IDEA! Avatar 2: Ava-Tarrer

[Stark]

You know you're on the right side when you're saying the use of chemical weapons was actually a good thing.

Shroom is really onto something and I think it keys back into stuff we've discussed before about projection in art. You see above a perfect example - the morality of the situation is reduced to I NEED IT GIMME I GON FUCK YOU UP BRO in the most fundamental, personal sense. Thus the actions of the military tough guys who take no stick and do what must be done no matter the cost become something the viewer owns, and can vicariously enjoy the results of their own ruthless brilliance.

I think this is the same as people who hate movies with 'stupid' protaganists who do things 'wrong': the implication is that the speaker would be superior and we should listen to them.

[Cesario]

In preference to firebombing an occupied building, yes I think the use of chemical weapons to clear the area of people too stupid to listen to the person we already sent to warn them that the place was being firebombed is a good thing. I have no qualms about my moral position here.

The problem here is that we're dealing with two fundamentally different moral systems. In mine, there is such a thing as need. When you are faced with a legitimate need, you are obligated to try to meet that need through peaceful and socially responsible means, but should those means fail, you are morally justified in using other means to meet that need. The classic "is it moral to steal bread to feed your starving family" scenario.

You don't seem to think there is such a thing as a need that ever justifies violating the property rights of a legitimate owner.

This is the fundamental disagreement we're dealing with here.

[Stark]

It really doesn't have anything to do with 'moral systems'. You're simply framing the situation to justify your preferred action (ie, be the big tough man who makes the hard decisions to save mankind).

Is it 'moral' to 'steal' 'bread' to 'feed' your 'starving family' if you have to butcher civilians and you have other non-bread food?

Remember kids, if you assume the human race is doomed based on nothing anything is justified ever so we can live out our infantile fantasies.

[Cesario]

So you agree that it is sometimes moral to hurt or kill others to ensure your own survival? Great, now we're making progress. The only thing left to work out are the details. Did the humans go far enough out of their way to try to avoid violence? How many dead humans do there need to be before we cross the acceptable threshold for evicting these people from their homes?

(So, what's the non-oil solution to the modern western world's needs? Surely it's a simple thing that can be accomplished instantly with no loss of life if we just cut off the only source of oil in existence instantly, right?)

[Simon_Jester]

Ah yes, the old chant that technology is evil, and only by going back to the days before having clean water, food avalible during the winter season, and prenatal care, can we truly be enlightened and decent people. All advocated over the most advanced computer network mankind has ever created, mind you.

No, no, it's just interesting that you seem to find all this back-to-nature stuff so repulsive: the derrick is good, the tree is evil.

I mean, I don't imagine we could or should want to live in Iron Age or Neolithic conditions, but that doesn't mean I automatically assume other people are 'evil savages' because they do so, or that I cheer the guys blowing their homes up to build a strip mine.

Come to think of it... you keep telling me magic hover metal is vital to Earth's survival, but a few things don't add up. For one, Sol system is plainly exploited well enough to make building starships possible, and this was done before any unobtanium was available- so shouldn't the infrastructure to create arbitrary amounts of electrical power and mineral resources be available without any unobtanium? If we want a dead world like the Selenites of That Hideous Strength, we'd be able to have one.

Also, if it really is that important, did anyone ever explain to the Na'vi just how important the damn unobtanium was to us? I see no evidence of that in the movie. And surely, if they don't know we need unobtainium to survive, they cannot be blamed for refusing to let us destroy their homes and lives and holy interfaces with the planetary neural net in order to get unobtainium to survive.

Imagine if a Martian landed on your lawn and thrashed around breaking your stuff and you killed him with a gun... and then people called you an evil savage because he was only trying to get to the ammonia in your laundry room so he wouldn't die of thirst. You'd be entitled to be upset, I think, if the Martian never tried to tell you that he needed the ammonia to live, or even that he drank ammonia at all.

[Stark]

So you agree that it is sometimes moral to hurt or kill others to ensure your own survival? Great, now we're making progress. The only thing left to work out are the details. Did the humans go far enough out of their way to try to avoid violence? How many dead humans do there need to be before we cross the acceptable threshold for evicting these people from their homes?

I really don't know where you're getting the idea anyone is doing anything but laugh at you.

Let me play the 'deliberately obscure situation to make my preferred option the obvious choice'.

How many innocent people on a different planet who by default own everything there have to die before rich stockholders on the board of Space Oil decide to stop chasing their quarterly bonus?

[Cesario]

I do find this "back to nature" idealizing repulsive, because it fundamentally ignores the fact that for us mere humans who aren't blue space elves, nature wants to kill us. Whatever ennobling elements there are in this "simple life" pale in my mind, when compared to the suffering and death that will be visited on actual living breathing humans for these supposed spiritual benefits to the handful of survivors. In my mind it's just like zombie apocolipse fantasy. Can be amusing and fun to pretend, but anyone who seriously thinks that's a good life is going to find no common ground with me.

Part of my dislike of the Na'vi does come with how contrived their perfect little "nature" society is, when it's clear someone put a lot of effort into designing an entire ecosystem for them to live their perfect lives in. Especially when they act judgemental towards us for not embracing the natural world that tried to kill us over and over again.

If the humans in this universe could create arbitrary amounts of electrical power, why do they need room temperature superconductors at all? They could tollerate any ammount of energy loss from the grid because they would have an infinite amount to pump into the grid. The humans in this universe obviously don't have infinite resources, and we see that they've actually got so few that they can barely feed their population. There are repeated references to malnutrition among most of the earth population, and despirate attempts to keep the machines working to provide even the meger sustainance that they are currently managing. Their options at this point look to be "get more resources" or "live within our means". Unfortunately "live within our means" in this situation means "let billions of people starve to death so our population gets down to a more manageable number". And even that might not solve the problem if the lost labor force means they still can't produce enough to feed the people who are left after they nobly starved to death so the blue space elves wouldn't be inconveninced.

The Na'vi don't talk to humans, remember? That was one of my major complaints about their supposed moral superiority. They aren't listening no matter what is being said. The people who actively give their lives to save their sorry asses are the same ones they kicked out prior to the start of the movie. They don't listen to Jake when he says "those guys are going to blow up your tree, you should get out of it before it's too late", so why would we expect them to listen to a complicated explaination about a resource and population problem? Heck, attempting to explain it seems to have made human Na'vi relations even worse. Witness "they killed their mother" being repeated a few times.

So you agree that it is sometimes moral to hurt or kill others to ensure your own survival? Great, now we're making progress. The only thing left to work out are the details. Did the humans go far enough out of their way to try to avoid violence? How many dead humans do there need to be before we cross the acceptable threshold for evicting these people from their homes?

I really don't know where you're getting the idea anyone is doing anything but laugh at you.

Let me play the 'deliberately obscure situation to make my preferred option the obvious choice'.

How many innocent people on a different planet who by default own everything there have to die before rich stockholders on the board of Space Oil decide to stop chasing their quarterly bonus?

Like I said, it's a fundamental moral disagreement. You don't think there's ever a justification for violating the property rights of a legitimate owner. I think there are situations where that is indeed justified.

[Shroom Man 777]

Ah yes, the old chant that technology is evil, and only by going back to the days before having clean water, food avalible during the winter season, and prenatal care, can we truly be enlightened and decent people. All advocated over the most advanced computer network mankind has ever created, mind you.

Check your reading comprehension. I did not say that technology was evil. I said that for the kind of person who fawns over military warmachines, somehow they find the concept of the Na'vi and others like them - people living in communion with a nature spirit actually made manifest - somehow horrible, disconcerting, frightening or loathsome or terrible. And I think this is very interesting.

Let me present a sequence of events for you.

That is nothing remotely like the situation in Avatar. You conflate Selfridge's comments on the market price of unobtanium, and some imagined dialogue or information never even mentioned in the movie, to concoct your terminal sickness and rare disease cure analogy when in the movie, unobtanium was not once ever stated to be the cure for anything.

It's more like "you have terminal sickness and need a rare bone marrow transplant, Shroom may or may not have that same type of bone marrow, so you abduct Shroom and... steal his kidneys. then a village or two get bombed".

Even IF unobtanium was vital for humanity's survival despite this never being mentioned in the movie. They could've still mined unobtanium elsewhere without firebombing people's population centers,.

I don't know if you noticed this, but at the start of the story, the Na'vi had kicked out the nice scientists who were on their side running that school, who continued to be on their side, even to the point of dying for them over the course of the story. (Also note that they had to use Avatars in order to even get that much talking in. World-tree forbid they talk with these sky demons when they aren't the right skin color.)

Uh, the school had a trailer, which humans could live in. It's more like "They had to use Avatars in order to walk freely outside in an environment where the air is freaking ammonia, without having to bring gas masks and shit, and also to ease interactions with aliens and make them feel more comfortable and also not get crushed by these huge guys."

Did the Na'vi evict the humans from that school? As in, forcefully or otherwise, tell them to get out? Or is this another one of your imaginations? Or was the school merely abandoned because the Na'vi stopped going there, because they got pissed that the humans would not take "no we won't give up our homes for your stripmine" for an answer?

Because, uh, Jake and Grace and Michelle Rodriguez were able to work in that trailer in that school freely - and this was before they allied with the Na'vi. I think the Na'vi didn't force anyone out. I think the Na'vi just stopped going to school.

So... according to you

Not only is "This rock is expensive" = "THE FATE OF THE WORLD AND SURVIVAL OF OUR SPECIES"

But also "We're not going to the humans' school anymore" = "WE DONT NEED YOUR EDUCATION HEY TEACHER LEAVE THOSE KIDS ALONE" *blue skinned Pink Floyd attacks humans*

The chemical weapons that you so decry? They were to flush the Na'vi out of Hometree so that when they blew it up, they could minimize the casualties. This was supposed to be a symbolic act, not a genocidal one. Destroy things so you can bring the other guy back to the negotating table while killing as few people as you can.

It was a violent act that still ended up with their homes, and god knows how many people were stuck inside there, exploded and killed or crushed in the tree-fall.

The importance to earth's survival can be derived from the repeated references to earth being a dead world, and people contniuing to emphasise how important the unobtanium mining is in the same breath.

Sully was the only one who talked about the dead world. Selfridge didn't mention any ecological whatevers, he just prattled on about unobtanium's market value.

Sully's breath in saying "dying world" was a different breath from Selfridge's breath that said "it costs mucho dineros". Unless, you're imagining once more off-screen, that Sully gave Selfridge some mouth to mouth and breathed some air into Selfridge's lungs while sticking his tongue inside Selfridge's mouth for some hot lengua luchadore wrestling, it cannot literally be the same breaths.

As to the possibilities of deposits away from major population centers, I imagine not. The Unobtainium was likely just as artificial as the ecosystem, so it's highly probable that the home trees were either dependent on the resource to grow or were part of the process of creating it. But we'll never know, since efforts to talk to these people about what we know about the mineral and try to cross-reference it with what the natives know about the land don't work so good when the natives refuse to talk to you at all.

You mean to say, there are no deposits away from major population centers? Are you implying that the pre-existing RDA mining operation was also done on another population center that they evicted?

[Shroom Man 777]

Imagine if a Martian landed on your lawn and thrashed around breaking your stuff and you killed him with a gun... and then people called you an evil savage because he was only trying to get to the ammonia in your laundry room so he wouldn't die of thirst. You'd be entitled to be upset, I think, if the Martian never tried to tell you that he needed the ammonia to live, or even that he drank ammonia at all.

Imagine reading a story about "a Martian landing on someone's lawn and thrashed around breaking his stuff and he killed it with a gun... and then people called him an evil savage because it was only trying to get to the ammonia in his laundry room so it wouldn't die of thirst." And then you'd think that "he'd be entitled to be upset, I think, if the Martian never tried to tell him that it needed the ammonia to live, or even that it drank ammonia at all" and you also scratching your head because not once in the story did anyone mention anything about Martians eating ammonia to live, yet this book reviewer was screaming about how the Martian was simply dying of de-ammoniadration even though the author never wrote anything about that in the book.

[madd0ct0r]

EDIT: whoops, missed a page off the thread. please disregard the below.

... I will die if I don't get your blood due to some rare disease. ...

Under certain moral frameworks, my actions in the above are unforgivable violations...

... This was supposed to be a symbolic act, not a genocidal one. Destroy things so you can bring the other guy back to the negotating table while killing as few people as you can.
...
The importance to earth's survival can be derived from the repeated references to earth being a dead world, and people contniuing to emphasise how important the unobtanium mining is in the same breath.
...
As to the possibilities of deposits away from major population centers, I imagine not. The Unobtainium was likely just as artificial as the ecosystem, so it's highly probable that the home trees were either dependent on the resource to grow or were part of the process of creating it.

Yup, coming at someone else with a knife because you desperately want blood to keep living the way you are, is a unforgivable violation. Them freely giving it to you would be less arseholeish but still...

As for a symbolic act? yeah. A symbolic act, followed by the establishment of a symbolic mine to extract the symbolic mineral.
As opposed to just blowing up a flying mountain or a nearby hill or anything which wouldn't have killed people. They wanted the tree removed to get at the mineral. nothing symbolic there at all (inside the movie at least)

As for unobtanium being key to earth's survival, as a dead world - do you not think that could also be a clue that the terra way has failed? that continuing the current strategy of earth won't work? That the fact it's a mega-corp and mercenaries and not the UN out there suggests that maybe it isn't really anything more then a fantastically valuable mineral. Like plutonium, platinum or gold. Would our way of life disappear without enough of these?
It ain't space-oil, it's space-mineral, nothing more is shown or known.

followed by you admitting that in order to cut as much of the mineral as you need from the planet, you'll happily take out as many population centres as needed?

Here's a hint, given the interdependence of the ecosystem, maybe the Navii NEED to be near a worldtree, maybe exposure to unobtanium is key to their way of life. who bleeding knows?

[NecronLord]

Okay for a start: are you accepting out-of-movie stuff, or not? Because you reject the shit with the school in order to paint the navi in the worst possible light;

I have been to a cinema and seen that material in the film (in glorious Imax 3D in a gallery not less) It's in the extended cut.

It's therefore fully canon.

So, mind you, is the idea that it's a room temperature superconductor.

[PeZook]

I do find this "back to nature" idealizing repulsive, because it fundamentally ignores the fact that for us mere humans who aren't blue space elves, nature wants to kill us. Whatever ennobling elements there are in this "simple life" pale in my mind, when compared to the suffering and death that will be visited on actual living breathing humans for these supposed spiritual benefits to the handful of survivors. In my mind it's just like zombie apocolipse fantasy. Can be amusing and fun to pretend, but anyone who seriously thinks that's a good life is going to find no common ground with me.

I find it amusing that you can say this, because that's exactly what my and Shroom's proposition for Avatar 2 mocks.

You have in your mind this idea that industrialized life is better, and therefore the humans can lookd down with disdain on the primitive savages who don't know any better, and that's exactly the attitude the Pandoramakers would have towards us if Avatar 2 was made how the OP described it: they know better. Any human who doesn't like it can fuck off and die. Earth will become a nature-worshipping paradise, humans WILL be mutated into blue space elves, because that's what our superiors decided was best.

It's seriously hilarious that you don't see this

Simon tried explaining to you why you can acknowledge industry and technology is good for humanity while also not imposing your only just and proper way of life on others because they think differently.

Part of my dislike of the Na'vi does come with how contrived their perfect little "nature" society is, when it's clear someone put a lot of effort into designing an entire ecosystem for them to live their perfect lives in. Especially when they act judgemental towards us for not embracing the natural world that tried to kill us over and over again.

So what if they're judgemental? It's their world. If you neighbor is a hippie who spends his time listening to Native American music and protesting development projects, are you also going to say he's a prick who deserved to get his skull bashed in by strikebreakers?

People's jobs are at stake, after all!

If the humans in this universe could create arbitrary amounts of electrical power, why do they need room temperature superconductors at all? They could tollerate any ammount of energy loss from the grid because they would have an infinite amount to pump into the grid. The humans in this universe obviously don't have infinite resources, and we see that they've actually got so few that they can barely feed their population. There are repeated references to malnutrition among most of the earth population, and despirate attempts to keep the machines working to provide even the meger sustainance that they are currently managing. Their options at this point look to be "get more resources" or "live within our means". Unfortunately "live within our means" in this situation means "let billions of people starve to death so our population gets down to a more manageable number". And even that might not solve the problem if the lost labor force means they still can't produce enough to feed the people who are left after they nobly starved to death so the blue space elves wouldn't be inconveninced.

The Na'vi don't talk to humans, remember? That was one of my major complaints about their supposed moral superiority. They aren't listening no matter what is being said. The people who actively give their lives to save their sorry asses are the same ones they kicked out prior to the start of the movie. They don't listen to Jake when he says "those guys are going to blow up your tree, you should get out of it before it's too late", so why would we expect them to listen to a complicated explaination about a resource and population problem? Heck, attempting to explain it seems to have made human Na'vi relations even worse. Witness "they killed their mother" being repeated a few times.

(bolding mine)

Seriously, dude. Did you watch Avatar, or some other movie?

Like I said, it's a fundamental moral disagreement. You don't think there's ever a justification for violating the property rights of a legitimate owner. I think there are situations where that is indeed justified.

Perhaps there is, but you still haven't shown this was the case here.

Also, "heavily armed military guys were scared of Quarritch and therefore are blameless". You sure are lucky that you didn't have to defend yourself at Nuremberg, man

[Shroom Man 777]

I have been to a cinema and seen that material in the film (in glorious Imax 3D in a gallery not less) It's in the extended cut.

It's therefore fully canon.

So, mind you, is the idea that it's a room temperature superconductor.

What is fully canon?

[NecronLord]

The stuff about the school is not 'out of movie' it's in the theatrical extended edition & thus canon.

[Cesario]

I can't help you with the mindset of military wankers. The Na'vi culture is repulsive entirely on its own merrits.

The fact that you need to declare that the situation in Avatar is "totally different" means you think the answer to my scenario is that there is some justification for my hypothetical behavior, and you don't want to admit to that in the face of the paralells, so you just won't admit that there's justification, and then you'll move on to talk about how it's totally not the same thing anyway. Got you.

As I understood it, the point of bombing hometree was twofold. One, because richer sources mean you don't have to use as environmentally destructive of mining methods, and two because the Na'vi don't quite grasp that we litterally could wipe them out without effort, and until they realize the technological disparity they're up against, they're going to keep trying to kill our miners until the folks back home run out of patients with people sent home in body bags by the blue space elves. And you know what? If mighty whitie hadn't intervened and rallied the Na'vi, the movie makes it quite clear that the message would have gotten across.

You think they engineered the Avatar bodies because it was more convenient? After all the talk about how impossibly expensive and difficult they were to make, you still think anyone in their right mind would pick that option before the "put on a gas mask, you idiot" option? Like all the miners were actually using, I'll note. No, the Avatars were an attempt to be accomodating to the Na'vi's racism, which manefested in numerous ways throughout the film. That is how far out of their way humanity had already gone to get these people to sit down and talk to them.

As to the trailer, you clearly missed the line where Jake remarks explicitly that the Na'vi are now letting Grace and her people come back to the school.

Please try to separate out what points I'm actually defending in a given block. I'm defending the chemical weapons because they're being used to minimize Na'vi casualties in light of the firebombing that is coming, not in and of themselves.

It seems like an aweful coincidence that the major mineral deposit is right under the huge tree that the Na'vi make their homes in. Maybe this is again just God dicking with humanity trying to force them into being the bad guys, but otherwise it seems more likely that there's some causation there one way or the other between the tree and the mineral.

Also, note that the Na'vi were shooting at humans before they sent bulldozers to their population center. The population center was considered the better choice because the Na'vi were reacting with violence whereever they put the mine. If there was a place they could have mined without facing Na'vi shooting at them, I find it hard to believe they wouldn't just mine there instead of building the fortifications and hiring military personel for security. There's only so much stupid I can believe, especially when it is directed oposite the path of greatest profit.

[PeZook]

First of all, learn to quote properly.

As I understood it, the point of bombing hometree was twofold. One, because richer sources mean you don't have to use as environmentally destructive of mining methods, and two because the Na'vi don't quite grasp that we litterally could wipe them out without effort, and until they realize the technological disparity they're up against, they're going to keep trying to kill our miners until the folks back home run out of patients with people sent home in body bags by the blue space elves. And you know what? If mighty whitie hadn't intervened and rallied the Na'vi, the movie makes it quite clear that the message would have gotten across.

Where the hell do you get this idea that Selfridge wanted to tear down the tree because it would be more environmentally conscious?

Please try to separate out what points I'm actually defending in a given block. I'm defending the chemical weapons because they're being used to minimize Na'vi casualties in light of the firebombing that is coming, not in and of themselves.

No. Just...no. They were a token attempt to make the attack look like it was humane. Quarritch fired the gas, then no more than thirty seconds later firebombed the fuck out of the tree. If police fired tear gas into a crowd, and then fucking machinegunned it half a minute later, would you really be saying with a straight face they were being humane and reasonable?

The tree was doubtlessly still full of civilians and their belongings when it was burned down.

It seems like an aweful coincidence that the major mineral deposit is right under the huge tree that the Na'vi make their homes in. Maybe this is again just God dicking with humanity trying to force them into being the bad guys, but otherwise it seems more likely that there's some causation there one way or the other between the tree and the mineral.

It's too bad Selfridge didn't care. He didn't even care what the scientists were finding out about the biology of the forest, despite the fact they doubtlessly published a fuckload of papers on it, and pretty much HAD to write reports to him since Selfridge was, you know, their boss.

Selfridge didn't give a fuck about the enviroment of Pandora, he didn't give a fuck about Na'Vi attitudes and culture or religion (he dismissed the destruction of an "incredibly holy site" as "you can't throw a stick around here without hitting some sacred fern!"). How the hell can you negotiate with people if you hold their entire culture, way of life and religion in disdain? When you think they're being unreasonable because they don't want to leave their ancestral homes in exchange for roads and English?

Also, note that the Na'vi were shooting at humans before they sent bulldozers to their population center. The population center was considered the better choice because the Na'vi were reacting with violence whereever they put the mine. If there was a place they could have mined without facing Na'vi shooting at them, I find it hard to believe they wouldn't just mine there instead of building the fortifications and hiring military personel for security. There's only so much stupid I can believe, especially when it is directed oposite the path of greatest profit.

The extended edition of the movie mentions the RDA machinegunning kids at the school because a Na'Vi who vandalized a bulldozer ran there. It's really transparent you're just doing the utmost to paint the locals in the worst light possible by not mentioning this little incident.

Do you think America would react any better if a bunch of cops machinegunned Arkansas kids in a school because a vandal ran inside?

[Shroom Man 777]

The stuff about the school is not 'out of movie' it's in the theatrical extended edition & thus canon.

Can you, or anyone, tell me what exactly is in the extended edition that wasn't in the original edition?

The fact that you need to declare that the situation in Avatar is "totally different" means you think the answer to my scenario is that there is some justification for my hypothetical behavior, and you don't want to admit to that in the face of the paralells, so you just won't admit that there's justification, and then you'll move on to talk about how it's totally not the same thing anyway. Got you.

Uh, the fact is that you have to interpret Selfridge's comment on the monetary value of uobtanium to somehow mean that it is vital to the survival of the Earth in order to make your life-saving blood transfusion/the needs of humanity outweighs the needs of the blue people argument even remotely work?

Like PeZook told me, Not only "earth is dying" is a GREAT argument to make Grace shut up, it's also a great and natural way for the screenwriter to set up this fact. So if it was true, Selfridge would've just said so.

As I understood it, the point of bombing hometree was twofold. One, because richer sources mean you don't have to use as environmentally destructive of mining methods, and two because the Na'vi don't quite grasp that we litterally could wipe them out without effort, and until they realize the technological disparity they're up against, they're going to keep trying to kill our miners until the folks back home run out of patients with people sent home in body bags by the blue space elves. And you know what? If mighty whitie hadn't intervened and rallied the Na'vi, the movie makes it quite clear that the message would have gotten across.

I know what the demented rationale of the RDA mercenaries were going for in their "shock and awe" campaign. To subdue the Na'vi by not only destroying their homes, but also by depopulating them and thus demoralizing them in a supreme act of violence.

I don't know about the extended edition, but in the movie I saw, people only started dying when the RDA started blowing the shit out of the Na'vi.

You think they engineered the Avatar bodies because it was more convenient? After all the talk about how impossibly expensive and difficult they were to make, you still think anyone in their right mind would pick that option before the "put on a gas mask, you idiot" option? Like all the miners were actually using, I'll note. No, the Avatars were an attempt to be accomodating to the Na'vi's racism, which manefested in numerous ways throughout the film. That is how far out of their way humanity had already gone to get these people to sit down and talk to them.

And guess what, the humans still shat on that by their monomaniacal desire to destroy the Na'vi's homes and turn it into a pit mine.

As to the trailer, you clearly missed the line where Jake remarks explicitly that the Na'vi are now letting Grace and her people come back to the school.

My mistake, I thought the trailer was the school. I guess Jake might've made them rethink their idea of the humans as two-faced conniving people who only came there to, you know, destroy their homes and force them from their land.

Please try to separate out what points I'm actually defending in a given block. I'm defending the chemical weapons because they're being used to minimize Na'vi casualties in light of the firebombing that is coming, not in and of themselves.

The firebombing came within moments after the chemical weapons. That's like, defending the use of tear gas to disperse a crowd, before opening up on them with machineguns mere seconds later.

It seems like an aweful coincidence that the major mineral deposit is right under the huge tree that the Na'vi make their homes in. Maybe this is again just God dicking with humanity trying to force them into being the bad guys, but otherwise it seems more likely that there's some causation there one way or the other between the tree and the mineral.

Was there also a huge tree full of Na'vi in the mining area the RDA was already using? Were there giant treefulls of Na'vi in all the other deposits, some of which had so much unobtanium that they freaking flew off into the sky?

The Home Tree was convenient and economical. And that's what the RDA wanted.

Also, note that the Na'vi were shooting at humans before they sent bulldozers to their population center. The population center was considered the better choice because the Na'vi were reacting with violence whereever they put the mine. If there was a place they could have mined without facing Na'vi shooting at them, I find it hard to believe they wouldn't just mine there instead of building the fortifications and hiring military personel for security. There's only so much stupid I can believe, especially when it is directed oposite the path of greatest profit.

Maybe those other places where they could've set up shop without upsetting the natives were also further than the Home Tree and also not gifted with as large deposits.

Faced with the option of going for further away mines with smaller deposits, and murdering people for a more convenient mine with a bigger deposit, well... it's not like people haven't done this sort of shit before.

[Shroom Man 777]

Anyway, the morality of the Na'vi isn't the topic at hand. It's about great Pandora Making aliens coming in to make us "better", by also turning us into the nature-loving tree-hugging worldsoul-communing blue people these guys so despise and abhor.

Also, transcendentalist interpretations of Hinduism and Buddhism with the mind-souls of peoples being subsumed in the worldtree for the metaphysical process of rebirth and reincarnation via the interlinked parapsychic meta-ecosystem of the remade Earth.

And, for added irony, the Pandora Makers thinking exactly like these guys in "enlightening" the human savages. Not by blowing up our home trees, but by fucking mutating and ascending our entire planet into an entirely different form.


BTW Strak, I think we can also talk about how people siding with XYZ asshole factions or ABC goody-two-shoes showing some kind of behavioral parallelisms. Guys who are all going might makes right or survival of the species or blue people are savages or Alderaanians should've gotten out of the way of the landing shuttle are using the same arguments, and thinking the same way, as the guys they're rooting for. I'd like to hear your thoughts on that, caps or no caps.

I think Avatar, and what it brought out in folks who reacted viscerally to it (either positively or negatively) by touching on the whole fundamental "imperialists versus natives, etc." thing that everyone can relate to (either in the side of the natives getting their asses oppressed, or imperialist assholes), is one of the great things about the movie.

[Starglider]

You have in your mind this idea that industrialized life is better, and therefore the humans can lookd down with disdain on the primitive savages who don't know any better, and that's exactly the attitude the Pandoramakers would have towards us if Avatar 2 was made how the OP described it: they know better. Any human who doesn't like it can fuck off and die. Earth will become a nature-worshipping paradise, humans WILL be mutated into blue space elves, because that's what our superiors decided was best.

Ah, but the only way they could have that power is if they themselves went through the whole process of industrialisation and scientific/technical advancement. It's true that on the far side of that process you have both great power and the luxury of messing about styling yourself as an environmentalist without risking your survival or giving up any luxuries. We see that with first-world car-driving Internet-using supermarket-shopping environmental activists now, although not with our civilisation as a whole. The magical space bugs in this scenario almost certainly went through a phase of building ramfanscramjet killcopters and are probably driven to make Pandoras by a deep abiding species-guilt about the genocide of the neon cockroach people of Cetus IV. So you cannot in fact reverse the scenario of nature-is-best vs industrialisation-is-best without invoking an even more developed and powerful industrialisation with the power to enforce the reversal as a mere hobby. I would say that if you hold to might-is-right in the first place, this is just a further validation of the philosophy; in Avatar humanities might was sufficient to invade and exploit another planet. In Avatar 2 we lose, but look, if we manage to industrialise and advance to space bug level we could trivially rearrange planets and remake species for our own amusement! Something to aspire to...

[Shroom Man 777]

The Pandora Makers can bypass that and give us an idyllic situation wherein we won't need to go through the tears, sweat and blood of megaindustrialization by forcefully mutating our planet into a Pandoran utopia and by taking those worthy, and surgically remaking them into blue space elves, while devolving the unworthy into miscellaneous flora and fauna doomed to the cycle of death and rebirth until their karma is cleansed and they can rejoin their purified brothers as blue space elves, or become one with the world-soul.

[Starglider]

The Pandora Makers can bypass that and give us an idyllic situation wherein we won't need to go through the tears, sweat and blood of megaindustrialization by forcefully mutating our planet into a Pandoran utopia and by taking those worthy, and surgically remaking them into blue space elves, while devolving the unworthy into miscellaneous flora and fauna doomed to the cycle of death and rebirth until their karma is cleansed and they can rejoin their purified brothers as blue space elves, or become one with the world-soul.

Or at least, that's what the tribal elders tell the children when they ask how the world was made. In the last two minutes of the film we find out what actually happened; the super-advanced aliens were actually the Reapers and they made Pandora as a honey-pot trap to detect civilisations that advance to having interstellar travel, and that they actually exterminated everything on earth and all the human-Navi are actually uploads running in a VR in a secondary processor of a giant cyborg laser space crab.

[Starglider]

Actually the above is considerably more plausible than your ending. After all, if the benevolent aliens actually cared about the Na'vi they would have left some defences behind. The Na'vi could have gone to the Hall of Thor's Might and prayed for deliverance and the teleport beams from ultrastealth magic-satellites would have made the horrible killcopters all vanish away. No such things existed though, proving that the magic space crabs are at minimum completely negligent parents.

[PeZook]

Actually the above is considerably more plausible than your ending. After all, if the benevolent aliens actually cared about the Na'vi they would have left some defences behind. The Na'vi could have gone to the Hall of Thor's Might and prayed for deliverance and the teleport beams from ultrastealth magic-satellites would have made the horrible killcopters all vanish away. No such things existed though, proving that the magic space crabs are at minimum completely negligent parents.

Way to miss the point

It's not about plausibility, it's about examining people's attitudes. Just like War Of The Worlds was (supposed to be) for Imperial Britain.

We never posited the Pandoramakers actually care that much about Pandora. To them it's just a laptop/hobby project/amusing ant aquarium and they are annoyed that it was wrecked.

Ah, but the only way they could have that power is if they themselves went through the whole process of industrialisation and scientific/technical advancement. It's true that on the far side of that process you have both great power and the luxury of messing about styling yourself as an environmentalist without risking your survival or giving up any luxuries. We see that with first-world car-driving Internet-using supermarket-shopping environmental activists now, although not with our civilisation as a whole. The magical space bugs in this scenario almost certainly went through a phase of building ramfanscramjet killcopters and are probably driven to make Pandoras by a deep abiding species-guilt about the genocide of the neon cockroach people of Cetus IV. So you cannot in fact reverse the scenario of nature-is-best vs industrialisation-is-best without invoking an even more developed and powerful industrialisation with the power to enforce the reversal as a mere hobby. I would say that if you hold to might-is-right in the first place, this is just a further validation of the philosophy; in Avatar humanities might was sufficient to invade and exploit another planet. In Avatar 2 we lose, but look, if we manage to industrialise and advance to space bug level we could trivially rearrange planets and remake species for our own amusement! Something to aspire to...

I suppose you do have a point that the warmongering xenocidal lunatic might, if he's honest with himself, see the Pandoramakers as completely justified and in fact an example to aspire to. Fortunately most people, even if they are instinctively inclined to worship the killcopters and ooorahooah human marines, are not actually total scum, which is evident by the fact that they will not outright come out and state it's the right of anyone powerful enough to abuse anyone not powerful enough to resist, but have to invent justifications like OMG NA'VI RACISM.

[Shroom Man 777]

Or OMG EARTHSURVIVAL.

Yeah, terribly, it's a mark for them that they have to invent rationales to justify the RDA's abhorrent behavior towards the natives. Now imagine a person who wouldn't need to lie to himself to justify horrible things in order to sleep easy. That man would truly be great.

[NecronLord]

The stuff about the school is not 'out of movie' it's in the theatrical extended edition & thus canon.

Can you, or anyone, tell me what exactly is in the extended edition that wasn't in the original edition?

A whole bunch of stuff, the thing that's relevant to this conversation is that the reason for the Ometicaya issuing a kill-on-sight order for humans is that the humans machine gunned the school with their children in it.