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.
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?