>>718260125
>so, did she actually love her brother in a sadistic tsundere way or no?
Yes, she's a pretty complex character and a lot of people miss many of the details but basically Zuko is the only person she is legitimately close with. She seems to want to have close family and friends but her childhood fucked her up and by point of the anime her morals and logic are so twisted that she doesn't know how to interact with anyone sincerely.

>>718261406
Azula and Zuko are both victims of their fucked up parents. Azula did not initially want to be close only with Ozai, she really isn't even close to him since she knows he will throw her away like Zuko if she fails which is where her obsession with perfection comes from. Basically their mother hated and feared firebenders due to Ozai, and since Azula was a firebending prodigy her mother projected this fear and hate onto her daughter subconsciously and avoided her which made Azula pivot to Ozai (who at least pretended to like her) and also become jealous of Zuko.
Due to her parents she has a complex about being abandoned which peaks toward the end of the anime where her friends betray her and she goes insane.
Most of her other negative traits stem from that and she basically wants people to be too afraid and powerless to betray her.

>>718262659
Everybody other than Zuko is too terrified to get close to her which makes it difficult.
If anybody has an interest in the original series they should read the comic which continues after the anime and has an arc focusing on Azula. She travels with the avatar team for a while and it sort of seems like she's on the threshold of a redemption but it never quite gets there. Would have made a much better anime than Korra.
I doubt the writers will do anything else with her since she'd be considered a problematic character today.

>>714456560
>>714465730
>If you watch the show you would know she isn't nice to anyone, not even family. You're either a tool or a threat.
Have any of you read the sequel manga? I feel like most of you missed a lot of her character.
She's entirely a victim of circumstance. Her mother and father hated each other and put her and Zuko in the middle. It's implied that the only reason Zuko did not turn out as deranged is because his mother and uncle actually cared about him and set him on the right path.

However unlike Zuko, Azula's mother hated her and was terrified of her because she hated fire-benders (due to her husband), and Azula was a fire-bending prodigy. This caused Azula to cling to her father instead, who also didn't care about her and only viewed her as a tool.
So to cope and not be thrown away by her father (like Zuko eventually was) she had to be a bitch and relentlessly pursue power and perfection.
She did actually desire a caring family, friends, and good relationship with her brother, but by the time we get to the events of the series she only knows how to interact with people by being cruel and she fucks up her attempts at getting close to people when she tries.
Her border-line friends don't really understand her either which is why they end up betraying her. This causes her to lose it at the end of the series because she did care about them and it hit specifically at her main insecurity of being abandoned by everyone again.
Zuko is the only one who sort of understands her issues, but he always narrowly misses reaching the point of resolving them.

So of course like many tragic villainess type character the main appeal is in saving her. Though i'm sure there are some masochist fags who'd like to be beaten and all that too.