a monstrous blend between human and reptile. In the wake of this transformation, Tokuga uses his new physiology to inflict more pain and strives for bigger targets. Seeking to conquer Republic City, Tokuga seizes containers of nerve gas and plots to unleash it on Republic City's civilians so he may seize control.
- The Rise of Kyoshi gives us Xu Ping An, a ruthless Firebender warlord. With a finely-honed, superficial sense of charisma, he uses to reign in a loyal gathering of marauders with which he pledges to overthrow the law and let anarchy reign. Xu put entire villages of "abiders" to the sword, leaving countless corpses stacked behind him until his rampage was finally stopped by Jianzhu. When inadvertently broken out eight years later by the Avatar, Kyoshi, Xu muses that the land has forgotten his name and pledges to scar his name into history in a way they will never forget. To begin his new wave of bloodshed, Xu captures a family and forces them to watch as he dunks the father in and out of a pot of boiling water, gleefully intending to move on to slaughter the nearest town. Xu even uses his rare ability to bend lightning to savagely torture Kyoshi, proclaiming himself absolute and that all anyone can ever hope to do against him is obey.
Noncanon Works[]
- In the noncanon video games of Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Burning Earth, & Into the Inferno, Fire Lord Ozai is once again the tyrannical overlord of the Fire Nation and an abuser who burned his own son's face and banished him for speaking out of turn. Through his reign, entire cities are invaded and subjugated by the Fire Nation; villages are poisoned to the point of lethal sickness by his weapons factories; and the kingdom of Ba Sing Se is almost decimated by a massive drill. In his ultimate move of malicious ambition, Ozai plans to use the power instilled upon the Fire Nation by Sozin's Comet to burn the entire population of the Earth Kingdom to ash. When confronted on his reasoning for this atrocity, Ozai simply notes that "the people did nothing to me, they're just in my way".
- The Last Airbender video game:
- Commander Zhao, the Fire Nation's ambitious general, seeks to kill Zuko after he rescues Aang from the prison he'd put him in. Choosing to blow up an entire ship of his own Fire Nation soldiers in order to make Zuko's death look like an accident, Zhao later leads the invasion of the Northern Water Moon Tribe and murders their Moon Spirit, hoping to wipe out everybody at the North Pole and allow Fire Lord Ozai to take control.
- DS version only: Fire Lord Ozai is the tyrannical ruler of the Fire Nation and Prince Zuko's abusive father. Ruling the land with an iron fist, Ozai has Earthbenders imprisoned and Airbenders killed when he hears of the Avatar's return. Previously willing to allow an entire battalion of his own troops to be sacrificed to take out some Earthbenders, Ozai challenged Zuko to a fight as punishment for speaking out against this plan, scarring the boy to teach him respect. Ordering the invasion of the Northern Water Tribe and all the deaths that follow, Ozai seeks to have Zuko killed when he rescues Aang from Zhao's prison, viewing him as a traitor.
Live Action[]
- The Last Airbender:
- Fire Lord Ozai leads the Fire Nation in endless conquest and war. A brutal tyrant who stifles all dissent, Ozai has caused countless deaths in his attempts of conquest and even sacrifices his own troops without any hint of regret to achieve victory. A horribly abusive father who brutalized, scarred, and exiled his son Zuko for speaking out against such an action, Ozai intends to mold Zuko into a heartless, murderous child soldier like his other child, Azula, and plans on razing all the non-Fire Nation lands with his enhanced firebending power on the day of Sozin's Comet.
- Commander Zhao is an ambitious Fire Nation militant who seeks the utter annihilation of the Northern Water Tribe. After failing in his plan to imprison young Avatar Aang for the rest of his life, Zhao uses knowledge gleamed from the Great Library to scheme an affront against the Spirit World itself. Zhao goes behind Fire Lord Ozai's back and tries to assassinate Zuko to eliminate him as a rival, before invading the Northern Water Tribe with intent to kill the entire population. To further his goals, Zhao ruthlessly kills the Moon Spirit, lethally wounding Princess Yue in the process, and is uncaring to the broader effects of destruction that such an outrage against the spirits would cause so long as it weakens the Water Tribe enough for his genocide to be carried out, arrogantly proclaiming "We are now the gods!"