Why Korra's "I'm the Avatar! I want to be the Avatar! I'm scared enemies will stop me from being the Avatar!" stuff wasn't really done well.

Season 1. We're first introduced to her bending all three elements, scaring some grown-ass monk men, and saying they have to deal with her being the Avatar. We see her training and winning a spar, which is cool. I'm going to skip the plotholes in later scenes and skip ahead to the bit with Amon. She is scared that the world might not "Need" an Avatar to give it balance any more and she is TERRIFIED that Amon might take that away from her, but... What has she done with her avatarhood, besides getting given free training, free housing, and so on? Who has she saved at this point in the story? What balancing has she done? Yes, we can tell she WANTS to be the Avatar, but considering how often she abuses her gifts (Using the Avatar State to beat children in an air-scooter race), what does being the Avatar even mean in this world?

She doesn't do anything positive with her Avatarhood above kicking the ass of some villains until Season 3, where she talks a scared suicidal man into calming down. No, opening the borders to the spirits was not a positive action, despite the writers thinking it is because "yay nature yay balance boo learning lessons!", but someone else already made a video on that.

You realize what this means, right? For three whole seasons, every time the "I wanna be the Avatar! But the world keeps saying it doesn't need an Avatar any more, and just like the Pheonix King, all the new villains want to be the new Avatar!" plot point is brought up and hammered in, it falls flat. For too much of the show's runtime, to Korra, being "The Avatar" means getting cool powers, being good at bending, and getting to do whatever you want because you're the avatar and you're special and everyone else has to deal with it. There's the implication that she wants to help people, but we never see her putting out fires and helping the Bending Corps with that, we never see her helping the Bending Corps build new homes for the homeless or poor, we never see her aid the Lightningbenders in Lightning generation. Does Republic City even have a Bending Corps? Of course not, screw the logical things the old Avatar series had. This new Avatar series has made Metalbending so common, its average policeman in the field can metalbend. Forget how useful earth, water, and even fire and air would be when building new houses or reducing land costs by bringing up more land from the sea bed to be part of Republic City. Korra doesn't have time for that, not when she needs to flounder around in an inconsistent and bad setting for two seasons, then realize the setting is absolute crap and move away from it so the show can "Get better" in the sense that one of its glaring flaws is no longer glaring at you.