Kidlet: *gives me dubious look*

Me: Sorry. I mean vegetables.

Kidlet: *gives me alarmed look*

Me: Sorry! I mean bread!

Kidlet: *starts laughing* No vegetables for breakfast?

Me: No, no vegetables. Fruit.

Kidlet: *snickering* Vegilante.

Now I want to write a story about a superhero who puts vegetables on the plates of kids who don’t eat enough vegetables. It would feature dialogue like this:

Dramatic voice: This child is not eating enough vegetables! But never fear, vegilante is here!

Vegilante: *dressed in green and orange spandex* Have some broccoli!

what DID he save querich for?? 😭😭

idk this debate has kinda run its course i think considering the movie came out nearly 4 years ago... but ill put my two cents in bc fuck it.

i think spider would have had to fundamentally been a different character to let quaritch die. knowing what we know about spider, his upbringing, and his difficulties with his identity, for him to make the moral decision to let him die would have felt a bit... not right.

we have seen spider kill people- or, at least it's implied- when the ship goes down in atwow and he's pulling of humans' masks as they fight to escape. spider is a very fierce kid and he protects his family. i think the conflict in his character is that there are moments where he isn't sure who his family really is. he loves the sullys, but they don't all love him back, or not in the same way (at least at first). amongst his admiration for jake, his love for the brothers and tuk, his antagonism with neytiri, and his crush on kiri, its a very unsettling position for a child to be in.

enter quaritch, a man who is technically but not actually his father. a man who rescues spider from torture, promises safety, and then seems to genuinely listen to spider. that's not something spider has had much of in his life, and to a child, a biological parent can mean so much to them if they've spent their whole life missing them.

spider shows clear contempt for quaritch and what he stands for, but that logical and moral footing can only guide him so far when the emotional part of his brain is reacting to an adult who is paying attention to him. i work with kids in my full-time job. it's an often-cited law that children want attention and they want it all the time. (this is often complicated with trauma and complex families etc, but the principle stands). whether he wanted it to or not, quaritch's attention meant something to spider. quaritch himself meant something to spider, even if it was simply the knowledge that his dad is an asshole.

but knowing your father is an asshole and leaving him to die are two very different things. i could write far, far more about the fallacies of the teenage developmental brain that might have affected spider's decision making, the trauma-related behaviours that would contribute to it, and even the fact that james cameron needed someone to save quaritch for avatar 3 to exist, but its friday night babey and i wanna go play videogames.