Talk:Iroh vs Ozai/@comment-31082993-20180924133544

I see this as a victory for Iroh, particularly if we're talking about when he got back into shape in jail.

Ozai was already king. He wasn't out on the front lines, and no duelling opponent in the fire nation would have likely wanted to endanger or risk humiliating him in battle. So Ozai likely hadn't fought very competitively in a long time.

Meanwhile, Iroh was out travelling the world with Zuko. He was using his firebending and studying other fighting styles regularly, keeping his skills and combat prowess sharp. Whilst he was a bit older than Ozai, he was shown to be in pretty exceptional physical condition by the end. Remember that Iroh escaped from prison during the eclipse. Meaning he managed to break out of his cell and defeat armed guards without any firebending. Ozai admitted that Zuko could have beaten him during the eclipse, because Zuko had his broadswords and there was no firebending at the time.

Finally, Iroh just has a more rounded set of techniques. Whilst Ozai stuck to the core traditions of firebending, believing his nation's techniques to be objectively above all others, Iroh embraced the other styles, and tried to learn from them. Iroh is able to breathe fire (how the earned the title "The Dragon of the West") and re-direct lightning. Particularly with the lightning re-direction, we don't know whether or not Ozai even knew he could do that. It never occured to him that Zuko could, and he had been studying with Iroh. But even if Ozai did know, that still takes his most powerful attack all but out of the game, where Iroh could still hit him with lightning of his own.