That comic also represents 100% of all survival crafting games, plus Factorio
Avatar is just recycled CGI Fern Gully anyway
It's a motif as old as time. Foreign invader getting Stockholm Syndrome with the natives. Another famous example is Dances With Wolves. That film called The Great Wall as well. Some versions of Robin Hood has it. Anthropologists call it Going Native, which is what Carlos Castañeda did.
But they're not all about economic expansionism
I saw the film in a theater with someone who wanted to impress upon me that someone pointed out to her how alike it was to what happened to indigenous peoples in the Americas (someone else had pointed that out to her, so she assumed I wouldn't get it on my own). I was like, if you think that's a novel observation, you really need to be hit in the face with concepts to understand things. It couldn't have been more obvious.
But maybe that highlights how much some people just aren't observant or introspective or whatever else. It would explain a lot.
That was not a subtle theme...
Yeah man, we all understood that the first time around when it was called Fern Gully.
Like Avatar if you want but like.... it is not a deep piece of media with hard-to-discern messaging. Shit is pretty clear.
One time I unmatched someone from a dating app because the second avatar movie was coming out and they said that it was weird of me to say that the alien people were supposed to represent Native Americans because "they're just blue aliens why would you compare them to real life?"
Apparently media literacy makes you a weirdo?
Yes it definitely makes you weird. Turn the brain off and consume the media like a good little sheep (/s if it wasn't obvious)
Fucking Tarzan was fighting evil white exploiters of pristine Africa in books back in the early 1900s.
A good white saviour from the evil white people, because the indigenous can't do it for themselves. Just like in Ferngully and Avatar.
Are there even any indigenous people in Tarzan? I haven't read the book, but from the movie I only remember his gorilla buddy and the little elephant. I think Tarzan is more about rebelling against civilization in general, instead of colonization in specific (which James Cameron's Avatar is). It's very post-industrialization in that sense.
Edit: Whoops, just read the synopsis on Wikipedia. I don't think Tarzan is the white saviour you're looking for...
I can't decide if I should post the "wait, it's all the failures of capitalism?" or "wait, it's all systemic racism?" meme, cuz it's wait it's all both (always has been).
Explore, exploit, exterminate.
Satisfactory music starts playing
Paved paradise, put up a parking lot.
It is also about settler colonialism. There are natural gas fields off the coast of Gaza.
Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.
Satisfactory
The factory must grow
I feel so bad cutting trees and draining lakes 😔
But your corporate overlords demand it, sadness isn't efficient, get back to work!
But really they did a great job with commentary. People still say "why can't we get green energy in the game?". Because that's not the point. This is raw capitalism. You're dropped on a pristine planet, destroy the environment, clear it of all natural resources. It's &meant_ to make you feel guilty. Maybe look around outside
Avatr is about capitalism
That wasn't glaringly obvious to everyone?
Thx. Thought I missed something
There's someone arguing otherwise in this very thread
Like, to absolutely everyone? This ranks up there with "breathing is good."
Well acschually oxygen is a corrosive chemical and probably damages your lungs (since that's the tissue that comes in most contact with it). And also the Great Oxydation Event is probably one of the greatest - if not the greatest - mass extinction of all times, so ...
you forget the kind of people who complain that wolfenstein games or the x-men animated series "became" political
Some people are dense enough that “the point” is the name of a baseball bat you have to go get to get it across.
It was also about the poor soldiers getting used to further capitalism.
Honestly, though…. That military wasn’t very credible. Half their aircraft you could disable by dumping buckets of pebbles into the fans.
That’s just Evil, if we build an industrial park there where will the
slavesforced laborwork bit*hes*Due to recent very public events our Public relations officer has been sent on leave with pay instead Nataly will complete this statement.
That’s just Evil, if we build an industrial park there where will the (Checks Notes) Employees park there cars?
So... We manage to master space travel. We manage to master interstellar travel. We eventually find a planet with suitable environment for sustaining our species. And we just overlook it.
Can someone explain me the reasoning behind this?
Sci-fi to the side, there are more minerals available - readily - on asteroids and barren planets than anywhere else. Why go hopping around looking for habitable planets, to the reason of 1 out of who knows how many, to then strip mine it?
I think there's a tendency to see inter- (and intra-)stellar travel through the lens of the inter-continental expedition and colonialism. It... kinda makes sense... superficially, there's some similarities; a voyage in a vessel, going to uncharted places, kicking off a new era of settlement and extraction. For this reason, movies and games really like the comparison, cus it makes for an easy narrative the audience is already familiar with.
In reality, though, nothing about space bares any similarity to anything in our past. Everything about the expeditions to, the colonizing of, and the industrial development and extraction of the Americas? All that was couched within the biosphere, contingent on it. Movies and media and junk get to ignore that because they exist to tell a story. So what if SciFi du jour doesn't actually make sense? Doesn't harm anyone, right? Except...
...except Musk and his fanclub really like describing Mars as the next colonial outpost. They'll tell you it's only a few short decades away! And I think that's cus they don't see where the metaphor falls short. To them, colonizing Mars is just the next thing that will happen in the narrative of history. After all, it's happened once - so it must happen again right???? They don't see the sheer wall of work and resources and work and decades (probably centuries, realistically) that would have to go into it. They don't think about anything more than a superficial picture on a screen. People needed boats to cross the Atlantic, we'll need rocketships. Now that they've got rocket ships, thats most of the work done. Afterall, in movies, you just need to get there. Then the plot can advance.
There could be many reasons:
- The thing you are mining is actually very rare, and although it could be elsewhere, it's the only place you found it. This is the case in Avatar. The Unobtanium they are mining is not found anywhere else.
- It's easier to mine on a habitable planet. You don't have all the extreme difficulty of operating in space or a planet/moon with no atmosphere. In Avatar workers can freely operate without any special equipment, using just a gas mask, and don't need to be astronauts.
- You are assuming they found Pandora to mine on it. They probably found it through scientific research, and the mining angle only appeared later when the resource was found.
Another important detail is that in Avatar they don't have any faster than light tech. Pandora is in the Alpha Centauri system, the closest star to the Sun, and it takes years to get there anyway. Sure, there might be lots of better places to choose, but it's literally the only habitable body in reachable distance from Earth unless you want to spend decades flying in one direction.
The resource being extracted on the avatar planet was unobtanium.
It was only available on that planet, precisely so intelligent people like you can’t say “why not mine barren rocks instead”?
This annoyed me also.
If the Avatar universe has physics like ours, which it looks like it does from the way things move etc..
The protoplanetry disk that the planet formed from, must have had the unobtanium, since it is so evenly spread around the later formed planet.
Yes, there are higher concentrations in various places, which could have come from impact events in the past; if this is the case the impactors are likely from the local asteroid belt or equivalent.
The unobtanium must be available, in a much easier to extract form, in asteroids in the soloar system or the moons of Pandora.
Either way, a mineral is a terrible maguffin for a space faring civilization.
In the second movie, the whale brain juice is a much better maguffin, but still kinda stupid for a technologically advanced species.
Assume that to get interstellar travel, with the suspended animation and brain beaming tech we are shown, humans are a good 200 years ahead of where we are now....given that they can also make fully functional alien bodies from scratch, that can breed and pass on genetic material to what look like viable offspring. The level of synthetic biology expertise must be insane, and they can't make this brain juice....it is just stupid.
Pandora was a moon, not a planet. (Doesn't change your point, just correcting the detail.)
There are exactly zero minerals available inside planets that are unavailable on asteroids.
Sci-fi will be sci-fi but can we go back to the time it was at least well thought? Can't hurt. If the objective of the movie was to make social criticism, it didn't need to go to such lenghts.
And it was a boring movie; failed to captivate me.
Tbf, the air on Pandora is toxic to humans. That was the entire point of using the avatars in the first movie... Wouldn't exactly call that suitable for sustaining the life of our species
And that material they found in the planet was some fictional things humans had never encountered before.
I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it.
- Jack Handey
Literally Satisfactory
I'm torn, because there's an idea that industrial capital only knows how to consume and destroy what it touches. And there's ample evidence to that effect.
But there's this other more naive notion that life never changes, species don't compete for habitat, and doing anything to alter the local ecology is this unforgivable sin. This, despite the fact that everything in the area is itself a product of eons of speciation and evolution and carnivorization.
The impulse to preserve has to be balanced with the expectation for change. The goal should be symbiosis, not stasis.
The issue is that you're changing the ecosystems and environments so much that all those eons of evolution are simply lost. The only other times this happens is during natural catastrophes. Sure, in the long run this allows new life forms to take the old ones places, but it's still a massive loss of diversity and evolutionary knowledge - and unnecessary suffering for millions of living beings.
When species compete for a habitat, they rarely destroy it - and those species that do either don't survive for long, or they wipe out large swaths. We're actively killing almost anything in our habitats, and destroying them for almost all previous species.
The idea that nature is precious and must be preserved is human-centric.
Trees caused an extinction event when they appeared by absorbing all the carbon dioxyde and radically changing the atmosphere. But we feel bad when we're the ones doing it
What do you mean? Communists didn't mine minerals and didn't exploit indigenous people? Lol..
I dont get it either. This is not about capitalism, this is about human nature of mindless expansion and exploitation...
"It's human nature," okay bud and what about all the groups in history that prove otherwise? You're just washing history with capitalist mindsets.
The word you're looking for is imperialism, and that's definitely not unavoidable human nature
That's right. For example, Australian communists lived in balance with nature for 60,000 years. Then capitalists came and started breaking stuff.
Does this imply communism wouldn't extract resources?
That's what I was wondering. Capitalists didn't invent exploitation of nature, it just so happened that its worldwide adoption coincided with unprecedented technological advances. There's quite a few examples of historical societies that exploited nature as much as they could and suffered for it.
Businesses under capitalism aren't required to pay for the externalities of their decisions. In a democratic economy, the people affected by corporate decisions would have a say in those decisions. It's reasonable to assume that people want to breathe clean air and continue to have food and water, so they'd support policies that do that.
Don’t forget about the part from the intro (might have been cut from the theatrical release):
They can fix a spine, if you have the money. But not from a VA check. Add $5 and you get yourself a cup of coffee.
Oh, they got whales? Let’s take their brain oil for eternal life!
The take on immortality in Avatar 2 is really interesting, because both sides get to have it.
spoiler
But on one side of the fence, you've got a familial connection that echoes through eternity with the spirits of one's family forever surrounding you and offering guidance.
On the other side of the fence you just have Eternal Employment, in which your immortal mind is a captive instrument for the profit of your masters.
One is this transcendent euphoric existence and the other is an allusion to hell itself.
The realization that we probably wouldn't change how we are make me a bit glad we missed the chance to be a spacefaring civilization and are screwed here. The universe didn't need that, one planet ruined is enough.
I've found peace recently thinking about our blue planet. We may cause chaos for a bit, but in the grand scheme, it'll be fine. The rivers will run, the oceans will be blue, plants and animals will eventually, over tens of thousands of years and longer will be fine.
Humanity is fucked, we destroyed our chances because we as a society could never get over our greed, but the problems we cause will be temporary. Over time the planet itself will heal. We just won't be here for it.
That being said, it's why I'm choosing not to have kids.
Difference being the colonists of our world left perfectly habitable areas. In avatar the earth isn't habitable to most and so the colonists are actually kind of sympathetic. The real bad guys never have to leave earth but because it's Cameron it falls on the poors to play the bad guys
Me landing on Gleba.
