Avatar The Last Airbender Doesn’t Believe in Enemies to Lovers, Part One: How One Romance Spurred The Most Important Character Development
By: Priya Sridhar
Tags: Television, Avatar The Last Airbender, Animation, Couples, Shipping

Avatar The Last Airbender Doesn’t Believe in Enemies to Lovers, Part One: How One Romance Spurred The Most Important Character Development Priya Sridhar Follow May 29, 2020 · 6 min read

You go viral on Twitter for the strangest reasons. With Avatar: The Last Airbender returning to Netflix, people are talking about what rewatching the show means for them, as well as seeing new viewers’ reactions to the humor, action, and drama.

The show is about an alternate world where certain people can bend elements like water, earth, fire, and air; the Avatar is a reincarnation that can handle all the elements and supposedly brings balance. Unfortunately, the current Avatar has been AWOL for a hundred years and when he returns, he finds a world conquered by the Fire Nation. One exiled Fire Nation prince is gunning for him. Meanwhile, two water tribe siblings join the Avatar Aang in his quest to find balance and fun.

This means the ships are returning, of course. I am relieved, however, that people aren’t going down shipping Zuko and Katara, two of the leads. They’re on opposing sides of the ongoing war, with Katara trying to protect the Avatar and Zuko trying to capture him.

Here we get to the spoiler point. You have been warned.

“Don’t forget Zuko has a canon girlfriend” is the gist of what I tweeted. Somehow it received several thousand likes. I was surprised that people likede a simple fact of canon.

The reasons why Katara and Zuko weren’t intended to end up together are numerous. You can argue that they have good chemistry, but ultimately Katara isn’t the person for him in canon and vice-versa. That goes to a warrior named Mai.

Who Is Mai?

Mai is the daughter of prominent Fire Nation politicians. Firelord Ozai installs them as the governors of Omashu, where they just sit and wait for the resistance to launch assassination attempts against them. Mai starts her appearance saying she hates the city, and asks her old friend Princess Azula if she came to liven things up. The princess certainly does, since she wants Mai’s accurate knife-throwing skills to help with capturing her fugitive brother and uncle. Mai joins, without giving any approval or disgust about the notion. We later learn she’s fairly stoic and dangerous, and somewhat fearful of her friend.

You can’t blame Mai for disrespecting her parents. They are incompetent politicians who can’t even identify a fake pandemic or that their son may have run off due to being a toddler. Mai also reveals that they raised her to sit still and never react to anything, all to preserve their social standing and keep their fancy house pristine. She wasn’t allowed to be a kid, and she resents that Tom-Tom is given much more freedom as a baby. For that reason, when Azula refuses to trade him for the imprisoned King Bumi, Mai goes with the deal being off. Azula is persuasive in that regard. It helps that she can see the rebels — Katara and Sokka — are holding Tom-Tom protectively and won’t hurt him.

Mai, Azula and Ty Lee spend much of season 2 hunting down the Avatar, tracking Zuko and Iroh, and staging a coup. They only succeed with the last two when Azula tempts Zuko with a promise of return and imprisons Iroh as he helps Katara and Aang escape Ba Sing Se. The tie-in comics reveal that Azula and Ty Lee arranged a romantic dinner between Zuko and Mai, while flashbacks show that they had mutual attraction for each other as children. By season 3, they are openly nuzzling each other and bonding over how they hate the world.

A Life-Changing Bond

Zuko brings out one side of Mai we haven’t seen before: the freedom to feel and express her emotions. During their loving moments, she admits she hates the world but not him, and when they’re fighting, she yells at him that he’s hurting her feelings. Zuko says that’s what he loves about her, how she expresses the way she hates things, or finds them angering. It’s blistering, passionate, and honest like fire.

“But then what does Mai bring out of Zuko?” someone may ask. It’s an understandable question. She doesn’t get much screentime as a lackey to Azula rather than a major character. Unlike Ty Lee, who steals the show with her perky attitude, Mai would rather lurk.

We have seen Zuko interact with girls attracted to him, mainly in the Earth Kingdom. He stole a transport from one of them, and went on an awkward date with another. Even Katara expressed sympathy and the hope that she could repair his scar. Zuko never relaxed with any of them because in the former two, he was posing as a refugee. Then with Katara, her kindness wasn’t enough to convince him to fight Azula when she tempted him.

Zuko receives from Mai the reason to change. He’s never lied to her or forced her to uphold a rigid standard. She returns the favor. Yet Mai will tell him off for being a moody butthead at a party, and he actually admits that he’s angry at himself for what he did by choosing Azula over Iroh. She tells him it’s okay to be angry about a seeming exclusion from a war meeting and they’ll spend the day having fun together. Mai is the best part of the Fire Nation because she gives real, unconditional love. Zuko last received that from Iroh, and he didn’t appreciate it at the time. He can be himself around Mai, without worrying about how he appears to her or if he needs to lie. That’s what made him realize that abiding by Ozai’s plan would be wrong. He realized he deserved a life of honesty and integrity, even if he didn’t have either before.

We can agree that Zuko breaking up with Mai over a letter was a mean thing to do. It was necessary because the minute he defected, the Fire Nation would be out for his blood again, this time as a traitor rather than an embarrassment. He didn’t want her to be branded as well and give up that decadent life or end up on Azula’s murder list. When they reunite, after Zuko gets imprisoned at the Boiling Rock, Mai makes it clear it’s the letter itself that angered her more than Zuko’s other actions as a traitor. She says she would have preferred if he had talked to her about it upfront rather than leaving with only a note. What’s more, her last action before he leaves is to save him and his new friends from a boiling death, and then getting arrested for it. They imply that if he had given her the choice, she would have gone with him to help.

Mai delivers the ultimate line that breaks Azula: “I love Zuko more than I fear you.” Mai before this had never expressed fear of Azula the way their friend Ty Lee did. She wanted an excuse to leave her family and seek adventure. The problem was that Azula’s leadership was just as restrictive as her parents’ expectations. Zuko gave her the adventure she desired and didn’t even have to take her into the Earth Kingdom.

Even if you factor in the comics where she and Zuko break up, Mai keeps growing as a person. She comes to admit that she cares for Tom-Tom and doesn’t want anything to happen to her little brother. Without Azula’s influence, Mai is allowed to protect him. When her father tries to stage a coup against Firelord Zuko, Mai defies him for the first time ever and tells him to shove it once she gets enough intel on the group. There is hope that she and Zuko can reconcile, and he will stop trying to do things alone, without her.

In short, you can’t overlook Mai. She has an impact on Zuko, and vice-versa. Zuko has a girlfriend in canon, and she is amazing.