since you left this poll on my post, I may as well respond with my 2 cents.
toph kills plenty of people onscreen, even if there’s enough plausible deniability to circumvent that (see: my post where someone argued that slamming a bunch of dai li agents into the ceiling with rocks somehow wouldn’t kill them). like, she definitely left yu and xin fu for dead trapped in a metal box to die slow painful deaths, for example. toph is definitely a strong contender.
sokka also kills plenty of people onscreen. e.g., during the defense of the northern air temple (nooo wdym…. sokka doesn’t kill people!!! bombs kill people!!), during the airship slice and ensuing battle, when he literally kills combustion man, etc. since his whole thing is being a ruthless warrior who uses weapons designed to kill seals and people alike, he is obviously also a top contender. especially once he gets his sword, cuz you know he just starts slicing through necks and torsos left and right. he values efficiency, after all. see: “there. that’s how it’s done.”
katara, notably, does not directly kill anyone, but considering she does on multiple occasions waterbend a bunch of soldiers backwards falling from great heights, one could assume at least some of them have died on impact. you could also argue that bombing a factory probably resulted in some casualties. don’t tell aang that, though.
zuko burned down village and hired an assassin to explode aang with his mind and such, but he’s actually quite terrible at killing directly. zuko’s explicit kill count is canonically so low because he’s constantly displacing the gruesome, violent stuff onto others and then tries to take the credit for it because he wants to seem way tougher and less sensitive than he actually is. i wonder if he’s like, a foil to the protagonist or something…
suki deserved to kill more people. as a treat.
if you count koizilla’s actions during the siege of the north as aang’s doing, then he has by far the highest kill count in the show. he wiped out an entire naval fleet! that said, aang didn’t seem exactly conscious during that fight, seeing as he’d been possessed by the ocean spirit, and was merely acting as its vessel. in terms of conscious kills, you could argue that aang is responsible for some casualties at the northern air temple and during the factory bombing in jang hui, but otherwise aang obviously falls very low on this list.
appa can stomp fire nation soldiers to death with his six humongous paws. as a treat.
iroh is definitely responsible for the most deaths among this cast (including the death of his own son haha who said that), but in terms of explicit onscreen murder during the narrative chronology, he probably wouldn’t directly kill anyone, even if the show was R-rated, since it still goes against his current philosophy of non-violence. based purely on the terms of the question, he falls very low on the list.
ty lee doesn’t kill people. she knows how to kill people, and yet graciously refrains. everybody say thank you ty lee for being so merciful <33 and so so scary…
mai is really precise with those knives for a reason, but considering that she has no compunctions flinging them at people’s faces, she’s definitely accidentally sliced someone’s neck open at least once. as a treat.
let the record show that azula DID murder aang but no one gives her credit for it because he just so HAPPENED to get revived minutes later .. smh no one appreciates women’s accomplishments in male dominated fields :((
tldr; my official order within the following poll options is thus as follows:
sokka>toph>suki>appa>katara>zuko>iroh>aang
you can debate whether or not aang deserves to be higher, but it barely matters after appa tbh. intentionality and direct ruthlessness are also important factors here, and aang is, crucially, a pacifist. and yes, im extremely aware that iroh and zuko are warmongering imperialists who are by far responsible for the most destructive violence out of everyone else included in this lineup. that is not what the question is asking, however. may we all write beautiful fanfic about sokka beheading imperialist soldiers with his space sword amen
