Mia

I’m aggressively not an Avatar fan, but my feed started filling with really creative oc designs and I wanted to put a spin on it.

I don’t like their stripes, they look like Blaschko stripes and don’t seem to provide any kind of evolutionary advantage.

Maybe it’s genetically tied to a trait that DOES, but I’d rather just make the stripes more purposeful. So they’re tiger stripes.

To be strict, they aren’t dark enough or positioned well enough to truly work as well as tiger stripes do. Real tiger stripes are black and vertical to break up a tiger’s shape in between trees and tall grass. Na’vi stripes aren’t dark enough or contrasting enough for that, plus they’re horizontal. So I’m bending rules a bit to avoid falling headlong into a complete reworking. They’re tiger stripes that work when a na’vi is hunting in the way they’re evolutionarily designed to- in a crouch that rotates the stripes vertically. I made them a touch darker and upped the contrast a bit, let’s just pretend the contrast is good enough.

I gave her an extremely choppy ponytail because it’s strange that TAP didn’t shave these kids. It’s a fairly straight-forward residential school metaphor, why didn’t they do a uniform cut like what was soooo common in those schools? The writing at the beginning is kind of hard to parse out. TAP is ruthless enough to murder a kid in front of all her peers, but didn’t remove every culturally significant artifact they had? Or aggressively punish things like singing or speaking Na’vi? Or wearing traditional hairstyles and decorations? (that path leads down a never ending sinkhole of “they didn’t research historic examples of ethnic cleansing well enough to pull this topic off” so I’m leaving it there).

Yefti here is growing out her bowl cut but doesn’t know what to do with long hair anymore. She’s mimicking what she’s seen others do, with mixed results. The braids are mostly hair twisted around thread to keep the overgrown length out of her eyes while the rest is shoved through the center of a large hair-bead. Wooden, or from a large seed pit idk. She’s wearing random things she’s found from abandoned campsites to look more na’vi than she feels. The woven chest piece she’s wearing is meant for a boy child, but how could she know that.

She doesn’t like being recognized as Sarentu. When she’s unable to answer basic questions about her clan she feels a silent accusation from the na’vi asking, like she’s a liar and a particularly bad one. Eventually, she’ll learn to cover the mark.

Maybe when Tamtay revives the clan, Yefti will hear and feel less like she’s pretending to be a dead person.