History Headscratchers / AvatarCharacters

No drivers were shown to receive training in using mind link or taking proper care of the queue. Though friendly natives didn't teach them, chances are that humans' early technique was flawed and produced "handicapped" avatars with non-functional queues. Their divers didn't figure out what the queue does, nor did researchers even after this flaw is unwittingly fixed. Said flaw might be responsible for compromising Grace's life-saving mind transfer.

[[folder: How the hell did Tsu'Tsey know that Jake and Neytiri mated? Was is just simple implication based on the fact they went off together?]]

[[folder: Why did Neytiri never find out about Jake being paralyzed?]]

[[folder: Why didn't Trudy get reprimanded for ditching the assault on Hometree?]]

[[folder: Jake gets lost]]

[[folder: Trudy isn't wearing a re-breather while flying Rogue 1]]

[[folder: Jake's atrophied legs]]

[[folder: How did Norm get out of the uplink station after his avatar died? It was in the middle of a battlefield. He's not in there when Quaritch arrives.]]

[[folder: Did Jake make ''any battle plans''?]]

[[folder: Awesome as it may be, isn't it just too big a coincidence that the peaceful science division's issued pilot, Trudy, would also be sympathetic enough to the good guys to betray her allies, and then later fight and die for Jake's cause?]]

[[folder: Whither Lyle Wainfleet?]]

[[folder: Jake not being able to see stuff outside the frame.]]

[[folder: Jake goes from "touching everything that moves like a third grader" to "instant survivalist" overnight.]]

[[folder: Way to look delicious, Jake. Gawd.]]

[[folder: When did Norman learn to ride the direhorse?]]

[[folder: Why, oh why...]]

[[folder: Why would Dr. Grace, hardass scientist, chainsmoke in her own lab?]]

[[folder: Where the hell were they after they had sex?]]

[[folder: Again with the InformedAbility, Jake...]]

[[folder: Quaritch escaping the Dragon gunship]]

[[folder: Jake never makes a full confession]]

[[folder: Why don't we see Jake's fight with Toruk?]]

[[folder: Norm's Avatar]]

[[folder: How is Jake "better than the Na'vi at everything"?]]

[[folder: Where's the dragon?]]

[[folder: Whatever happened to Jake's first banshee?]]

*** Filters and CO2 scrubbers. Oxygen tanks would be completely redundant on a moon with almost the same O2 percentage as Earth.

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*** Quaritch knew he betrayed them and had heard about him hanging out with the chief's hot daughter, Jake's joke about "who has a date with the cheif's hot daughter" joke probably helped set the thought. The thought of soldiers betraying their country for "hot native tail" is TruthInTelevision, there were cases of sargents in Vietnam getting loose lips for a woman that knew how to clean their "weapon" was with them.

*** Of course, she could have just claimed some sort of technical failure occured so she needed to break off from the attack and return to base for repairs.

**** Word of God : "Major weapons towers at each apex provide heavy munitions defense against surface and air intrusions by large hostile Pandoran wildlife, while four smaller towers spaced along each side handle intrusions by smaller life forms, including burrowing attacks." from http://www.pandorapedia.com/doku.php/hell_s_gate . Why the helicopter wasn't gunned down by any of these towers is a major fridge logic moment IMO. Unless there's some schedule whereby the towers are disactivated at night too... But that's stretching my willing suspension of disbelief, even 6 light-years away.
***** They have IFF. Trudy's Samson would still have been recognised as friendly. Even if there WAS capacity to override it in realtime, she was already long gone by then.

** When all the Na'vi clans were gathering at the tree of souls, of course. Trudy meets the Na'vi, which is also where she gets her Na'vi jewellery from.

*** Exactly. I don't know if this is what the OP meant, but Jake didn't make an *apology*. At all. He took the time he should have spent warning Neytiri and her people and spent it trying to impress her, and then having sex with her, instead. After hundreds of her people were killed, he "apologized" by showing up with Toruk. YMMV, but in this troper's opinion, that's a lot like [[TheSocialNetwork "Hey, I invented Facebook! Want to date me now?"]]

[[folder: Why not just make Jake a person of color?]]
Then all of us tropers would be talking about how James Cameron cleverly subverted the MightyWhitey trope instead of playing it straight.
* Because Cameron wasn't focussing on the fact that Jake was white. The movie is anti-imperialism, pro-environment, pantheistic, etc., not "oh, Jake is a white guy and he's awesome".
** Funny how, despite all that... the story is still just a MightyWhitey story, ain't it?
*** In that case, it's also ''just'' an ArmiesAreEvil story and ''just'' a HumansAreTheRealMonsters story. Representing any form of media with only a single trope puts a lot of things out of proportion.
* Frankly, given how much controversy there is about him being white, being a PoC would be even more problematic.
** That and the problem isn't with him being white, it's with the fact that the actual ''plot'' is a MightyWhitey plot. It's the basic formula of "Audience-sympathetic guy joins foreign tribe, foreigners gradually learn to trust him, protagonist becomes the most awesome member of that tribe for badly thought out reasons". It was annoying enough when TheLastSamurai did it, and at least that wasn't claiming to be unlike anything you'd ever seen before.
*** If he wasn't white, you'd have written the same thing but replaced with "affirmative action guy".
*** The folder directly above this one points out all the ways he wasn't as hot-stuff as the film's detractors make him out to be. He fails left and right during the movie, and his only successes come with qualifiers. The originality claim refers to the SFX, not the plot, which Cameron admitted somewhere was based on other movies.
***** Exactly. Overall, Jake certainly makes a mediocre to bad Na'vi. He just takes the '''non-unique''' approach of looking at Toruk a different way.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Wait, Jake was a ''human''?!]]
For a film that was about walking in another's shoes, Avatar did a very poor job with relating to Jake. Most people have FAMILY AND FRIENDS. Other than his brother existing as a mere plot point, we don't ever see anything human about Jake: No photos, no phone calls or e-mails home, no old school friends, no fellow vets that he served with in Venezuela, not even perhaps sending a part of his paycheck home to help his dear old Aunt Gladys. And here he is, talking up about helping his "People", when he doesn't even bother with his own family. This killed the movie for me, and was surprising coming from a director like Cameron, the same director that made the T-800 a father figure to John or in Aliens where Ripley became a mother figure to Newt.
* It's easy to understand that anyone willing to leave to Pandora wouldn't have any bonds to Earth they'd consider significant. The trip takes six years one way, so they can be away close to 20 years; no-one with strong ties to their family, or a promising relationship underway would take such an assignment. Thus, it's pretty much given that Jake had no family besides his brother, and they apparently weren't very close, either.
** Which makes it a miracle how the operation hasn't gone all Lord of the Flies at this point. It's the type of job that self-selects for misfits, loners, and probable psychopaths, and an environment that makes things worse, thus going back to the question of why nobody (figuratively) pulled Jake's plug when he was getting maybe a bit too involved in the whole program.
*** It's probably not ''all'' loners. The operation is big enough to support some families, as long as they're productive workers (procreation is probably discouraged). While the ex-Marine patrols the jungle, his wife operates one of the consoles in the control tower. The primary reason for traveling that far is the excellent pay, and being able to bring some people you know who can also earn good money probably minimizes the downsides for a lot of them.
* Just look who is present at Tom Sully's cremation: Jake and two RDA reps. Clearly there are no other family bonds present (or it may even happen that Sully brothers are last ones in their family, everybody else is dead, because Earth is a crapsack world). As for friends - Jake might have made friends in Marine Corps, but they are still in active service and they're not present on Pandora. And Jake does get a paternal figure at Pandora - one Col. Miles Quaritch, have you heard about that guy? Quaritch also served in the same Jake's unit couple of years before his time.
** And a maternal figure - one Dr. Grace Augustine, at least by the time she's good-naturedly forcing him to eat breakfast before he runs off to tribal school and tucking him into bed when he falls asleep at his desk.
*** Yep. But then a whole plot starts to look like a story of a kid who got caught into crossfire when his parents had an... argument. Freud Was Right, eh?
* It's not impossible that Jake might have cut ties with the rest of his family. It happens to plenty of real-life people, too.
** This bugs me less as a plausibility factor and more as a story related issue. I mean, if it was Cameron's intention to make Jake Sully a dull character that ends up having no conflict in choosing his identity, then he's done an excellent job. Heck, that's kind of my critique of the whole movie. By the 3rd Act, I was just excited that there was a huge battle, and really didn't care who won or lost.
*** Jake's character was designed that way on purpose - so that when the opportunity came to move to a beautiful planet full of gorgeous cat-people he'd jump at it. Hence the whole "my cup is empty" bit - sure, he was supposed to say whatever the natives wanted to hear to ingratiate himself to them, but I got the impression that he was happy to do it (even if they detested him; I think he'd fallen in love with the bioluminescent forest). It probably wouldn't have made a difference, anyway - even audience members with actual lives wanted to move to Pandora.
**** You're saying that Cameron ''intentionally'' made a dull and robotic character so that it would be believable for him to go to Pandora. First, that's inconsistent. By HUMAN accounts, Pandora is a BAD place, and they're only there because of the "U". Jake was only sold on Pandora because of being able to walk as an Avatar, not on its beauty. Second, it's contrived. Good writers don't need to strip their characters of interest and humanity in order to crowbar them into a decision. His life doesn't need to be perfect, but he also shouldn't be completely bland. And finally audience members are not very smart. They can definitely move to beautiful places like Papua New Guinea or the Amazon, but they'd DIE, just the same if they moved to Pandora.
***** Did you that in real life, people are sometimes ''boring''? It's true!
**** Or that people who have ''lost their legs'' might be a wee bit pissed off about their loss, and may alienate their friends and family with their bitterness and/or self-pity? Jake lost his career and his future along with his legs, and has found no substitute direction for his life to shake him out of his sulking, until he's hired by RDA.
****** You still have not answered the previous post's question: Is it Cameron's intention for the character to be this way? Even his avatar self was found lacking, so it doesn't sound like it was intentional.
******* Protagonist theory, friends. He was made bland so that the audience could 'self-insert' to some degree.
******** We've already established that the plot requires him to be emotionally closed off, not for self-insertion. Any self insertion which would be taking place would be hampered by him being in a wheelchair, being ex-military, having a hot catgirl girlfriend...
********* Exactly. I love Avatar, and I honestly do not like Jake for the first hour or so. He's deliberately made unrelatable to the vast majority of people, except for the simple idea of wanting something worth fighting for.
* The question that comes to mind is why would the company pick Jake of all people? You'd think they'd pick someone who was rabidly human-centric(or maybe just my species wrong or right), but who could hide it well when speaking to the Na'vi. At least it would have subverted the whole Pochahantas/DancesWithWolves thing. The first would have made the story itself more complex especially if his personallity was not revealed immediately, and the second would have him honestly conflicted over the prospect of an interstellar empire for humanity via the Unobtanium and the genocide of the Navi(assuming that he thinks humans should be better than that).
** They picked Jake because his twin brother, who was supposed to travel to Pandora, was dead. Avatars cost a shitload of money, so to minimize monetary losses, they send Jake because he can operate his brother's avatar.
*** Which kind of brings up another weakness: If we believe Parker's words about Avatar's ultimate purpose, then RDA spends way too much on PR programs.
*** Background material; The avatars were meant as work supervisors, only used later for research purposes. Also, they are pretty much the ambassadors of Earth, and while earth is crapsack, it doesn't seem to be because of the governments are bastards, but rather because of overpopulation. Thus the governments make very explicit laws about what the RDA needs to do, which they are happy to pay because of getting unobtanium. 8 kilo of that stuff pays the avatar program.
* I understand that siblings don't always get along, but I thought identical twins usually had a special bond with their twin that the rest of us don't have with our siblings. Why wasn't Jake more upset about his brother dying? He took one look at the body, and it was like he just didn't care. Did I miss something?
** Well, Jake was kinda dead inside all around until he rediscovered himself on Pandora, so it wasn't really out of character for him to not react very much to the news. The way the officials handled the cremation with little sympathy and virtually no decorum also suggested that Earth's become so much of a CrapsackWorld that a random mugging death is just business as usual. And Jake's a hardened marine, so he was likely holding back his emotions until he could be alone (which also happened to be out of the camera's view). That, combined with his not having seen his brother in years, and getting the double whammy of "you're paralyzed from the waist down and, oh yeah, your twin brother just died" all at once can explain why his reaction seemed more numb than distraught.
** You thought wrong. Identical twins are people too, you know; some get along with their siblings, some don't. Having an identical twin doesn't mean you have a super special mind link with them. Jake, under those circumstances, reacted just like anyone else in shock at losing both a sibling and his legs would have.
[[/folder]]
[[folder: So...in the deleted scene how the hell did Norm get to smash Trudy?]]
* I can't be the only one who thinks they there is no way in hell Norm would've even gotten into a relationship with Trudy let alone in her pants for casual sex. They didn't even show a HINT of attraction to each other...at all. [[/folder]]

** In that case, it's also ''just'' an ArmiesAreEvil story and ''just'' a HumansAreTheRealMonsters story. Representing any form of media with only a single trope puts a lot of things out of proportion.
** Frankly, given how much controversy there is about him being white, being a PoC would be even more problematic.
*** That and the problem isn't with him being white, it's with the fact that the actual ''plot'' is a MightyWhitey plot. It's the basic formula of "Audience-sympathetic guy joins foreign tribe, foreigners gradually learn to trust him, protagonist becomes the most awesome member of that tribe for badly thought out reasons". It was annoying enough when TheLastSamurai did it, and at least that wasn't claiming to be unlike anything you'd ever seen before.
**** If he wasn't white, you'd have written the same thing but replaced with "affirmative action guy".
**** The folder directly above this one points out all the ways he wasn't as hot-stuff as the film's detractors make him out to be. He fails left and right during the movie, and his only successes come with qualifiers. The originality claim refers to the SFX, not the plot, which Cameron admitted somewhere was based on other movies.

[[folder: So...in the deleted scene how the hell did Norm get to smash Trudy?[[/folder]]
* I can't be the only one who thinks they there is no way in hell Norm would've even gotten into a relationship with Trudy let alone in her pants for casual sex. They didn't even show a HINT of attraction to each other...at all.

[[folder: So...in the deleted scene how the hell did Norm get to smash Trudy?]]
* I can't be the only one who thinks they there is no way in hell Norm would've even gotten into a relationship with Trudy let alone in her pants for casual sex. They didn't even show a HINT of attraction to each other...at all.

I can't be the only one who thinks they there is no way in hell Norm would've even gotten into a relationship with Trudy let alone in her pants for casual sex. They didn't even show a HINT of attraction to each other...at all.