Moments pages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned.
- When Neytiri calmly reminds Jake to be not too hard on their sons, he expresses his fear of losing them in the process gets teary-eyed and states: "I thought we lost them."
- After Spider is kidnapped by Quaritch, Jake elects to take his family into exile at Metkayina territory in order to get them and the Omaticaya off the RDA’s trail. Neytiri is unsurprisingly distraught over the prospect of having to leave her home and clan behind for some faraway place.
- None of the Omaticaya themselves are happy about this either; they all respectfully place their hands over their hearts in a gesture of farewell to the Sullys. Jake's successor, in particular, looks heartbroken as he effectively banishes his friend and mentor.
- Quaritch and the Recoms almost going full My Lai on the Metkayina villages. Spider can only stand and apologize tearfully as they kill one of their ilu, threaten the same against the tsa'hik, and ultimately burn down the entire village. The only consolation is that the Na'vi themselves are spared.
- The scene where whalers hunt down and mercilessly kill a mother Tulkun is utterly gut-wrenching. The whalers state they usually go after mothers and calves because the mothers are forced to swim slower to stay with their children, and so they're easier targets. After the mother Tulkun is finally dead, we see her baby desperately trying to revive her as the whalers move in. It gets worse still when we discover that the scientists believe the Tulkuns are actually just as intelligent as humans, if not more so - based on their interactions with the Na'vi, they are borderline sapient, capable of empathy and have something resembling a culture - and the whalers kill them just to extract an expensive substance from their brains that can slow human aging, while wasting the rest. To pile on the tears, a deleted scene shows Scoresby then executed the calf just because.
- Shortly afterward, the Metkayina discover the body of both the Tulkun and her baby, deliberately left for them to find. The rest of the pod have gathered too and are clearly mourning. Everyone is horrified, but Ronal is particularly devastated, as she had formed a close bond with the mother. Ronal sobs that the Tulkun was her spirit sister whose songs were heard all over and that she and her pod had waited years for the birth of her calf, which brought them all joy, only for them to die like this.
- Neteyam, Jake and Neytiri's eldest son, is shot and badly injured. He initially plays it off with humor but after he's helped back to shore, Jake and the audience quickly realize just how serious the injury is. His parents futilely try to apply pressure to the wound and reassure Neteyam; he tearfully says he just wants to go home before dying in his parents' arms, while his siblings look on. Neytiri begins pleading with Eywa to spare him even though he's already gone, and ends up clinging to his body, screaming and sobbing. Jake immediately begins demanding to know where his daughters are and learns they're still being held captive by the same people who just killed his son. Lo'ak is clearly blaming himself because his brother was shot rescuing him and tries to speak with his father, but Jake just snaps at him to stay behind, saying he's "done enough", clearly lashing out in his own grief. Neytiri is inconsolable until Jake reminds her that their daughters are still in danger and she's forced to compose herself to focus on them, not even able to properly grieve Neteyam yet. It gets worse when you recall Neytiri's father died in her arms in the previous film (and if you watched the Extended Edition you also know she saw her sister shot in front of her) and now history's repeating itself with her child.
- Neytiri breaks Eytukan's bow in her Roaring Rampage of Revenge. In her grief over losing her son, she's accidentally destroyed her last memory of her father.
- Neteyam's funeral in the epilogue. The whole scene is heart-wrenching and tear-inducing, as we see the entire Sully family (including Spider) escorting Neteyam's body to the Cove of Ancestors and lay him to rest within the coral reefs, set to the music of Neytiri singing the songcord in the background as well as Jake's voiceover. The entire Metkayina Clan was also present as well to witness the funeral, and we see even Ao'nung, Roxto and Tsireya shedding tears.
- Lo'ak's expression was the most heartrending, as he was reaching out as though to touch his elder brother one last time before the coral took Neteyam into its embrace.
- Following Neteyam's funeral, his parents visit the spirit tree and use it to view a memory of him; namely, the day Jake took Neteyam fishing, which we saw earlier. Neteyam proudly shows Jake the fish he caught until he notices his father is tearing up and asks what's wrong, and Jake says he's just happy to see him. Behind them, Neytiri silently watched with a sad smile on her face.
- Just Spider's situation in general. Despite growing up rather happy with the Sully family and bonding with fellow adopted siblings, his adopted parents never truly liked him being around, especially Neytiri - who doesn't even see Spider as one of them. This doesn't even go into the fact that he knows he's the son of Colonel Miles Quaritch, the ruthless human soldier who was almost responsible for destroying the entire Na'vi way of life. When he's captured by the revived Quaritch later on, he has to bear witness to his father and the humans' cruelty one after another in their search for Spider's adopted family. Not only that, his Na'vi brother Neteyam dies trying to save him, and in her grief, Neytiri unleashes her vengeance on the RDA soldiers while Spider watches on in horror. She then proceeds to hold Spider himself hostage to leverage Kiri's life, going as far as to first shallowly slash him in the chest but then goes for an actual kill until Quaritch releases Kiri. Finally, despite all the resentment he has for his father, Spider still feels connected to him enough that he can't bear to let Quaritch drown and grudgingly drags him to safety, even if he knows that it'll mean his family will continue to suffer from Quaritch's vendetta in the future. While the rest of the Sully family are reunited and bonded together closer than ever, Spider ends the film conflicted and isolated, having chosen to disown his actual father for his adoptive family who never really welcomes him while also quite possibly blaming himself for endangering them once more by secretly saving their mortal enemy from his watery grave.
- Payakan's furious grief when he sees Lo'ak has been captured by the same whaling vessel that massacred his kin. He vents his rage by destroying coral reefs, to no relief. If he fights to rescue Lo'ak, he risks repeating the greatest mistake of his life. But if he doesn't fight, he'll lose his only friend in the world. So he fights.
- There's also Lo'ak's vision of Payakan's past. It turns out that when he was younger, Payakan's mother was hunted and killed by the RDA whalers, while he watched and was attacked for trying to interfere. When he brought some of his fellow young bulls and their Na'vi brothers, all of them are killed and he was left injured, losing a fin and getting a nasty scar over his eye. Since the Tulkun decided that all of their deaths are his fault, he's forced into exile to wallow in his own grief for the rest of his life, entirely alone.
- After Quaritch realizes that he's been saved by Spider, he calls for his son to join him only to be rejected by him for the last time. Quaritch's pathetic anguish afterwards as he climbs onto his Mountain Banshee serves as reminder to audiences that underneath that brutal persona is a man realizing too late that his service to the RDA is costing him the only person he ever cared about.
