LAST EDITED ON Jan-14-14 AT 01:26 PM (EST)
 
>Hrm. I was pretty certain the whole reason Corwin was in anguish over
>the uncertain status of Korra's immortality, and the source of his
>inability to see her for six years, was because he thought he would
>never see her again because she had no chance of entering Valhalla.

No, it's more complicated than that. I mean, if nothing else, Corwin knows how to get to Dìqiú's Spirit World (from the Dìqiú side, anyway, so there would still have been a logistical issue there, but still), so even if Korra couldn't get to Valhalla, he'd theoretically be able to find her there. The main problem is really that, however seamless our few glimpses of Valhalla have made it look, dying isn't easy and it's never any fun, and what happens immediately thereafter doesn't always go according to plan.

Without a Valkyrie on hand - and it looked like there wouldn't be one - entry into Valhalla isn't guaranteed at the best of times. As for the Spirit World, well, Bad Shit sometimes happens in there and Corwin doesn't trust the place as far as he could throw it. The whole affair was fraught with far too much, and far too many flavors of, uncertainty for Corwin to have any confidence in a favorable outcome. Yeah, the best-case scenario was still that she'd get to Valhalla anyway, and the second-best was that she'd take up residence in the Spirit World with Naga and the gang, but the non-best-case scenarios ranged from "wandering in eternally forgetful despair through the identity-corroding mists of Niflheim" to "devoured by the soul-eating hounds of Hel and destroyed forever" to stuff he didn't even have the stomach to envision (so, you know, worse than what I just said).

For that matter, some people are... changed by the experience of dying. Most of those we've seen on both sides of the divide, as it were, have handled it pretty well, but there are those who take a long time to recover their equanimity, and those who never do. It seems unlikely in Korra's case that she would be permanently scarred and rendered a different, much less pleasant, individual by the experience - she wasn't by (UNKIND COMPARISON TO ONE OF HER LIFE EXPERIENCES REDACTED), after all, and compared to that dying will presumably be a doddle - but you never quite know ahead of time. Again, it's the uncertainty that's the problem.

Utena mused about that a little too - how some of Corwin's best friends are dead people and she wasn't entirely sure what the big deal was - but the time wasn't right to ask him to elaborate, and either she hasn't felt that time has come yet since (which is entirely possible given what they've all been up to), or we didn't see her do it.

And yes, before you ask the obvious corollary question, it's entirely possible that much of the above is little more than Corwin's imagination running off to a dark place on him late at night, but that doesn't make the pain of it any less real to him.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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