Is Guy Fawkes night pro or anti Guy Fawkes?

I think you're focusing too much on the 'king' aspect. It was the entire governmental structure which, while not democratic by modern standards, did separate us from the totally autocratic despotic regimes of contemporary France and Spain. I think the most accurate comparison for an American might be if Trump were tried and executed for instigating 6th January coup attempt, then you celebrated by burning an effigee of him (or the QAnon shaman, since Guy Fawkes wasn't the lead conspirator, just the most prominent in failing to execute the plan) on 6th January every year for the next 400-odd years. Then some guy comes along and says "why are you celebrating killing a guy who tried to stop someone who supported a genocide in Gaza?". Like, sure, James VI/I was a shit, but that doesn't really have anything to do with why the gunpowder plot failing was a good thing. In terms of the time period and its perceptions versus today, it's also fairly common now to think about the Catholics as an oppressed group, especially in light of Scottish and English plantations in Ireland. But, at the time it was only about 3 generations previous that Protestants were the persecuted group, and Catholic persecutions towards Protestants were just as bad as (British), if not worse than (Spanish) Protestant persecutions of the Catholics. It's also important to remember how important Protestantism (of whatever variety) was to all the nations of the mainland and several European refugee communities in Great Britain. For the Welsh, getting a Bible in Welsh (sponsored by Elizabeth I) was a really important part of retaining Welsh linguistic identity as a principality without its own parliament under England. Scotland had a really reactionary wing of Calvinists as the majority - Mary Queen of Scots is often remembered now for being executed by her paranoid English cousin (Elizabeth I), but she was initially deposed in favour of her newborn son, James VI, by her own people, who were mostly Scots and Gaelic-speaking Calvinists that resented having a French-speaking Catholic queen (and the queen part is important because John Knox in particular was a raging misogynist). England was only just out of generational swings of horrendous reprisals from on group to the other, and was the safe haven for a lot of French speaking Walloon protestants fleeing Spanish persecutions in what is now Belgium and Northern France, and Spanish persecution of Protestants in the lowlands made British persecutions in both directions look like a strong telling off. Most of these refugees fled south into Catholic, but relatively (to Spain) tolerant France (which also had the benefit of being francophone), and it's the descendants of this latter group who went on to form a significant portion of the much more famous Huguenot refugee group who fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The Walloon refugees in England were even given the Black Prince's Chapel in Canterbury Cathedral to conduct worship in French, which still happens, in French, to this day.