There's this paradox between A.ang and Zuko's philosophies of harm reduction/non-violence that the narrative pretty clearly wants us to take A.ang's side on but honestly? This will make people mad but without a Lion Turtle Ex Machina to save the day so that A.ang doesn't have to make any tough decisions, Zuko was right and his stance was the one that held the sanctity of life in higher regard.
Aa.ng's stance was that he couldn't bring himself to kill the Fire Lord because "he's still a human being" regardless of the wider consequences of leaving the Fire Lord alive, knowing that the Fire Lord wanted to rain Nuclear Armageddon down on the Earth Kingdom and burn millions of people alive.
To Zuko it was the world's easiest Trolley Problem. You either don't pull the lever and allow millions of people to be burned alive, or you pull the lever and kill the guy trying to nuke the planet.
Zuko looked at the situation about to unfold and resolutely decided that they needed to stop it by any means necessary, including violence, even if that meant helping kill his own father. The most clear cut "lesser of two evils" situation the world has ever seen.
Because in real life, violence is NOT never the answer, sometimes it's actually the only correct answer, and in this hypothetical, being hesitant was actually quite selfish because it meant playing with the lives of millions of people and having a philosophical debate on whether or not it's morally acceptable to use defensive violence to stop mass murder when it's meant to be literally his divinely ordained job to protect the world by any means necessary including violence.
Like the trolley is barrelling down the tracks and Aa.ng is standing next to the lever and debating whether or not it's morally correct to pull it and divert it away from the millions of Earth Kingdom citizens and towards the guy who tied them all to the tracks in the first place, meanwhile the Earth Kingdom citizens are screaming and crying begging for him to do something and he's like "eeueggghhhhhhh but he's still a human being and I saw his baby picture. 🥺"
I'm aware this was a Nickelodeon show so they had to find a workaround to the hero killing a guy even though it's a show that centers around a war (and why still I fantasize about there one day being a reboot that Bryke are uninvolved in and that is not constrained by needing to be kept PG), but even if we accept that A.ang was handed a pass and killing didn't end up being necessary, no one could've possibly known that that was an option and based on all of the information they had, Zuko was still right to be crashing out at A.ang for dragging his feet on whether or not he'd kill Ozai.
Because Zuko had his priorities straight, he valued the lives of the millions of innocent people in the Earth Kingdom over his genocidal dictator father's life while Aan.g was still unsure about it, willing to risk all of those people's lives for the sake of his own squeamishness at the idea of killing someone despite the fact he'd already reasonably killed dozens of people without having to know their names, faces, or watch them die.
The sort of sanctity of life philosophy that Zuko was espousing is the kind that accepts the hard truths of life, that sometimes doing the Right Thing is unpleasant but that it has to be stomached, it has to be braved for the greater good even if it makes us uncomfortable.
This might seem like a non sequitur but hear me out. As someone with a background education in environmental studies and a vegetarian of 6 years, this is an area where people who know me IRL find my opinions to be somewhat contradictory, but they're really not when you take harm reduction into account. True environmentalism CANNOT be pacifistic and committed to non-killing, because nature is not pacifistic. Nature cooperates just as much if not more than it competes with itself, nature seeks balance, and life cannot exist without death to balance it.
Though I might be committed to not eating animals, though I might feel my ire rise every time I see the forests being eaten by machines, I also understand the grey areas and wiggly lines present within the philosophy of ecology. If you want to protect the ecosphere, you have to get comfortable with the idea of cutting down sick trees, of culling invasive species, of hunting animals whose other natural predators have been extirpated, and of lighting some controlled burns. Environmentalism isn't always pretty, and sometimes it looks like the opposite of what the general public would assume it is.
Sometimes the greater good feels mean and gruesome, sometimes public safety and environmental safety means capturing a wild animal, euthanizing it, and decapitating it to dissect its brain and test for rabies. Sometimes it means mass-culling feral cats when there's not enough resources to rescue all of them and the population has gotten out of control because otherwise it means allowing the local bird, reptile, amphibian, and small mammal populations to be hunted to extinction. And I say that as someone who loves cats and would prefer to see all of them rescued and neutered and placed in loving homes, because I also have the maturity to understand that that's not always possible and my hurt feelings at the idea of feral cats being culled are not more important than the ecosphere, and protecting the greater good means making hard decisions.
Zuko's philosophy is to swallow the discomfort and do what needs to be done to protect the greater good. He'd be the type of environmentalist overseeing controlled burns, culling invasive species, and rightly rolling his eyes at the rebranding of pleather to "vegan leather" and going on rants about how buying real leather is the truly eco-friendly option and second-hand leather is the most eco-friendly and vegetarian-friendly, while A.ang would be the type of person who thinks he's an environmentalist but is anti-all-hunting and wears plastic "leather" that will end up in a landfill in a year instead of animal byproducts that will last a lifetime.
Aa.,ng's non-violent philosophy wants to have its cake and eat it too, wants to save innocent people without having to hurt the ones threatening them. Zuko's philosophy is harm reduction that acknowledges that some violence is necessary and that the greater good often means doing things that are unpleasant.
I don't care who the narrative would have us believe is right, I can see with my own eyeballs and logic that Zuko valued life more than his own complicated feelings. It doesn't matter who espoused non-violence because valuing non-violence is not the same as valuing life, and sometimes it can even mean the opposite.
