What happens if Avatar: Fire and Ash doesn’t make enough profit to convince Disney to bankroll Avatar 4 and 5? Creator James Cameron has said he’s ready to walk away from the franchise, adding he’ll write a book to resolve the one thread Avatar 3 leaves open.
As an Indigenous Canadian, I think the whole Avatar series is sickening
An invading colonizing force of foreign people invading a native people … but the natives are incapable of helping themselves so they need a white saviour to lead them in the fight against their oppressors
It’s basically cultural appropriation masked as a space opera
The worst part of it is how wealthy European people are still able in the most imaginative ways possible are able to monetize the misery and memory of oppressed people. Not only did they destroy entire cultures, they spend a good part of their time making money off of that memory and history.
The only thing I enjoy about the films is the AI, CGI and special effects … beyond that, the writing is just another continuation of white people fantasizing about what it would be like to be a heroic Indigenous person who wins over colonizers … a fantasy that has never been allowed to exist in reality.
I completely agree with you. Cameron always gets so triggered whenever he’s faced with this criticism as well, like all rich white American liberals. He doesn’t even try to hide these views because he’s so incredibly clueless:
As opposed to the other Avatar, which explicitly features Inuit and mesoamerican cultures resisting literal fascist, genocidal regimes. And deconstructs the “chosen one” trope while they’re at it. And (as of now) uses culturally appropriate VAs.
Which avatar? The only one I can think of is the last air bender but I don’t know how they deconstruct the chosen one trope
I would say one of the key points is that Aang gets constant support from everyone around him. Like any individual, he’s nearly powerless without that support. Most other “chosen one” stories I’ve seen, the character is saving everyone else.
I strongly recommend you watch it. It’s very good.
Sort of. Per TVTropes:
They were going somewhere with the pacifism too, though ran out of time.
Korra straight up deconstructs it, which is more what I meant. She was born to fight, she basically never got to be a child/regular human, but being a ‘Chosen One’ doesn’t fix anything. She’s targeted and hated by the antagonists for being such a singular figure of authority, and beat up to a pulp over it.
My favorite movie about an Indigenous person taking on an invading and/or colonizing force is Prey. No white savior there.
Prey was fucking awesome
Good shit there for sure.
oh yes
It’s a white saviour rehash. Classic movie trope in the USA and yes it is incredibly insulting.
If the natives are outgunned and technologically outclassed, how are they to prevail without help from “the inside”? Otherwise it’s just a depressing plot about the natives getting overrun.
I’m having trouble thinking of a time when the natives were able to help themselves against colonizers. OTOH, guerilla warfare has worked pretty damned well in the last century.
Why is “it’s realistic” the line your drawing on a space colonization movie?
Your entire premise of “the natives are out gunned” is dripping with white colonization. Why are they always out gunned? Why not show them capable and holding their own and are helped out by “insiders”.
Its a fantasy story, and there’s tons of ways to do it without relying on the racist “natives are primitives” narrative.
There have to be some kind of rules or else there’s no tension. It must be realistic within the rules of the story.
Well, there’s Ethiopia, and uh… it’s a pretty short list.
(I’d also give an honorable mention to Haiti, although the oppressed people in that case were imported African slaves, not natives. By the time of the Haitian Revolution, the indigenous Taíno had long since been pretty much wiped out.)
Isn’t any territorial war won by the attacked party an example? Like, the aggressors never start being successful colonizers because they don’t win, but they would have colonized the land if they’d won.
It reinforces the idea that the only way we can understand meeting any new culture or group is through conflict … that one or the other has to overpower one another and win … that everything is automatically a contest of winners and losers.
We can’t imagine a world where we actually cooperate with one another and live in some kind of harmony. Partly because we as a species have seldom been like that and the other being that we find that story kind of boring. We prefer a world of constant conflict and fighting.
We also enjoy cheering for the underdog and listening to fanciful stories of them winning over the oppressor … the classic David and Goliath story … where the little guy gets to win. Only problem is, all throughout our actual human history, the big guy, the strongest and most wealthy always wins and destroys the little guy. It’s a fantasy we like to perpetuate to make ourselves feel good about the terrible reality we actually we live in.
The tech trees are a lot more balanced recently