Azula is alone for months and years after what happened to her family. She has been abandoned in a cell. Or a psychiatric yard. She doesn’t know. She couldn’t care less.
“My father never did anything to me,” was what Azula always told herself. Anytime it was difficult to love him, to respect him, she’d remember that he had never did anything to hurt her. Sure, he’d hurt others. His subjects, his ministers, his own brother, his own wife, his own son. But never laid a hand on her. Never shout when she was there. Of course Ozai wasn’t tender or soft but he never hurt her the way she saw him hurt others. He believed in her. He put his trust on her. He had high expectations, yes. But nothing she couldn’t shoulder. Because he had raised her to be the best. To be his heir. And she always did whatever it took to be deserving of his trust and love.
Love. Yes, he loved her. She was certain of that. What was it if not love ?
No one can understand how she feels. They call her dangerous, treacherous, broken and wild. They never see beyond that. How could they ? Their anger makes them blind. They don’t see all the love she had received. People only want to see her pain. And it hurts so much.
She knows she should hate him. But she can’t bring herself to think about him like that. He’s her father. Her dad. He raised her. She learned so much from him. He made her strong and fierce. He made her.
And now she’s alone. Zuko never visits her.
That’s why she didn’t understood when people told her that she should hate him. Of course, with time, she came to understand that he wasn’t a good man. Far from that, even.