this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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Why didn't this movie develop the nerd following of other properties?
It seems to check all the boxes. Why isn't there a huge Avatar fandom running amuck on the internet?
Compare to Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings. I'm pretty sure you know what those were about, and usually they had multiple layers of meaning.
I cannot for the life of me tell you what specifically the Avatar team thinks about deforestation, genocide, etc. It feels like they just put objectivelt bad things in the movie for the bad guys to do.
I think the difference is world building. In the stories you listed there's a sense that you're only seeing a tiny fragment of everything notable going on. History is being made by everyone concurrently.
In Avatar, you see everything notable. We don't care what's going on on Earth (they never hint anything), we don't care what's going on outside this one tribe, the only thing happening right now is the conflict on screen.
I actually really don't get the sense of a deep world from Harry Potter as an adult. I know as a kid I did, but the more I thought about the logic involved in the plot the less I felt it held up. I started getting really annoyed with the setting around 10th grade.