>>113841911Makes sense. Generally-speaking, that's one of the uncomfortable bit about seeing ANY idealistic hero go murdermode, be it Steven, Aang, or someone like Superman, Batman, or Spider-Man. Their enemies may deserve it a hundred times over in some cases, but it's what it robs the hero of, and their loved ones of: an innocent life, at peace, with ideals intact and the belief (illusory or otherwise) that was can rise above the endless brutality of existence and aspire to something better and purer.
It's part of why such characters don't kill: they seek to be transcendent, transformative, and to make the world into the place we all kind of want it to be. Killing is a necessary evil, but still an evil; pragmatic need to kill is a failing of the universe, a flaw to be fixed. To see them resort to pragmatic brutality to achieve a watered-down ideal of peace where unnecessary violence, loss, and conflict will forever persist dulls the shine of their idealism, and implies an ultimate failure of their mission to transcend the inevitably of death and failure.
When Steven cannot redeem his foes, his community, or himself to a place beyond violence and trauma, it reminds us (and, perhaps, him) uncomfortably of the lack of true meaning, destiny, or purpose in the universe, of the lack of a narrative and a real, lasting identity. We remember we are no better than gems: just networked lattices of molecules briefly conjoined into a multifaceted shape, to last for indeterminate time and then have our pattern sundered and never reformed.
tl;dr: when shiny, bright, idealistic heroes like Steven give into the necessity of killing, it makes us aware of entropy and the void
