Also this is another thing people miss about Iroh. Lu Ten dying didn’t turn him good, it just broke his will to fight. He quit the war, but he didn’t oppose it. It was arguably Zuko that changed his ideology, speaking out against the sacrifice of those soldiers.
If redemption were deserved, it would be a transactional trade. Redemption is an unearned gift of grace. Because you can never "earn" your way back from a mistake, true redemption relies on remorse, accountability, and the difficult, ongoing work of changing your future behavior.
@simp4mako Me too I loved that it felt earned (esp cause he learns waterbending off screen lmao 💀) and that we get to see the Gaang actually live in Ba Sing Se. There’s way more of a sense of time going by compared to the cartoon
(4/4) The question isn’t whether Zuko would have done it for anyone else (he would have), the question should be, would that scene look and feel the way it did if you had swapped Katara for another character. And the answer is no, otherwise they wouldn’t have had Katara there
(1/4) Zuko’s sacrifice matters for his arc just as much as it does for Katara. Sure he would have saved the others, but Katara is not an interchangeable placeholder for "Zuko’s redemption" and undermines how zuko's sacrifice impacts Katara directly, narratively and heavily