Bump
I don't care for most fictional characters who refuse to kill, mostly because most authors seem either unaware of or unwilling to explore the actual challenges and implications involved in taking such a difficult and disempowering moral stance. In almost every case, characters that make this grandiose decision are granted battleship-scale plot armor, unerring accuracy, and god-like insight in a way that completely negates much of the personal risk and moral challenge involved in living such values.
Choosing not to kill your enemies isn't an easy decision that comes without consequences, and implying that it's a simple moral decision is fantastical at best and at worst is insulting both to the viewers intelligence and to the thousands of good people who are forced to take a life to preserve the life of another.
Certainly, most moral people, if given the ability to incapacitate a criminal or enemy without killing them, would do so. Point in fact, nearly every legal system in the world places an obligation on their law enforcement to use only the minimum force necessary to subdue a perpetrator, because human beings largely agree on this across all cultures. In reality, however, incapacitating an individual armed with a lethal weapon is practically impossible without exposing yourself or other people around you to serious bodily injury or death. In a hand-to-hand grapple, the amount of force necessary to restrain a person versus the amount necessary to grievously wound or kill them with a weapon is greater by several magnitudes. An individual attempting to disarm an opponent armed with a weapon is far more likely to find themselves seriously wounded or killed than they are to succeed, even if they are substantially stronger than their opponent. Add firearms into the mix and the scenario becomes even more preposterous - the combatant fighting only to incapacitate their foe will likely be dead before he ever comes within reach of his opponent. Shooting to wound, particularly while being shot at by a hostile target or targets, requires both a degree of accuracy possessed only by the world's top sharpshooters and the type of cool mind that holds hardly sliver of a fear of death, and still comes with a substantially increased chance of missing the target, which introduces the chance of a wide shot or ricochet striking and killing an innocent bystander. Meanwhile, while our principle shooter is attempting to aim for a specific, incapacitating part of the target's body, the target is given additional time to attempt to kill the shooter, his allies, or innocent people in the area.
Ergo, any character who both regularly enters combat and insists on never taking a life would either need to have superhuman abilities on a level that would make nearly any challenge seem effortless, or they would have to regularly and knowingly risk not simply their own life, but the lives of all their friends and any innocent people nearby.
In most cases in anime, these types of "principled" characters are the former - Kira Yamato types who's abilities so exceed the challenges of mortal existence that they become impossible to identify with. Every once in a long while, you get a character that's the latter. If an author is willing to show a character's need to struggle to hold their principles, I can respect that narrative, even if I disagree with their moral viewpoint. To me, sparing an enemy or criminal is never worth risking the life of an ally or innocent, but I can accept that a select few may have the type of character that would allow them to decide the opposite.
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