system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Legend of Korra] Does "Korra" truly exist?

Raava tells us that the Avatar exists because she merged with a human spirit and created Avatar Spirit. The Avatar Spirit is the thing that gets reincarnated with each death.

So what does that mean for individual identities? Is "Korra" really a true, individual person, or is it just an identity slapped onto the same consciousness that has existed for who knows how long? Are all the Avatars just repaints of the same consciousness? And what happens to the past Avatars when they die? Do they cease to exist until their present incarnation remembers them? Was Aang sentenced to an eternity behind Korra's eyes, doomed to never go to heaven with his friends?
gpt
It's Wan's soul, reincarnated over and over again, but that doesn't mean Korra and Wan are the same *person*. A person is a soul tinted by their individual upbringing, life experiences, personality, etc. Wan's and Korra's essence is the same, but this core is coated differently. This coat is what characterizes a person.

What happens is that when the Avatar dies, the coat is removed but "stored" within Raava itself, which is what allows the different Avatars to exist as different entities that can talk to each other. When Raava was destroyed, all the coats—that is to say, the information that is added onto Wan's soul to produce an individual—was lost forever.

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As for previous Avatars being doomed to never go to heaven: as far as we know, there's no afterlife in the Avatar universe. There are no ghosts or mediums, nor any reference to an afterlife. Everyone seems to reincarnate, it's just that they don't have a coat rack Raava, so the information of their previous past lives is lost when they are reborn.