#anthropocentrism can suck my fucking dick

[eldritchtouched]

James Cameron is a fucking coward. Iinstead of risking alienation with his audience by either making the Na’vi flawed but still better than a corporate hellscape that strip-mines places instead of realizing the beauty and value of alien biology, or by making the Na’vi look truly inhuman, he made them idealized “noble savage Native American stereotype take #13832″ and “sexy blue humans with some cat features.”

The same can be said if you watch Sideways’ commentary about the soundtrack, where anything close to not traditional Western orchestra was essentially stripped out of the music during composition because of Cameron’s interference.

Avatar would not have been nearly so lucrative, and most audiences would not have sympathized with the Na’vi, if they actually looked inhuman instead of like sexy blue humans. You wouldn’t even have to change the script around, just plop in freaky alien slug people and a bunch of audiences would’ve rejected it and thought Jake was an absolute freak for falling for Neytiri and turning on Quaritch.

#anthropocentrism can suck my fucking dick #avatar #james cameron #I care about alien and spec fic designs deeply #make your aliens alien dammit #be weird!

[eldritchtouched]

I suppose why I’m always a little weirded out by the idea of “corruption” people have surrounding Mohg, the Formless Mother, and Miquella and that whole situation is that I do not see any particular form of existence as somehow corrupted, and that’s in a broader philosophical sense. It influences how I interpret that whole thing because I do not see having an inhuman or unorthodox form as necessarily being some horrific existence. (Now, there is a discussion of if Miquella is willing or not, but that’s not my focus with this.)

The very idea of an inhuman form as some lesser thing or a corruption is itself disconcerting to me. There are countless species that have existed, do exist, and will exist, but what makes the human form so inherently better that anything outside of it, or traits outside of it, bad? Because we are human? That’s... absurd. If we were born dolphins instead, wouldn’t we make the same assumption about anything dolphin vs non-dolphin?

It’s also part of why I get frustrated with most post-Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos and Mythos inspired/adjacent works. It’s all well and good to acknowledge his severe shortcomings as a writer, but most do not cut to the core problem, the idea that certain sorts of existence are inherently better and worse, pure and corrupted. They still cling to the notion that there are “things which should not be,” and this limits them. Their reinterpretations are based around the current zeitgeist that racism and sexism are bad, not grasping the underlying concept that different modes of existence as a whole are not worthy of spurning. (Many such writers still often play into other real-world bigotries easily, too, especially surrounding mental health, physical disability, being trans, and religious coding, so...)

In a much broader sense, it also worries me how contact may go when it comes to the possibilities of alien life. Alien life would likely be very, very different from Earth life due to a whole myriad of historical, evolutionary, and possible cultural pressures, but people have it in their head that aliens would have the same mores humans would. 

#writing discussion #anthropocentrism can suck my fucking dick #underlying philosophies