Pie_Sky

I know the film expects us to believe Jake loves Spider so much he rather endangers the world than harm him but that's not what it establishes. It never shows us Jake actually caring outside general taking care of a kid when it's not to inconvenient to his family. It never shows there is any parental care on Jake's side. And then it just but actually Jake loves him like a son.

No, he doesn't. He would never leave his kids behind like he did Spider. he would never take them to the woulds. He doesn't love Spider like that. At most this is the kind of love that gets you on the news about the father that shot his kids because life is too hard and he didn't want his wife to get custody. Jake would so lose at that King Solomon court to Quaritch.

It feels like being gaslit when Jake talks about love because we see at the same time Quaritch who, for all his other faults, actually loves Spider no matter his mission, his beliefs or even Spider's rejection. The kid tries to kill him and he still jumps after him. Spider isn't even allowed to be angry at Jake and Neytiri after murder attempt. The contrast makes that scene feel even more fake and creepy on rewatch.

They all failed him one way or another.

To a point where spider in the next addition of the series is gonna be an adult.

All sections

3.Spider - emotional anchor/tie to the villain

Spider’s role in the franchise is established, however, there are many people on TikTok who like to question his mere existence in the story of Avatar. “Why do we need a human in a story about Na’vi?” “I’m here for Pandora and the life of the Na’vi” -sorry to disappoint - Avatar has been about colonization and war since movie 1. Spider was created to give a human bridge between Na’vi and humans that’s still a human and not an avatar, permanent avatar or hybrid, the meta-reasoning for it is probably for audience-immersion. The thought process was probably that it’s easier to relate to an actual human character if relating to the Na’vi somehow didn’t work out for all watchers.

That’s not Spider’s only purpose though.

Story-wise, he is there so the Sullies don’t one-shot Quaritch again immediately after finding out he managed to come back as a recom. It’s also to build a more emotional, even some-what sympathetic bond with the character through the lense of his son who always yearned for a father figure. Spider exists to build tension and relation between the Sullies and Quaritch, as seen by the so-dubbed “custody battle” Jake and Quaritch have over Spider in Avatar: fire and ash.

Spider’s personal conflict is obviously that of blood family and found family.

He clearly yearns for a parental figure and their love in his life, so he latches onto Quaritch for the smallest gestures of non-cruelty when everyone else abandoned him.

In Avatar: the way of water, Spider’s kidnapping is surprisingly glazed over by the fandom. Spider, a 16-year-old, was tortured. Put into a machine that could read his brain waves and questioned about the whereabouts of the Omatikaya (atwow 44:45-45:30) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcOPZy2zxbE). As general Admore says “any kind of thought and we’ll see it” - this machine could give away everything if Spider even has so much as an image flash through his mind. Think about it: when someone mentions a place to you that you’ve been at before, your subconscious gives you a mental image of that place immediately when you hear the name or location. Spider had to supress this subconscious urge for an undefined amount of time, before Quaritch cuts the torture short - and even then it had already left Spider shaking and bleeding.

Quaritch then makes himself the ‘safe person’ of the RDA to Spider. He takes him away from the lab guys, talks to him eye-to-eye, tries to endear himself to him… and when it doesn’t work, he throughs in the not-so-subtle threat to give Spider back to the lab-guys to torture if he doesn’t comply and help. Spider is forced into helping and chipped with a tracker like a dog so he cannot flee.

He is not safe up until this point.

He starts going with Quaritch and helps him - at least that’s the surface level of it, that what TikTok managed to understand.

In the scene where Spider takes the recoms to the ikran’s nest, he purposefully plays into Quaritch’s ego so he doesn’t just shoot an ikran to drug it into obeying but tames it the traditional way. Be that to test if he’s willing to go Na’vi or an attempt of Spider to get Quaritch to kill himself since he withheld important information about taming ikrans that he knew about. But Quaritch manages to tame one and survive. We can see Spider’s expression after that: he’s surprised and incredulously amazed.

This moment is what makes him open to communicate with Quaritch. Because this proved to him that Quaritch cannot be all bad. If he was all bad, the ikran that chose him would’ve killed him. But it didn’t. And Quaritch listened to Spider. Did it the Na’vi way.

When they’re traveling to find the tulkun hunters and their leader Mike Scoresby Spider is shown to feel comfortable enough to teach Quaritch Na’vi. During the Tulkun hunt he is disturbed and sad at the brutal killing of these intelligent creatures, thus not working with them.

     So far, Spider did one helpful thing for the recoms: get them to tame ikrans. And that was not his free choice. Helping them was the only way he could stay away from Ardmore’s torture and questioning. Quaritch is taking him further away from her to make himself truly seem safe for Spider. That is manipulation and using a kid’s trust that you want them safe to your advantage.

On the tulkun hunter’s ship, Spider is once again alone, surrounded by adults that do not care for his safety, but at least don’t actively harm him like Ardmore did.

He is taken along as translator as Quaritch goes to the different sea clans and tortures them for information they do not give him.

I don’t know how obvious that is, but… that is not Spider’s fault and he is not complicit in it, since he has no power here and isn’t helping any destruction the recoms are doing at all.

(complicit adjective; com·​plic·​it kəm-ˈpli-sət  : helping to commit a crime or do wrong in some way. He was complicit in the cover-up.) – source: merriam-webster.com/dictionary

He cannot flee, since there is a tracker in his mask and he’s either at sea or in unknown territory which would be dangerous for him as a lone human teen to scout out alone. He cannot physically stop Quaritch because 1. He’s a human kid while Quaritch is in the trained, adult body of a naturally bigger and stronger being. 2. Because he has no power in this situation. He has no command over anything, he cannot even dictate if he joins Quaritch’s raids or not, because Quaritch literally physically drags him along.

He however, does not stay complicit. He pleads for Quaritch to stop “This is wrong! What you’re doing here is wrong!” and apologises profusely to the clans being destroyed for something he has no control over. He does as much as he can for someone in his situation.

Now, moving to the climax of the movie: the fight on the ship and Spider’s part in it.

The ship crashed through the efforts of Spider (knocking out the driver and destroying the lether to start the Sea Dragon) and Payakan (ramming and crushing parts of the ship). Spider then tried to flee in the chaos, together with Neteyam and Lo’ak, who managed to find him. That’s when they’re spotted, Neteyam gives Lo’ak and Spider a distraction so they can jump into water to flee before jumping himself and getting shot.

After Neteyam’s death Spider brings Jake back to the ship because he knows where Kiri and Tuk might be located now that they’re kidnapped. Once the girls are found, they’re in a new pickle, since Quaritch isn’t willing to go without Jake and threatens Kiri’s life. Spider tries pleading with him like he did earlier in the movie, but before we know if his words could have had an effect on Quaritch again, Neytiri has him as her own threat against Quaritch.

As understandable as Neytiri’s reaction and want for revenge is, and she was no doubt desperate and didn’t think or care about how Spider would see this, this is wrong to do to him.

Because, as much as Neytiri using him as a threat worked - it’s a betrayal.

She showed openly that she could see him dead, that she could kill him if she wanted to. And Quaritch? He does the opposite. He sees a genuine threat to Spider and he yields, takes the knife away from Kiri’s throat.

This betrayal from Neytiri with the immediate response from Quaritch showing he does care for Spider’s well-being is one reason he saves Quaritch.

The other reason as pointed out by the guide book is Spider following the ways of the Na’vi and also just not wanting the one parental figure that showed to care for him to die. Spider saves Quaritch because of the morals he grew up with and to pay back his debt, since Quaritch saved his life by letting Kiri go.

On a meta-level Spider saved him because the franchise wants to keep Quaritch. That’s even less Spider’s fault, he was simply used to show why Quaritch comes back in afaa when otherwise, we as the audience would have thought him to be dead for sure now.

It’s not even a “we would have gotten rid of Quaritch for good if it weren’t for Spider”, characters do not have such independence. If Cameron and his writers wanted Quaritch to stay, he would stay. They just chose Spider to show to us, the audience how and why Quaritch survived so we knew what we’re up against in the third movie and his re-appearance doesn’t feel like a cheap cop-out.

That’s once again, basics in story-telling. Avatar is doing nothing new and AvatarTok is losing their minds about old tropes. If they were so ineffective they wouldn’t be implemented anymore.

In afaa he’s still the emotional anchor between the Sullies and Quaritch and he takes on a new role with his new abilities: he’s a new kind of human - a sort of hybrid, a new concern they had thought impossible before. Him being able to breathe Pandora’s air thanks to Kiri and even growing a kuru is big. It shows humans adapting to Pandora in a beautiful way, his character shows that humans could live in harmony with their environment… until he gets to the humans of the RDA who – cold, profit-searching and non-compassionate as they are – experiment on the teen, basically torturing him yet again. He gets rescued alongside Jake by Neytiri and gets to feel safe with them while they now plot his murder. Jake’s and especially Neytiri’s acceptance of him after ultimately not killing him shows they get to finally see Spider as who he is: a child who never asked for any of this and doesn’t deserve this, a child worth protecting as much as their own.

(I’ll add this here because I have nowhere else where it could fit)

There’s also this belief going around that Spider had opportunities to flee/escape when he was kidnapped by Quaritch in atwow and I’d like to argue the following as to why the situation is not as simple as people want it to be:

1. Spider's a kid, alone, surrounded by adults that could harm him and would if it weren't for Quaritch

- adult recoms mind you, they're at least twice as big and strong as the average human adult and Spider's a 16 year-old human.

2. We get a literal scene of Quaritch telling Spider there's a tracker in his mask. If he leaves, they're going to find him

- he would have to switch masks and that could be noticed and be noted as suspicious, since he's always watched by the recoms.

3. Even if Spider managed to escape - he's in the middle of the ocean. He's never been there, he's half the size of a Na'vi (thus easy prey for anything in the water) and he'd have to either swim through the ocean to safety with no idea how long he'll have to swim, how the weather will affect the water or if he's even going to get onto safe land. And if he doesn't, Quaritch will find him and give him back to Ardmore, who'll torture him again.

Either those arguing he could have just left are missing/forgetting this vital point or they’re purposefully ignoring it.

Spider never went with the recoms because he genuinely wanted to. The first time, Quaritch literally kidnapped him and the second time Quaritch gave him the ultimatum to either come with him and not run or be send back to Ardmore to torture him again. And even if he runs when he's with Quaritch, again, tracker in his mask and recoms that are physically at least twice as strong as he is.

What opportunities? The ones that would have endangered him even more? The ones that could have made Quaritch give him back to torture? Yeah, no wonder the kid was passive.

3.1 the villainization of Spider

Going through TikTok however will make you believe Spider is a malicious, evil little cunt who was safe and happy when he was with Quaritch and Neteyam died for nothing because Spider was safe with the man who was willing to give him back to torturers in atwow and actually was complicit of his torture in afaa - twice: with the RDA and with Varaang.

Many people on TikTok are blowing things out of proportion and act like their warped perceptions are fact. “Spider killed Neteyam!” “Spider is taking away all the attention” “Spider didn’t care about Neteyam’s death” “Spider betrayed the Sullies!”

-Lyle killed Neteyam. War killed Neteyam. Plot killed Neteyam. Cameron and the writers designed Neteyam’s story to end on the tragic point of his untimely death.

Spider didn’t ask to be born, nor did he ask to be kidnapped. He did not ask to get tortured and going with the recoms was his only way out of that torture.

-Spider is growing into a bigger role like Kiri and Lo’ak are. That’s obvious from the stance alone that he’s the villain’s son growing up with the children of the protagonist. His establishment as a character made him important from the get-go. Why give the main antagonist a kid if he’s not going to become important?

-Spider didn’t get enough screen time showing him actively grieve - neither did Kiri or Tuk. Neither did Tonowari, Tsireya or Aonung for Ronal. That’s on the writing. Not on the characters themselves.

-Spider was conflicted about who to put his trust in in atwow and switched immediately to the Sullies when he realized his mistake and rejects Quaritch, both in afaa. Mistakes happen when you don’t have an accepting parental figure around you and then one shows up and starts to care for your most basic well-being. He realized that he was only acting out of morality immediately after saving Quaritch hence why he didn’t go with him as the latter requested. He wanted Quaritch to leave and start over and leave the Sullies alone, his own morals forbade him from leaving Quaritch to die.

Was it wrong? - obviously Is what he did unreasonable/illogical for Spider’s character? - no

3.1.1 Spider is NOT doing this intentionally

“Oh, Spider saved Quaritch, so he’s at fault for everything evil Quaritch does in the future.” -meta-answer: He saved Quaritch because the plot demanded it. -in-universe answer: He saved Quaritch because it’s in his character and he’s displaying why he’ll never be like his father and why he belongs with the Na’vi - he acts according to their ways of living. He didn’t kill or let die someone whom he owed a life-debt. OF COURSE it sucks for the Sullies and the overall well-being of Pandora, but you’re looking at every meta faction instead on focusing on this character’s reasoning for doing what he did AND regretted.

It is not on Spider that Quaritch decides to keep harming the Sullies. That is on Quaritch and Quaritch alone. He is the adult. He is the one obsessed with taking out and harming Jake. That is on him.

Spider is a 16-year-old kid.

He was kidnapped. Tortured. Quaritch saved him. Made himself the trusted adult in this environment - manipulated Spider. He took Spider away from the lab. He let Spider roam. He let Spider feel a little bit free. He made Spider a helpless witness to the destruction of the home of multiple sea clans - but then he listens to him. He looked after him. He kidnapped his friends again. His orders killed one of Spider’s lifelong friends. He threatened to kill Kiri - until Spider was in danger. Then he let go, prioritized Spider’s safety, wellbeing and life over his revenge mission. There is a little bit of hope in Spider after this. Maybe Quaritch does care. Maybe he can change. He listened to him earlier with the other sea clans and didn’t execute them outright, toned down from outright execution to burning the clans’ homes. A tiny change. Quaritch’s still horrible. But he cares for Spider’s opinion and feelings, at least enough to ease them a tiny bit. He wanted him safe when Neytiri didn’t. He might actually care. So he saves him.

Quaritch’s manipulation and his own conflicted feelings about Spider are having an effect on Spider as well. Neither Quaritch nor Spider can really explain the attachment they have to each other.

Spider wants a father, obviously, and now he has a semi-chance to get to know his “biological” father in some way. As much as Spider knows how objectively horrible Quaritch is - he’s still his father. A parent - someone Spider has always longed for. But this man truly is as horrible as Spider was always told. And then, the conflicted feelings start, some of those intentionally formed by Quaritch, some of them not. Because Quaritch begins their relationship with manipulation and then turns genuine throughout atwow before his need for revenge destroys his chances of getting so close to Spider ever again, as we can see at the end of afaa. Because Quaritch also builds an attachment to Spider. The difference is, Quaritch still has his mission. And what sets him apart from the Sullies is that he, unlike Jake and Neytiri because he’s their foil, puts the mission and his own need for revenge over his child. Jake and Neytiri usually do the opposite.

3.1.2 Spider DOES NOT “deserve to die”

This one actually enrages me. (even more so after having rewatched afaa – you absolute unempathetic fucks – shut the fuck up. No one needs to hear how fucking disgusting you are, crying over one dead child while simutaniously wishing death upon another. You’re not against child murder, like the story itself is, you’re in favour of the child you don’t like getting murdered because he dares be a character you personally don’t enjoy. Oh no, whatever will we do? Well, shutting the fuck up is an option, but that’s so hard apparently!)

People say it so proudly and act like everyone saying otherwise is wrong and a bad person, as if they’re even one bit better in hating a fictional kid so much they wish death upon him for being written in a way they dislike.

He has his reasons to exist in-universe. He’s exists to show humans are capable to naturally adapting to a lifestyle on Pandora like the Na’vi and he’s narratively there to have Quaritch’s and the Sullies’ relationship have emotional ties. If Spider didn’t exist, killing Quaritch would be too easy to accomplish because Jake and Neytiri wouldn’t have to do anything different from Avatar 1 since there’s no new emotional stakes. It’s like they want the story to be worse.

There is such an EASY fix for that.

You don’t like this character and the growing relevance he’s getting and it RUINS the franchise for you? - Stop torturing yourself. Stop watching the franchise further.

Don’t make up reasons why he shouldn’t be in the story - this is professionally written with multiple experienced writers on board - they know better than you what works for the story they’re writing. Cameron knows better than you what he wants to portray with HIS story and which characters are relevant for that.

Your moaning on TikTok does nothing but make people feel bad for actually liking this character or his part in the story. Just because you personally cannot relate to Spider (if that is even required for you to like a character, which is weak in it of itself) doesn’t mean others can’t.

Don’t ruin the franchise for others by bitching about him on everything because his relevance is growing.

Don’t bully people for not agreeing with you.

Don’t be passive-aggressive to people who don’t share your opinion.

Don’t be mean to people who genuinely want to explain why they love a character. You are OF COURSE allowed to dismiss them, but do so maturely and politely – of course, given that the other person did so as well.

Behave like adults. All around.

3.2 Did Jake, Neytiri and Quaritch fail Spider? – what makes a parent?

Quaritch? – no doubt, failed all the time and it’s his own doing and deliberate action or inaction. He let Spider get tortured, first by the RDA in atwow, again in afaa by the RDA again and by Varaang. But he valued his life in atwow. At a point where Spider had no other parental figure because Neytiri betrayed him, which is why Spider clung to him and had to immediately regret it after saving him.

Neytiri? – while she had no parental responsibility for him in atwow, she was still willing to kill him and was suspicious of him since he was a child for simply being born Quaritch’s son. Her learning to see him is important for her character and working through her trauma, but that’s at the end of afaa. She wasn’t a parent at all for him and she didn’t have to be. We’ll see how she behaves towards him in the future.

Jake? – like Neytiri, he has no parental responsibility for him in atwow. This changes in afaa with Spider living with them and his immediate idea is to send him back to the labs. While he didn’t want to kill Spider, he was still willing to do it, even if he couldn’t bring himself to. His feelings for Spider are complicated and they’re allowed to be, but he’s also not a good parent for Spider.

So what makes a good parent? - for Spider? Radically speaking – none of the above. They all either wanted him dead, were complicit in seeing him tortured or having him be killed, didn’t feel responsible for him or tried to send him off. If he decides to forgive them and still see them as parental figures is entirely on him. He decided to forgive the Sullies and stood against Quaritch (as it stands after afaa), so his (likely final) choice was made on that matter.

3.3 Why isn’t Spider getting killed off?

Because he’s the emotional tie/anchor between the Sullies and Quaritch. He’s there so killing Quaritch becomes harder for the Sullies since there’s now someone they care about that cares about Quaritch. Of course that’s frustrating, but it’s not an unreasonable or uncommon trope. Characters exist for a reason. The reason Spider exists as Quaritch’s son is because the Sullies liking Quaritch’s kid makes killing Quaritch a more emotional conflict than it was in Avatar 1. Do you want Quaritch’s death to be the repetitive same thing as in 2009?

Also, common fiction tropes again because Avatar is not an original, completely new phenomenon story-wise: the children from the heroes and the child(ren) from the villain become friends/grow up together/love each other and it complicates the conflict of their parents (or sometimes the relationship of the kids, not in Avatar, though)

Again, you can say that Avatar’s writing is nothing new and you’d be right, but being unoriginal doesn’t automatically mean bad. It’s executed well enough, it’s just rushed. That is what’s sad.

I personally had hoped for a real, deep movie after afaa’s first promotional materials came out, dealing only/mostly with the different kinds of grief driving the Sullies apart from one another. What we got was disappointingly shallow and predictable again. Am I disappointed? - yes. Does that ruin the franchise for me? - no. Can I still see what was done in the story with the characters? - yes. Again, Avatar is not that complex that you cannot comprehend it.

But Spider has made his disapproval of Quaritch clear now after afaa… so where does that leave his purpose of being that emotional tie between him and the Sullies?