I’m pretty close to done; there should be enough to give you an idea of how I’m intending things to work by the end of the week. I can either put it up somewhere and post a link here, or I can send it to you (if you send me an email address — I believe that you’ve got mine from the comment)?

So much so that I’m in the process of writing a random character generator. I’m afraid that it’s a stand-alone program, rather than a handy web application; but would you be interested in having a look?

So power differential shouldn’t be the criteria for whether someone is being oppressive, the difference is whether you’re actively working against someone’s comfort and culture, refusing to understand them and just bulldozing them out your way or forcing them to participate in your plans against their will, by force alone.

That puts the in the humans in the position of crappy oppressors, they would be if they were powerful enough, they just suck at it. And they lose for the same reason they start attacking; they are really ignorant!

And Jake does help them win, but not for the tarzan reason “a white man in your environment will do it better than you” but because he brings deviousness and hope from human culture. He actually prays to the tree, which none of the Na’vi got round to doing because they are too fatalist.

So he’s not a magic white boy, he wins for a non-magic cultural reason that suggests a bit of cross-species chatting might be quite handy.

If Avatar were realistic – the Na’vi would be poor, dirty, uneducated, ravaged by disease, superstitious and religious fanatics, treat their women as either chattel or slaves, and be at constant war with one another. They’d be victims alright, but of their own sad existence.

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Regarding the evolutionary history of the world, another possibility is that the planetary AI is the generative lifeform which has evolved and in turn created the various autonomous consciousnesses which inhabit the ecosystem. It seems to me that the AI really saved the day after the Na’vi ineptly battered their low-tech heads against a wall of steel.

Also – I went and rewatched the movie last night. The Lemur/Monkeys all have 1 single connector at the back of their head (like the Na’vi) and they all have noses (and no chest breathing devices). ALSO, the flying creatures and the land creatures had some interesting differences between them, but also some very strong similarities (their chest nose thingies were different – their crests, etc.).

I think my theory of there having been ONE species of interconnected animal that basically over ran then ENTIRE land/air system and then diversified is the theory they worked off of for this movie. There are other creatures that aren’t part of the system, but they’re either in the sea or a non-major part of the system (the whirly bird/lizards/bugs).

Come visit–I’ll buy you a beer at our neighborhood hangout, Blue.

Gulik, I totally buy data-transmission cropping up somewhere (and I’m sure there are real-world examples in Earth’s ecology), but I have real issues with everything being linked up to the same network and the superusers who have access to everything they need through that network not having had to conquer their way to that primary position.

I bring this up not because it contradicts your points, but because its an interesting bit that a lot of folks don’t realize. We’ve gotten so used to the Last of the Mohicans idea of “when the white man came, inevitably the Indians lost because white people had numbers and guns” that the actual history of it gets often overlooked. (Along with the fact that there are still Mochians, and Mohegans, they didn’t disappear — Cooper just assumed they must have because he didn’t see them anymore.)

All of which could, you know, have been used in Avatar, but weren’t. Much like your ideas are quite interesting, but alas, I can’t see them actually being what the movie was trying to do. If it was, it’d have been better. Maybe you should be paid millions of dollars a year to write movies?