HELLO! AND KEEP AWAY FROM CASTLE LEMONGRAB! A few days ago I made a handful of Avatar fans (blue Avatar, not bald Avatar) angry by joining Twitter's "this franchise has no impact on our culture" choir. I took a screenshot of AO3's fiction count for blue Avatar, which numbers somewhere in the 350's. I contrasted it with bald Avatar, which has over 37,000 works.
350 fics is absolutely nothing** for a franchise that's being pushed like blue Avatar. I bet the bald Avatar tag has more than 350 stories strictly about Zukko kissing the Cabbage Man.
More fool me. I learned that blue Avatar does indeed have its fans, and boy oh boy, are they ever proud of how much money their pet franchise raked in with the second movie. "It made a lot of money, therefore it is culturally important" is the most American take of 2022, but I understand the fans' triumph. It still doesn't drive me to care about Avatar, or Way of the Waterslide (even though I am a mark for watery settings), or the rest of it.
Fans or no fans, I still feel like I'm standing with the majority on this. The conversation about Avatar usually ends with "Yeah, it's boring" or "It's kinda dumb" or "Eh, it's a popcorn movie." Everyone is bristling for a fight on Twitter, but Avatar discourse never inspires much passion. Even the fans who chased me down were kind of toothless. What can they fight back with beyond "It's so pretty" and "It's just escapism" and "It made so much money?"
I like Cameron's movies a lot, but I'm not a religious follower of media outside the video game space. If someone told me "We got Avatar 2 instead of a new Terminator," I wouldn't get mad. I'm glad he has a passion project, and I always appreciate a fellow water-worshipper. His deep sea excursions are incredible.
But Cameron's talent doesn't erase my number-one problem with blue Avatar. It comes down to a big design flaw I call "Everything is Arcanine." Yes, it's a reference to Pokemon's Arcanine. I promise you'll understand in a minute.
Simply put, Pandora is too perfect. Its fans point out how beautiful the planet and its inhabitants look. Yes! Avatar is gorgeous! The terrain, the water, the people, the peaceful, luddite lives--it's all very attractive and appealing. But not every living thing is as over-produced as a PlayStation 3 cinema. Nature is pretty, yeah, but it's also ugly, cruel, and weird, which makes it fascinating. Even the most majestically-bred Arabian horse still rips huge horse farts.
The "Everything is Arcanine" flaw is something I encountered constantly during my days of reviewing Pokemon clones on mobile. Developers packed their monster rosters with the coolest monsters: Wolves crossed with dragons, demon cats, fiery birds, and the like. Problem was, not a single one of those monsters ever stuck in my head, nor did they make any sort of lasting impression before iOS 8 and/or iOS 11 wiped the games out forever. If every monster is cool, no monster is cool.
I get it. We all talk shit about Pokemon that are clearly evidence that "Game Freak is running out of ideas." Ice cream? Keys? Trash bags?? Is this even for real? But you'll never forget Vanillite or Klefki, and you'll definitely remember Trubbish until the day you die. My favourite "what the fuck" Pokemon is Pallosand from Gen 7, a literal sand castle that lures people to their deaths by encouraging them to pick up seemingly abandoned beach toys. As someone who used to scout shorelines for buckets and shovels, the very idea of being eaten alive by a fucking sand castle Pokemon will never, ever leave my brain.
So what's this have to do with Arcanine? For my money, Arcanine is the coolest Pokemon. It's strong. It's fast. It appears in the original opening for the Pokemon anime. It can breathe fire. It looks like a tiger and a lion crossed with a Tibetan mastiff. Arcanine is perfect in every way. He had near-legendary status in the first Pokemon game because Game Freak wanted him to stand out. And stand out he does, for reasons that are very different from the reasons why Pallosand lives forever in my memory banks.
Everything is Arcanine in Avatar. The Na'vi are lovely, sleek cat people who do not fit a single niche in Pandora's ecosystem, but I guess that doesn't matter. Why did they evolve alongside six-legged horses? It looks cool, that's why. Why are there hammerhead-elephant things wandering the forests? How do they even make sense in this ecosystem? Eat shit, they look cool, that's why.
Hey look, we're the Na'vi, we're reserved and pretty peaceful even though we likely evolved from an apex feline predator. That shit makes a lot of sense. Such a pity the humans are violent, bumbling fools. Too bad they don't have a literal neural network they can dial into to sense the emotions and thoughts of others. Oh, and we can control dragon-things with our carbon fibre hair weaves. Of course the dragons are ridable! Riding dragons across paradise is cool as fuck.
Nothing about Avatar, the Na'vi, or Pandora stick in my head. The property exists as an aqua-blue smear in my mind; nice, soothing, but formless. Nothing about the trailers piques my interest more than a commercial for a theme park ride. Everything is blue. Everything is pretty. Dragons are easily tamed, and weird ponytail sex makes instant, easy soulmates out of destined couples.
Oh, and according to some Wiki lore I pursued, Na'vi aren't placental mammals, but their babies still have belly buttons. It makes zero biological or evolutionary sense, but when I put on my Cameron Vision Goggles, I get it. Why address the more complicated, frankly life-threatening aspects of birth, though? That's not cool. All the blood, pain, tearing, and illness that comes with developing and delivering a placenta-nourished baby...ew. That's not the Na'vi way. The ponytails have sex, the babies are born (somehow) and they're connected to the Na'vi Neural Network. [Dial up sounds.] It's all very clean.
Goddamn I want to be a Na'vi. Who wouldn't want to skim over seas and fly through the air on massive beasts that can be commanded via a USB hair hookup? There's a Disney ride where you get to ride a dragon ("Banshee," apparently) through the biomes of Pandora. I want to do that! It sounds like an awesome theme park ride.
Thing is, theme park rides are fun to be on--not necessarily to watch. (Especially if you're the schmuck who gets nauseous when she turns around too fast and therefore is charged with watching everyone's crap while they go on the rides.) It's lovely to be a perfectly-sculpted, monster-riding cat person for three minutes at Disneyland. Watching that shit from the outside, though? Especially for three hours? Naaaah.
If you're going to build a world, build it. I want to know what animals live there, how they live there, and how they struggle to survive. I want to know how the sentient populations struggle to carve out an existence in a world where sickness and disease are always ready to pounce like tigers. I want to know how they fall in love and make babies, and I want to know what brings them joy during hard times. Give me all that dirt and grime, that grief and joy.
(I haven't even had a chance to acknowledge how the Na'vi are basically a mushed-up amalgamation of several hundred indigenous peoples' customs. Combine that with the hippy-dippy belief that said indigenous peoples are "one with nature." Sure is easy to be "one with nature" when you can plug your hair into nature's perfectly-bored asshole.)
Well, I've lost the thread. I think the point I'm trying to make is that Arcanine is the best Pokemon.
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**A couple of Avatar fans tried to rebuff my point about the franchise's dismal AO3 count by taking screenshots of the low fanworks counts for "fandoms" like The Count of Monte Cristo. They said, "Oh, I guess by YOUR metric, The Count of Monte Cristo isn't a classic, either!" That's just the funniest, most amazing shit to me. Good on you, Avatar fandom. Drag me.
