The Philosophy Of Uncle Iroh

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Iro is one of those characters who people love immediately without always being able to explain why. There's just something about him that feels like a person you've met or a person that you at least wish you had. Someone who just looks at you like you're already worth something. But he wasn't always like that. And to understand how he became the wise, tea loving, flirty old man that we all love, we have to go back to his days in the Fire Nation. This is because the man who was humming about leaves on the vine spent most of his adult life as a war criminal. That might be a strong word, but it is just straight up who he is. Iro wasn't a soldier following orders he disagreed with, and he wasn't a reluctant participant who eventually defected. He was the heir to the throne of an expansionist empire and invaded a city and killed plenty of people as a general in the army.

[00:00:45]>> I hope you all may see it someday if we don't burn it to the ground first.

[00:00:51]>> His grandfather, Fire Lord Sosan, started the war and his father, Aulon, carried it on. Conquest was the family business. And for most of his adult life, Iro was the man holding the spear.

[00:01:03]He believed in the cause. He was a renowned general, the crown prince, the dragon of the west, a title that he earned by being very, very good at burning the world for the Fire Nation.

[00:01:14]Oh, and also lying aboutwarding the last dragons to protect them. He was ruthless and capable as a military figure, but he did always have a compassionate side for his culture, his people, his soldiers, and his family, unlike his more power-hungry younger brother. However, Iro's pride would be his eventual undoing. After laying a siege against the walls of Basen for 600 days, he finally did it. His forces breached the outer wall. He became a legend, the first commander in history to manage this. The thing he had envisioned in his youth was finally happening.

[00:01:49]But as fate would have it, his son, Lieuten, was killed on the front lines.

[00:01:53]The greatest moment of Iro's military career soon turned into the worst moment of his life. This is the pivotal moment where the reality of the war finally dawned on him. There is no glory in blood. There is no respect in an enemy's submission. There is no honor in violence, no power in anger. None of it can bring back what has been taken from you. Every Earth Kingdom civilian, soldier, and parent who had lost someone to the Fire Nation's incessant imperialist siege had been feeling exactly this. He hadn't let himself know that before, but now he couldn't stop knowing it. He finally could empathize with his victims. With his morale in shambles, and seeing no end in sight to the bloodshed, Iro abandoned the siege.

[00:02:36]Some of his messengers never reached the men cut off behind enemy lines. Soldiers who had served him loyally for years who died in the chaos because he couldn't keep going. He carried that for the rest of his life, too. Back home, Ozai schemed to take the throne. Iro never fought back because the throne had been what all of this was for. And what all of this was for had killed his son.

[00:02:59]There was nothing left for him in the Fire Nation. He was at the lowest point in his life. So he left to do some soulsearching. What followed were the wandering years. It was during this period that Iro became the wise old figure that we all now know and love.

[00:03:14]But the show only ever gives us bits and pieces of that journey here and there.

[00:03:17]Let us know in the comments down below if you want to see a series of Iro and his journey. We know that he entered the spirit world to find Lieuten, and we know he came back without him. Imagine the size of that journey to go to the literal spirit world afterlife to look for your son and to come back empty-handed. Whatever he found there, it wasn't his boy. He had to walk away from that, too. But we do know that he at some point ended up joining the Order of the White Lotus, a society built on the principle that wisdom doesn't belong to any one nation. He became a grand lotus in the order as well. For a former Fire Nation general, that's a kind of slow conversion over to the best of the best. And we know that it was probably during this journey where he studied water benders and developed lightning redirection and became the man that we know. He'd also met the dragons back when he was still a Fire Nation loyalist, where Ran and Shaw saw something in his heart and deemed him worthy and taught him the original ways of firebending.

[00:04:11]Everything we see from him in the rest of the show, the patience, the kindness, the refusal to let his power become cruelty, all of it comes out of those years. Unfortunately, we don't actually get to see any of that, but hey, before Iro could be the person we know, and before he could give anyone else a reason to keep going, he had to find that for himself. When he finally did come back home, he was by all accounts a changed man, at least in his personal beliefs. He was also probably very disillusioned and unsupportive of the expansionist ideals of the Fire Nation by this point. But he was still a retired general, a decorated war veteran, and still at least outwardly loyal to his people. We know this because we see him in the Fire Nation palace. We see him take young Zuko to Ozai's war council which eventually led to the brutal agony Kai when Zuko spoke when he shouldn't have and was then scarred for life and banished by his father and that whole thing. O talk about daddy issues. Iro then leaves with his nephew on his quest to find the Avatar and that's where we see him in the show. By the time we meet Iro on Zuko's ship in season 1, the man has already been built. Everything we love him for is in place. We just need to find out over time. What he believes is hard to summarize without flattening it down. He's not a Buddhist exactly, even though much of what he says does echo Buddhist ideas. He's not a Dowist, although the lightning redirection technique is essentially wooue made physical strength through yielding action through non-resistance and redirection. He's not even a clear convert away from the Fire Nation because he still loves Fire Nation things and people, his tea, his music, his memory of his son, his family. He's something stranger and harder to name, which is a man who has been forced by grief to think for himself about what a person is for. And the answer he's arrived at is built out of pieces from everywhere.

[00:06:00]>> It is important to draw wisdom from many different places.

[00:06:04]>> That sentence forms the foundation of his entire worldview. The willingness to draw from many places is the philosophy because otherwise you basically limit yourself to living inside of an echo chamber. If you only get your ideals and your personality traits and your understandings of the world from a single place, you become a copy of that.

[00:06:22]So instead of trying to box him into one tradition, it's more useful to look at what he actually believes. Three main convictions, each one a direct inversion of something the true believer would have taken for granted. The first conviction is the one underneath everything else, and that is people are not tools. They're not instruments to play and manipulate. The Fire Nation had taught him to see other human beings and nations as resources, soldiers to sacrifice as pawns, subjects to govern, enemies to defeat. And after Lieuten, that way of seeing things became impossible for him. He couldn't look at a stranger anymore without seeing somebody's son or daughter. The clearest single demonstration of this is the scene with the mugger in Tales of Bosen.

[00:07:04]Just some random guy who tries to mug him and Iro is still kind to him and tries to teach him how to do it properly. That whole episode deserves a full video in and of itself, but we'll focus on this specific scene. Now, Iro could instantly kill this man with a pinky if he wants to, but he just disarms him, critiques his stance, and invites him to share a pot of tea. By the end of his conversation, the wouldbe mugger tells Iro that he doesn't know what to do with his life, and that he's always wanted to be a masseuse, and that nobody's ever believed in him.

[00:07:32]>> While it is always best to believe in oneself, a little help from others can be a great blessing. help from others, not earned, not bargained for, and not contingent on usefulness. The young man in the alley is not someone Iro needs to fix or convert or recruit. He's a person that Iro has just decided to be kind to because being kind to people is what Iro does now and is what a good person does.

[00:07:59]Not because it's required, not because it helps you in any way, but just because. He kind of does the same thing for Tooff as well, who has the opposite problem. She feels that the people around her see her as weak and treat her too delicately because she's blind and she hates it.

[00:08:14]>> There is nothing wrong with letting people who love you help you.

[00:08:19]>> Same conviction, different presentation.

[00:08:21]One person needs someone to believe in them and empower them. The other needs permission to stop proving that she doesn't need anyone. Iro reads both of them correctly because he's not looking at either of them through the lens of what they can do for him or how to prove himself to them. He's just looking at them for who they are. The monk Thomas Merin wrote that in the truly humble, something strange happens. Even in the greatest sinners, they can see virtues and goodness that no one else can find.

[00:08:48]He wasn't writing about a cartoon character, obviously, and Iro is a pretty extreme version of this concept, but he was describing the same disposition. A man who's given up keeping score, who has stopped defending the imaginary self that needed the throne and the title and the legend and the power and the ego. Who finds that he can no longer rank people or place them as better than anyone else. He can only see them and understand what their struggles are and that's it. Iro has been emptied out by grief and filled up with something else. He gave up the throne. He doesn't care for his reputation. He doesn't care about being right or with proving himself as better.

[00:09:26]The imaginary self that the dragon of the west needed to protect is long gone.

[00:09:31]What's left just looks at who's ever in front of him and asks what they need.

[00:09:35]>> Pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source. True humility is the only antidote to shame.

[00:09:41]>> Iro has no legacy left to defend. He gave up his throne. He doesn't care about his reputation anymore. He can play the bumbling old fool and a fearsome oneman army whenever he wants.

[00:09:51]He knows who he is and he's content with it, so might as well put on any mask when he wants to. The second conviction follows directly from the first and is the one that Zuko has the hardest time understanding for most of the show.

[00:10:03]Power and strength are not the same thing. Iro is by most accounts the strongest firebender alive, the only man other than the Avatar who could have beaten Fire Lord Ozai in single combat.

[00:10:15]And he uses that power almost without exception to do nothing. Okay, that might be a bit much, but you get the point. He warms a cold tea with it. He soaks in a hot spring. The man who breached the wall of bossing ends up working as a tea server in the lower ring of that same city, and he's happy doing it. This gets misread sometimes by Zuko himself as a kind of laziness or cowardice, but it's not. When Admiral Xiao plans to kill the moon spirit at the North Pole, a move that would unbalance the world and break water bending for generations, Iro confronts him directly, fights him without any hesitation, and warns him that whatever Xiao does to the moon spirit, Iro will turn back on him 10fold. And he did. But that confrontation led him to being branded as a traitor to his nation. But that didn't matter. The world was at stake. When the time finally comes, he marches with the Order of the White Lotus to take back Bosen. That same city he spent 600 days trying to breach as a young general. The same city where he lost his son. He finally captures it.

[00:11:17]Just not for the Fire Nation and not for himself either. He captures it to give it back to its people. So he will use his own power. He just won't use it to needlessly dominate, to perform, or to prove anything, to flex his muscles, to show that he has the strength to overcome anything and to take over anything. The Dowist tradition has a phrase for this. Wooi. Often mistransated as non-action, but really meaning action that flows with what the situation actually requires instead of forcing an outcome. Kind of like flowing with the river kind of thing. The Fire Nation's true believer used his power because his country told him he should.

[00:11:54]He turned his power and strength into something that could dominate. The Iro we know uses it only when something real is at stake. Strength that has nothing to prove can spend itself on kindness.

[00:12:07]That's what makes them so easy to underestimate and so terrifying in the rare moments he stops being kind. When someone is quiet and peaceful and kind all the time, you really do pay attention when they start getting a bit louder and a bit more direct, don't you?

[00:12:20]After he lost his son, he ended up carrying Lieuten with him for the rest of his life inside of his heart as love, not as grievance, but as a way he could give back. The clearest statement of this comes at the end of Tales of Bossing when Iro sets up a small altar on a hilltop. He places a picture of Lieuten against it and lights two sticks of incense with his fingers and says, >> "Happy birthday, my son.

[00:12:45]>> If only I could have helped you."

[00:12:47]>> I cry every single time I watch this scene. If only I could have helped you.

[00:12:52]I feel like the writers used the word helped instead of something like saved intentionally because Iro is not just regretting the death. He's regretting having been the wrong kind of father for most of Lieuten's life. I should have known better sooner. I should have been a better father to you. I should have been the man I am now while you were still here. I should have been able to teach you what the dragons taught me, what the water benders taught me, what losing you eventually taught me. All the things I had in my hands as a young man and was too captured by my country and my desire to dominate. And I didn't understand it. The grief is double at this point. He lost his son and the chance to be the father that his son deserved before he lost him. The man on the hilltop is mourning both at once.

[00:13:36]What Iro does after this is try to answer that regret. He didn't get to be the father that Lieuten deserved, so he became that father for someone else. He chooses Zuko over and over again, giving him everything because the only way to honor what he learns too late is to give it to someone who can still use it. A family member who reminds him of his own son who can still use this advice and betterment. Zuko is angry, scarred, exiled, desperate for his father's approval, and convinced that the only thing that will fix his own life is hunting down and capturing this 12-year-old boy. What Iro never does is directly compare Zuko to Ozula or even anyone else for that matter. He never directly compares him even to his own son. Even though Zuko constantly compares himself to everyone around him, he never tells Zuko what to want.

[00:14:24]Instead, he just keeps pushing him to find the answer to that question himself. Is it your own destiny or is it a destiny someone else has tried to force on you?

[00:14:34]>> He knows the answer to that question from his own life, but he can't push it onto Zuko. He doesn't want Zuko to learn the same lessons the same way. He wants him to learn them himself. He lets Zuko make mistakes, big ones. He lets Zuko betray him in bossing and choose Aula and the Fire Nation and his father's approval over him. He gets imprisoned.

[00:14:54]And this is the next scene that I definitely cried over. When Zuko finally comes back with a rehearsed apology and the right amount of shame, Iro interrupts the speech with a hug.

[00:15:04]>> I was never angry with you. I was sad because I was afraid you lost your way.

[00:15:11]>> Iro never needed his nephew to fit some kind of mold to like him. He never needed him to be exactly like his own son. He just needed him to become his own person, to choose his own path, to become the best version of himself.

[00:15:24]The fact that Zuko had temporarily become someone Iro wouldn't have chosen didn't break that love, didn't make him give up. It just made Iro sad on Zuko's behalf because losing yourself is its own kind of suffering. And Iro, of all people, knew what that caused. This is what makes Iro's philosophy stand in stark contrast from his brothers.

[00:15:44]Because what Ozai produced as a parent isn't a personal failing on top of a sound world view. It's the world view correctly applied. If power is the only real thing, then your children, especially Azula, are extensions of your power and are only used in order to grab it. If the strong rule the weak, then you should rule your children. If love is conditional on usefulness, then you should love them only to the precise extent that they're useful to you.

[00:16:10]>> My father says she was born lucky. He says I was lucky to be born.

[00:16:14]>> That line is a child's translation of a worldview that treats human beings as resources. Zuko was less useful and less powerful. so he was loved less. Azula was more useful, so she was loved more.

[00:16:26]There's a horrible internal consistency to it. Azula is really that proof of concept. She is what Ozai's philosophy looks like when it works. She was a 14-year-old prodigy, ruthlessly competent, capable of taking down bossing from the inside in days when her uncle couldn't take it within 600. By Ozai's measure, she is the perfect child. But then she breaks. Near the end of the show, Azula is coming apart in real time as she realizes that she was betrayed by her only friends Mai and Tylei. That fear alone is not enough to make people follow you and that she doesn't understand her own purpose. And with her father now putting her in charge of the nation as he himself plans on becoming the Phoenix king, she slips further and further into that downward spiral. She begins hallucinating her own mother, distrusting everyone around her, screaming at her own reflection, and ending the war, chained to a great, sobbing hysterically, broken on the inside. Ozai's system works until the person inside it loses that external scaffolding for one moment. Then there's nothing left because the entire self was the performance, trying to be the best you could be for someone else, for someone else's power and desires. This is what Iro's philosophy is built against. a stark contrast. It's not just two parenting styles that ended in two different ways. It's two styles of metaphysics. It's two directions that life could take. It's two completely different ideas. Ozai says you are only what you can do. But Iro believes you are who you are. And what's good is good. Ozai's children have to keep proving their worth to retain their right to exist. Iro's nephew gets to exist first and figure out the doing later.

[00:18:08]One of those produces an Azula. The other produces Ozuko, who in the end freely chooses to do the right thing.

[00:18:16]But there's also a glaring weakness in this approach to life that the show kind of ignores. Iro's philosophy definitely works. It transforms him from the inside out, and it shapes Zuko over years of patience that most people would never have had. But for the span of the war's last decades, when Iro had the standing and the power and by this point the moral clarity to actually challenge his brother, he doesn't. He steps back. He lets Ozai take the throne without a fight and also refuses to do anything during Sosan's comet. And this might be because he feels that a brother killing a brother to seize power would set a worse precedent than letting things unfold. And there's kind of some truth to that. There genuinely is. He doesn't want to become the person that he was before. But now there's also a lot of Dead Water Tribe and Earth Kingdom civilians in that gap between the reasoning and the outcome. So not exactly the best way to go about things.

[00:19:10]A philosophy built on individual personal transformation has real and beautiful strengths in what it does to the people inside your immediate orbit.

[00:19:18]But it also has real and uncomfortable limits when the machinery and the system around you is doing mass violence and you're choosing on principled grounds to tend to your own small garden. A philosophy that heals things one nephew at a time is still a philosophy that heals things still very meaningful and is still the extent of what most of us could possibly hope to do. It's just a very very slow one that can't restructure the system and stop it from the inside out which is what he had the chance to do. I don't think there's really a clear resolution to that tension. I don't think Iro found one either. Whether you would have made the same trade-off or killed your own brother in his sleep is a question I'll leave for y'all to debate in the comments down below. Regardless, the thing Iro spent the second half of his life demonstrating is that the world has a habit of calling that weakness or naivity. He spent decades proving that it's not so. It's really the opposite.

[00:20:11]It's actually much harder to do. That's the thing that Ozai with all of his power could never do. step back from it and tend to just the people around him.

[00:20:20]If you have an Iro in your life, then definitely let them know how much you appreciate them and the kindness they give to you. And if you're trying to become more like one yourself, the honest thing to say is that you don't have to wait for something to break you open first. You don't have to wait for that grief to change you. Iro did, but that was never really the point. It was just the initiation to that. But you don't need that grief to start that for you. The point is for you to let go of any grandiose ideas you've built of yourself in your head and to stop trying to put up the performance for other people and to make it legitimate. But be humble. Be compassionate. Find out who you are and what you're truly meant to do. Most people just never find out because putting down the performance feels too much like losing, like giving up. Iro would tell you it's the opposite. It's a new direction. It's a new chance to become a better person.

[00:21:10]But Iro is not the only character who got a second chance at life. Fry and Leela are also some characters who have some experience in that department, which we explored in the previous video.

[00:21:19]So like, subscribe, and then go check that video out. I'll see you there.

[00:21:22]Peace.