Hi, I’m A.S. Wilder — welcome to my corner of Tumblr!
I’m a writer and template-maker, and this blog is where I share my work, and the behind-the-scenes chaos of building stories I can’t stop thinking about.
Rambling about story craft, characters, and feelings
Notion setups for writers (because yes, I’m that person)
I love making moodboards and have an extensive collection of images which I am happy to share! Feel free to message if you see a picture you want to use!
If you want to follow my other blog @aswilderuniverse where I post my
Fandom content + reblogs + occasional “I’m not okay” screaming
My current obsessions (in case it wasn’t obvious)
The Lion King has had me since forever — and Simba is my absolute weakness.
And I’m completely, unapologetically in love with Avatar… especially my kingJake Sully. (If you get it, you get it.)
I write with Notion (and I’m obsessed with it)
I use Notion to organize basically everything: story hubs, outlines, character + worldbuilding notes, scene banks, revision checklists, posting plans — all of it. If you ever wonder how I keep track of my plots without combusting, the answer is: Notion. Always Notion.
I do not use AI, I feel its important to say that, especially in the climate we're currently living in.
Templates (if you’re into that!)
I also sell my Notion templates on the Notion Marketplace for anyone who wants to steal my systems and make their writing life easier. If you’re a writer who loves structure (or needs structure), you might like them.
The link to my Marketplace is here, and the link to my Ao3 is here!
Let’s be mutuals
If you like fandom + writing + intense character feelings + organized creative chaos, you’re in the right place. Feel free to say hi, ask me about my projects, or scream about Simba and Jake with me.
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Sometimes the heat is in what isn't done, not in what is said.
Title Painted In Fire
Summary He has been stripped of every marker of his old life. She is the one who will mark him for the new.
In the small sacred alcove high above the clan’s feast fires, Neytiri paints Jake for the ceremony that will make him Omaticaya. Line by line, her hands move over him while the air thickens with everything they are not allowed to speak. The final stroke — drawn slowly across his lower lip — breaks something open between them. She looks at him from the doorway, full and open, then steps through the curtain and leaves him alone with the silence she has made.
Hometree was alive at this hour.
The cooking fires below were going full, pulsing heat and the thick scent of whatever food they were cooking into the air.
The work of the ceremony rose up through the trunk in waves — voices calling between platforms, the rhythm of someone practising a drum, the smell of roasting meat and crushed herb threading up through the warm evening air. Children's voices on the lower levels, still loud and unguarded. The People were preparing him a feast he would walk into within the hour, and the whole great body of the tree was leaning into the work.
Jake followed Neytiri up through a corridor he did not know — up, and away from the busyness, into the higher levels where the sound began to thin and the air grew warmer and stiller the further they climbed.
He had thought he had learned the place. Months of being shown, of being corrected, of being walked from one branch to another with her hand at his elbow — he had thought he had seen all of it. He had not.
The corridor narrowed and turned and let them out into a small alcove he had never seen inside before, and the air in it smelled different: paste and resin, warm wood, something flowered burning slowly in a clay dish in the corner. The hum of the tree fell away at the threshold. Inside this small room there was only the soft pulse of the lanterns and the hush of something sacred waiting.
The lanterns burned and painted the walls a honey gold.
Jake paused at the entrance.
Neytiri, who had been walking close behind him, nearly came crashing into his back.
She reached out a hand and pinched him hard on the side.
He turned with a startled yelp, pain already fading from the spot. Her grin was already in place, sharp white teeth bared and a tilt of the head he knew by heart now.
"Even after all this time, your mind is always distracted," Neytiri scolded.
The words were laced with warmth. None of the old bite that used to follow each lesson.
She slipped past him into the alcove. The space was narrow enough that her chest pressed into his arm as she went, and her tail flicked once against his thigh, light as a question.
He watched her go.
He was suddenly, keenly aware of how small the room was.
She knelt in the centre of it with a smooth grace that made the bowl of paste in her hands look like the only thing in the world that mattered. She set the bowl down on the woven mat in front of her. Then she looked up at him, and the smile she gave him this time was different — softer at the edges, less teasing.
She waited.
Jake's tail flicked behind him, nervous, and he stepped forward, the curtain at the entrance falling back behind him.
She had stripped him already. Earlier in the day, with the same hands that now waited with the bowl.
The bow off his shoulder, the woven cord at his throat, the small bone pendant that meant he had hunted with the Omaticaya and lived, the leather strap of an ikran rider in training. One by one she had taken them. You do not need them tonight, she had said. Only the loincloth remained. Nothing had prepared him, until he stood in the doorway of this small room, for how naked a person could feel with cloth still on him.
Tonight was the ceremony that would make him one of the People. When the paint had dried she would lead him down into the firelight, and before the whole clan the words would be spoken that named him Omaticaya — no longer a dreamwalker under instruction, no longer a student at her elbow, but one of the People in his own right. Everything from the day he first opened these eyes had been pointing at this. Every step leading down to this moment.
He sat down across from her. His knees not quite touching hers. Close enough that her heat reached him.
He had not been excited, walking up here. He had been too nervous to be excited. Had not been nervous like this since he was fifteen and the girl two streets over had agreed to meet him behind a movie theatre to watch a film neither of them ended up watching. That nervousness lived in the same low spot under his sternum as this one did, but this one was more alive, more electric.
She dipped two fingers into the paste.
The first line was cool against his skin. The temperature of it reached him before the touch did — a brush of something the colour of river clay drawn down from the hollow of his throat, where her fingertip had paused as if asking a question. Then the line moved. Down across the rise of his collarbone. Slow. Deliberate.
He held his chin up.
It seemed important to hold his chin up.
He looked at the wall behind her head. Then, when the wall got dangerous, at the carved curve of the alcove's ceiling. Then at the slow stir of smoke from the clay dish in the corner. Anywhere that was not the careful work of her hands moving in long, slow lines down the plane of his chest.
His breath was loud.
Loud enough that she would be able to hear it too.
He closed his eyes and slowed it the way she had taught him, the way she had taught him a hundred small things — quiet, like the forest before dawn, quiet like an animal that is not yet hunted. In through the nose.
Hold. Out. Hold.
The technique worked, the way old skills always worked, until it didn’t.
It caught when her fingers skirted lower. Down past his collarbone, into the soft skin at the centre of his chest. She painted in slow, narrowing circles. He tracked the path of her fingertip the way he would a small animal moving on his arm at night — exactly, every inch of its movement, every change of pressure. She circled in. Circled in. The circles tightened. And then her fingertip dragged, cool with paste, deliberately over his nipple.
His eyes opened, and his gaze dropped — helpless, animal — to his own chest.
She did not look up at him.
She reached back, dipped her fingers in the paste again, and kept painting.
The next line went straight through where she had just been. As if she had not noticed. As if she had not split him open.
He was tense, and she clicked her tongue at him.
"You must relax, skxawng."
The grin came despite himself, a spreading of his lips over his teeth as he forced his muscles to relax. He breathed in deep. Exhaled long. The tension drained out of his chest and his shoulders and his arms the way she had taught him, and made a clean, unambiguous run for the only place his body had not yet been told to behave.
His tail thumped against the woven mat.
He did not apologise for it. He had stopped apologising for his tail months ago — she liked the tail; the tail was an entire conversation between them that had been going on, in side glances and quiet jokes, since the first week he was conscious in this body. She did not pretend not to hear the thump. Her eyes flicked, the small precise movement he had learned to track on her — to the source of the sound, then to him, then back to her work. A small smile turned up the corner of her mouth.
She shifted closer on her knees. The space between them halved by inches.
The paint was cool, and her fingers were cool with the paste, and yet everywhere her hand touched him he burned, clean and steady, the way a banked coal burned under ash. He was being painted with fire, and her hand was the brush working over him.
She kept working. The painting went around. She came down off her knees just enough to lean in close, and her hair fell forward, the small beaded strands at the ends of it brushed his shoulder, cool weight where the paint was still wet, and her warmth came with the lean — her ribs, her breath. She was painting now across the cap of his shoulder and down his arm, and then she rose onto her knees again and shifted to his side and started to paint his back.
He had to sit in the dark of her hands now. None of it reached his eyes, only his skin: the cool press of paste tracking down between his shoulder blades, the brush of her fingertips after each stroke as she smoothed it. He was not afraid. He had no reason to be afraid of her. The thing under his skin was not fear; it was a hot, insistent tension that lived in his muscles, banked and patient and running steadily along every nerve she touched.
He was reading her, too. He had been reading her since the first stroke, since the moment she brushed against his arm, since her tail had flicked his thigh.
He had found, over the past weeks, that reading her came as naturally as breathing. The small catch in her breath when his tail shifted and grazed her leg. The place at the side of her throat where her pulse showed. The faint brightening of the spots along her neck and the slope of her shoulder — there, definitely there, brighter than they had been when she had pinched him in the doorway. The way her nostrils flared, just a flicker, when she leaned in close enough to read his scent.
He could read hers, too.
Her scent had changed somewhere over the slow course of their friendship, in a way he could not name and had no vocabulary for — only a recognition: warmer, deeper, closer. With everyone else it had a clean sharpness to it, like a posture held. With him, somewhere along the way, it had loosened. Tonight it was looser still, and it ran up into the back of his brain and made his thoughts faintly fuzzy.
It scared him, slightly, how much it warmed his insides. How much his chest tightened to know that she only smelled like this when she was with him.
She painted the small dip of his waist. Her fingertip ran along the curve there, low on his side, drawing small fine lines that tickled his skin and sent a small ripple of warmth down the length of his spine.
He shuddered.
She stopped.
Her hand stilled flat against his ribs and her eyes lifted up to his — and in the moment her eyes lifted, his scent shifted, and her nose twitched. Her gaze flicked down to his throat where his pulse showed, and back up to his eyes.
He did not look away.
Neither of them said anything. The painting did not resume. The room did not breathe.
Then, very deliberately, she dropped her gaze back down to her work, reached for the paste, and the line on his waist became just another line.
He let his eyes go down.
They went over the long curve of her spine, where the spots glowed steady and warm, down to where her tail lay coiled on the woven mat behind her, calm, still, undisturbed.
His own tail had not stopped moving since he had sat down.
She painted down his spine, and the mission surfaced.
It came up like a coat being settled on his shoulders by someone he could not see — heavy at the collar, dragging at the sleeves, familiar. Her fingertip kept moving the whole time, one slow vertebra to the next, even as the old guilt throbbed once in him, hard.
She doesn’t know who you are, and if she did, it would break her heart.
You are going to break her heart.
The thought arrived complete, like ice in his brain, venom on his tongue. He did not chase it. He did not justify himself to it. He simply chose, in the small alcove with her hand moving down his back, to set it aside for later.
Always later.
Halfway down, she stalled.
It was not the small considered pause of a painter checking her line. It was a held thing. A held thing where her breath caught and then very deliberately released. Her hand sat motionless against the small of his back for a single beat too long. He did not turn around. He did not ask. He could not see her face, and he had no permission to fill in what was on it. Only that she was carrying something just then that he could not name.
She breathed out, slow.
She kept painting.
His tail swept the mat in a long, lazy thump.
She huffed, just once, a quiet laugh against the back of his shoulder. Fond. The kind of laugh that travelled quietly from her and into his chest. She had been so serious when he had first met her, those first weeks being taught under her hand. Now she smiled with her eyes more than her mouth, and she laughed with a warmth that lit up inside him and drew out a happiness he had not carried since he was a child.
The laugh undid him faster than her touch. His shoulders dropped — properly dropped this time, the last of the held tension going out of them — and he sat there in the dark of her hands, undone, and let her finish his back, a soft smile settling on his own lips.
She finished it with a long flat stroke from his shoulder blade down to the small of his back, smoothing the paste with the heel of her hand. It ran along the length of him, slow and deliberate, and there was no way she could miss how her touch reached under his skin, to his bones.
She came back around to the front.
She settled in front of him on her knees again, and this time when she settled her knees came forward into the space between his and they touched. The warm bare skin of her thigh against the warm bare skin of his own. She did not move them away. She did not apologise or make any move to make the moment anything more than what it was.
She was reaching into him, messing up the perfect control he had tried so hard to maintain.
Something in him was coming loose.
She dipped her fingers in the paste and started a slow curve low on his stomach.
His breath caught.
His whole body locked down.
This was not the easy stilling from before, when her fingertips along his waist had made him shudder and they had both clocked it and moved on. This was training. Marine and Taranyu both, every bit of it summoned at once and set against a single problem — keep it inside, don’t let it show. He pulled all of his attention to the level of his diaphragm. He measured his breath like he was running a long descent. He forced his focus into a small bright point above his own collarbone, anywhere but the path of her finger as it tracked the slow line of the curve down across his stomach to the place where the curve ended just shy of the binding of his loincloth.
The heat of her touch travelled down through the fabric.
Warmth travelling down between his legs.
That was the problem.
The response his body was having without his permission. The heat he had no power over. He gritted his teeth, breathed in slow, breathed out slow, and held himself so still he could have been a wall.
Her eyes moved, just slightly.
He sensed it more than saw it: a small drop of her gaze, down, and then up again, back to her work, the path of her finger never once breaking. No smirk. No comment. No staring. But from the corner of his eye, on her neck, her skin darkened and the spots along her cheek and neck brightened for only a moment. One small private reaction, and then her shoulders stilled and settled, and she was painting again.
Torture, or a blessing.
Maybe it was both.
He stayed locked still. He breathed. She painted.
"Jake," she said.
She said it low. Lower than she usually said it. In a voice he had not heard her use before in months of hearing her use his name in every register — barking it across a clearing, hissing it as he was about to step in something dangerous, sighing it when he failed something easy. This was new. This was dangerous.
He heard the difference.
He smelled the difference.
Something in her scent had warmed and closed the last polite distance, and her ear twitched once when his own scent answered it. Neither of them said anything about it. Both of them understood, in the only way they could, that this thing between them was something that could not be said out loud, not in that alcove.
His tail thumped against the mat.
Then again.
Then again — louder.
He stopped trying.
He reached behind himself, took hold of the end of his own tail with one hand, dragged it forward and sat on it.
Her hand went still on his ribs.
She pressed her mouth into the soft skin of her own shoulder, and a small helpless laugh escaped anyway — muffled, delighted, entirely undignified in its way. Her eyes, when she lifted them, were shining. She did not say a word about what he had just done. She did not need to. The pretence — that this was just a painting, that they were just sitting still, that this was not what it so obviously was — wobbled hard between them and did not fall. They held it on purpose.
"Your tail," she said. It was not even a sentence. It was a small breath of fondness with a noun pinned to it.
"It's got opinions."
"And what are its opinions?"
He looked at her. She was painting again, eyes back on the line she was drawing across his lowest rib, and she had asked the question very lightly, the way she had asked him a thousand small questions over a thousand small fires.
He didn’t answer. The words caught at the back of his throat, holding too much, giving away too much.
She did not look up at him. The corner of her mouth turned up.
She knew. She had to know.
She finished the line on his rib and dipped her fingers in the paste again. He watched her two fingers come up out of the small clay bowl wet and white with the paste, and instead of going to his chest or his arm or his side they came, very slowly, up to his face.
Half a second before they reached him, he held his breath without meaning to.
A final ceremonial line, she said with the angle of her wrist. A small mark across his lower lip, the kind of thing a Tsahik's daughter had done a hundred times to the warriors before him. Nothing remarkable about it. Just paint. Just paint.
Her fingertips dragged, slowly, across his mouth. Slow. Warm. She was not in any hurry to lift them away. The paste was cool against his lower lip, and her fingertip lingered there a moment longer than the paint needed, dragging his lip down slightly and releasing the breath he had held locked behind his teeth.
The slowest beat of his life passed between her thumb and his lower lip.
His eyes lifted.
Along the line of her hand, helpless, and met hers, and there was nothing left in him to look away, because she had just, with two fingers and the paint on his mouth, spent it for him.
In that moment, with the low honey light dancing across the space and making her eyes sparkle a deep amber, with her fingers still burning against his lip, he might melt under it all. Might simply sink into a loose puddle between her knees.
Everything he wanted to say pressed against his ribs, and none of it could escape the bars that were locked around the both of them. So he let his eyes reach across the space to her, let her see, for only a moment, how truly she had broken him open, broken him from the man he had been when he had first arrived on Pandora with a grudge and no future.
Something passed over her face.
She breathed out, slow.
Her hand resumed its line down from his face.
He stayed exactly where she had put him.
She finished it with a line drawn under his jaw.
It was the last line. She drew it slower than any of the others, the way a painter signed something they would not see again, and at the end of the line her thumb deliberately brushed the soft place just below his ear on the way down.
She let her hand fall away from his skin, hesitantly, like she was as sad to end the touch as he was to lose it.
She settled back on her heels and looked at her work.
A long beat passed where neither of them spoke. He sat very still. The cool paint was drying on his chest and his arms and his back, the heat of his own skin underneath it, the warm honey light on his face. Her gaze moved over him, over her work, to make sure everything was done perfectly.
Her eyes went over what she had made of him.
She wet her lower lip once with her tongue.
Then her face changed.
It softened. It settled. Something in the line of her brow moved into a register he had not seen on her at any point during the painting — something that looked, for half a breath, almost like sorrow before she folded it away behind a smile.
"You are ready," she said, softly.
She said it quietly. Almost reverently. It was not a tease or a joke. It was a thing she had made true, with her hands, over the course of the last hour.
She breathed.
One long, deliberate exhale, the kind she let out at the end of a hunt.
She stood, her body unfolding in front of him.
He stayed sitting on the woven mat with the paste cooling on his skin and did not reach for her. She did not reach for him. Whatever had been between her hands and his skin all night, this was the place she had chosen to set it down, and he was not meant to pick it up again. No one had to tell him so.
She crossed the small space to the entrance.
At the entrance, she paused. She lifted the curtain back in one hand. She turned, and she looked at him.
The look she gave him from the doorway was full and open. Across the small alcove, without any painting to be doing, without any pretext to angle behind, without the safety of a glance or a flicked check, she let him see her.
Then she stepped through with a soft smile.
The curtain fell behind her.
He sat where she had left him, in the honey light, with the paint drying on his skin and the muffled sound of the People rising up from somewhere below. The heat beneath his skin was pooling, and the quiet of the hollow held the last of his breath.
Across the circle, next to her mother, Neytiri watched. Her own bowl sat untouched in her lap. She said nothing — but her face, for the first time since the walkway at dawn, had opened. He felt her watching. He did not look. He let the children stay.
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Jake woke into the pain.
The link-in had gone smoothly. The canopy of the link-unit descending over him like a coffin lid, the chest-pressure of the transfer, the moment where neither body was his and his mind lingered in the space between — and then his eyes opened in the hammock.
They couldn't catch her. So they built something that could.
The RDA has Jake's face. His voice. His hands. They have footage of the way he moves, the way he fights, the way he holds a blade — and a recombinant body wired to do all of it. They taught it to speak Na'vi. They taught it to move like one of the People. They built a flawless copy of the one person Neytiri would never run from.
They just couldn't put anyone inside it.
In the rotting bones of an abandoned RDA facility — overgrown, flickering, almost dead — Neytiri comes face to face with her husband, and slowly realises the eyes looking back at her are bright, and empty, and wrong. The horror was never being hunted. It's being hunted by him. And by the time the real Jake reaches her, her body has already learned to flinch from the shape of the man she loves most.
Am sitting with this idea as a potential one-shot that plays with the horror of the re-combatant avatar concept, should I write it??
She knelt at his side, her body folding down onto the mat.
She did not look at him as she knelt. She could not bear to see what his face was already doing — the concern lifting up off his own pain and turning itself onto her. So she kept her eyes down and lowered herself into the narrow space between his body and the edge of the mat.
She knew that holding her would cost him, that his body was in enough pain that each movement came with its own price. She also knew that given who he was, he would pay the price if it meant she could be still against him. She lowered the way a butterfly lowers itself into an open palm: light, and choosing, and fragile enough to be hurt, and trusting the hand not to close around her. She was small in a way she let herself be only with him.
She said nothing. She did not need to.
She laid herself along his good side and gathered herself inward, smaller and smaller, until she was folded into his warmth.
His arms closed around her as he moved to take her into him. A slight hiss came out of him as his leg shifted and the thick scent of the salve saturated the air around them. The guilt at his pain settled into her, and for a moment she thought about pushing back and giving him back his space, he seemed to expect that and his arms only tightened around her, pulling her closer.
She kept still and let him do the work of arranging himself around her; she needed the arranging, needed to be the thing moved and not the thing moving for once, and he seemed to know that because he settled around her like a cacoon. When he finally stilled, her face was pressed up under his chin, into the dip of his neck. Through the cloth at his lap she could feel him at her hip — soft, warm, the body she had known since they were young. The dark of him closed in around her. His scent swallowed her whole.
Jake constantly apologises when they fight, he even apologised after this, when he didn't even say anything wrong!
But I know when Neytiri said what she said, and then didn't take it back in this scene, that shit must've really hurt...
Imagine the person you love just told you that everything you can't help about yourself, is something they hate. That the characteristics you passed onto your children, are things they consider a flaw.
She should've had a moment where she apologised for this. He's always the one holding her while she breaks, but we've yet to see her holding him when he breaks.
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BBBlue - Olivver the Kid - Nothing Has Changed Song Analysis
on "BBBlue" by Olivver the Kid, and what it does to Jake Sully
(no plot spoilers below — only the premise and Jake's interior. nothing past what's already on the page.)
I heard this song over the weekend and had to sit down. If you read Nothing Has Changed, this is the song. Let me show you why.
The warning he cannot give
"BBBlue" is structured around a narrator who has already walked through the thing his beloved is now walking toward, and who refuses, line by line, to be the one who corrupts her.
"I thought that I warned you about the woods / The pain they caused me, the life it took / Here you are, centered and stark / Sun shines through, lights you up."
That's the line my whole story can't quite speak aloud. Jake has been warned. The warning cost him the first life. He doesn't pass it to her — not the foreknowledge, not the bullet, not the woods. So when the song speaks the warning out loud, it does the same thing the prologue does for the reader: it puts a knowing in the air that the character isn't allowed to share.
Green woods, blue ocean
"I'm green just like the woods / You're blue just like the ocean / Your colors drown mine out in one fluid motion."
The colour logic of this song fits the chromatic facts of Pandora so cleanly it almost reads like it was written for the story. Green corrupter, blue beloved. The narrator believes he is the woods, and that his beloved is being drained by being near him.
That fear lives in my Jake. He carries it from the moment he opens his eyes in the young body and sees her again, alive and untouched by anything he has brought back with him.
"It claimed another, first it was my friends, now it's my lover"
This is the line I sat with longest. On the surface, it would mean I lost her before, and now it's happening again. That isn't the story I'm writing. There is one Neytiri. Not two to grieve in series.
But read with my Jake in the chair, the another isn't another beloved. The another is another version of him. The young man he was. The marine who walked into the forest the first time and met her. The younge man he handed her, that did not survive losing her. The woods didn't only take his friends and his lover. The woods took him first — the boy he was when she chose him, the man who didn't yet know what loving her would cost.
That boy died the night she did, in his arms, on the wrong end of a bullet that came from a direction he wasn't watching.
And then Eywa returned him to that boy's body. He is wearing the husk of the thing he gave her. He is being asked to walk into the woods a second time, in the same skin, knowing what it does.
That is the song's interior, the way my Jake holds it.
The butterfly in the palm
Picture this: every moment Neytiri is smiling, loving her world, loving her people. He is watching her, never anything else, loving her. Holding her in his palm like a butterfly he is terrified will be caught in the wind or crushed by his fingers.
Two terrors in one hand. The wind is everything outside his control. The fingers are him as the corruption — the song's whole thesis. The hand stays open and unmoving because closing it is one fear and opening it is the other. He cannot touch her, and he cannot stop watching her, and she does not know she is in a hand at all, because she is busy loving her world.
That is the shape of him, right now, in every scene you've read.
"I guess"
The verb that runs the song's whole emotional engine is "I guess." Not I know. Not I was told.I guess. The narrator is interpreting himself into a role. Making meaning out of an unbearable situation, because standing still inside it isn't survivable.
That is my Jake's posture exactly. Eywa never told him why she sent him back. No voice in the wind. No instruction at the rite-fire. No verdict given. He wakes in the young body and he is left to decide what that means. He can only guess. And whatever he chooses to make of it, he is choosing — because the version where it means nothing isn't a version he can live inside.
That's faith. Not certainty.
It's also, I think, what the song is really about: a person who has been handed a situation they weren't given a reason for, and who has to choose what meaning to act on.
The song says it in three and a half minutes. My novel is taking a bit longer.
Pin "BBBlue" to the spine of Nothing Has Changed. It's the unsayable interior, said.
It is such a deplorable and revolting thought to believe that Neytiri doesn’t hate humans anymore for the sole reason that she accepted Spider, or that, even worse, accepting Spider healed her and made her let go of her (absolutely legitimate) hatred of her colonizers.
Just so you know: you can hate and be angry at your oppressors and still have a happy, peaceful life. Neytiri didn’t magically let go of her hatred and rage when she accepted Spider (which is something she did NOT owe him or need to do in order to heal). Assuming the opposite is absurd and insulting.
Adding onto this because you've articulated something the fandom dances around but rarely says directly.
I'm gonna have a pretty controversial take here, and might get some people disagreeing with me, which is totally fine, but lets keep it civil please.
Spoilers Ahead!
The original post is right that Neytiri doesn't owe anyone her forgiveness, and that anger at oppression is legitimate. I'm not disputing that. We could go really into depth over the moral standing of the humans being on Pandora to begin with, but I'm focusing just on Neytiri here...
There's a difference between protecting Neytiri's right to her anger and insulating her character from any critical examination whatsoever. Those are two very different things, and the fandom conflates them constantly.
The original post says Neytiri didn't owe Spider her acceptance, and in a narrow sense that's true — nobody can force grief to resolve on a timeline. But owing someone something implies they had a claim on it to begin with. Spider wasn't owed her forgiveness, because he never did anything wrong to deserve it. Her rage against him was entirely misplaced on her part.
Neytiri's acceptance of Spider wasn't a gift she was reluctant to give. It was the correction of a wrong she was doing to him. And the fact that it came at great cost and effort for her, that wasn't magic but hard won — that's not an excuse for the wrong, it's actually what makes her arc genuinely moving. She did something difficult and painful and necessary. We should be able to honour that struggle and acknowledge what made it necessary in the first place.
And ironically, the film itself answers the "you can hate and still live peacefully" argument — by showing us exactly what happens when you can't put that hatred down. Avatar is full of characters whose repressed rage and grief are the very things robbing them of peace. It's not a background theme, it's the spine of the whole story.
Jake's grief and anger over Neteyam is the thing stopping him from connecting with Lo'ak and very nearly lost him another child... Lo'ak's grief and guilt over Neteyam is the very thing stopping him from recognising his own self worth throughout the film... The whole film literally shows the effect of anger and hatred and how it twisted Varang and the Mangkwan... It literally puts their makeup on Neytiri to paint a subtle comparison of what she could turn into if she doesn't let go of her anger.
Neytiri was not okay in the last film, she did a lot of things that were disgusting, and that's coming from me, one of her biggest supporters!
Neytiri nearly killed a child. Not metaphorically, not ambiguously — she held a knife to Spider's throat and meant it. Then after that deliberately hid his mask and watched as he suffocated. These are premeditated acts against a child who had no way to defend himself and no culpability for his father's crimes. Jake sending Spider back tot he Ometikaya was clearly a shielded attempt to get him away from Neytiri. Him having to shield Spider from his own wife is not incidental — it's the film telling you directly: this has gone somewhere we are not meant to celebrate.
The entire ideological crime of the RDA is that they look at the Na'vi and see a category rather than people. They see savages, not individuals. Neytiri looking at Spider — a child who grew up among her people, who loves Pandora, who has no culpability for his father's actions — and seeing only human/pink-skin is the same failure of vision, just pointed in a different direction. Understandable given her trauma? Absolutely. Something we're meant to endorse? Absolutely not.
It's also worth stepping back and looking at Neytiri's own life, because the "all humans are her oppressors" framing doesn't hold up even on a personal level. Her daughter Kiri was born from Grace Augustine's avatar — Grace, who was human, who dedicated her life to understanding and protecting the Na'vi, and who Neytiri knew personally. Neytiri has fought alongside humans, lived alongside them, built her entire family alongside them for the entirety of her marriage to Jake. These are not abstract allies. These are her people. A blanket hatred of all humans isn't just directed at the RDA — it's directed at the very humans who bled for Pandora, who died for it, who became Omatikaya. That contradiction matters.
Grief and hatred consuming even good people is one of the oldest and most powerful storytelling themes there is. But that theme only works if we're allowed to acknowledge that the person has been consumed. Neytiri is one of the greatest characters in this franchise precisely because she's complex enough to be both a wronged, grieving mother AND someone who has lost herself. Her arc of accepting Spider is meaningful because it required growth, not because she was right all along.
And can we also talk about the elephant in the room? Neytiri cannot genuinely hate all humans and still love Jake. He is human. He will always be human, no matter what body he inhabits. Her children are half human, carrying his blood, raised alongside humans their entire lives, speaking with words and mannerisms that come from him. Lo'ak, Kiri, Tuk — they are living proof that Neytiri has not and cannot draw a clean line around humanity as a thing to be despised wholesale. You cannot love a man that deeply, build a family with him, fight and grieve and survive alongside him for decades, and then credibly claim that his species is your enemy. The hatred the fandom wants to protect isn't just directed at the RDA. Taken to its logical conclusion it's directed at her own husband and her own children. That's not a reading of Neytiri that honours her. That's a reading that doesn't hold together at all.
Protecting a character from criticism isn't the same as respecting them. Sometimes it's the opposite.
Chapter 9 is kicking my ass! There's so much happening in the chapter, so many emotional moments that I want to get perfect, so writing and editing is taking longer than expected!
I am hoping to have the chapter done and posted by Thursday, sorry for the delay!!
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Nothing Has Changed - Chapter 9 - Sneak Peek Excerpt
She had set her own work down on the mat beside her and was now reaching across the weave to the arrow he had just laid down. His body stilled, and his hands began their trembling. He had not noticed that they had stopped until now, when they returned.
Turning the arrow slowly in her hand, she inspected it from feather to tip.
She brought the fletch close to her face.
Her eyes narrowed and she slowly brought one of her own arrows up into her other hand, and held his arrow beside one of her own.
The two arrows were identical. The same wrap. The same angle. The same closing of the binding over the quill. The same bite at the knot.
She turned both arrows once more in her fingers. Then she set her own down. She kept his.
"Who taught you?" she said.
His jaw worked.
"Your hands cannot draw a bow. Yet they can craft an arrow perfectly."
She turned his arrow over once more
"They craft like mine."
He drew a breath in.
Another question too small for the answer it required.
He looked at the arrow in her hand, and swallowed against the words lodged in his throat.
"My wife taught me."
Her face did not move.
"She must be a great warrior."
Her voice had softened — not greatly, but he knew the edges of her voice from years of marriage. They softened now.
He looked down.
"She was."
I see so many people talking about how Quaritch cares about Spider. How he's actually a good father, But I'm gonna be so honest, I agreed until this scene.
This scene just showed how manipulative he is... He doesn't care about spider, if he did, he would want him somewhere safe, not being prodded by scientists and kept in a cell.
And Quaritch uses Spider's need for a family to manipulate him. Bringing up his mother like he cared about the woman. There is no mention of him loving her in the comics or the previous film, and I'm going to go so far as to say, I don't think there was any feelings involved, it was probably just sex for him... I don't think Quaritch cared about anyone.
He brought her up just to gain an edge with Spider.
Luckily my boy is too smart for that and used it to his own advantage!
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