A random ramble on what I saw from a comment on Reddit in regards to Katara’s arc during The Southern Raiders:
I am not sure if any of you experienced this but I did and it bugged me. So I was going around on Reddit, through the Character Rant subreddit. I was looking at a post that was talking about ‘Revenge is bad’ stories and what is often brought up is Katara’s arc in The Southern Raiders as an example. I don’t know if it’s just me or I feel that some of the people on that platform just misunderstand the point behind the story of the episode and Katara’s arc. I even saw a Redditor say that Aang was being supportive towards her, even though he wasn’t really. Him preaching the ideals he learnt from the Air Nomads and forcing them onto her were not making things better for her. It just made her more agitated. Hell, at the end of the episode she even tells Aang that she would NEVER forgive Yon Rha even after he preached about forgiveness to her. She gives Aang a look of annoyance and anger upon him suggesting that. Like, Aang and Katara experienced trauma very differently. Aang wasn’t even there when his people was slaughtered and Gyatso died. He will never know who killed them and his father figure because they are all dead and it happened 100 years ago. Katara knows who murdered Kya. She was there in that hut and she knew it was Yon Rha that murdered her mother and scarred her for the rest of her childhood to the point she had to grow up way to fast by stepping up and getting into the role that her deceased mother took.
Katara was in complete control of her anger in her confrontation with Yon Rha. It was more colder and restrained than Aang’s anger in when the sandbenders took Appa. The worst that could have happened with Katara’s anger would have been her killing a war criminal that was guilty of killing a defenseless woman without remorse whilst also partaking in genocide. The worst that could have happened with Aang’s anger would have been Aang getting his friends hurt too. We’ve seen how dangerous Aang can be in the Avatar state without proper control. Hell, that outburst in the Southern Air Temple is one good example where Katara and Sokka were almost pushed off the mountain.
The episode was never about the morality of revenge. Not once did Katara or Zuko give any idea that their trip would be to kill and get revenge on Yon Rha. It was about moving on from trauma and finding closure to scars as well as forgiveness (as shown with Katara forgiving Zuko at the end).