Okay.
So I'm hearing a lot of stuff about this "Magic Aang". And I agree!
But here's the thing.
Here's how you could have made it all better:
Animate, like, 5-10 seconds of Korra closing her eyes, maybe concentrating a bit, and then, actually asking Aang and the other Avatars what she should do.
And then you can have Aang show up and just hand her the answer if you want. Too easy? Maybe, but remember, energybending has a long and proud history of being the bullshit solution to all of the Avatar's most intractable conundrums, so whatever. At any rate, communicating with the spirit world, activating glowy eye mode and energybending are all special Avatar-y things that we know that Korra has the capacity to do, so it would have been nice to actually see her at least try to do them instead of it all just sort of spontaneously happening to her.
But what we got is this: Korra tells Mako she'll never be okay ever again, goes and curls up in a fetal ball, sheds the shiniest single tear ever, and contemplates suicide (maybe).
Now, the problem with this isn't the fact that, at this point, she can still bend air, which still puts her above 99% of the population and pretty much all of those other benders who got lined up and summarily executed bloodenergybentblocked by Amon while she was fucking around, and if she had just talked to Asami for like 5 minutes she'd realize she's not even the most unfairly shat-upon girl in the room. Let's just accept that it can pretty traumatic to be the world's one super-important Avatar and not be sure whether or not your gross incompetence just fucked up the entire natural balance of the world itself. I mean, that's pretty acceptable.
Okay. So that's not the problem, and I'm rambling off message. The problem is what happens next, which is that Aang just sort of... walks up behind her, taps her on the shoulder, and says "Oh hey, here's the solution to all your problems." She doesn't even realize it's Aang at first. Despite his assertion that she called out to him somehow, she did not, in fact, consciously do a damned thing.
Now this presents a problem for the presumed protagonist, because at this point she is not actually protagonizing, at all. Korra really has no agency during this entire sequence, save for not deciding to tell Aang to go fuck himself. She's already given up, in a pretty extreme sense, and made herself into just another victim, and it's up to a completely external force to step in and rescue her. Now this is not a bad thing for a hero - it's an essential part of the monomyth, the lowest point and the rescue from without - and Aang had his own breakdown and subsequent smacking out of too. But it can't be the resolution of the conflict. That has to be something that the protagonist, in at least some fashion, initiates or brings about. There's a term for a resolution without hero agency, and it gets pretty lazily applied to a lot of situations that are really just convenient for the hero to take advantage of, but in this case Magic Aang is definitely a dragon-drawn chariot being lowered by a winch.
And I for one have had it with these motherfucking drakes on these motherfucking cranes.
