When we first mentioned furries on Nightcharm, we had no idea that a movie like Avatar was in the works. The “Furry” moniker includes the the fans and artwork of anthropomorphic animal-human hybrids, typically with animal faces but human bodies and hands, and they’re often cast in a sexual context, with bulging genitals and insanely kinky sexual habits. A furry fan can design an human-animal character to epitomize her or his own personality, which is called, coincidentally, an avatar.
Which brings us to the film. Imagine slender, blue-skinned warriors with deerlike ears, polished fanged yet human-looking teeth and amazingly proportioned physiques. Their faces are vaguely feline, eyes large and yellow, their tails thin and whiplike. Imagine them running around with loin-cloths and arrows, with an intense sense of tribal duty and honor, leaping around on gigantic trees and floating rocks in a brilliant otherworld where familiar mores and taboos are unknown.
Sound familiar?
Furries have been special fodder for jokes in the online world for years, but Avatar might finally bring their anthropomorphic forms something that those with a wealth of imagination and mischievous creativity still lacked: mainstream recognition.
As it turns out, Avatar contains almost all the elements of the furry fantasy; the alien hominids on the planet Pandora are distinctly gendered, passionate and noble, and mostly-naked throughout the film. A select group of human characters are allowed to actually become the Na’vi, the alien world’s indigenous creatures, by uploading their minds into lab-grown avatar bodies — giving viewers a chance to fantasize about the possibility. The central story in the film features the human-turned-alien who joins the native community, falling in love and — yes — mating with a local girl under a bioluminescent weeping willow as he gains the community’s trust.
To take the paradise element of this strange world a step farther, the Na’vi are able to link their minds directly to a variety of native creatures by connecting exposed neurons that come out of the backs of their heads with similar appendages in other living things, including trees. Artistically, it is the ultimate manifestation of the human desire for intimacy and belonging. One could imagine that kind of thing leads to incredible new sexual opportunities: you could tell your partner, “I want to know what it feels like for you when I do this” and see it through.
My boyfriend invited me to see Avatar on opening night, and I agreed just for the sociological opportunity, expecting to see a lot of geeky teenagers and eccentric-looking adults who look like they delve too far in to stories. Instead, the crowd looked like any other; there were a lot of college-aged boys in groups, young couples, and a few kids there with their parents.
I’ll leave it to other sources to summarize the movie, as well as to judge the quality of a familiar plot that anyone could accurately predict beginning to end by watching the trailer. I’ll just say that the English-speaking humans who invade Pandora in Avatar are so callous, greedy, racist and dismissive of the interest of others that they lack authenticity and you’re rooting for them to be slaughtered at the hands of the Na’vi before the film is halfway over. During scenes that take place in the sterile laboratories or control rooms at the man-made mining camp, you’ll be longing to return to the forest of glowing flowers and endless green.
The thing that really caught me is the art of exaggeration here. The typical scientific explanations for what constitutes attractiveness includes symmetry, height, a certain waist-to-hip ratio, erectness and musculature. Our brains are so thoroughly programmed to enjoy seeing these characteristics, markers of health, that they can be exaggerated to the extent of being no longer human and have the same effect. In Avatar, you grow so used to seeing the robust, able-bodied Na’vi that when they appear alongside human bodies toward the end of the film, otherwise attractive human actors look frail and sickly by comparison.
There seems to be a similar programming for landscapes; the steeper the cliffs, the farther the downward plunge of a waterfall, or the higher gigantic trees penetrate into the misty sky, the more beautiful we perceive the landscape to be. Pandora is like Earth to the Nth power, with the same features but bigger and more colorful and more packed with living things in the form of animals and trees.
One imagine that the way we are struck by fictional people in the Na’vi is similar to how people in the past have encountered an ethnicity they’ve never witnessed before; for Native Americans who first saw white European colonizers gathering on the coastline, ancient Greek soldiers coming across Persians for the first time in battle or cro magnon nomads in Stone Age Europe finding a band of Neanderthals, who recent research indicates modern humans likely interbred with. You are initially taken aback by a difference in skin or hair color, which is the singularly most benign trait that differentiates individuals of any species from others within the species.
Over time, though, biological recognitions click in: the facial features are in the right place, even if they are shaped differently, the body proportions are correct, these creatures are gendered in the same way that we are gendered, and the first awareness of sexual attractiveness indicates that the subconscious has recognized this other as the same species, no matter how desperately the conscious seeks to avoid the connection.
© 2010, Matt P.. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com
So timely! I’ve already seen people avatar-ize their usericons on Yahoo and other sites, placing themselves in the movie. I’ll let you know as soon as I catch some furry fan-fic based on Avatar or furry-porn derivatives of giant blue people with their cocks out.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I imagine there’s a sex scene between two of these blue humanoids. And on more than one occasion I bet it aroused a conservative christian. Talk about fucking with someone’s value system….
All you need is colloidial silver and good plastic surgeon.
They’ve said the “peace and Gaia” message of Cameron’s film is political, but archconservative Jonah Goldberg has his own take on the politics of Avatar, via the ever-timely Wonkette.com:
“What would have been controversial is if — somehow — Cameron had made a movie in which the good guys accepted Jesus Christ into their hearts.”
Jonah, that’s great.
“I’ll let you know as soon as I catch some furry fan-fic based on Avatar or furry-porn derivatives of giant blue people with their cocks out.”
It’s out there. Quality stuff, no, but it’s out there…
I have seen the movie twice. Once in 3D & also regular. There are no sex scenes in it. The guy who though there were is an all to typical gay reaction to something he knows nothing about. It makes my sorry to have gay men who dont know what they are talking about put info out there that makes all gay men look stupid. Its a very good movie and I liked it alot.
d
Well, good for the furries!
And, the movie might be full of exaggerations and greedy humans, but I went to see the 3D show at our local theater and damn, I was impressed with the movie. Perhaps not so much the plot, because it’s relatively simple, but the way it focuses on getting to know these new people and the stunning images you get to see throughout the movie. A simple plot, in this case, helps. Because I could spend all my time looking at the pretty surroundings in the movie
.
As for attraction and the like, I can’t say that I found any of these guys attractive. Sorry, but it takes more than a long person with a fit body to get the juices flowing…for me, anyway.
As for the sex scene: meh. Just meh. It was nothing special. It always amazes me how every alien race conveniently shows affection in the same way.
I do recommend people to go watch the movie, a 3D version if possible, because it’s amazingly well-made in terms of CGI and such. (Although, sadly, the ’3D-ness’ of the movie is thrown completely askew when you see a few pictures hanging off a fridge. You should check them, they’re only on screen a few seconds, but damn, those things look like they go on forever o.O)
(I hope this doesn’t constitute shameless advertising, I just loved the movie xD)
re: Dale @12:22am.
“I have seen the movie twice. Once in 3D & also regular. There are no sex scenes in it. The guy who though there were is an all to typical gay reaction to something he knows nothing about. It makes my sorry to have gay men who dont know what they are talking about put info out there that makes all gay men look stupid. Its a very good movie and I liked it alot.”
Uh, what? What about the scene where they’re kissing under the glowing willow tree and later confess that they “mated.” They wake up naked together. Maybe you don’t think so, but in most people’s vocabulary, “mating”=sex, and a scene showing what happens between two characters in a romantic setting just before sex and just after sex counts as a sex scene. Just because they didn’t show the penis entering the vagina (which they can’t do unless its porn) doesn’t mean it isn’t a sex scene.
re: Dale @12:22am.
“I have seen the movie twice. Once in 3D & also regular. There are no sex scenes in it. The guy who though there were is an all to typical gay reaction to something he knows nothing about. It makes my sorry to have gay men who dont know what they are talking about put info out there that makes all gay men look stupid. Its a very good movie and I liked it alot.”
Uh, what? What about the scene where they’re kissing under the glowing willow tree and later confess that they “mated.” They wake up naked together. Maybe you don’t think so, but in most people’s vocabulary, “mating”=sex, and a scene showing what happens between two characters in a romantic setting just before sex and just after sex counts as a sex scene. Just because they didn’t show the penis entering the vagina (which they can’t do unless its porn) doesn’t mean it isn’t a sex scene.
If you can, see the movie on IMAX and in 3D. The flick is so much more wretchedly mind blowing and so very worth it from a visual standpoint.
Annalee Newitz of io9 is, as usual, worth reading on the topic of Avatar: (link)
“Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?”
I’ll see if I can get her to come over here & weigh in on the fascinating furry angle.
I thought this was a film about that EST-like group of people that doing trainings across the country, called Avatar. I guess I need to get out more. Oooops.
I’m an occasional furry artist and strangely, despite the pointed ears and tails and fangs and kitty noses, it didn’t even occur to me that this might have somehow resembled furry when I saw the movie.
Come on boys time to move their asses! too much inactivity in this blog!
It turns out the sex scene was cut out so that they wouldn’t lose their pg 13 rating. It will be on the DVD though.
“ancient Greek soldiers coming across Persians for the first time in battle”
Greeks had a huge amount of cultural and trading contact with Persians, seeing as they were neighboring empires. They also looked ethnically similar (dark hair, tanned skin). Don’t toss around historical parallels if you’re clueless about the history.
“Greeks had a huge amount of cultural and trading contact with Persians, seeing as they were neighboring empires. They also looked ethnically similar (dark hair, tanned skin). Don’t toss around historical parallels if you’re clueless about the history.”
WTF are you talking about? Just because the two cultures had contact doesn’t mean every individual from Greece had been to Persia on a regular basis.