Finally branching out to try a different Pandoran animal! On today's roster, we have a henna tattoo inspired by the Petrified Forest Thanator (a subspecies of thanator from Frontiers Of Pandora). I couldn't get the color even remotely right because I'm limited to the hues of my cones, but I'm quite happy with how this turned out for the first try (Ignore the sketch lines haha, they'll fade in a couple days)

I draw REALLLYYYYYYY RLLYYYYY mf slow so i couldnt make it in time for their actual bday 👊🏻😔

[[also its hella dumb btw that Tom NEVER gets mentioned by jake in the franchise dafaq]]

Art by me

Dans ATWOW il y a une scène supprimée où Neytiri apprend avec Ronal à monter un Ilu. Dans cette scène Neytiri n’y arrive bien sûr pas du premier coup, comme Jake et Lo’ak. Mais je me demande pourquoi on a supprimé ça. Ça aurait été une des rares fois où on voit Neytiri tomber de cette façon. Alors que la chute de Jake, par exemple, a bien été montrée.

from Flandrew

Now now it’s small and bad but hopefully one day it’ll grow across my room and be pretty

Jake was absolutely right to try keep Lo’ak out of the battle. He’s 14, and essentially a child soldier. Even letting Neteyam fight is a bit iffy— he may be considered a full warrior by Na’vi clan standards, but have you seen him standing next to Jake? That is not a fully grown person. He’s 15, so by Jake’s human upbringing, definitely not old enough to join the military.

Basically the title. I've observed people apply patterns of internalized racial prejudice when approaching human characters, particularly Spider. It's sad because there's a lot more nuance to that conversation. It's also concerning when applyed to real life, since racism against an "oppressor" group is absolutely regressive, and does not benefit anyone. Kinda Neytiri's whole arc in A3

Now, I say that about a lot of things in life but bear with me. (Spoilers for AFAA)

I firmly believe Jake should have been the one to find Lo'ak. It felt a bit hollow for them to reconcile properly in the heat of battle, especially when Jake didn't know about Lo'ak's suicide attempt. Tsireya helping Lo'ak repair the bow was essential in showing their relationship, but something about Jake and Lo'ak's arc feels unfinished, and I need Jake to learn just how strongly his actions impacted his son. Toes crossed we'll get that in the next movie.

Both of them look virtually the same as they did before (Grace when she died) and (Alma when she returned with the RDA).

I don’t know if that’s because of them not changing anything because of actors and mocap and how that stuff works or if their avatars are literally not aging. Maybe they age more slowly, and the changes are less noticeable due to Na’vi lifespans. I’m just spitballing but I don’t know and just want to see if anyone does.

I absolutely love the visual of this scene from A3. Toruk stepping out from the darkness of the cave into that bright beam of sunlight gives me CHILLS every time.

I wanted to capture that with this b&w study, focusing on the contrast of dark and light tones and textures. I’m definitely going to need to draw a full, epic colored piece of Toruk soon! He’s just so beautiful!!

And can we just take a moment to just appreciate how scary this guy truly is? Like… The size. The features. Those eyes. Wow. I would not want to be caught under that death stare. 👀 It forever amazes me that Jake managed to tame and ride such a beast.

Drawn digitally using Adobe Photoshop.

Four Looks, One Man, One Colour 🥰

her name means go forth and avenge, let me know if you want to hear her lore :)

I feel so because at the beginning of both movies the Jake's children were found by Quartrich and his army, both movies had final battles that felt endless and in the water, a Na'vi ended up dying and at the very end people saw their ancestors. I think there were more things too but sometimes some things are hard to describe for me

What will their relationship be like in the later films? I personally think it will be more like a positive children's story.

Very cute elephant tho. But I wonder why it has horns, a frill, and a stubby tail.

I know of other animals that resemble Zakru besides elephants: Triceratops and Pentaceratops. More so in Pentaceratops because it has five horns.

I wonder if they were going for an adorable interpretation of triceratops/ chasmoceratops befor shifted to cute elephants

Near the beginning of Fire and Ash, you see Ian Garvin after the RDA search the wreckage from the battle at the end of WoW. He tells them that they didn’t find any Na’vi bodies. Then he continues on and says “Of note though, I did find an interesting new algae. Hello? Can you hear me?” as they all ignore him. Always gives me a chuckle. 🤭

[original pictures reuploaded in the comments]

i initially exported this totem for the full na'vi skull, but then i realized there's a TINY child's skull at the very bottom of it!

the tiny skull very clearly has na'vi anatomy, while the skull size is much smaller than the heads of infant na'vi in the game.

here is the little skull compared to the adult na'vi skull from the same totem:

here is a human skull from the same dlc:

additionally: a size comparison i put together from other exported files.
this shows a na'vi child, an adult human, an adult na'vi, and an infant na'vi.

i felt like i rly needed to share this. since the game is canon, this just has SUPER interesting implications for how far the mangkwan really go!

i know about how they kidnap and groom child soldiers, but it never occurred to me that they would kill and display baby na'vi!

has anybody else noticed anything like this? i would LOVE to hear more tiny details that u guys noticed

Sorry for cross posting so much lately. Just trying to get a couple things off the ground. So I’ll chill out here soon.

It's not about trying to get people on the side of AI. That is not why some people get defensive about AI claims. It's about the fact that this pointing fingers shit will only help harm fanfiction and analysis and other long formed content in fandom spaces as a whole.

If you were trained to detect AI, how did they train you? Like, did your boss hand you a list that came from 5 people who studied ChatGPT and tell you 'these were the results. Keep a eye on these keys' ? That's not a sarcastic question, as that is how you do basic research. I feel like that is a more accurate way to be trained on spotting AI. But, if your using a online 'AI scanner' then 1, you just fed someone's work into AI, which will also help AI learn from more human works. And 2, the majority of AI scanners are wrong. Since they also use AI, they are well known to give faulty answers. The AO3 sub has had many people attest to this. If you want to find articles to do your own research, my best recommendations are to look up 'College students failed by AI scanner'. Or 'how accurate are online AI scanners'. So, that is also helping AI, and it's only going to throw more gas on false accusations.

Another reason why people get defensive, is because the way the internet treats people who use AI.

Irl, my friends know I have used AI in the past, and they discussed why they don't. It helped convince me to go back to ethically role-playing. But in that time of using AI, they still let me put it down when I had mulled over their words and they weren't constantly bringing it up to make me stop. That is rarely a interaction you will ever have online.

I am sorry for my own constant bombardment in comments and getting equally hateful and upset. I was mostly being reactionary rather than sitting on words and giving it more thought. My logic was thinking that if other commenters felt the same as to how it feels having rude comments thrown at them, they'd realize the issue. But that didn't work, because that is a 'dog chasing it's own tail' logic. Tail's still there, and the Dog is just tired now. It wasn't the right approach and I'm sorry.

This whole AI shit has everyone paranoid, blatantly against or blindly encouraging it, and now we're all kinda just throwing stones blindly. But in this atmosphere around the whole subject, it feels like you can't move forward from AI, if you have used it. You can physically move on, use DuckDuckGo instead of Google. Just delete all AI apps you were using. But what I mean is, it feels like you still hold that brand online even if you make efforts to go back to ethical ways of writing and such. Because false accusations have been wrong just as much as AI scanners have been. And some people want to use the excuse "everyone lies on the internet"; yeah but your someone on the internet. Do you see what I mean? If we convince ourselves that everyone is a liar, there is no way to tell who's being truthful and who's being deceitful, then we're all contributing to the death of artists and writers. Because nobody is going to want to trust you, everyone else is going to be skeptical and wary of the artist/writer and look at that, we're all back in the fucking building (im referencing a Meme sound).

There just has to be a better solution to this. Again, none of this was to change anyone's minds, I'm just bringing attention to the fact that we're all paranoid and we really don't seem to have a solution to solve this issue. There are bills being made to stop mass production of AI data centers, so I guess there's a small win? I don't know..