I apologize for the length of the post and I am going to try to not do this ever again.
From this "Wasn't an ordinary AS activation" to "It's not really comparable to just knowing some trivia information on Azula's abilities."
All of the AS stuff directly involving spirits is actually answered quite simply: The Avatar is the bridge between the mortal and spirit worlds. That one sentence answers everything. Azula's blue fire is just a special case since the dragons let us know that fire is basically powered by emotions and there's a rainbow cavalcade of colors that follows. It's never explained how the AS works that way, but we know that it does. It isn't explained how fire works that way, but we know that it does. They're not vague, they're simple answers. The whole giant spirit fish activation looked the exact same usual activation to me: Aang saw dead fish, got upset, started glowing, giant fish. He merged with it, but again, not explained how. Just happened. The only thing that can genuinely qualified as needing a more in-depth answer in TLoK is (and this is my favorite name for it) Jinora, Queen of the Fairies.
They establish that healing uses chi paths in one particular technique, and later with lightning bending. I don't think that is a go ahead to assume all bending is fundamentally based on chi paths, or that this is what Amon does. Second, one can become spiritual due to a dire event depending how you react to it, but it is not inherent to the dire event itself. Bad shit happening to you and feeling sad doesn't automatically make you spiritual, it's in how you deal with it.
I think we're thinking of two separate things here. What I'm saying is that bending requires the usage of chi in order to function and that Amon chi blocks using precision bloodbending and chi blocking stops bending. I feel like you're talking about the case of water/lightningbending, which requires "feeling the movement" of ones chi in order to properly redirect the attack, since you aren't using brute force. Feeling ones chi for bending is only applied to water/lightning, because earth requires physical application than other bending (makes Bumi even more ridiculous), fire comes from the breath, and air seems to rely much more on your mentality than other bending. Even then, we've seen other people using other bending styles and mentalities on elements not associated with those styles or mentalities. The reason I point out waterbending using chi points and paths in healing, is because of the dummy used in the healing class Katara goes to back in
Water. Just guiding it along chi paths, though in that case I may have just been assuming things since I can't recall if anything was specifically said about it.
I'm not going to debate what makes people spiritual. There's a wide variety of reasons, and there's not really a concrete way of defining it. People get fucked up, they turn to higher powers. It's happened in real life, it'll happen in fiction, and that's pretty much it. Not really any prerequisites for it other than "ya gotta believe!"
No, what he said was that if he left before he was finished, he would be unable to use the avatar state until he completed the last step that they never finished. Aang did that in the season 2 finale.
He said "By not giving up attachment, you have locked the chakra. If you leave now, you won't be able to go in to the Avatar State at all." I checked, because this seems to be a constant point of contention with people. The way he said it always gave off the vibe that he couldn't do it again, but that isn't the case.
"As for the lightning and rock, chi paths are evidently affected by physical things."[...]"If the chakra pool was free in the way it was supposed to be, that wouldn't have happened."
Katara affects chakra, Aang has flashback to getting killed. Aang never knowingly attempted to enter his AS again and in fact, it seemed like he tried to avoid it. He never did Katara's healing again, either as far as we know. I mean, he basically locked his chakras again: He was scared to fight Ozai without all the elements; He felt guilty about Ba Sing Se and was afraid that the world would abandon and hate him because he let them down; He was angry because of what had happened and what he had to do; and he lied about how his chakra was locked initially (because he left for Katara, not because Azula zippity-zapped him, although that was also the case). He did come terms with that stuff eventually, though. You're right with the fact that it was not a proper activation, but Aang did manage to pull out of it by himself without needing anyone else to do so, which as far as I recall is a unique occurrence. So yes, it wasn't a "proper" (seems like a weird word choice for that. Dunno why) activation, but he also gained more control of it at that time than he had at any other given point.
"No, because she doesn't complete any of the steps on how to activate the AS that were establlshed in the Guru episode, and they don't really establish any idea that there is an alternative way." [...] "How is that not awful storytelling?"
Aang had a shitload of issues preventing him from connecting with the AS, and the Guru was basically a therapist. So Korra gets spirituality "right" at the end. She was also willing to do anything to get her powers, whereas Aang was in denial and scared of the whole thing until he saw the Guru, and even then he was having issues. Not only that, Korra was much more confident and assured than Aang was when it came to her abilities. I mean, Korra could use three of the elements by the time she was four, so I'm feeling she caught on a bit fast once she acquired the base skill. Fuck, airbending became her most used element next to fire after she learned it, even though it took her awhile.
As for her airbending unlocking, like I said: Her airbending was never fully locked or unlocked. Besides, she adopted the airbending mentality of effectively playing keep-away when she wanted to get away from Amon, so she got airbending.
I don't feel that ending was "awful" because I've seen "awful." That ending doesn't qualify for the term. The bottom line is: I saw
Air's ending no different from
Fire's.
