The Fire Nation seems weirdly reluctant to kill benders after the Air Nomads. They go to a whole lot of fuss and bother creating a special prison to hold the Southern waterbenders, and keep the earthbenders on a ship. Even during the Black Sun invasion, they accept the surrender of Hakoda and everyone else instead of killing them.
It’s kind of jarring to realize that the FN lost primarily because they weren’t more genocidal. If at any point Azulon had said “Screw it, kill them all” about the SWT, or even just rounded them up for slavery, Katara would have been slaughtered as a child or never born at all, and Aang would never have woken up. The FN would have cruised to victory unopposed.
(Assuming someone stopped Zhao from killing the planet by accident, I guess.)
A lot of their troubles throughout the show would also have been solved by killing prisoners out of hand. Or even just killing Katara for trying to inspire a prison riot. Aang would have died at Ba Sing Se, and the cycle would have ended right there.
I think that this says a lot about the human condition, and how reluctant we are to actually commit murder. In “ordinary men”, we get a detailed account of German soldiers participating in the Holocaust. One of the things that we see from this book is that 1- it’s very easy to get even regular people to follow orders if they believe it’s coming from an authority figure. 2- even though you might be able to get these men to do the killing for you, they won’t have the stomach for it long term- especially if you’re killing defenseless individuals. This is why the Germans ended up resorting to repurposing police battalions to carry out most of the killing instead of soldiers from the front lines. To ask soldiers to fight in war and participate in the Holocaust would be too much of a psychological burden for most people.
So now let’s think about the world of Avatar. The middle class families that make up the fire nation’s armies have been at war with the world for 100 years- nearly 20 times longer than WWII. Mass genocide on that scale for that long would be just as psychologically damaging as it would be costly.
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u/Temeraire64 12d ago
The Fire Nation seems weirdly reluctant to kill benders after the Air Nomads. They go to a whole lot of fuss and bother creating a special prison to hold the Southern waterbenders, and keep the earthbenders on a ship. Even during the Black Sun invasion, they accept the surrender of Hakoda and everyone else instead of killing them.