Why was Ozai such a shit-tier one-dimensional villain? How do writers manage to get away with tripe like that still?

Why was Ozai such a shit-tier one-dimensional villain? How do writers manage to get away with tripe like that still?

Ozai was just set up as the big bad and wasn't even revealed until later in the series. Before that he was shrouded in darkness and had others do his bidding. This is why Azula was a better villain because she had more depth and was more active in pursuing the gaang.

What is this obsession with "depth" and "nuance?" Some bad guys are just bad, not every bad guy, fictional or otherwise has some complex motive or sympathetic backstory, in fact, most don't. They're just people with a fucked up vision of a "perfect world," bad morals, or a desire for power over others (Ozai was kind of all 3).
Why is it wrong to be "one dimensional?" He was a cool, evil, powerful, had great lines, and was a great antagonist even when he was behind the scenes.
Just because she's your waifu doesn't make her a better villain.

Because we live in a generation where the writers feel like that just because AT did it, they have to as well. Faggot adults that watch kid's cartoons can't come to terms with the concept that it's meant for children so not everything will have god-tier writing.

>Implying AT had Good Writing
>Implying “B-b-But it’s fer KEEEDDS!” Is an excuse for shit writing
Your post does not deserve to use Best Boy as it’s image.

Ozai had all of it going on, but he just didn't follow through.

>great design
>GOAT voice
>father of one of the main characters

He just wasn't Sheevy enough.

because they didn't give him any character traits besides being a sociopath and a master Firebender. not hard to figure out.

get out of here palpatine

>not everything will have god-tier writing
But, Ozai and many other "one dimensional" villains did have god-tier writing. Making villains sympathetic and complex is actually shit tier because it is a complete failure to imitate reality, or to make reality more engaging. You actively inhibit your ability to tell a good story by attempting to make both sides of a conflict redeemable (in most cases, some stories do it well).

>Why was Ozai such a shit-tier one-dimensional villain?
I'd argue he wasn't.

Oh is it cool to hate on ATLA now?

>One person makes a post criticizing a character in a show
>It's cool to hate ATLA
Jesus, OP is retarded but people like you need to go back to your hugbox

>making an entire thread about a 12 year old show just to talk shit about villain
You're retarded if you think op's intentions are to "criticize" and not wave round his dick by being an contrarian.
Jesus Christ lurk some more and learn to see these bullshitters.

>making an entire thread about a 12 year old show
There is almost no other show that gets brought up here as much as ATLA.
The fact that the show is over doesn't mean discussion of it has to stop.
This isn't even that unpopular or outrageous of an opinion to be bait
>muh contrarian meme
Some people disagree with you, get over it.

I don't think being an evil jerk was the problem with Ozai.

His problem was that he was barely in the show at all. In Book 3 when we finally see his face all he does is welcome back Zuko, his confrontation with Zuko when he decides to leave (which is one of the best scenes in the whole series) and then the final fight with Aang, though I guess you could also count the parts where he shows up in Aang's sleep deprived hallucinations.

Instead the writers chose to have Zuko spend most of his Fire Nation time in a boring, badly written romance that added nothing to his character.

The comics were was at least a little better in that regard since we get to see more of him and gave him a good and fully fledged characterization without changing him.

fpbp

Because Ozai wasn't the real antagonist of the story, he was just the premise of it. The series was rife with actual antagonists of varying motivations.

>Why is it wrong to be "one dimensional?"

He's boring. And underutilized in the show. And his plan is retarded and makes no sense. And overall he's just a waste of Mark Hamill. There was a lot of shit where they dropped the ball in Book 3, and he's near the top of the list. The fucking shitty comic books at least manged to make him two-dimensional in his conversations about ruling with Zuko in prison, he's still boring but he's not a cardboard cutout propped up for Aang to beat up for a resolution.

You can be a one-dimensional villain and still be entertaining, but Ozai sure as fuck isn't. He only has two good moments in the entire show; that part where he grins when Azula shows off in front of his father and his little frown when Zuko tries and fucks up, and the bit where you see his cute baby picture and realize Aang is going to try and kill an actual human being. And then he starts ranting about being the Phoenix King and how he's going to burn down the entire soil rich farming land continent they've been fighting for the last hundred years and nearly conquered anyway for no raisin and you just don't fucking care. And he's not much of an antagonist behind the scenes when he's doing fuck all in the shadows and his daughter is doing all the dirty work.

But what was Ozai "perfect world"? Nothing, he was just a power hungry jerk.

This is the dumbest shit I have read all week.Is this b8?

>making a thread about a comic or cartoon on a board for comics and cartoons

that fucker

Ozai was meant to perform a specific function for the narrative speaking and he did. There wasn't a pressing need to give him any development because focusing on Zuko and the rest was far far more important.

This.

Making the antagonist plans making sense is important, without it the whole story fell apart because the conflict stop making sense.

Because he wasn't a character he was a tool to progress the plot and a motivation for half the characters
Both zuko and Azula where the villains of the show

No the conflict was literally the same. i.e. The Fire Nation is burning shit. Let's go stop them.
It was a dumb plan but justifiable enough to suspend my disbelief plus it worked as a microcosm of all the problems with the Fire Nation's war.

>He was a cool, evil, powerful, had great lines, and was a great antagonist even when he was behind the scenes.
Besides giving orders that send Zuko and Azula places, what "behind the scenes" moments could there possibly be?
He shows his skills in the same battle he is taken down in, so he's never really set up as a true threat.
He didn't do squat for 99% of the series.

nth-ing the point that Ozai was just there to be the main antagonist out of logic, but not the focal villain of the story we follow. It'd make no sense for him to directly go into conflict most of the time until the last fight. We don't see anymore dimensions to him because its not important to the story. By the time we see him he's too far gone for their to be any reason to sympathize or see him differently. You could just as easily make a prequel story that justifies why he is what he became, but that wasn't the point of the story we saw.

ITT: coping losers who actually defend the trash that was ATLA Book 3 (not that Book 1 was much better though)

But but muh socioeconomic realities! Surely pointing out oversimplifications and unreasonable plot points in a cartoon where drama is emphasized over realism will show the world how amazingly smart I am!

Yet Book 2 managed to do realism quite well.

Stop defending shit writing.

To spread the greatness of the fire nation, their proverbial "white man's burden." This idea was a large part of the fire nation's cultural mythos.
There is zero wrong with a villain just being power hungry though, some of the best villains are.
>he's boring
He steals every fucking scene he is in. His fight with Aang has the actual best line in the series, besides being the most well choreographed in the series.
Throughout the series the Fire Nation is central to most all conflicts and in the late 2nd-3rd season is when there finally begins to be a real face to the monster responsible for it all(technically that's mostly sozin, but in the present), the ominous figure from 'the storm', and his limited appearances only help to make him seem that much more intimidating. His limited appearances make each one meaningful, moments of real consequence, all painting the picture of a man who is truly and unredeemably evil. And the 'unredeemably' is an important part of Aang's own conflict with what he has to do.

Making Ozai more human and less monster would have been counterproductive.

Idiots, did you miss this part?
>And then he starts ranting about being the Phoenix King and how he's going to burn down the entire soil rich farming land continent they've been fighting for the last hundred years and nearly conquered anyway for no raisin and you just don't fucking care.
He was clearly NOT power hungry if he wanted to do that.

I don't think Ozai was one dimensional but I think that his depth is mostly left to be inferred rather than stated outright.
Ozai was the second born son of a royal family; in other words, he was the spare, rather than the heir. Then he's married off not even for political gain but as part of a fucked up eugenics experiment.
I can't help but imagine that's part of why he's so power mad in the first place. He can't afford to look like a fuckup since he's already got tenuous legitimacy to the throne; so Zuko making him look bad drives him double crazy.
Not to mention he clearly favors his own second born; there's gotta be some parallel there.

What part of his plan doesn't make sense to you? The Earth nation was the only significant contention to the fire nation's power, and he was going to destroy it all.
They haven't been fighting for land you ape, it's for superiority, he wanted to rule or destroy them. Ozai didn't think people like that haf the right to exist in his world.

>Did you ignore the stupid statement I made that is devoid of basic logic
Why yes, yes I did.

The only thing that's devoid of logic here is the Fire Nation's plan. Not even the most insane RL dictatorship historically would have done that.

Yeah, like the fucking giant drill, the super convenient library that just happens to be there, or how the secret police of the worlds biggest city fell under the sway of some teenage chick because she had 18 points in charisma, apparently.

For the record, I love all the episodes that contain these things, but realism is pretty far removed from the world of Avatar

The earth kingdom razing was just shock and awe tactics.

Are you retarded? For most of human history we've razed, raped, and killed as the most humane acts of conquest, we've irreversably burned generations worth of knowledge. Making efficient use of conquested territories is a relatively new idea, and still not one that is completely standard outside the first world. Relatively few conflicts historically are about resources.

The 100 year war was about nationalism. He acted to secure the superiority of the fire nation

Not necessarily disagreeing, but I think it's needed to be said that Ozai did not give a shit about spreading greatness. He wanted to achieve conquest as a monument to himself.

I think they were both factors considering how prominent that ideal was among other characters on the side of the Fire Nation, but yes, Ozai himself only really talked about his own glory and power. Though, I don't think a separation between the monarch and nation as useful in an absolute monarchy.

I wouldn't say that Azula was a villain but more of an antagonist.

>Ozai was meant to perform a specific function for the narrative speaking and he did

Being a shitty final boss and amateur chiropractor for Aang to unlock his super mode for incredibly dumb reasons?

>There wasn't a pressing need to give him any development because focusing on Zuko and the rest was far far more important.

Like making half of the season random adventures fucking around behind enemy lines with no sense of fear or urgency? Or Zuko's plot about reconciling with his father that just kind of fizzled out? Or the stuff with Iroh that went nowhere for half a season because Mako died during Book 2 and they had to cut him out until the finale despite having more planned for him? Or Sokka finally learning to fight sixty episodes into the show? Or Toph not learning a goddamn thing? Or Katara ignoring every single thing everyone but Zuko tells her about revenge but following their advice anyone just because, and Zuko urging her to kill the fuck out of the guy, completely ignoring his own character development up to that point? And deliberately leaving the plotline about his mother unresolved, either because they ran out of time or because they were angling for a sequel?

It'd be one thing if they did focus on the others properly but Book 3 fucked that up too. And making a bad villain at the expense of focusing on your main cast is a bad allocation of resources, you can make them both good.

>Fire Nation starts the war over expanding the colonies because they need land and resources because they're literally Imperial Japan
>The Earth Kingdom makes up the majority of the world's landmass, and is incredibly rich in resources and arable farming land
>100 years later the Northern Water tribe is the only holdout left, and not a pressing one
>Azula has already conquered the capital and the Earth Kingdom monarchy is dethroned
>The last remaining capable standing armies are captured during the Invasion of Black Sun
>All that's left is scattered pockets of resistance all across the Earth Kingdom, none of which are a match for the Fire Nation in an outright battle and at worse can use guerilla tactics to disrupt your holdings for years to come
>LET'S USE OUR CENTENNIAL POWER BOOST TO REDUCE THIS ENTIRE USEFUL FERTILE LAND WHICH WE ALREADY RULE MOST OF AND TO DUST AND ASHES
>FUCK WIPING OUT THE NORTHERN WATER TRIBE IN AN APOCAYLPTIC HELLFIRE STORM, WE ALREADY KILLED HALF OUR NAVY LIKE TOTAL FUCKING MORONS BY GIVING COMMAND TO A GUY WHO THOUGHT NAVAL COMMANDER WAS A PROMOTION OVER CAPTAIN AND NOT A DOWNGRADE

The dustbowls created by Ozai's retarded plan would have blotted out the sky over the entire continent, and probably would have lead to mass starvation anyway (in the colonies AND the homeland) were it not already a certainty due to how much existing farmland he would have destroyed. He didn't even start with population centers for fucks' sake, the first thing he burned was fucking mountains. He couldn't even do a good job with his retarded supervillain plan that ignored the reason why they declared war on the world in the first place.

Ozai is stupid.

>Ozai is stupid.
No, the ATLA writers were being stupid. It was clear they just didn't care anymore by Book 3.

>Yet Book 2 managed to do realism quite well.

>>Fire Nation starts the war over expanding the colonies because they need land and resources because they're literally Imperial Japan
But that's fucking wrong. Sozin started the war for the express purpose of spreading the greatness of the fire nation, he said this explicitly, did you not even watch the show?

>>The Earth Kingdom makes up the majority of the world's landmass, and is incredibly rich in resources and arable farming land
No one cares
>100 years later the Northern Water tribe is the only holdout left, and not a pressing one
>Azula has already conquered the capital and the Earth Kingdom monarchy is dethroned
Most of the earth nation wasn't under fire nation control, and Ba Sing Se which they'd barely just captured was already being liberated.
>The last remaining capable standing armies are captured during the Invasion of Black Sun
A few mainly southern water nation groups.
>>LET'S USE OUR CENTENNIAL POWER BOOST TO REDUCE THIS ENTIRE USEFUL FERTILE LAND WHICH WE ALREADY RULE MOST OF AND TO DUST AND ASHES
They didn't control it. They don't care about fertile land.
>that ignored the reason why they declared war on the world in the first place.
You're the one ignoring it. You got it objectively fucking wrong and based your entire autistic tirade around your mistake.

>The dustbowls created by Ozai's retarded plan would have blotted out the sky over the entire continent
You're basing this off of?

>Ozai is stupid.
Ozai almost ended a 100 year war in his favor and only lost because what is essentially a god got in his way.

Book 3 was the best one my dude

>Sozin started the war for the express purpose of spreading the greatness of the fire nation, he said this explicitly

You're right he did, that justification just makes no sense compared to them just grabbing land and territory to sustain that growing industrial society. Or that said prosperity is extended only to Fire Nation citizens in Fire Nation colonies inside those sovereign territories, so he wasn't really sharing it at all.

>Ba Sing Se which they'd barely just captured was already being liberated.

Ba Sing Sae was under the complete control of the Dai Li, which threw in with Azula. It was only liberated after Ozai launched his attack, he didn't know shit about the White Lotus.

>No one cares
>They don't care about fertile land

Then they're even bigger fucking idiots then you can imagine. They're an industrialized country, you, think they have the land to feed the home island population that's already exploded in the last century of total warfare? They need the colonies or they'll starve.

>You're basing this off of?

He was going to systematically torch an entire continent. That tends to create a lot of ash.

>Ozai almost ended a 100 year war in his favor

By reducing the enemy country to a fucking charred wasteland. What benefit does that present to the Fire Nation, what advantages beyond no more enemies? What do they gain in terms of territory, or wealth, or labor, or capital? Nothing. It just means their total war based economy is suddenly out of a job. Was he going to burn their colonies too? He never said he was but he was dumb enough for it not be outside the realm of possibility. When the Mongols salted an entire fucking city as a message they didn't do it to every single people they conquered, what favor is there in ruling over a pile of ashes?

>Book 3 was the best one my dude

I can't quite process how anyone would feel that way. Can you talk more about why it's your favorite?

>he wasn't really sharing
>that justification makes no sense
Read Rudyard Kipling's 'The White Man's Burden'
>Ba sing se.. he didn't know about the white lotus
Besides the fact this plan existed before Azula captured Ba Sing Sae, Their control over the territory was questionable at best. It was an unsustainable military coup that most of their military probAbly only comitted to out of fear.
>They need the colonies
They seemed perfectly fine outside of a single settlement with some dirty water.
>What benefit does this present them
They win. This was about winning and glory for their nation, just because you aren;t motivated by that doesn't mean others aren't.
>War based economy
They were just as well off before the war

>Book 3
Had some of the best episodes
>ember island players
>sozin comet(undeniably the best fight in the series)
>southern raiders
>boiling rock
>black sun
>space sword

Burning the farmland wouldn't ruin the soil
It would remain just as fertile afterwards and the starvation it would cause would end the war in his favor
It was a solid plan

The drill episode was the one exception that season (written by Bryke BTW, thanks for that).

Your other complaints are literally retarded, the plotting for those was impeccable.

How was she not a villain?

She didn't really do the villainous activity, she was more of a foil and rival to Zuko.

What do you guys think about Zuko's 1D backstory and motivation expanded into a somewhat 3D one?
>I want to capture the avatar under the order of the big boss
>I want to capture the avatar to return to my life of luxury as a spoiled prince
>I need to defeat the avatar, return to the fire nation and realize I was never happy back then. I'm just as unhappy as I was during the journey.
>I need to understand why I am biologically and consciously incapable of being an immoral bastard that feeds off bad things like my psycho family.
>I have a choice to make between being the good guy or the bad guy. I can be a puasy and pretend I enjoy being bad or I can man up to my true feelings and help take down my psycho sister and father.