It saddens me a bit tbh. The message in the show overall wasn't bad. Fairly well rounded characters for a kids show (I mean who didn't love Iroh?) and things like Zuko's redemption arc were really great when I was watching as a kid. Frankly it seems more against the show's message to call a nation bad when they spent a lot of that last season really trying to show how normal the fire nation were. Even small humanising moments like one of the soldiers happy that his boss remembered his birthday seemed to me to push that "they're just normal people" narrative.

Hell even the fire nation that believed that they were helping other nations felt kinda realistic with how that was portrayed. I mean the episode where Aang is in school showed that the "we're the best and we're helping everyone else" being pushed on them from a young age made sense. Showing the kids as normal and wanting to have fun def felt like that's what they wanted to push. It's not the nation that's bad, it's was bad leadership that you'd be unable to question (look what happened to Zuko when he tried and he was the crown prince ffs, can't really imagine anyone else even wanting to challenge it knowing that's the response you'd face). To dilute that always feels like they're not understanding the message in the first place.

Turning it into fire nation bad does it a disservice imo. That and it shows they don't understand it properly. Not saying I do but the whole last season def felt like that's what they were getting at. Bad leadership that people couldn't challenge, not bad people. Other than Ozai and Azula being crazy lol.