Yon Rah turning out to be retired is actually a really good example of moral luck because the narrative treats it like Zuko and Katara should have known all along, or that this is the consequence of being "consumed by revenge" or some nonsense. It's why I've never really taken the whole bit where Katara bloodbends the captain and is horrified that it's the wrong guy seriously, and as an extension, why I've never taken the show's portrayal of bloodbending as always evil and unforgivable seriously. It feels like it's there specifically to paint Katara as irrational, as if she should have known somehow that the dude was retired. Also, I've said this before, but it's not like the current captain who was still active and probably had already murdered many mothers and children didn't deserve it.
It's bad writing, and I've said before that the narrative often uses moral luck to make Aang seem right. People got real mad when I said this before but I'm right.
it's one of those things that was so obviously done just so the narrative didn't actually have to provide any kind of resolution to the moral questions they were asking. imo it's evident that katara would never have let yon rha live if he were still the active captain of the southern raiders but they probably didn't want a 14 year old straight up slicing and dicing a man which is like... fine, kids show and all that but then why even include this sort of moral conflict if you don't want to do anything with it? just to make aang look better so we can set up ANOTHER moral dilemma that will ultimately come to nothing, either?
it creates this really odd incongruence with how violence has been treated in the show so far too because logically you know everyone in the gaang has probably killed multiple people at this point even if it's just nicely shoved offscreen, but NOW all of a sudden we're making it a Problem when it comes to katara. it just feels unnecessary at best and narratively contradictory at worst.
It’s also a disingenuous solution. In real life, the generals of colonizing nations don’t go on to live in poverty and obscurity- specially if the nation that they served is still in power.
Let’s look at a real life “Yon Rha”: The Water Tribes people are based on the Inuit communities. A relatively recent genocide that the Inuit people suffered and still impacts them to this day is the residential school system. One of the leaders of that system was Sir Charles Bagot, who wrote a report calling for these schools to keep indigenous children away from their parents’ influence and to strip them of their culture. Charles Bagot retired on his own accord, went back to his regal house, and died of natural causes. He was never a poor and struggling man living in a hovel.
And Yon Rha never suffered any consequences for his actions either. Hama gets sentenced to life in prison but Yon Rha gets a stern talking to and nothing more. He continues to enjoy his freedom without any restrictions while Jet is 6ft under and Hama rots in a cell.
ATLA demonizes every form of revolution unless it’s all-forgiving, non-destructive, and with 0 casualties or real harm. Essentially, any revolution that is grounded in reality.
I'll be thought of as a psychopath for this, but this is exactly why I was always like "so WHAT if Katara decided to kill him?" The dude murdered probably countless people. Why in the hell should we care? Yeah it's a kid's show, but this is just flat out bad writing.
And this is going a little off track from the original post, but it just reminds me of how Aang gets to kill dozens of not hundreds of FN soldiers in the S1 finale, but once the final battle is drawing closer he suddenly has a dilemma about taking lives when Ozai is the perpetrator of countless killings, genocides, colonialization, and the fate of the entire world is at stake. Like, even as a kid I was so underwhelmed and frustrated by his moral righteousness that comes out of nowhere.
This applies to The Southern Raiders and how I felt back then too. If Katara had killed Yon Rha she would have been completely justified.
I always got the impression not that Katara sparing Yon Rha was the "right" thing to do, but rather the thing that she chose to do.
Katara is shown time and time again to be an empathetic person at heart, even to her enemies. Even ignoring examples like her working to save the Fire Nation fishing village, as far back as season 1 we have her freezing over Zuko in the North Pole instead of directly killing him when she could (although, it can be argued she might have assumed freezing him would be lethal and inescapable). We later see her attempt to heal Iroh when Azula injures him, despite the fact that Iroh has wholeheartedly helped Zuko hunt the Gaang at this point, as far as she knows. Even in her final fight with Azula, she would be well within her rights to kill her once she freezes the two of them, or even just leave her frozen to die, and arguably would be smarter to do so. Instead, she chooses to restrain and spare her.
It's more likely than not that Katara has killed multiple enemies in combat over the course of the show, but it's consistently shown that when she's in a position of absolute power over them and not in the heat of combat, she chooses to spare them.
Granted, she never had as much personal enmity with someone as she did with Yon Rha, so I don't think it would have been character assassination or anything if she chose to kill him. She would have been justified. But neither do I think it is out of character for her to have spared him. Regardless of whether or not Yon Rha is deserving of a death, it is consistent with her character that, upon seeing a hollow, pathetic man powerless and whimpering on the ground, that she wouldn't feel good about killing him. Not from a "violence isn't the answer!" but just from the angle of it's not something she wants to do. Even later, when she's talking to Aang, she's unsure if her sparing Yon Rha was a sign of strength or weakness. It clearly wasn't a decision of "killing him would be wrong" but "I don't feel good about killing a defenseless, sniveling person in front of me." Which I think is understandable.
Ultimately, Katara's goal this episode isn't about killing Yon Rha, and never was. It was about getting closure for the death of her mother, in whatever form that may take. She thought that would take the form of killing Yon Rha, and if it had been, that would have been reasonable. But ultimately, seeing him for the pathetic, miserable, empty man he is was enough for her.
I know Zuko never explicitly advocated for killing Yon Rha, but in his line of "You were right about what Katara needed. Violence wasn't the answer," it's pretty clear that he at least assumed that violence was what she needed to heal. (On a side note, Aang asserted two things about what Katara needed. The first is that she did not need to kill Yon Rha, in spite of what it is implied Zuko believed- this ended up being correct. The second is that she needed to forgive Yon Rha, which she explicitly states was incorrect).
So it is implied that Zuko thought Katara needed violence, material revenge against Yon Rha. Not that he is manipulating her or anything, as many anti-Zuko agendees like to suggest, but merely that this is what he thought would be needed for her to heal. In contrast, Aang thought that Katara needed to forgive Yon Rha, to let go and move on. In the end, they were both wrong. Katara explicitly does not forgive Yon Rha, and rejects Aang's brand of pacifism. Aang is wrong. But she also finds that, contrary to what even she likely expected, she did not need to kill Yon Rha.
Katara did what she needed to find closure, regardless of what anyone around her expected. And that's what I always thought to be the central point of the episode, and Katara's emotional journey in it. Not a moral judgement or lesson on of "does Yon Rha deserve death," or "would it be wrong of Katara to kill him," but rather it's a depiction of Katara dealing with her grief and anger and gaining closure in whatever way works for her.
Ultimately, the question of whether or not sparing Yon Rha is the right thing to do is irrelevant, and the show doesn't strongly take a side, I feel. I think the show even underscores this with Katara's line at the end, "I don't know if [I didn't kill him] because I'm too weak to do it or because I'm strong enough not to." Whether or not Yon Rha deserved death is irrelevant, because this story wasn't about Yon Rha- it was about Katara. Her deciding to spare him wasn't an ethical judgement saying it was the right thing to do, but rather a personal realization that it wasn't something she personally felt she needed to obtain closure.
Maybe someone else would have, and that would have been fine. But it feels consistent with Katara's character that she wouldn't. And ultimately, this episode is her story.
ALL OF THAT BEING SAID. I agree with almost everything that's being said in this chain. ATLA absolutely does have a problem with moral luck, and it has an obnoxious obsession with Aang's supposed moral superiority, and several of its moral lessons range from obnoxious to offensive, especially in regards to its ideas about justice, and doubly especially in how it handles these ideas in relation to genocide and war. But in the particular case of TSR, I think that the episode is best read as an exploration of Katara's personal journey and her dealing with unresolved grief and seeking closure, rather than a moral lesson on revenge or the ethics of killing war criminals.
Of course, you can raise questions like "why did they decide to write Katara's emotional journey this way, and what does it say about the writers/showrunners?" Which is totally fair. But I think that, moral habits and patterns of the show aside, TSR stands alone as a good episode and story with its content, themes, and ideas, whereas something like Rock ex Machina saving and retroactively justifying Aang's passivism in the finale cannot possibly be read in any way other than bad writing.