What happens if Avatar: Fire and Ash doesn’t make enough profit to convince Disney to bankroll Avatar 4 and 5? Creator James Cameron has said he’s ready to walk away from the franchise, adding he’ll write a book to resolve the one thread Avatar 3 leaves open.
If the natives are outgunned and technologically outclassed, how are they to prevail without help from “the inside”? Otherwise it’s just a depressing plot about the natives getting overrun.
I’m having trouble thinking of a time when the natives were able to help themselves against colonizers. OTOH, guerilla warfare has worked pretty damned well in the last century.
Why is “it’s realistic” the line your drawing on a space colonization movie?
Your entire premise of “the natives are out gunned” is dripping with white colonization. Why are they always out gunned? Why not show them capable and holding their own and are helped out by “insiders”.
Its a fantasy story, and there’s tons of ways to do it without relying on the racist “natives are primitives” narrative.
Logically, any colonizer will only proceed if they out gun the natives. Otherwise it’s not colonization, but war. And even then in war, the attacker usually figures they have a significant advantage, or else they wouldn’t attack.
As if colonisers are in possession of perfect knowledge and logic.
Plenty of stories of wannabe colonisers eating shit because they underestimated natives, if the " historical realism" for some reason is important in a story about blue space aliens, draw inspiration from that why don’t you
Isn’t that pretty much how all fiction stories of these type actually play out? Much more than in reality, sadly.
Its fantasy, what does logic have to do anything with it?
Like it really comes across as “we can suspend reality, but so long as it’s still racist like us”
Well sure. But even fantasy needs to have internal logic to some degree of it gets stupid. If some colonizer attempt came and attacked, and the natives just wiped them out with superior tech, not only would it be unbelievable, but it would be a boring story. We can have the natives eventually victorious and avoid the ‘white guy saviour’ trope which certainly sucks. But for a good storey, they have to be the underdogs.
If you can’t tell a story without basing it off of racist stereotypes, maybe it’s a story that doesn’t need to be told…
Does it have to be racist? Societies progress in different directions, and when they collide it magnifies this. In the trope where white guys come is with bigger fire power, usually the natives win in the end based on spiritual superiority. Not a bad message really. And in fantasy, the ‘races’ are arbitrary. In avatar, if the corporation was all black people and the aliens looked very white, would it change the story?
There have to be some kind of rules or else there’s no tension. It must be realistic within the rules of the story.
Well, there’s Ethiopia, and uh… it’s a pretty short list.
(I’d also give an honorable mention to Haiti, although the oppressed people in that case were imported African slaves, not natives. By the time of the Haitian Revolution, the indigenous Taíno had long since been pretty much wiped out.)
Isn’t any territorial war won by the attacked party an example? Like, the aggressors never start being successful colonizers because they don’t win, but they would have colonized the land if they’d won.
It reinforces the idea that the only way we can understand meeting any new culture or group is through conflict … that one or the other has to overpower one another and win … that everything is automatically a contest of winners and losers.
We can’t imagine a world where we actually cooperate with one another and live in some kind of harmony. Partly because we as a species have seldom been like that and the other being that we find that story kind of boring. We prefer a world of constant conflict and fighting.
We also enjoy cheering for the underdog and listening to fanciful stories of them winning over the oppressor … the classic David and Goliath story … where the little guy gets to win. Only problem is, all throughout our actual human history, the big guy, the strongest and most wealthy always wins and destroys the little guy. It’s a fantasy we like to perpetuate to make ourselves feel good about the terrible reality we actually we live in.
The tech trees are a lot more balanced recently