I looked at the Zuko Alone episode to see if it passed the Beckdel Test and here are the findings that I found –

Are there at least two women in the episode?

  • Sela (Mother of little boy named Lee)
  • Ursa (Mother of Zuko)
  • Azula

Do these women talk to each other?

  • Azula and Ursa talk to each other multiple times throughout the episode

Do these women talk about something besides men?

  • No, in this episode when Azula and Ursa talked to each other it was about the tragedy that happened to Uncle Iroh and how he lost his son as well as the Fire Lord and his perfect health.

This episode was close to passing the test, but it didn’t at the last step of the test. While it is nice to see that there are more than two named women in the episode, they talked about men and what is happening with them.

This episode was interesting to watch as Zuko is starting to see on his own how much of the war has affected others and that maybe the Fire Nation is wrong. He was taught his whole life that the war is for the glory of the Fire Nation and that this is a great thing, but when he enters a town and sees how the war has affected them. When I see this, I think of the topic of cultural imperialism that we talked about in class and how the Fire Nation is trying to dominate over the other nations and impose their values and ideals onto them. Which in this case means that they cannot bend the element that they trained and mastered for years since the Fire Nation believes it can be used to start a revolution against them.

Some other things that were interesting from the episode –

  • Ursa shows lots of expressive traits that you would expect to see in a mother while Zuko and Azula’s father shows a lot of instrumental traits that you would expect in men
  • But Azula shows a lot of instrumental traits that she takes from her father while Zuko takes more expressive traits like his mother. This happens when they were children, but as they got older Zuko started to have more instrumental traits than expressive traits

Shared by: Gabriel Olsen
Image Credit: Pinterest