yeah he killed six children. so what? do you think leaders dont kill innocent people all the fucking time either directly or indirectly?? it was totally worth it to escape their prison after hundreds of years of closure. if toriel wants to be a moralist and doesnt want you, who cares, you litteral king uwu
"Asgore was a coward" is an odd way to look at it.
Dude loses a war (or his father did), probably expects he'll lose it again. He wants to help his people. He also doesn't want to kill anyone anymore.
If he violently collects the souls from across the barrier and frees everyone, they get slaughtered by machine guns and missiles. If he does nothing, his people eventually have a Malthusian catastrophe. Sitting and waiting for random people to fall and harvest their souls (by force or by old age) is cold, but it makes sense for someone like him.
Someone with a hereditary status with no way out due to personal obligation. So he's indecisive, sure. But deliberating between a fast glorious death or a slow plodding one when the possibility of another option could come up--which it does, by the way--doesn't come across as cowardly.
Edit: If you couldn't tell, I find Asgore and Toriel's story the most interesting part of the whole game.
Yeah coward isn't really the best way to put it. I still feel that if didn't want to kill anyone he could have tried crossing and brokering an agreement to break the barrier. It's obvious from the pacifist ending that humans are pretty receptive to peace when the game takes place.
Also if he were to actually go to war surely he'd wipe the floor. Wasn't the whole thing that seven or eight souls makes a monster into a god? I don't fully remember that part
I thought that was Asriel/Flowey, who's a monster/human hybrid at that point.
I'd imagine if that were so, surely the monsters would've won the initial war