Avatr is about capitalism
That wasn’t glaringly obvious to everyone?
Like, to absolutely everyone? This ranks up there with “breathing is good.”
Well acschually oxygen is a corrosive chemical and probably damages your lungs (since that’s the tissue that comes in most contact with it). And also the Great Oxydation Event is probably one of the greatest - if not the greatest - mass extinction of all times, so …
Some people are dense enough that “the point” is the name of a baseball bat you have to go get to get it across.
It was also about the poor soldiers getting used to further capitalism.
Honestly, though…. That military wasn’t very credible. Half their aircraft you could disable by dumping buckets of pebbles into the fans.
you forget the kind of people who complain that wolfenstein games or the x-men animated series “became” political
Well it’s literally Pocahontas in space so more obvious comparison is to the colonialism. They could grow gardens and farms while destroying the natives, the movie would have been the same.
-
Colonialism was driven by capitalism
-
They weren’t settling land - they were setting up a mining operation.
It was just one line of dialog, but the sequel did mention that the company is expanding from just resource extraction to selling settlements to the wealthiest who are fleeing a dying earth
-
There’s someone arguing otherwise in this very thread
That comic also represents 100% of all survival crafting games, plus Factorio
It’s true, but when I play games like Terraria, I try to preserve beautiful features of the map and even incorporate them into my builds. Like those surface cave things where it’s basically floating dirt/rock with grass and trees growing on them. I often make those into the entrances of underground homes. Same with the deserts. When you get the actuators, you can make sand entrances. I also enjoy making houses in the leaves of the living trees.
That was not a subtle theme…
Me landing on Gleba.
Avatar is just recycled CGI Fern Gully anyway
It’s a motif as old as time. Foreign invader getting Stockholm Syndrome with the natives. Another famous example is Dances With Wolves. That film called The Great Wall as well. Some versions of Robin Hood has it. Anthropologists call it Going Native, which is what Carlos Castañeda did.
But they’re not all about economic expansionism
Holy shit! Avatar is about capitalism? How did u miss that?!
Wait until you learn about its subtle ecological message!
Oh! The bit where they fire dozens of rockets at a giant tree was also an allegory?!
Or when they blast a few square kilometers of forest from orbit to make space for an alien whale refinery. It may say something about us and I hope to understand it one day.
I saw the film in a theater with someone who wanted to impress upon me that someone pointed out to her how alike it was to what happened to indigenous peoples in the Americas (someone else had pointed that out to her, so she assumed I wouldn’t get it on my own). I was like, if you think that’s a novel observation, you really need to be hit in the face with concepts to understand things. It couldn’t have been more obvious.
But maybe that highlights how much some people just aren’t observant or introspective or whatever else. It would explain a lot.
It is also about settler colonialism. There are natural gas fields off the coast of Gaza.
Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.
There’s a lovely coast and trillions to be made.
Yeah man, we all understood that the first time around when it was called Fern Gully.
Like Avatar if you want but like… it is not a deep piece of media with hard-to-discern messaging. Shit is pretty clear.
One time I unmatched someone from a dating app because the second avatar movie was coming out and they said that it was weird of me to say that the alien people were supposed to represent Native Americans because “they’re just blue aliens why would you compare them to real life?”
Apparently media literacy makes you a weirdo?
Yes it definitely makes you weird. Turn the brain off and consume the media like a good little sheep (/s if it wasn’t obvious)
Fucking Tarzan was fighting evil white exploiters of pristine Africa in books back in the early 1900s.
A good white saviour from the evil white people, because the indigenous can’t do it for themselves. Just like in Ferngully and Avatar.
Are there even any indigenous people in Tarzan? I haven’t read the book, but from the movie I only remember his gorilla buddy and the little elephant. I think Tarzan is more about rebelling against civilization in general, instead of colonization in specific (which James Cameron’s Avatar is). It’s very post-industrialization in that sense.
Edit: Whoops, just read the synopsis on Wikipedia. I don’t think Tarzan is the white saviour you’re looking for…
Which Tarzan book did you read the synopsis for? Burroughs wrote 24 of them.
Sorry, it wasn’t as much a synopsis as it was the criticism section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarzan#Themes_of_gender_and_race
Looking at it now, I see citations for the essays, but not for the factual claims made by those essays, so I hope the editor who wrote it didn’t take their word for it.
I can’t decide if I should post the “wait, it’s all the failures of capitalism?” or “wait, it’s all systemic racism?” meme, cuz it’s wait it’s all both (always has been).
That’s just Evil, if we build an industrial park there where will the
slavesforced laborwork bit*hes*Due to recent very public events our Public relations officer has been sent on leave with pay instead Nataly will complete this statement.
That’s just Evil, if we build an industrial park there where will the (Checks Notes) Employees park there cars?
Nataly needs a spelling-checker. Also, a quick tutorial on comma splices wouldn’t be wasted.
You know: grade school stuff.
Thanks, I’ll remember that when I go to school… oh wait, I’m not in school anymore. I’m gainfully employed, get paid plenty, and nobody cares. Huh, it’s almost like the hyper-educated imposition placed on us by society is simply a form of control, gatekeeping, and self-aggrandizing and the people who spent more time studying than forming relationships wasted their time and are now disgruntled because they have to work harder than those who aren’t overly anal grammar Nazis.
I’m torn, because there’s an idea that industrial capital only knows how to consume and destroy what it touches. And there’s ample evidence to that effect.
But there’s this other more naive notion that life never changes, species don’t compete for habitat, and doing anything to alter the local ecology is this unforgivable sin. This, despite the fact that everything in the area is itself a product of eons of speciation and evolution and carnivorization.
The impulse to preserve has to be balanced with the expectation for change. The goal should be symbiosis, not stasis.
The idea that nature is precious and must be preserved is human-centric.
Trees caused an extinction event when they appeared by absorbing all the carbon dioxyde and radically changing the atmosphere. But we feel bad when we’re the ones doing it
The issue is that you’re changing the ecosystems and environments so much that all those eons of evolution are simply lost. The only other times this happens is during natural catastrophes. Sure, in the long run this allows new life forms to take the old ones places, but it’s still a massive loss of diversity and evolutionary knowledge - and unnecessary suffering for millions of living beings.
When species compete for a habitat, they rarely destroy it - and those species that do either don’t survive for long, or they wipe out large swaths. We’re actively killing almost anything in our habitats, and destroying them for almost all previous species.
I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.
- Jack Handey
Satisfactory music starts playing
Paved paradise, put up a parking lot.
Does this imply communism wouldn’t extract resources?
That’s what I was wondering. Capitalists didn’t invent exploitation of nature, it just so happened that its worldwide adoption coincided with unprecedented technological advances. There’s quite a few examples of historical societies that exploited nature as much as they could and suffered for it.
Businesses under capitalism aren’t required to pay for the externalities of their decisions. In a democratic economy, the people affected by corporate decisions would have a say in those decisions. It’s reasonable to assume that people want to breathe clean air and continue to have food and water, so they’d support policies that do that.
Sure, but none of the economies we actually have (or recently had) work like that.
Someone had better have a communist revolution so we do have one like that, then.
Judging by the communist revolutions we had so far, I’m not holding my breath for that.
Explore, exploit, exterminate.
