Water, Earth, Fire, and Air are the four elements that make up the universe. These four elements are used to remind us of just… elements. Then “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” directed by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, changed everything. “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” Nickelodeon’s best, is by far one of the best examples of Western Animation. This show is quite possibly the lovechild of Eastern and Western animation, as it is heavily inspired by Eastern culture, traditions, and spirituality. With the influence of the East comes a slew of incredible but deadly foes.
Most of the shows we watched as kids tended to have a hero and a villain, a good and a bad, a light and a dark side. The anti-hero, the evil guy who turned nice, or villains that you can not help but feel sorry for did not have much of a chance. This is where Avatar enters the picture, radically altering the game. Sure, it contains a cast of scary villains who commit heinous acts. They do, however, have some fantastic dark side characters with incredible character development and growth. Let us speak about the incredible villains who help to make “Avatar: The Last Airbender” one of the best-animated programs ever!
Fire Lord Ozai
The ultimate big bad guy of the Avatar-verse, Fire Lord Ozai is the father of Prince Zuko and Princess Azula. He rules over all, under the Fire Nation’s rule. A master of firebending, he is believed to be the most capable and the strongest firebender throughout the course of the show.
Ozai was always hungry for power but was second to the throne after his brother, the beloved Iroh. However, after Iroh’s son Lu-Ten died in battle, Ozai manipulated the strings and got to his father, Azulon to make him the Fire Lord.
All wasn’t bad under his rule though, since the Fire Nation saw significant development in industry and technology during his reign. He was a skilled firebender and could also bend lightning and as we know, lightning bending is not an easy business. His fighting style was unhinged and flamboyant, as seen in the final battle between him and Aang, which Ozai ultimately lost despite being powered by Sozin’s Comet.
It was Ozai who etched Zuko with the infamous scar around his eye after he challenged his own son to an Agni Kai (which is a traditional fire nation duel). Zuko had spoken out against the General’s plan during a war, making Ozai challenge him to an Agni Kai. In the end, he scarred Zuko’s eye with his firebending and banished him with the objective of not returning unless he found the Avatar.
Ozai was proud of his younger daughter, Princess Azula, who was known to be a firebending prodigy and also extremely intelligent. He believed that Azula was ‘born lucky’ while Zuko was ‘lucky to be born’. He was also the reason why Azula turned out evil, manipulative, and ruthless. Like father, like daughter? Unfortunately, he did not love her and saw her as a mere tool to expand his domain, considering that the Fire Nation had always been incapable of capturing Omashu and Ba Sing Se (Earth Nation kingdoms) until Azula sneakily besieged it with her friends Mei and Ty Lee.
During an altercation with Zuko towards the end of the series, he shot a bolt of lightning at him hoping to kill him, but Zuko re-directed the lightning back to Ozai, which was a huge turning point in the series. The only other time Ozai’s lightning got redirected back to him was when Aang attempted to do so in his Avatar state. However, instead of killing him off, Aang took away Ozai’s bending and he was imprisoned. A fitting end for a tyrant.
Azula
A popular fan favorite villain in the entire series for many, Azula is the daughter of Fire Lord Ozai and Ursa and the prodigious sibling of Prince Zuko. Despite being only fourteen, Azula is evil, manipulative, cunning, and unhinged. She is also quite possibly one of the best firebenders in the show, often surpassing that way older than her. Even though her father is the main villain of the show, Azula has much more screen time and interaction with the Avatar Aang and his gang during their battles.
From a very early age, Ozai was partial towards her due to her prowess as a firebender, and began to train her about strategies and ruling the nation. She attended the Royal Fire Academy for Girls where she met her friends Mei and Ty Lee. Her relationship with her mother, Queen Ursa was sour and she often expressed her thought that Azula was a monster. This is something Azula speaks up about during the Beach episode. It is hard not to feel bad for her at that moment because she was only fourteen. This trauma shows up later during her coronation as the Fire Lord, when she hallucinates seeing Ursa in the mirror. She had a complicated relationship with her brother Zuko and always looked down on him. She began to warm up to him slightly after she manipulated him into betraying the Gaang. However, she would still manipulate him from time to time.
She is a master at firebending and lightning bending. What’s even cooler is that she is also skilled at combat and can use fire to thrust herself into flying. Unlike the other firebenders who use their fists or palms, Azula uses her fingers. She is known for her signature blue flames, which are much more intense than other forms of fire. She is also one of the most versatile users of fire and shoots them from her feet as well while flipping in the air or kicking her opponents. Her firebending was controlled and strategic as she was a perfectionist, and it allowed her to fight for longer durations with more power without tiring.
She is also the first character to demonstrate lightning bending (a highly complicated sub-set of fire bending) in the series. She is an insanely good strategist and was responsible for conquering two revered Earth Kingdoms: Omashu and Ba Sing Se. She was the biggest obstacle for Aang and his friends and has consistently outperformed and outsmarted them throughout the course of the series, making her a truly formidable villain. She also almost killed Aang, that too during his main character’s power-up moment. It would have ended the Avatar cycle, had Katara not revived him with spirit water.
She also very nearly became the Fire Lord but ended up descending into madness towards the end. During the shenanigans at the Boiling Rock, Azula’s best friends, Mei and Ty Lee betrayed her to save Zuko, Sokka and Suki. When Mei betrays her, she tells Azula that she loves Zuko more than she fears Azula. This is shortly followed by Ty Lee attacking Azula to block her chi so that she cannot firebend.
This betrayal acts as the main catalyst that causes Azula to descend into madness. Deep down, she is a little child who has never been loved. Her mother thought she was a monster, she had a horrible relationship with her brother, her father sees her as his shadow and a tool for expanding his empire, while her only friends betray her. In her last Agni Kai with Zuko, her firebending is a lot less controlled, similar to her mental state at the time and she is finally defeated by Katara.
Zuko
On number 3, we have one of our fan favorites from the Fire Nation and the show in general, Prince Zuko. This one’s a bit different though. He’s not a villain per-se but more like an anti-hero. Sure, he starts out as a bad guy in book one and then goes through an altering moment in book two until turning bad again in book three. However, he finally joins the Gaang towards the end. His journey is quite possibly the most interesting one in the show and his character development is revered to be one of the best in the course of Western animation.
Characterized by his signature scar, Prince Zuko spent the major portion of Book One being of a hindrance to the Gaang and hunting down the Avatar to take him back to the Fire Nation. He was banished from his kingdom following a brutal Agni Kai with Fire Lord Ozai and was told that he could come back only if he captured the Avatar, an entity that was supposedly dead for almost a hundred years. He was assisted by Uncle Iroh, Ozai’s brother, who was a father figure and mentor to Zuko in every step of his way, and is obviously responsible for him turning to the side of good.
Zuko was so accustomed to being evil that he literally fell sick after doing one good thing in Book Two; setting Appa free. He also spends the majority of that time making tea with his uncle while being an incognito Fire Nation citizen in Ba Sing Se. Sometime later, he ended up sharing a heartfelt moment with Katara during Azula’s coup, where she offered to heal Zuko’s scar with the Spirit water from the Northern Water Tribe. However, he changed sides soon and joined forces with Azula, Mei, and Ty Lee, going back to the Fire Nation under the ruse of having killed the Avatar.
He developed a relationship with Mei after this, and his bond with Ozai got better. Not because of authentic emotional reasons but because he had supposedly killed the Avatar. At the same time, Iroh was locked behind bars due to Zuko’s betrayal. He suspected that Katara might’ve used that Spirit Water to heal Aang and hired an assassin called the Combustion Man to dispose-off the Avatar.
During Iroh’s imprisonment, Zuko learned that even though his paternal great-grandfather Sozin had started the war, his maternal great-grandfather was Avatar Roku, a previous incarnation of Aang’s. This was detrimental to his change of heart, after which he finally decides to abandon the Fire Nation on the Day of the Black Sun, where, in a very satisfying scene, he redirects Ozai’s lightning back to him and goes off to join Aang.
After meeting the Sun Warriors and dragons with Aang, Zuko found a new light and life to his firebending. He accompanied Sokka to the Boiling Rock, a high-security prison where Sokka and Katara’s father Hakoda was being held.
In the end, Zuko battled Azula in an Agni Kai to be the Fire Lord. He overpowered her, as Azula sloped into madness and lost control of her bending, while Zuko fought with resolve. In the end, when Azula jolted a bolt of lightning towards Katara, he jumped in to save her. He becomes the Fire Lord.
Zuko, unlike Azula, was not as skilled at fire bending. His source of bending, for the longest time, was his hatred. Zuko was shown to be highly skilled with dual broadswords, having trained with the esteemed swordmaster Piandao. His firebending got better, especially after learning from the dragons. Even though he did not learn to bend lightning, Zuko did get skilled at redirecting it.
Long Feng
He is the first non-firebender to be mentioned in this list. Long Feng is a major antagonist in Book Two: Earth. He is the leader of the Dai Li Secret Police, a police association in the Earth Kingdom’s capital, Ba Sing Se, which brainwashed its people into thinking that there was no war. He was the Grand Secretariat of Ba Sing Se and manipulated the king as his puppet, who later turned out to be just a figurehead. Similar to his Fire Nation counterparts, he was manipulative and hungry for power. He hid all evidence of the war against the Fire Nation.
He would capture potential threats to the false peace of Ba Sing Se and imprison them under Lake Laogai. Then, he would use hypnosis and brainwashing techniques to subdue them. He would say the words, “The Earth King has invited you to Lake Laogai”, and made anyone subjected to his hypnosis obey each and every word of his.
Long Feng is an exemplary Earthbender but prefers to use his pawns to do his bidding instead of fighting himself. He is seen bending a huge slab of ground on Appa to capture him.
Long Feng captured Appa, Team Avatar’s flying bison, and used him as leverage to prevent the team from disrupting the balance in Ba Sing Se. However, the king does find out about Long Feng’s treachery when he is made to see “The Drill” that Azula had gotten to tear down Ba Sing Se.
and imprison him but the Dai Li remains loyal to him. He uses this to strike a deal with Azula where they decide to exchange the Avatar in return for Azula conquering Ba Sing Se. However, being better at the game of manipulation than him, Azula wins the loyalty of the Dai Li and double-crosses Long Feng. As he asks the Dai Li to arrest her, they hesitate to do so and Long Feng is mocked by Azula for not having the “divine right to rule”. As he contemplated being beaten by Azula at the game of manipulation, something he excelled at, Azula reminds him that she never even considered him to be a player.
Mai
This is another one of those characters on our list who is not a villain per se, and has a change of heart as the show progresses. Mai is the daughter of a rich politician in the Fire Nation and best friends with Azula and Ty Lee. She is also Zuko’s girlfriend. She is known for her hatred for boredom and betraying Azula, something that was pivotal in Azula’s descent to insanity.
Mai is characterized by her cold and detached personality. She almost comes off as emotionless but she explains why she is the way she is during a heartfelt conversation with Zuko, Azula, and Ty Lee in Ember Island. As the daughter of a noble family, she was always expected to act properly and never act out for the sake of her father’s political career. So, she always had to suppress her emotions, but her parents gave her anything she wanted.
She played Azula’s ally throughout the majority of the show, helping her hinder Team Avatar and infiltrate Ba Sing Se. However, in the episodes where Zuko and Sokka infiltrate the Boiling Rock, an inescapable prison, Mai switched sides. Mai helps them escape the prison and her uncle, the warden, with her skills and agility. She is also shown to have broken up with Zuko at this point, as he left her a note before leaving the Fire Nation to join Team Avatar.
As Azula attempts to stop Zuko, she turns against her and tells Azula that she miscalculated her love for Zuko, which exceeded her fear of Azula. She eventually ends up in prison but is released after Zuko becomes the Fire Lord. The two restore their relationship.
Mai did not have any bending abilities but she is a very skilled fighter. She is a master markswoman and used knives to hit precise targets from long-distance ranges. This skill was known as ‘stilettos’ and is reminiscent of ninja skills, as she throws hand arrows and shuriken knives. It turns out that she mastered this ability because she hated being bored in her bedroom and would throw knives at the walls. Considering that she spent most of her time bored, she had had enough practice in this department, resulting in lethal accuracy and an ability to pin her opponents down with ease. She could also subdue benders by pinning their hands even if they were moving, which prevented them from bending. She could easily take down powerful benders. She was nimble and could take on her opponents without killing them, and was also capable of causing fatal injuries if she wanted to, such as the time she attacked Aang, Toph, and Katara.
Ty Lee
Ty Lee is one-third of Azula’s girl gang trio and similar to Mai, she switched sides in the end of the show. She was never evil but always sided with Azula and participated in her evil antics such as fighting Team Avatar and infiltrating Ba Sing Se.
Ty Lee is a master gymnast, known for her immense flexibility in a fight, and the excellent and unique ability of ‘chi-blocking’. While fighting benders, Ty Lee could simply tap the pressure points on their bodies and temporarily block their bending. However, she doesn’t use any weapons. Her athleticism led to her being called a ‘circus freak’.
Ty Lee was one of seven identical septuplet sisters. Since everyone looked the same, they all needed to have a special ability that set them apart from the rest. For Ty Lee, it was gymnastics, which is why she worked in the circus before joining forces with Azula.
Ty Lee is always seen in a cheerful mood and is also extremely flirty, as seen in her antics at the Ember Island parties and her taking a particular liking towards Sokka.
During the Boiling Rock incident where Azula is double-crossed by Mai, Ty Lee sides with Mai as well and uses her chi-blocking on Azula, which drives the latter crazy. Both of them get arrested, thanks to Azula’s orders, who asked the guards to let them rot for betraying her. During this imprisonment, Ty Lee befriended the Kyoshi Warriors and shared her chi-blocking skills with them.
Following the defeat of Fire Lord Ozai and Azula, Ty Lee was released along with Mai and the Kyoshi Warriors, by Zuko, who was now Fire Lord. She met with Suki and joined the Kyoshi Warriors. What’s interesting here is that a character who took up gymnastics to be different from a group of people who looked exactly like her joined a group of people who wore similar makeup to look the same.
Combustion Man
The Combustion Man, or the Sparky Sparky Boom Man, is one of the supporting antagonists in Book Three: Fire. Zuko hired him while being allied with Azula, as he suspected that Aang was not dead yet and needed to be disposed-off before Ozai found out.
The Combustion Man has a special ability with which he can concentrate his chi into a third eye and use it to shoot beams at his opponent, making him a lethal long-range combatant. The downfall of this ability? He accidentally shot off some of his body parts with this special power when he was a child.
Combustion Man is an assassin who is as intelligent as he is stealthy. He would destroy any evidence that could compromise his secrecy, for example, when two Fire Nation soldiers spotted Aang, he used his raven eagle to intercept the message and destroy it before it could reach Fire Lord Ozai. He met Team Avatar at a campsite where he attacked them. Despite his stealth, Toph detected him. However, his firebolts were almost impossible to counter while he countered all of their attempts. The Gaang saved themselves by fleeing on Appa.
He showed more of his intellectual prowess in Fire Fountain City where he set up a trap, capturing Katara and Toph in a wooden cell so that Toph could not bend it. It was a bait to lure in Aang which turned out to be successful. But, Katara smartly jogged on the spot and used her sweat to cut through the wood, reaching Aang and Sokka right at the nick of time and rescuing them. During this, his weakness is revealed when Toph launched a boulder at him and he used his bending to make the boulder explode. A stray pebble hit him right in the third eye and he temporarily lost his ability to bend as his chi was blocked. When he was trying to shoot another explosion, the air around him detonated due to a blocked chi and he was sent flying against a nearby wall.
The Combustion Man met his demise in the Western Air Temple as Sokka used his boomerang to block his chi. The Combustion Man still tried to direct a blow at them but died in a point-blank explosion.
The Combustion Man’s ability is a rare subset of firebending that requires the bender to concentrate their chi in a point between the eyes and shoot lasers in the form of energy. This ability was never shown by another in “Avatar: The Last Airbender” but was next seen in Book Three of Legend of Korra, demonstrated by P’Li.
Hama
Similar to Long Feng, here we have another antagonist who is not a Fire Bender in the show. Hama is a water bender from the Southern Water Tribe and even though her antagonistic endeavors have nothing to do with the main plot of taking the Avatar down, the episode with Hama was quite possibly the darkest in the entire show. She introduces Katara to a lethal and dark form of bending, known as Blood Bending.
She appears in the Book Three: Fire episode known as ‘The Puppetmaster’. The Water bender is taken captive by the Southern Raiders as they try to eradicate every water bender. She realized that her prowess was heightened during a full moon and learned how to manipulate the blood within a living being’s body. She practiced this trick on jail rats before moving on to a Fire Nation guard, bending his blood to unlock her cage, and subsequently inventing Bloodbending.
As an old woman, she settled down in the Fire Nation with the reputation of a kind innkeeper. However, she would use the villagers as her puppets using bloodbending during a full moon as revenge for her imprisonment by the Fire Nation.
She was initially hospitable to Team Avatar and bonded with Katara over being water benders from the Southern Tribe. Impressed by Katara’s bending abilities, she decided to pass on her teachings. She began by teaching her how to extract water from the environment around her such as flowers, and during a full moon, introduced her to bloodbending. Katara is horrified and refuses to use it when she learns that Hama is the one behind the disappearances of the villagers. The two battle and Katara’s waterbending overpowers Hama’s, so Hama begins to use Aang and Sokka as her puppets. She sends Sokka to stab Aang, forcing Katara to use Bloodbending to stop Hama.
As Hama is being arrested, she congratulates Katara for becoming a blood bender. In the future, Katara bans the practice of doing so.
General Zhao
This guy is probably the most hated villain of all. Whilst Ozai doesn’t have a lot of screen time, Zuko redeems himself, and Azula is cool, Zhao? He’s just plain evil. General Zhao happens to be a major antagonist in Book One: Water. A high-ranking officer in the Fire Nation Navy, his visions go beyond assisting Ozai in expanding the terrain of the Fire Nation. He is arrogant, narcissistic, cunning, heartless, manipulative, sadistic, xenophobic, shrewd, and plain malevolent and pompous. He wishes to make a legendary name for himself.
Admiral Zhao trained under Jeong Jeong, a revered firebending master. Fire needs to be controlled, otherwise, it can bring about destruction so Jeong Jeong was keen on teaching students the art of restraint. However, Zhao, being evil, only concerned himself with the destructive powers of fire bending and deserted his training after his prowess became destructive enough.
Now, he wanted to make a name for himself. His venture to the library of Wan Shi Tong in the Earth Kingdom helped him find that one thing that could make him a legend. He learned the secret knowledge of the spirit and about the mortal bodies of Tui and La. They were fishes but contained the ancient spirits of the Moon and the Ocean. Naturally, he became obsessed with finding the spirit to defeat the Northern Water Tribe and etch his name in Fire Nation history.
He also burned down the section about the Fire Nation to prevent people from learning anything that could potentially cause the demise of the nation. His usage of knowledge for destructive reasons was also responsible for making Wan Shi Tong pretty salty about guys who trailed his knowledge in the future. Zhao went on to become a Commander, but his authority was questioned by his own military.
In Book One: Water, Zuko and Zhao engage in an Agni Kai as both of them wanted to capture the Avatar. Due to Iroh’s guidance, Zuko overpowered Zhao and ultimately won the Agni Kai. However, Zuko spared him and walked away, causing Zhao to strike the crown prince from behind. Luckily, he was stopped by Iroh, and his dishonor was mocked.
Zhao encountered the Avatar at Roku’s Temple but could not capture him. With the aid of the special marksmen called the Yuyan Archers, he was able to hinder Zuko’s progress in capturing the Avatar and did it himself. However, his plans faltered when Zuko, in the guise of the Blue Spirit, rescued Aang from his fortress. He later encountered Aang again when the Avatar trained with Jeong Jeong. This is where Aang realized that Zhao had no restraint and tricked him into burning his own ships.
Following the knowledge that he gained about the spirits of the Water Tribe, he attempted to siege the North Pole. He breached the walls of the Capitol despite knowing that the powers of the Water Benders were enhanced due to the Full Moon. He located the mortal body of Tui, the Moon Spirit that resided with La in the Spirit Oasis. Since Water Benders got their powers from the Moon, killing Tui would destroy waterbending as a whole. He captured its body which caused the sky to turn red and named himself ‘Zhao the Moon-Slayer’. Despite Iroh reiterating that this would upset the balance in the world, Zhao killed the fish while the spirit of La, enraged, merged with Aang and destroyed Zhao’s fleet.
He battled Zuko, while with the help of the moon spirit inside Yue, Tui was brought back to life. In the end, Zhao was dragged down to his demise.
Sozin
Sozin is a posthumous antagonist in “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and is the Fire Lord responsible for starting the war. His actions are directly responsible for all the events that took place in “Avatar: The Last Airbender”; The war, the corruption in the Fire Nations, the purge of water benders in the Southern Water Tribe, the eradication of the airbenders. Yep. It was all because of this nasty, power-hungry guy. He is the Fire Lord of his time and Ozai’s grandfather, which also makes him Zuko and Azula’s great-grandfather.
Sozin wasn’t always bad though. He used to be best friends with Avatar Roku when he was young. However, being a Fire Lord while Roku got busy as a fully realized Avatar strained their friendship. Roku was strongly against Sozin’s plan of taking over the world and the two of them battled. Naturally, as Roku was the Avatar, he defeated Sozin, sparing his life owing to their past friendship. However, he gave Sozin the ultimatum that if he went ahead with his plan of invasion, he would meet his permanent end. They stopped speaking hence and moved on with their lives.
Twenty-five years later, the two met again when Roku’s homeland got caught up in a terrible volcanic eruption. Sozin went to help his old friend and the two tried to contain the lava flow but the poisonous gases overwhelmed Roku. He pleaded for Sozin’s help but the tyrannical bloke realized that if Roku died, he could pursue his dreadful dream of conquering the world and so, he left his old friend to die and rode off on a dragon.
Following this, Sozin built military strong enough to overwhelm the other nations. Eventually, he moved ahead with his plan of the invasion, striking when all firebenders were overpowered by a comet; also known as Sozin’s comet. What’s worse? He tried to break the Avatar Cycle by killing off the air nomads so that no Avatar that could stop the fire nation would be born in the future. But he obviously failed since Aang had run away. The thing with the Avatars is that, when one dies, their soul reincarnates into the body of another person from the subsequent nation. However, all Avatars have an overpowered state called the Avatar State. If the Avatar is killed in that state, one can end the Avatar cycle. Azula almost ended the cycle when she shot lightning at Aang while he was in that state.
Sozin became a cult-like personality and changed the face of the Fire Nation. He erased all records of Fire Lords before him and inculcated in his kids a streak of tyranny, manipulation, and antagonism. The education system of the Fire Nation became primarily focused on propaganda and the guy all in all just became a dictator.
Azulon
Similar to Sozin, Azulon, grandfather of Zuko and Azula and father of Iroh and Ozai, is a posthumous antagonist in “Avatar: The Last Airbender”. The apple did not fall far from the tree when it came to how Azulon was as a person; xenophobic, evil, ruthless, and manipulative. He was also a prodigy when it came to fire bending and his prodigy granddaughter Azula was named after him. It was during his reign that the Southern Raiders were formed. They were a group of Fire Nation soldiers that raided the Southern Water Tribe and killed off all of their benders.
He went on to become a successful general of the army and was infamous as a ruler and even more ruthless than Sozin. He expanded the Fire nation colonies greatly and partook in mass genocides. During his reign, he significantly increased the war capabilities and military of the Fire Nation.
His firstborn, Iroh, was the crown prince to the throne. However, after Iroh lost his only son during the Siege of Ba Sing Se, Azulon’s other son, Ozai, tried to usurp Iroh’s birthright to the throne. This enraged Azulon who ordered Ozai to murder Zuko so that he would know how it feels to lose his son. Ozai’s wife, Ursa, overheard this conversation and concocted a poison to kill Azulon so that Ozai could become Fire Lord without Zuko having to die for it.
As a cold and inhumane person, Azulon only cared about expanding the Fire Nation and his power. He is also responsible for Ozai’s cold and calculating nature which once again is reflected in Azula’s characteristics. However, he is shown to respect his firstborn son, Iroh, as he expressed his distaste towards Ozai’s idea of usurping Iroh for the throne since Iroh had just lost his son