korra-scenery:

Korra’s Spirituality: Avatar Aang’s Guidance

Location: Cliff, Southern Water Tribe, The South Pole

I loved this part. Book One: Air of The Legend of Korra began featuring this beautiful, confident young Avatar, effortlessly fulfilling her role as an Avatar in training. There was this instant implication of precocity and ease in Korra’s life. She was prideful and powerful.

I see the series of events presented this season as the first instance of conflict and struggle in her life. She can’t Airbend: her inability to do so and her constant failure in overcoming her spiritual block resounds the entire season. She is repeatedly thwarted by her opponents and rivals; she fails in her first romantic endeavors. And here she really is at her lowest point.

I think a lot of people might misunderstand Korra’s feelings here. She desperately wants to feel normal, to relish in her little victories with Mako and unlocking her Airbending, but it is all overshadowed. She may have won the war, but she lost the battle. She feels stripped of her potency and identity, what shaped her since the unripe age of seven, an identity and essence she gripped and held so tightly. It was everything for her. And yet in losing it, in experiencing this utmost sense of loss and despair, she breaks down and comes closer than ever before to the true purpose her possession of The Avatar Spirit is really meant to serve. She accesses her untapped, untouched, locked, and hidden spiritual reserve, that which was perpetually buried and unapparent to her because of her nature and attitude as an intensely physical and temporal individual. She calls Aang to her. She solicits assistance from the very last hope, an improbable and unlikely savior.

I can just imagine how many times Korra called upon Aang in her times of need this season, hoping against all hope that he’d just appear, possess her, or that he’d come and unlock the Avatar State for her and permit the use of the safety net, the security mechanism to which all other Avatars had emergency access. And now, finally, Korra is answered. All that she was is broken. She retains not a single vestige of her former self, her former pretension and hubris. She is humbled and desperate, and finally answered.

Thus, I credit Korra in this restoration of her bending, just as much as I credit Aang. I see Aang as this leader of Avatars, this paragon, initiator of this Avatar Spiritual Renaissance. He rediscovered Energybending, and here he gifts the ability to Korra. It is a direct transmission, and Korra, with all her shields lowered, is the perfect candidate for acceptance and enlightenment. This was as much Korra’s victory as it was her salvation by Aang’s assistance.

So many fans are jaded in the “message” of these last moments. However, Korra’s bitterness, rejection of Mako, and complete lack of self-worth doesn’t imply that without your bending you are worthless. I should hope Lin’s beautiful sacrifice would’ve taught us exactly the opposite: that there are many things more important than possessions we hold most greedily. It’s about love and honor, yet in the moments before Korra’s call for help she is incapable of accepting love or feeling worthwhile because she has lost herself. She has fallen into nothingness and uncertainty, the kind of uncertainty that provokes authentic self-discovery. She has been crushed, but that was what was necessary. The destruction of this former, hot-headed, pugnacious, and arrogant persona was an absolute requisite to her quest for Spiritual Enlightenment. She needed to detach herself from everything around her, and here, at her lowest point, when she was least herself, lost in a tumultuous sea of emotions, she comes to her knees, and from within calls to Aang, brings her quest to an end, and earns her own salvation.

This is how I translated this scene, though I am unable to explain it as eloquently.