#The Sarentu would have mixed feelings about this

[sutxdreamwalker]

Ok, three words

Recom Aha’ri Au

That is all thank you

[nyrtopia]

Because there's SO LITTLE of my bf Teylan,

Could we pretty please have some dating headcanons with Teylan 💜🫶

Of course I can, Teylan is so underrated and one of my favorites. :]

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ﾟ。 Dating Teylan ✉

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Teylan x Gender Neutral Reader | Avatar Frontiers of Pandora | Fluff

➛ His favorite place to kiss of yours, is your wrists. Not sure why, he enjoys paying attention to the weakest parts of your body.

➛ When you go on missions, Priya literally has to PULL him away from the communication device. Or else he'd be buzzing in every 5 seconds making sure you're okay.

➛ He is really self conscious, after everything with Mercer he has issues trusting that you truly love him.

➛ Thus coming to his love languages: Words of Affirmation and Physical Touch. If he could hold you forever, he would.

➛ Since he doesn't have an Ikran (yet) he often goes out looking for Berries to bring you. Or he'll trade something with one of the cooks so that when you come back you'll have something delicious to eat!

➛ He absolutely worships the ground you walk on, he truly feels like you're his saving grace. He always felt out of place with the Sarentu, but you made him feel as if he was the only Na'vi on Pandora.

➛ You two have matching warpaint, it's a mix of Sarentu & Your Clans colors!

➛ He is always talking about you around the resistance camp, whether it be to Ri'nela when she's teaching him how to craft arrows. Or Raj when he's looking at new gear.

➛ He is respectful of all your boundaries, he himself has some so he is easy to understand how you feel. All he wants is that you're comfortable within the relationship.

➛ Hand kisses!!!

➛ You taking him for rides on your Ikran, he's never flown before so he's nervous. But he's thankful that his first experience on an Ikran was with you.

➛ Always calling you “tanhì” or “ma’tanhì” which means star / my star. Because no matter what he will always follow you home.

➛ You always tease him by stealing his hat, although he thinks it looks way better on you than it does on him.

➛ You help him understand the Na'vi traditions by telling him stories, taking him to new places, introducing him to your clan (if you're not Sarentu.)

➛ If you're Sarentu you'll sing your people's songs to him when the two of you are alone. Before, he was scared he'd lose that part of him. But you're always there to remind him it's not going anywhere.

➛ When he goes for walks around Pandora, he always picks the most beautiful assortment of flowers for you. Your favorite too, he remembered after hearing you talk about it during dinner.

➛ You're his protector, mostly in the beginning when he's new to Pandora. But as he becomes more comfortable you two protect one another and things become balanced.

➛ He's less afraid when he's with you, he doesn't feel the need to be someone he isn't or to succumb to what others want him to be. He's just himself with you.

➛ The courting process was so sweet, he was very intentional when it came to his tactics. If you needed something but wasn't sure how to acquire it, he'd search high and low to be able to gift you what you needed. His favorite gifts to you were handmade bracelets, he learned to weave from one of the Aranahe weavers. They taught him when he went to visit their hometree.

➛ Ri'nela is so supportive of your relationship, she saw how Teylan was alienated from her and the other Sarentu. She's glad he finally has someone who truly cares about him, and isn't just manipulating him like Mercer.

[godidontevenknowwhat]

Track me down

Eetu x Sarentu!Reader (Romancing Pandora 2024 Day 4 - Predator/Prey)

A/N: I'm so sorry I feel like this sucks ass, I love Eetu like he might genuinely be my favourite rn but I could not get flowing with this

Tagging: @eywaite @neteyamsyawntu

Synopsis: After you help Eetu give his Ikran, Zomey, the heartfelt goodbye she deserved he feels a bond with you that can't be compared to the members of his own clan. He offers you whatever he can including hunting and tracking lessons to help you in your fight with the resistance against the RDA.

Fic Includes: NSFW so MDNI! Eetu being a little shit, teacher/student dynamics as well as predator/prey dynamics, brief dry humping, fingering, squirting, Eetu being kind of condescending but in a sexy way, minor breeding kink mention, minor male masturbation, 2.9k words

You’d been on a constant journey of relearning since being broken out of the RDA facility you were raised in by So’lek and his team from the Resistance. Relearning your instincts, your clan’s history, your home and yourself. 

Becoming close with Aranahe was one of the things that really helped you on this journey, mostly because the Aranahe introduced you to Eetu.

Eetu was complex and exciting, he thrived in the forest in a way that you only wished you could grow to emulate and taught you more in your brief time together than you could have imagined. His energy was infectious, bored by the traditional and seeking action through every action with his Ikran Zomey. You found that to really get along with Eetu, to break through his walls and become, dare you say, friends, you had to find a game to play with him and if you did that and if he liked the way you played.. He would open up.

You suppose that’s why when he was ready to say goodbye to Zomey, the one person he wanted to be there with him was you. To this day you still feel nauseous at the smell of fortune’s fruit, a guilt that you can’t shake making your stomach turn despite the reassurance from Eetu that you had nothing to feel guilty about. 

It was later that day over a shared meal of some spiced hexapede meat hunting and prepared by himself that Eetu had offered his help to improve your hunting and tracking skills, something he’d expressed boredom about previously as a stranger but now as a friend he was eager to propose. You had accepted his help more than eagerly, knowing deep in your heart that you needed his help more than anyone else’s.

Sweat beaded on your forehead as your light steps drifted along the forest floor, Eetu had taught you quickly how to lighten the impact of your feet on the ground to make your approach borderline undetectable on hunts. It wasn’t a particularly hot day on Pandora but the pressure of wanting to succeed and even more to impress Eetu made your skin burn hot. The small, loose hairs that escaped your tied back hair clung to whatever damp skin they touched instantly and made your skin itch with the tickle of constant contact.

As you crouched over the last remaining footprint in the trail Eetu had left you, on purpose to make tracking him easier, you resigned yourself to attempting to pick up his scent in the air. It seemed your Karyu was playing games today, trying to make the hunt more challenging. You quickly caught his scent in the air, he always smelled like a mix of sweat from the physical exertion of hunting and the nectar from swamp hives, something he used in the polish he made for his bows and knives.

Following the scent trail of your Karyu proved easy enough once you caught it but before long you came to a riverbank where the scent began to dissipate. Suspecting Eetu had used the cover of water to hide his scent, you approach the edge and crouch down to search for signs of disruption in the mud. There’s a heavy silence in the air only broken by the flowing river, running your fingers along an odd break in the mud of the river bank you try to look for a matching disturbance across the water when a sudden, sharp tug on your kuru makes a choked gasp escape your throat and the unmistakable feeling of a cool blade pressed against the delicate skin of your neck causes your back to tense with the tension of a well strung bow string. 

“If I were RDA, you would be dead already taronyutsyìp”, the sound of Eetu’s voice immediately put you at ease despite the blade still pressed against your skin but it also caused irritation to prickle along your spine. He had tricked you. You hadn’t heard any sign of his approach until it was too late. That damn show off.

“You played unfairly, Karyu, purposefully making yourself harder to track.. the RDA are not that smart��, Eetu’s deep chuckle sent a shiver down your spine and a flush began to creep up on your cheeks from his remaining grip on your kuru, he was the only one other than yourself to touch that part of your body in a way that wasn’t meant to cause pain and every time it happened you felt shame at the yearning that stewed in your gut. 

You feel the heat from Eetu’s body surrounding your own as he crouches behind you, the muscles of his chest barely brushing against your back when he leans close to rest his chin on your shoulder. “You were doing well, I have to say, I was almost worried” the grip he has on your kuru is dropped and the knife against your throat is sheathed in his knife holder as he continues speaking “Almost, taronyutsyìp, until you turned your back and didn’t pick up me approaching you. Then I knew I had won, once again” the smirk on his face is unbearable and it makes you shake your head in annoyance.

“You cheated”

“Ah, Sarentu, your words wound me” you feel Eetu move away from you, leaving a chill from his lack of warmth. Quickly getting to your feet you watch as he makes his way back into the cover of the trees, his tail swaying with satisfaction that forces your next words out of your mouth uncontrollably.

“Let me try again, I want to win this time” 

Eetu’s ears twitch with interest as his feet stop their path ahead instead moving to turn his body towards you once again. His eyes roam your body from head to toe, taking the time to look you over as he thinks about your words before a large grin stretches across his face.

“Eetu, what-”

“10.. 9..”

He approaches you slowly, like a stalking thanator approaching its prey and it makes an unexpected thrill shoot up your spine. Your ears and tail betray you by standing straight up, showing straight away how intrigued you are by this little game and yet your feet remain stuck in place. Eetu’s brown raised, surprised at you standing your ground and he takes a purposefully large step towards you.

“8.. 7..”

You stare him down the closer he gets, a sudden confidence taking over you and a great need to make Eetu look as stupid as he makes you feel half the time.

“6.. 5.. 4.. 3..”

He’s close enough now that he could reach out and grab you if he wanted to, but you know him well enough by now to know that he won’t take the easy way out.

“2.. 1..”

Eetu lunges towards you, intending surely to push you into the river but you avoid him at the last second, crouching close to the ground and snarling at him in a playful take on an aggressive display. His grin widens as he nods to the forest, giving you the time to begin running before he can get to you.

You take off with a sprint, running as fast as your feet can carry you yet you can still hear Eetu close behind you. Your heart pounds in your ears and when you chance a glimpse back to see how much breathing space you have a startled yet amused scream bursts from your lips at the sight of Eetu so close. 

The impact of his body hitting your own makes your head spin almost as much as the sudden tumble you both take down the hill that you were trying to avoid while running away. Eetu quickly pulls you against him, pressing your face against his muscular chest as his thick arms circle you to protect you from as much impact as he can. 

Eetu lands on top of you at the bottom and you’re thankfully cushioned in the plush foliage of the forest as well as the soft muscular coils of his arms. You’re both panting from the exertion and the thrill of the chase, you can’t help but laugh at how ridiculous this is. 

You look up at Eetu, his hair is ruffled and despite the tumble a grin is still present on his handsome face. His eyes are gentle as they gaze into yours and he can’t hold back the fond thoughts that plague his brain about your beauty.

“You lose again, taronyutsyìp” You roll your eyes as you attempt to sit up, ready to bite back at him once again. This is your usual song and dance, tease, tease and tease some more until one of you ends it and you both return to hometree to eat together by the warmth of the fire. 

You shift underneath Eetu, hindered by the weight of him on top of you as he refuses to move.

“Eetu, get off you skxawng-” A sudden groan startles you and you freeze in place, looking up at Eetu with wide eyes full of concern at the thought of accidentally hurting him. 

Eetu fights a losing battle with himself, his attraction to you combined with the adrenaline of chasing you like he was hunting a nimble arrow deer had his cock harder than it had been since his teenage years and your cute little thighs unknowingly brushing it every time you tried to get more comfortable under him wasn’t helping in the slightest. Etuwa told him that he was a skxawng, that he should just say something to you and express his interest in you the normal way. But the adolescent rebelliousness still lingered in his brain and he knew that wouldn’t satisfy him, so he settled for teasing, being stupid with you and hiding his feelings behind condescension and sarcasm.

Your ears pin back in concern, hands reaching for his face to smooth back his hair as your eyes flick over every inch of him you can see in this position. A concerned whine rips from your throat before you can stop it and the desperation in the sound is enough to break Eetu’s strength entirely. May Eywa strike him down during the next thunderstorm for his selfishness.

Before he could talk himself out of it, Eetu kisses you with all the force he has, hands cradling your body so delicately that he could swear they weren’t even his own, unable to remember the last time his hands were used so gently. He waits for a bite, scratch, kick.. something that expresses your disgust at his actions but instead he feels your hands in his hair, encouraging him closer until his chest is pressed against yours and his arms are flexing with the effort of keeping his full weight off of you.

You have no time to worry about your kissing talents, your only experience with kissing being with Nor when you were still in your early teens. Eetu grips you like you’re the only thing keeping him present on the planet and you grip him just as tenderly. Every teasing moment, every grip and hit and stupid comment has been leading you both directly here. Eywa was clearly playing a game with you both, pulling your strings while you pulled each other’s.

Eetu pulls back as little as he can to allow you both breathing space and his head falls to your neck, the ache of his hard cock getting more painful the longer it’s forced to be confined in his tewng. His hot breath warms the skin of your neck and for a brief moment you feel the sting of tears filling your eyes, overwhelmed by how incredibly intimate this all feels. 

You feel his breathing match your own as you bask in each other’s presence and you think twice before breaking the silence.

“Thank you.. for making me feel like a normal na’vi”

“You’re welcome.. but you aren’t a normal na’vi”

An offended gasp escapes you and your hand comes down with a dull smack against the back of his head. His snickers fill the air as he pulls back to meet your eyes.

“You are not a normal na’vi” His eyes search your own, full of something you try hard to convince yourself isn’t love for fear that would make you delusional. “A normal na’vi would not make me feel like this.. make my heart pump with all the vigor of hunting a wild thanator, make my brain so clouded that all I can do is act like a skxawng..” A shaky breath rattles through your chest as Eetu drops his hips into your own, the unmistakable outline of his covered cock settling against your covered cunt, embarrassingly damp from his kiss. 

“I would never desire a normal na’vi the way I desire you” 

Your ears ring at his admission and you gape up at him like a fish out of water desperately trying to find the words to express your feelings and match the intensity of his own confession but all your brain can seem to muster is a shaky gasp of his name and a roll of your hips to meet his own.

Eetu groans at the pressure your movement causes, rolling his hips in return to be rewarded with a moan of your own. He rises onto his knees, pulling you with him to settle in his lap as he holds you. He feels the warmth of your cunt through both of your coverings, slick beginning to seep through and wet his thick cock where it sits inside his tewng. 

You feel Eetu’s fingers pressing into the skin of your hips and your own scramble for somewhere to hold as he begins forcing your hips to move against his own. Settling your hands on his shoulders, your sharp little nails dig into his hot skin leaving marks that you have no time to worry about at the current time. The feeling of his hard cock catching your swollen clit forces a sob of pleasure and frustration to rip from your throat, desperate to feel his burning skin against your own.

Eetu, sensing your frustration, quickly works to remove your tewng. Laying you back on the ground once again as soon as you're uncovered from the waist down. He double checks your comfort, looking you up and down as you lay back in the grass and he’s disappointed that this encounter won’t last as long as he’d like purely because of the location. He would love to play with the plump set of tits you hide behind carefully crafted chest coverings and he yearns to spend from sunrise to sunset with his tongue buried as deep as it can reach inside your flushed, dripping cunt.

Your swollen clit peeks out from between your pussy lips, your entire cunt covered in a shining film of your slick that continues to flow under Eetu’s wandering eyes. His rough hands grip onto your thighs, forcing your legs wider and squeezing the fat of them tighter when he hears the sweet little sound of your wet pussy slickly spreading for him. 

He keeps your left thigh in his grip as he brings his right to your pussy, two fingers tracing your entrance and collecting your slick to help ease them inside of you, immediately curling to press against the swell of your g-spot and his thumb rubs delicate circles into your clit. 

The pleasure is overwhelming, almost causing your legs to snap shut if it wasn’t for Eetu’s grip keeping them spread. His fingers hammer into your g-spot causing you to see stars, this was a feeling you had never been able to give yourself and you’re sure you could never replicate. 

Soon Eetu’s third finger slips in amongst his others without much resistance at all, you’d never been so soaked in your life and the squelching noises coming from your cunt was so obscene that it caused your face to burn from the noise of it. 

With a particularly rough rub of Eetu’s thumb against your clit you feel your mind go completely blank, your legs trembling as your hand slapped against your mouth to try and contain the high scream coming from you. Clear liquid sprays from your clenching cunt as you cum around Eetu’s fingers, wetting the length of his straining forearm with obscenely loud splashes. The string of moans each hit against your g-spot forced out was totally uncontrollable, his fingers seemingly moving lightning fast to keep you cumming until there was nothing left to force from your pussy.

Dragging his fingers from your pulsing walls he brings them straight to his mouth and sucks your wetness off with a feral groan. Cock twitching from neglect and interest at how incredible it would feel to have that same pulsing of your walls against him, he presses his hand against his covered cock to try and give himself some relief. The thought of emptying his heavy, full balls into your sweet cunt combined with the taste of your slick on his tongue is enough to make his eyes roll back in his head as his hand dips under his waistband and begins jerking himself to completion.

“Eetu..” His head snaps down and his eyes meet yours, his spit slick digits slipping from his mouth as he groans your name and his large rough hand strokes his hard cock as well as it can behind the constriction of his tewng. You’re stuck in place at the debauched sight, cunt still twitching with the aftershocks of such an intense orgasm.

“Want you inside me Eetu, please..”

[frogletscribe]

I finished the main story of A:FoP last night and I have more thoughts but don't want to spoil anything for anyone who is not there yet so im putting them under the cut again lol. Also a lot of this gets into like general Avatar lore things and not always specifically A:FoP. I just have a lot of thoughts and not a lot of people to talk to about it lmao.

Warning: this is very long, i am apologizing now if you choose to read the whole thing.

Spoilers for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora under the cut

TEYLAN oh my god my boy. He scared me so bad when he showed up again but I'm so glad he had a hand in stopping Mercer. It felt like such a moment of growth for him finaly setting himself free of his abuser. Poor guy feels so guilty about everything that happened, and I'm very nervous about whenever Nor comes back in future DLC stuff because he still doesn't know that Teylan 'betrayed' them. Especially after everything with Alma.

Speaking of Alma, I have somewhat mixed feelings about her story? Obviously the Sarentu have every right to be pissed at her, I am pissed at her, she used them (and honestly is still using them) to ease her own guilt. What bothers me is the "You will never be one of us" rhetoric? Mostly because it makes me think of Jake and the Sully kids (Lo'ak and Kiri specifically) who all are/look more like Avatars rather than Na'vi. It makes me wonder how the Sarentu would react to them? The situations are very different, Jake gave up almost everything that made him human to live as a Na'vi where Alma has stayed human, albeit unhealthily attached to her Avatar form. Jake worked to earn his place with the Na'vi where Alma is trying to take it from this group of children she has been lying to from the very start.

But more than that, her still talking as if she was a part of their family at the end made me so mad. I don't think Nor had a good reaction to her by any means, stabbing her was definitely not good, and it leaves all of the other humans scared of him but like,,, i'm on his side tbh. His anger is justified, he's just not coping with it in healthy ways. Like at least the Sarentu did shut her down, Alma is not a part of their family by the end, but giving her the grace they did at the end i think was more than she deserved. Idk, I am glad that they are able to be the bigger persons (pun not intended lol) and move forward, I'm just not a fan of forgiving a person who was partially responsible for the murder of your entire family?

Back to Nor. He is such an interesting character to have next to Ri'nela and So'lek. His anger is palpable and it has nowhere to go. He refuses to connect to Eywa again because he feels he has been poisoned by TAP and humans as a whole and it colors everything he does. He copes with his pain by ignoring it until it becomes too much and he snaps.

And then there is Ri'nela, who is also clearly hurt by everything that comes to light about the Sarentu and TAP, but she is so much more reserved about it. She has a really lovely audio log about how she feels the need to set her own emotions aside so she can take care of others and their emotions. You can really tell how much pressure she puts on herself to be that emotional stability for others. Still she works through it and at the very least tries to talk with the Protag about it in a much more healthy way than Nor does.

Compare that to So'lek, who is similarly reserved in is emotions to Ri'nela, but less to protect others and more to protect himself. Hopefully we will get a little more insight into his character with the comics coming out, but So'lek is i think very similar to Nor in a lot of ways. His clan was wiped out in the Great War, and he was the only survivor to not assimilate into another clan, and we can assume, i think, that those other survivors were most likely children and other non-warriors, either too old or unable to fight for whatever reason. He is entirely alone by choice, and he is angry, but he keeps it together.

So'lek sees the bigger picture, he knows that the resistance is the one other group that's actually fighting back (Besides Jake and the Omatikaya), even if its entirely a group of humans, who we can assume he is not terribly fond of in general. He makes a point of saying the RDA is what needs to be removed from Pandora, not humans. He knows how to separate his allies instead of generalizing 'all humans bad', something Nor is implied to struggle with at least a little. That is especially clear when So'lek calls Nor out after he stabs Alma. But that still doesn't negate how angry So'lek is and is capable of being. He says it after HQ is attacked, he is trying not to follow Nor and his rage. He knows that if he has that conversation with Nor, it will be very easy for him to let his rage consume him as well.

Given that Nor is pretty much gone from the game after he stabs Alma, I'm hoping that in the upcoming DLC we get to find him? Maybe he is being an angry loner out on the woods or if he has found other missing TAP students? There are 4 mentioned in game, either by name (Ri'nela asks where two of them, Telisi and Yefti, are at the very start of the game, and 2 more are mentioned in TAP School Records, Okni and Yuayt) Of course they could all have died while the main four were in cryosleep, 15 years have passed and if they werent with that group when Alma saved them, theres no telling what exactly has happened to them. I just think it could be cool for them to pop up and join back up with the Sarentu.

On, like, an entirely different note, the joy it gives me that there are multiple nonbinary characters! Ahh!!! I think right now the only ones are Tsu'kiri from the Aranahe and Okul from the Kame'tire, at least that I have found, but the way that they are handled, I really really love. They are both just people! Existing in the world! As a nonbinary person myself i also really appreciate the game using they/them for the protagonist and letting you flavor your character however you want so that you aren't locked into male/female like so many games tend to do.

Getting into less A:FoP specific and more general lore territory: Something else I found really interesting while digging around on the wiki is that Mokasa is not the Olo'eyktan? He is listed as Anufi's chief advisor, which made him a sort of stand in Olo'eyktan while she was exiling herself, but he isn't actually the Olo'eyktan the way Ka'nat and Nesim are for their respective clans. Even on the wiki, the Olo'eyktan for the Kame'tire is labeled as Unknown. At most we get Okul being named ? Tsakarem? Thats at least what I took from it. But it makes me curious about the other clans and their leadership (also just very curious about them in general lol). There are 16 clans that we know of (that are all still canon) but we really have only really in depth explored 6 of them in the whole series so far. (Just counting the movies and A:FoP right now because I do not have access to the comics or I think the like one? other games that is still canon) Idk im interested in more Olo'eyktan/Tsahik dynamics beyond just mated pairs like we have seen. Like the Zeswa sisters is really cool to me, or father/daughter dynamic with Ka'nat and Etuwa. Obviously, Jake, and later Tarsem, are not mated to Mo'at but there was the intention of Neytiri eventually taking over as Tsahik before the Sully's left, which would have continued the married couple leaders dynamic that we have been seeing.

We also know that Olo'eyktan don't always have to be men (See Nesim for the Zeswa and Ikneyi from the Tayrangi clan that we see in the first film), so then are there examples of male Tsahik somewhere? Okul being presumably named Tsakarem as a nonbinary/gender non-conforming character would imply that on some level, but im curious if we will ever see examples of it.

And finally, somebody has got to let me smooch the characters in this game PLEASE.

If you actually read all that kudos to you and thank you for indulging my screaming.

[prvtocol]

@rebelichor : Brianne Landry, Director of Science Operations and evidently a double-edged weapon that cut both ways. She helped, and she hurt. She was with, but she she was against. The Resistance based in the Western Frontier were wary about an alliance, given the immense presence of Security Operations and how much of a crisis any leaked intel would create. There had additionally been mixed feelings about engaging with a woman so high up in one of the Resources Development Administration's most secretive operations — their business was very much behind closed doors. Trust was lacking. On both sides, naturally. The meeting point was inside an abandoned research facility. The River Delta Station, Brianne would arrive by covert water transportation and as the only Sarentu bonded to an Ikran, Ariadne arrived on the outskirts of the marshes on the back of Katir. It was a brilliant location for the Director to choose. The Waterway Valley was more accessible, no sheer cliffs or difficult local weather patterns to navigate. Though there was also no Na'vi interference. Two outposts acted as a wall, a hydro injector neighbouring steam injector towers that guaranteed their privacy. Even though she had more of a diplomatic heart, Ahri would have been a fool if she wasn't even a little uneasy as she dismounted and gave a hearty pat to Katir's curious head. "Easy girl. Stay here, okay?" The throaty complaint of an ikran pierced the blanket of silence. Her arrival was hardly a secret now, though she felt prickles wash over her skin, as though she had already been watched. Unlike most abandoned facilities, this one had already been powered up again, and there was a faint scent that trailed in the air. It was with a crouch that the young Na'vi followed her nose into the small building, her tail sweeping and making contact with some of the equipment with a heavy thud. Her nerves were showing but she wouldn't admit to it.

The glitches of a dilapidated old computer console hold the director’s interest just as much as the overgrown potted plants at its side, but her snooping around the abandoned research facility comes to an end with the sudden awareness of another’s presence in the vicinity — the guttural chirp of a large animal hits her ears. Pin straight posture returns, elbows bending and hands folding softly at her front in nervous anticipation of the expected company to enter. 

Behind the perspex shield of her mask, bright eyes scan the blue features and bright accouterments donning the young Na’vi woman who enters, and slightly clumsily at that. The thud raises the eyebrows on her otherwise neutral facade, but they drop just as fast and a hint of a smile grows; not in amusement but in welcome. Always a woman packaged in polite formality.

That Brianne is mildly disappointed at the chosen interlocutor will not move her features, unlike the concern held with being confronted by someone twice her size. Her hands wring at her front in discomfort. Messages sent by an encrypted comm-unit were not enough for the Resistance here to agree to work with her. Still, perhaps she should have sent a proxy also rather than go it herself. Too late now.

“I was expecting the courtesy of making Dr. Cortez’s acquaintence since I understand she is in charge of the Resistance in these parts. And you, you are not her.” Unlike her posture's rigidity, her posh and accented voice is soft and melodic in its pacing with a put-on unaffectedness that pairs with her high position in the RDA. “But,” she continues less dull and with head canting and a closed-mouth smile stretching in hope to invite trust into the arrangement. “You must be someone just as significant.”

The desire to appear trustworthy might seem contrary to someone willing to betray her people. If Mercer was more sound of mind and SecOps less in control of HQ, maybe she wouldn’t be here — but witnessing her subdivision scramble to keep afloat their research objectives amid funding cuts and her scientists incessantly put at risk and losing their lives in the field results in drastic measures. She seeks not an alliance per se, but a mutually beneficial scratch of each other’s backs.

“May I assume you understand my language?” 

[nattikay]

ok, so here’s the Avatar addendum @arcadia-trash

So, I can understand why on a very surface level some people think Avatar falls into the “humans are bad” camp: after all, the main antagonists, the RDA, are a human faction. But I disagree. Avatar is absolutely saying that greed and apathetic overconsumption are harmful, and yes the group that representing those ideas happens to be a group of humans, but I don’t think it’s saying that all humans are inherently Like That, and it certainly isn’t advocating for human extinction. Yes, they force the RDA to leave, but emphasis on RDA, not humanity as a whole. The humans who were willing to respect Pandora were allowed to stay.

Speaking of which, if you actually look at all the named human characters, at least half of them…are actually part of the good guys. Jake, Grace, Norm, Max, Trudy, Spider…all humans who disagree with the RDA’s actions (sometimes right off the bat, sometimes after a character arc) and fight back against it. Frontiers of Pandora even gives us a semi-organized human Resistance of RDA defectors who have become disillusioned with the corporate propaganda and are fighting back.

Even among the actual bad guys there’s some variation. Selfridge, for example, certainly doesn’t respect the Na'vi, but also doesn’t seem to want to actively harm them…buuuuut ultimately prioritizes profit above all else. Quaritch, on the other hand…he’s actively itching for a fight, he sees the Na'vi not merely as an obstacle to the operation like Selfridge does, but as The Enemy. Both are bad, don’t get me wrong, but Quaritch’s villainy is more actively malicious, whereas Selfridge’s is more just…apathetic.

Then there’s kinda gray characters like Ian Garvin, the marine biologist. He does go along with the tulkun hunts (because doing so is the only way the RDA allows him to conduct his research), but he absolutely abhors the practice and turns to alcohol to cope with the guilt.

Avatar isn’t saying “humans are bad”, it’s saying “greed/overconsumption is bad” and use a corrupt faceless megacorporation as the vessel to represent those ideas. Not every human is aligned with the RDA, several of them actively hate the RDA and what it stands for.

I think the reason it sometimes feels like “humans bad, Na'vi good” is that while the human characters are a pretty mixed bag of good guys vs. bad guys, so far we’ve only really met good Na'vi (in the films at least), so there’s an imbalance there.

I do think this is something that will change in the future: we know that movie 3 is supposed to introduce us to a darker side of the Na'vi, and some of the non-film canon has shown us more questionable characters already: the comics give us Ateyo and Artsut, who attempt to assassinate Jake and frame their innocent son for it, and FoP gives us Mokasa, who sold out the Sarentu to the RDA, enabling their genocide.

There’s also the factor of that deleted scene from the first movie where Grace talks about how the Na'vi don’t have a word for “lie” and that they had to learn about the concept from us. Personally I’m very glad this scene was deleted because yeah that would definitely push into the boundaries of “humans bad, Na'vi good”…but, again, deleted scene, so it looks like they changed their minds there. plus while it’s true that the Na'vi language has no single noun or verb that directly translates to “lie” the concept is still extremely easy to express, plus they DO have words for steal, kill, betray, etc

and also the idea that the Na'vi would be incapable of even understanding the concept of deceit until the humans came in is lowkey insulting to their intelligence so um yeah deleted scene is deleted moving on

BUT yeah. Just because we haven’t seen much of the Na'vi being bad (in the movies) yet does not necessarily imply that they’re incapable of it or that they’re Just Better Than Humans the way Sweet Tooth treats the hybrids; in the case of Avatar it’s less a difference between species and more a difference between culture. Na'vi culture (at least, the ones we’ve seen thus far) values balance and honor, whereas RDA culture (which, again, not every human agrees with) values only power and money. There’s no special genetic factor that makes the Na'vi especially virtuous, they simply live in that sort of culture with those sort of beliefs—beliefs that any sapient species is capable of adopting.

Lastly, speaking of Na'vi vs humans, you might say, “but several of the Na'vi hate the ‘sky people’ and want them to go away!! Doesn’t that fall under ‘humans bad’?”

Well, not really. Yes, several of the Na'vi do detest the sky people, but can you really blame them given all the crap the RDA has done?

Like, let’s imagine the situation in reverse. Say a hyperadvanced alien civilization, let’s call them the Glorks, came down to Earth one day because they discovered we had a rare resource that they wanted. The main Glork Hypership shows absolutely no respect for this primitive species—I mean, they haven’t even discovered quantum string hyperflux amirite!—and when they discover a particularly rich deposit of their coveted resource under New York City, they bomb the whole place to the ground.

……yeah, I don’t think anyone would blame humans for hating the Glorks and wanting them to get the crap off our planet and go back to their own!!

Does that mean Glorks as a species are inherently evil? No. Maybe there are good Glorks who were horrified by the Hypership’s actions. But it’s still understandable that most humans want the Glorks to buzz the heck off.

…yeah that’s how the Na'vi generally view the “sky people”, and understandably so.

buuuuuut that doesn’t make this a “humans bad” story because just because many of the Na'vi dislike humans doesn’t mean the narrative presents them as universally uniquely evil. We the audience still see both the good and bad side of the humans and root for the good guys, just like in any other story.

of course, there’s still three more movies on the horizon, so it is certainly possible that Avatar might end up pulling a Sweet Tooth and get more nihilistic with the fate of humanity by the end of the saga. And if it does that, I will again be very disappointed.

But so far at least, I don’t think that’s been the message. A human faction happens to be the villains, but the story is not claiming that greed etc. is unique to nor inherent to humans as a species.

I just finished the last season of Sweet Tooth on Netflix, I gotta vent a little, warning that this post probably won't be everyone's cup of tea but I gotta say it somewhere. [there be spoilers for anyone who may care about that]

so I've been pretty invested in this show since the first season; yeah, some of the acting is pretty corny and some of the effects look a tad clunky (hello awkward Bobby puppet), but I still enjoyed the characters well enough and wanted them to succeed and also, hey, I'm a simple woman, show me cute animal-people and I'm hooked.

But....I've gotta admit that I really didn't care for the ending. Within the last three episodes of the show they pivot from "we've gotta find a cure for this virus to save humanity" to "actually on second thought humans are the REAL disease and their extinction is the cure" which........ewwwwwwww, no dude, keep your cringe nihilism to yourself k thx

And yeah, in the end they do stop the virus so the remaining humans can survive for a while longer, but all babies are still born as hybrids meaning "humanity" is going to die off within the next 80 years or so anyways.

and they try to dress this up as a great mercy, and they say oh, yeah humans have some good in them but it always comes with Bad, unlike the hybrids who got all the Good in humanity but also they're Better because they're part animal so all the Bad will die off with the humans and hybrids will live in peace forever and I'm sorry but I call bullcrap

Animals are not these great bastions of altruism and morality. Animals rape. Animals steal. Animals kill. Animals cannibalize. Animals eat prey alive.

Even the "oh but humans are greedy and want to take everything and upset the balance of nature" spiel. Buddy, contrary to what some environmentalist stories want to tell you, animals do not actually have a concept of "the balance of nature". That's why invasive species are such a big problem. Introduce an invasive predator into a region and several native prey species go extinct. Those predators don't have a concept of "conserving resources", they'll just keep hunting as long as they're hungry.

And it's not a problem unique to predators either. Remember when wolves were hunted to extinction is parts of the US and then the deer populations exploded and ate all the grass and the whole ecosystem kinda fell apart until wolves were re-introduced to the region? The deer didn't give a crap that they were eating all the grass. They weren't even consciously aware of it. They're not capable of conceptualizing abstract ideas like that.

Natural ecosystems have a balance to them because they're intricately designed systems, not because the animals that live in them are actively making Morally Right Choices to preserve them.

One major thing that separates humans from animals is that we have the capacity for morality. We have the ability to comprehend abstract concepts like freedom and conservation and honor and sacrifice etc., and with it the ability to make moral choices. We are capable of great good, and great evil. You cannot have the capacity for one without having the capacity for the other, because good and evil rest on your choices. Even if you go through your whole life doing only "nice" things, if you did those things because you had no other option, no say in the matter, are you really "good"? Good people choose to be so. I love animals and they're super cool and all, and yes some of them are very smart, but they are not really capable of making that choice (no, I don't care how much of an "angel" your dog is). They are amoral, neither morally good nor bad.

And the hybrids? It's clearly shown that they have the same capacity for choice as humans....which in turn means that yes, whether the narrative wants to admit it or not, the hybrids still have the capacity for evil just like the humans did. Giving them some animal ears or special powers doesn't change that.

Not to mention that all but one of the hybrids we've met are children. They haven't even hit puberty yet!! Of course a bunch of innocent kids are gonna look like sweet little angels compared to hardened desperate adults trying to survive an apocalypse holy flip! And just because Gus happens to be a particularly good person who strives to see the best in others does not mean that all other hybrids for the rest of time are gonna be the same! He's not good because he's part deer, he's good because he's Gus! Because he believes in good things and acts on it!

The one adult hybrid we briefly meet isn't a sweet little kid who sees the best in others, he's a grouchy old man who wants human genocide. And while I can totally understand why he as a character feels that way....that's not good dude!!!! That's not any better than the humans who want to kill the hybrids!

You didn't "remove worst of humanity and preserve the best of it" by replacing humans with hybrids. You just gave them a makeover.

Human/animal hybrids as a character concept are totally up my ally, I think they're very cool, but pretending that being part animal makes them inherently morally better than regular humans is just ridiculous imo.

tl;dr I just really hate the nihilistic "humans are uniquely evil, deserve to go extinct as a Punishment, and literally any other sapient species would be better" trope and I'm very disappointed that this show pivoted to that at the last minute.

[sutxdreamwalker]

The Sarentu gang and Avatar 2 kids being found family hcs

• If they were ever to meet they would accept each other as best friends/siblings

• At first the Sarentu would just be enjoying the joy and curiosity from the kids and then all mentally agree that they have to be the best siblings figures they can be

• The kids on the other hand would of course be curious of these Na’vi who have Na’vi mixed human clothing and who use Na’vi and human weapons

• But once they see their trusting and trying to be friends with them, they start to warm up

• Obviously Tuk would compliment their hair and little pieces they have on their clothing

• Lo’ak would ask about the humans they use while Neteyam would ask about the human weapons

• Of course the sarentu gang would question the five fingers Kiri and Lo’ak have but once that’s explained they completely understand

• And when they see how Jake acts as a not so good father sometimes they go into comfort elder sibling mode

• The sarentu and Lo’ak would get along more since the sarentu knows what it was like to be like a younger sibling so they bond over that

• And angst points when after Neteyam dies the sarentu would completely be there for Lo’ak and tell him it was not his fault and shared the pain by telling him about Aha’ri

• Kiri and Tsireya bond with Ri’nela more, with Tsireya and Ri’nela being both Tsakarem, then Kiri thinking she’s some freak with her powers but Ri’nela thinks it’s incredible

• Nor and Ao’nung having that big bother who is both a mentor and menace to younger sibling relationship

• Tuk bonds with everyone, she’s the baby, everyone loves her

• Rotxo being a possible only child is glad to have four chosen older siblings

• Teylan let’s Tuk braid his hair, with lots of small braids and beads

• Then there’s So’lek being the cooler dad is now a father of 12

• “I’m a single father of 12 kids” - So’lek

• the sarentu loves giving piggy backs for Tuk and every sometimes Spider so he could feel taller than everyone

• Neteyam would want to learn some tips with the bow from the sarentu and they would instantly agree

• So all 12 of them are the best found family any of them could ask for