Avatar Scion - ''Reuka, Shining Back''

This took WAY too long to color.

I only gave in and drew this idea because I've been trying to warm up my rusty skill enough to attempt some movie posters for "Project Folly" and its VFX test project. Since all of my latest stories are turning out pretty whimsical and tragic, I need illustrations that 'inspire a stillness of the mind'. Haha, well, I can try at least. Fortunately, I believe the secret is in the concept rather than the skill alone. It's just that good drawing skill keeps the idea from hurting peoples eyes in its delivery... Make sense?

My initial inspiration for the following story was actually about two years ago. [2010 blog post] That idea just sat around in a junk pile of my imagination until a central character, who's point-of-view we can follow for the sake of storytelling, finally emerged from the chaos...

I came up with Reuka a few months ago because I dislike the 2009 movie "Avatar" so much that I thought up a whole subplot just to insult it properly. You see, every time I watch "Avatar" for the artistry and general sci-fi fun, the story, stupid cliche characters, and insults flying from everybody at everybody feel like a slap in the face! It's just not a movie I can pick sides on. Because, to me, it's pretty clear that the viewer is being forced to a certain side of some hot political issues (environmentalism, armed force) by using every dirty trick in Hollywood. And it drives me nuts. Dirty tricks (like blue boobs, and blue boobs getting shot at by people without any boobs of their own) may indeed work on the masses, but believe it or not some people (like me) still care about having honor and using only real logic in debate.

Anyways, the following story isn't a debate, it's more like a punching bag where I tear "Avatar" apart at my pleasure from within it's own fictional world----playing by its own established rules!


My character, Reuka, discovered an ancient cave deep underground beneath Home Tree. The cave contained a pancake-like stack of circuit boards each the size of an entire city! (What the humans mistook for deposits of Unobtainium ore; see movie for cannon virtual model.) This ancient vault, however, was forbidden to enter by decree of Eywa herself, though Reuka hadn't known it. She was just a child, a 13-year-old in human terms, but that wasn't important; the important thing to the Omaticaya tribe was that she should never be able to tell others what she saw down there. To ensure this, she was formally exiled from the clan. And furthermore, to keep her secret from being shared accidentally through tsaheylu (the Na'vi mind-meld, using actual nerve endings hidden in one's queue), the exiling ritual included an extremely traumatic haircut from Mo'at. (Jake Sully's mother-in-law, the priestess.)

Prior to all this, Reuka was a student of Gracie's in Gracie's one-room schoolhouse. One day, some of the other Na'vi children made Reuka cry by calling her names. (Such as Jake's favorite, "scound" aka moron.) Gracie cheered her up by telling her an adapted Earth fairytale. ("The Ugly Ducking" only using Pandora's native creatures instead of swans and ducks.) Reuka loved the story and started collecting Earth legends. Gracie even gave her a copy of the Brothers Grimm fairytales so Reuka could practice reading English. (It was untrue that the Sky People had nothing the Na'vi wanted, such as was claimed in the movie when Jake listed "lite beer and bluejeans". Being partial to acts of heroism, as we saw in the movie, naturally the few Na'vi individuals who learned how to read and not only speak human languages discovered our heritage of literature and art.) The book that Reuka is holding in my drawing is her copy of the Grimms' Fairytales.

Gracie witnessed Reuka's hair-cutting ceremony, and ardently defended her. This put Gracie at odds with the Omaticaya tribe, and as a result all Sky People were cast out as well, and Gracie's schoolhouse closed. Most of the school's contents were striped down over time and burned as fuel for the dinner fire, including every book, including Reuka's.

For two months, Reuka barely survived by herself in the forest, for she hadn't yet been taught how to make a proper hunting bow. Aside from some crudely Macgyvered implements, all she had were mere memories; memories of her parents to comfort her, and memories of her favorite stories to base her childish games off of when she needed to cope. Starving, lonely, and desperate for encouragement, Reuka dared but once to sneak back into Home Tree to steal a weapon and recover her book. She discovered the fate of her book, and then seized a miraculous opportunity which almost cost Reuka her life. She stole Mo'at's knife, the very one with which her hair had been cut. Mo'at in pursuit turned out to be as agile and swift as any male Na'vi, but Reuka, being young and small, escaped by diving into the very passageways below Home Tree for which she had been criminalized for entering in the first place.

Henceforth, for a time spanning two Earth years, Reuka made a home for herself as a hermit. Then, the Sky People felled Home Tree. Both of Reuka's parents died in that attack, and that's when the full impact of loosing her braid finally struck her. She could not even talk to her parents in spirit through the Tree of Souls, let alone would be able to "pass through the Eye of Eywa" herself in order to join them in Paradise when she eventually died. Having grown older and now also much wiser, Reuka now hated Mo'at more than ever for this ludicrous sentencing.

Reuka witnessed the great battle against the Sky People begin from a great distance away, and immediately, instinctively wanted to aid her people. According to her tribe's customs, Reuka was still too young to fight, but she had grown strong from living on her own, and as an exile, didn't exactly feel bound to their traditions anymore. Perhaps Mo'at would even let Reuka come home if she fought well! However, in order to cross the distance, and because much of the battle took place in the air, Reuka needed an ikran. (A kind of pet dragon that Na'vi hunters tame as a rite of passage into adulthood, then fly upon as they hunt.) Thousands of wild ikran and other fearsome beasts happened to fly over Reuka's head en-rout to the battle at Eywa's beckoning, but not one took notice of Reuka----as if she were a ghost, or didn't exist at all, she felt. And then she finally realized: in order to control an ikran in flight, she would have to perform tsaheylu (mind-meld) with it, anyway. Having her own ikran and being able to fly was something that Reuka had been looking forward to all her life, and now loosing this dream finally crushed her beyond reconcile.

As the battle ended, Reuka observed that the Sky People could fly their metal beasts without mentally linking to it. So, in a fit of black desperation, she abandoned her world and stowed away on a spacecraft with the bad Sky People who were banished from Pandora.

Interstellar adventure ensues!
...Including an episode detailing the answer to the much-asked question, "Why didn't the banished Sky People just bomb the Na'vi from orbit?" Yes, after all that Reuka had been put through, she singlehandedly saved every single life left in her village, becoming an even greater war hero than Jake Sully Fancy-Rope-Pants Rider-of-Last-Shadow, and the Omaticaya never even found out about it to honor her. (Like how if the Emperor had disregarded Mulan in front of everyone instead of bowing to her.)

Then, one day, just when life on Pandora has finally recovered equilibrium, a new, ultra-advanced alien race emerges from deep space. Home Tree, as it turns out, was actually an antenna for the gigantic subterranean computer below it, which had stopped transmitting when the Sky People blew it up. The new aliens, unable to conceal their repair efforts, are forced to reveal to the Na'vi that Pandora was actually a planet-wide biological experiment in which said ultra-advanced race cloned their primitive ancestors and their natural environment Jurassic Park style. The Na'vi are all given individual offers to leave with the ancient Sky-Na'vi and enter interstellar society, or remain on Pandora to live out the lives they know. It would have been an easy choice had it been an offer from the Sky People. However, family ties apparently dissolve amidst other family ties...

Meanwhile, Reuka visits Earth and has cyberpunk adventures (involving parkour) while attending school, but I haven't decided on anything else specific yet. Maybe she could fall in love with an eccentric young trillionaire (minus inflation) who just happens to have his own recreational avatar body conveniently on Man's home planet. lol

But, in the end, a great destiny awaits Reuka as a sort of 'space bard', knitting interstellar communities together through a common appreciation of fictional and Historical drama.


<sub>BTW:  If it matters, I'm actually a very nerdy Catholic. ^{(Whoever says we don't or can't exist are themselves dreadfully ignorant; for example, five in my immediate family have engineering careers and at least two hold patents! I brag because lately I keep hearing people say Catholics are holding science and society back and should be kept in insane asylums. Fools... They're lucky Catholics have to love them. lol)} So, just don't take this pic/fic the wrong way. ^{(That Reuka's braid symbolizes ALL "religions" with the implication that it's healthy to 'cut them off'.)} After all, the Bible would be a logical addition to Reuka's repertoire! OMG, the Bible infecting Space... What could be worse to a hopeful misanthrope, itching to adopt a new, hyper-intelligent species and leave his old world full of power mad, evolution-denying crusaders behind?!!

Well, now that you kind of know my spiritual stance.... (Possible only if you've studied actual catechism, not if the closest you've come to doing so is only having played Assassins Creed.)</sub> I deliberately wrote Reuka's story to commit 'sacrileges' against the original "Avatar" movie, because I was peeved that the filmmakers used visual beauty to make the Na'vi philosophically seem credible without actually playing through any major plausible controversies that could arise from it within the storyline. For instance, collective consciousnesses is something that Pandora and the Borg (Star Trek) have in common; weren't the Borg supposed to be monsters?! And, also, because "Avatar" misrepresented and verbally attacked characters that should have been the best of mankind----our scholars and our heroes.


To clarify, the details of Reuka's story listed below are what I'm referring to. They are intended to offend people who love and agree with everything about "Avatar"----by doing the opposite of what is expected. Albeit, mind you, without even going against established film cannon, except for elaborating on unexplained locations or events.

1. Eywa, the nature goddess, turns out to be fundamentally cyborg. (The city-sized circuit boards stacked underground beneath Home Tree are neurologically integrated into Eywa's matrix, and serve to regulate the natural impulses of wildlife planet-wide in order to maintain environmental equilibrium, as well as store, crunch, and transmit into deep space absolutely incomprehensible amounts of data about how the Sky Na'vi's little experiment is going.)

2. ALL of 'the beautiful Nature people' turn out to be descended from lab products, which would technically make every last Na'vi on Pandora no more 'authentic' than the artificial bodies of the Dream-Walkers, after all. (The DNA from which the Sky-Na'vi cloned the first Na'vi on Pandora came from fossils on another planet, way out in the middle of no-one-knows-where.)

3. The next 'invaders' to offend the Na'vi's naturalistic sensibilities by relying on machines are technically the Na'vi themselves, because the Sky Na'vi are in fact the future of the Na'vi. (This 'future' was realized long ago, and it's actually the Na'vi born on Pandora who are out of place in time.)

4. A perfectly sensible Na'vi individual was victimized by her own people's customs. ("Reuka, we love you, but we love Eywa more, and Eywa says no one is supposed to find out about what you found out about. We can't make you forget what you found out, so the next best thing is to make sure you can't ever tell  anyone, even by accident." You see, Eywa's 'big secret' was that she's full of computer parts. For the Na'vi to discover Sky-Na'vi technology buried on Pandora would compromise the whole million-year-long experiment! That's a LOT to loose over one little girl pretending to chase a white rabbit down a hole because she read a weird book, no?)

6. This Na'vi individual experiences curiosity, an emotion that the Sky People apparently introduced to Pandora. (Seriously, no one in that movie is curious about ANYTHING, except Gracie, who even then is still all devil-may-care antagonistic of her nemesis, the "idiots with guns". Her words in quotes there.)

5. This individual accepts technology when the natural world she was taught to trust implicitly in can't provide what she wants. Specifically, flight. (This is actually how I most identify with Reuka; I'm plumb crazy about Steampunk machinery; and since human biology doesn't allow me to have angel wings, I've kind of become obsessed with personal aircraft. Ornithopters, above all others.....yeah, pun intended. )

6. And, ultimately, this Na'vi even adopts clothing! (I mean, Oh my goodness, how inappropriate... )

7. It turns out that standing up for fair treatment of an individual faced with an unjust law is what actually got the Dream-Walkers kicked out of the Omaticaya village. (After, we, the audience were led by the movie to believe that the Dream-Walkers had done something wrong to deserve it having to do with a vague 'know-it-all' attitude. Well, I can certainly see how correcting one who is all of judge, jury, queen, and pope, no mater how mistaken she was, might certainly seem know-it-all-ish and insubordinate.)

8. The Na'vi reveal themselves as book burners! (After all, it's undisputed cannon that they hate science. Personally, book burning offends the heck out of me, even if I happen to know the book sucks and there are a million more copies of it laying around. It's just so.....heathenish is the only word I can think of to describe it. Like celebrating ignorance while reveling in primitive cruelty... Yeah, I overreact to it, but still---I kind of have a point, right? Even something like "Mein Kampf" has tremendous historical value. Not to mention it is wise to know thy enemy better even than he knows himself, and how better to start than to read his or her book or his or her favorite books?)

10. Jake Sully made it look easy to get accepted into the Omaticaya----a few obstacle courses, a few magic foreign words, a few MMO missions, and one surprise stunt for your grand finale----but, realistically, it probably wouldn't be. I mean, imagine if you weren't trained as a Marine, survivalist, Olympic athlete, etc? What if you were just a nerdy little girl who gets bullied by your peers for being small for your age?! If the Omaticaya tribe values brawn as their spiritual paragon the way that the movie demonstrated, you'd be at the absolute bottom of their social food chain.

11. Despite all this, Reuka proves herself superior to cruelty ^{_{(thanks to the ambient influence of Christianity on Earth, which forbids vengeance, grudges, and abandonment)}} by returning to Pandora to help her people, regardless of how the Omaticaya tribe had maimed and exiled her, when satellite imagery shows Earth-based astronomers that Pandora's ecosystem is collapsing on a planet-wide scale. Her people may have revered the strong as nobility, but here, in contradiction, a native Na'vi has learned how to uphold the weak for no other reason than undeserved love.

12. The reason that Pandora's ecosystem is collapsing on a planet-wide scale is because, when Home Tree was destroyed, the whole Omaticaya tribe discovered what Reuka had been banished for as a child: that buried beneath Home Tree was a vast multi-story super-cumputer that has been cybernetically manipulating Pandora's natural world for millennia. As soon as the humans left the planet, the Omaticaya launched a crusade to destroy it and "purify Eywa". Didn't work; the Omaticaya actually killed the semblance of centralized consciousness, the singular source of intention that whispered in the ear of every life-form on their planet, that the Na'vi had been calling "Eywa". Which is ironic, given that Jake Sully had argued that, "They killed their mother," to Eywa herself against us humans and our world.

13. As a result of this action, perhaps the first and the worst imbalance to manifest in the natural world was the corruption of tsahelu, the Na'vi's most sacred practice; without Eywa's influence holding pathogens in-check by cybernetically instructing micro-organisms not to grow beyond certain levels, tsahelu became a gret way to get sick; and also a way to announce your presence to every starved predator within running distance of you.

14. When a cloning company offered to grow a replacement for Reuka's severed cue in their laboratory, Reuka opted instead for a cybernetic plug in its place so that she could telepathically interact with Earth's digital technology! (And instead of taming an ikran as was her tribe's custom, in place of an ikran she got a personalized stunt-jet that she can pilot with her mind! Think toruk makto was hot stuff? Pffft! METAL dragons are where it's at now!)