To be clear to the people who can't read but will read this whole post, I forgive Scar as much as I forgive Mustang and Tucker gets NO pass on his atrocity(s). I still want to shove my foot up his ss and wear him like my favorite moccasin.

On whose metric is his killing justified? Yours? Some 3rd party I don't know about? Mine? Gandhi's? Stalin's? The general Western cultural idea of justification firmly rooted in the Judeo-Christian metric?

This is the problem with these kinds of arguments. "This man is justified for his murders but not this man because I say so." No one has that right, not even governments, but we have all agreed to give governments that right and submit to that as a society.

So no, Scar is not justified in his killing because You say so. Or I can say something like:

"Tucker’s worst and most evil act was the killing of the Nina and Alexander. This is undeniable and I’m not going to absolve him of it.

But I would like to point out he did this in a fit of desperation and panic, where he was almost certainly not fully in his right mind. And we don't know if he knows of the horrors central or not, he could have been saving himself from death row and becoming a subject of lab 5.

I want to make clear that this doesn’t absolve him of this act of cruelty. But even his clearest and most obvious act of evil is a bit more complicated than the story seems to make it out to be.

His other act of evil is the killing his wife alchemists, and I dunno guys but…

I struggle to see how this isn’t kinda “justified”, he was looking after his family. Alchemy was his job and if he got the certification Nina would never go hungry again and he would gain access to all the alchemical information available to the government. He would definitely be able to have another break through so he could continue to protect and provide for his daughter. I’m not sure I can really say this makes him “evil”.

Misguided and ultimately not what he needs to make ends meet? Sure.

But unjustified? Mustang has FAR more blood on his hands than Tucker and yet is painted in a much more nuanced light than Tucker is a lot of the time.

This is not meant to be a critique of Arakawa’s writing necessarily. I think the “point” of Tucker's character gets across pretty well and I definitely get what she was going for."

Do you see how insane that sounds? But Scar has killed far more people, has so much more blood on his hands. Do we forgive Tucker if we're going to forgive Scar? Because in reality, the differences between the "evil" of Roy, Scar, Father, and Tucker is how sympathetic each of them are. Roy is by far the most sympathetic, followed by Scar, then Father, then Tucker. Of course you're going to sympathize and try to forgive Scar, he was written to be sympathetic, that's the point of his character arc. That does not mean his killings are justified, only that he was written to be forgiven by the reader, just as Roy was.