Avatar, The Laster Airbender: Fire

[Sir Will]

Fine. The world is fucked and The Avatar couldn't really do anything. Fire Nation wins no matter what I guess. The End. Happy? I still don't see how Ozai dying or being depowered and captured makes a difference.

[TrueMetis]

Because if he is dead his supporters and supporters of the war can't use him to rally around, which at a minimum will give Zuko more time to work.

Like despite what I said I don't actually think there is no way for Zuko to pull off making the Fire Nation okay with the peace. It's just the way they set it up, and the way the continued it in the comics, means he's going to end up with a knife in his back really quick. Like if he doesn't immediately purge the higher echelons of the Fire Nation military or start working on getting anyone who's even remotely dissatisfied with Ozai on his side he going to be in for a damn hard side. I suggest immediately getting Iroh and Jeong Jeong back and trying to convince guys like General Shinu to side with me. Zuko basically staged a coup and he needs to act like it. And he needs to make it really clear that just giving the Earth Kingdom all the territory they seized back is a political impossibility.

[Lizuka]

Honestly this conversation is just making it occur to me that it'd make vastly more sense for season 4 of Korra to have happened in the aftermath of the end of Avatar than within the show where it actually happened. It's an ideal situation for someone to depose the new king and become a tyrant through military might after gradually seizing a splintered country... as opposed to in Korra where up until that's suddenly what season 4 is about I never really got the impression that the Earth King / Queen has any real power outside of Ba Sing Se.

[TrueMetis]

The balkanization of the Earth Kingdom is very much something I could see in the aftermath of the war. Given the weakness of the Earth King and how Long Feng acted there is certainly a fair bit of resentment towards Be Sing Se, and that's in addition to the fact that with how easily the Fire Nation rolled over much of the Earth Kingdom early in the war the central government can't have had much power. The Earth Kingdom is essentially a collection of city states nominally controlled by the biggest city state. And in the aftermath of this kind of war you're going to have some people that push for more independence after seeing how useless that central power was, and others pushing toward greater unification to prevent what happened from happening again.

So the Fire Nation may collapse into civil war between those who want to continue the war and those who don't, while the Earth Kingdom may collapse because without the threat of the Fire Nation those with grievances against the central government are going to let it be known.

For maximum irony we could have Zuko put down his civil war against the warmongers, only to then fight various warlords that have popped up in the Earth Kingdom which threaten his people.

Honestly I should write a fanfic about this, Zuko has to hammer down all his opponents and secure control of the Fire Nation, necessarily using some pretty brutal method to do so, all the while defending the colonies from Earth Kingdom forces of the nearby territories, and while this is going on the Earth Kingdom splits into a series of civil wars due to various pressures that have only been held in check by the threat of the Fire Nation. Eventually Zuko gets the Fire Nation under control even after nearly being killed several times, but is eventually forced to intervene militarily in the Earth Kingdom due to a variety of factors, like stopping attacks coming out of the Earth Kingdom and pleas for help from some of the smaller territories, which ends up with Zuko de-facto fulfilling Sozin's ambition.

Anyway, by achieving "balance" the world may just have been left in a far worse position.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Well this debate is certainly getting....heated.

[Dragon Ball Fan]

and natively, what was the point of bringing up the moral dabate about killing Ozi if Ang was always just going to take a third option cop out? it's the exact same problem I have with when comics bring up the "should superheroes kill" question.

[Steve]

There is another angle that Aang's demonstrated capability brings to this: the prospect for the militarists that Aang will take their Firebending too if they continue to support the war.

Beyond that... the Fire Nation, while triumphant by the end of Book 2, is also arguably exhausted. The entire point of the strategy meeting that turned Zuko definitively against his father was that despite taking Ba Sing Se, the Fire Nation was still facing resistance across the Earth Kingdom. And the implication was that they lacked the numbers to fully garrison the entire Earth Kingdom. Given they've been at war for a century, that's not too surprising.

Honestly, given that we know Zuko succeeded in pacifying his country and ultimately peacefully abdicated for his daughter, who was completely opposed to direct military action against even an evident threat like Kuvira, I'd say the most likely outcome was that the militarists were outnumbered by those willing to follow Zuko's direction on peace. Between war-weary people, people scared of facing the Avatar that took away the Fire Lord's bending, and those who saw advantages in peace, they weren't able to do more than the canonical assassination attempts mentioned in "The Promise" before their big attempt at a coup d'etat in "Smoke and Shadow" failed.

It probably did help that Zuko proved, in "The Promise", he was willing to march to protect Fire Nation civilians.