- cross-posted to:
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
- thisisnotmylife@lemm.ee
- cross-posted to:
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
- thisisnotmylife@lemm.ee
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Avatr is about capitalism
That wasn’t glaringly obvious to everyone?
There’s someone arguing otherwise in this very thread
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)
That comic also represents 100% of all survival crafting games, plus Factorio
It’s true, but when I play games like Terraria, I try to preserve beautiful features of the map and even incorporate them into my builds. Like those surface cave things where it’s basically floating dirt/rock with grass and trees growing on them. I often make those into the entrances of underground homes. Same with the deserts. When you get the actuators, you can make sand entrances. I also enjoy making houses in the leaves of the living trees.
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.
Holy shit! Avatar is about capitalism? How did I miss that?! I better rewatch it and see if it’s a recurring theme.
It is also about settler colonialism. There are natural gas fields off the coast of Gaza.
There’s a lovely coast and trillions to be made.
Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.
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.
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.
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.
That was not a subtle theme…
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?
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.
You realized I just opted for having a divergent view on the subject, right?
It seems more like intentionally missing the main point of the comic.
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.
