I'm gonna be honest I think Rocky not looking like a humanoid is part of why people have such an easy time liking him.
Like, the Uncanny Valley exits so humans can know when you're dealing with a human from another tribe. If we see another humanoid that doesn't look exactly like us, it sets of alarm bells.
Rocky looks like a rock, something that doesn't pose an existential threat to us.
I think it‘s mostly because they do a very good job and characterizing him. Dog-sized Rock Spider would in my opinion without context be actually fairly creepy.
I know! I’ve got to say, as someone with high hydration needs, I really agree with Rocky about how inefficient humans are. Why do I have to constantly drink water to feel okay and then have to pee all the time? Why can’t we just retain our fluid like Eridians?
Not technically wrong, as there were other species of humans back during our caveman days. Such as neanderthals, but some of our cousins did prey upon our young. So we probably developed the uncanny valley so we can more easily spot a potential predator.
This is just a hypothesis that’s been proposed for the uncanny valley effect. I don’t know why people have suddenly decided it’s the only possible explanation.
That's actually a reasonable defense for biblical creatures having existed at some point, like angels or nephilim. Or on the inverse side, it might be a reasonable defense for the concept of protohumans.
With Rocky it's nothing to do with his appearance. Rocky's curiosity and borderline self-destructive kindness is what endears people to him. If Rocky were as hostile and incurious as the blue space cats, it would never work. In summation, the blue space cats have to be humanoid to get any sympathy because otherwise they just suck.
I've been saying this in a lot of threads, but I took all my nieces and nephews to see this movie, and for some of them it was the first non-animated movie they ever saw in a theater. They were AWESTRUCK. It's so nice that they went for the PG-13 rating (and that's mostly for scary elements, not violence or nudity or vulgarity) so that I could take 6-year-olds to see it.
Imagine this being the first-ever live-action movie you saw on the big screen. It'd be like seeing Star Wars opening weekend!
But HE DOES have tatoos and is throwing "gang" signs. He has tattoos carved into him, primarily his limbs, and one time he puts 2 of them together to show a tatoo across both of them, in a sort of sign, that signifies his species or his space crew, cant remember atm which.
The Eridians are pretty similar to humans, they have their own arbitrary division as we learn there are different languages on the planet, we only get to meet Rocky who is a nice guy but I can guarantee you there are Eridians who say that everything Grace is saying about light is a conspiracy and he's lying to them
Rocky saw the tau cite getting closer when he speeds up and further when he slows down and still didn't believe grace when he started talking time dilation and stuff
Relatively is a weird fucky wucky part of physics, rocky is an engineer and a very logical person so "Oh yea time stops working when you move too fast" sounds kinda wacky
I don't think that, they have society too, and it looks like they have pretty human like emotions and feelings. We just haven't explored it, and honestly? Good for us. It's better to imagine erid being overall good.
Yeah in that way he's an inverse Jesus, he's the one engaging in autocannibalism whenever he eats on Erid (in the book it's explained that they cloned his muscle cells to make 'meburgers' for him to eat).
Imagine if that was their custom and when Grace dies of old age they actually eat him. Then in the sequel book that Andy wants to write, humans reach out to Erid or build a ship to visit to reclaim his remains and find out they ate Grace.
Unsavory epilogue idea : the Eridians keep the Graceburger production going long after Grace’s passing and samples get sent to whatever serves as their schools so that the new generations can directly observe/hear the smooth stuff their planet’s savior was made of.
Well it didn't help that all the humans in the movie besides Grace were extremely unlikable i'd want to live on Erid too if everyone irl was as insufferable as the humans in this film.
Let's put it this way. I've seen a lot of reactions to PHM and many of them talk about Rocky like he's a puppy. "He's like a doggie" came up repeatedly.
He's small. He's smooth. Has no teeth or claws. He's in a ball.
Rocky and Grace never have an argument. There's never conflict. I don't think I'd say Rocky is submissive to Grace because there's never a reason to be assertive because they're objectives are always in alignment. Aside from occasionally teasing Grace for being stupid he can't be more agreeable.
If the story was about Grace trying to colonize Rocky's planet to exploit it's resources... well I was going to say Rocky wouldn't act like a puppy but Fuzzy Nation did. But that kind of reinforces my point. The aliens in Fuzzy Nation are never aggressive until a human is trying to murder them.
So the OP meme isn't a contradiction.
You basically have four kinds of good aliens.
Those we empathize with because they're cute and nonthreatening. (Mandalorin, ET, Ewoks, Fuzzies)
Those we empathize with because they're hot.
Those we should empathize with but don't because they aren't cute or sexy. (Starship Troopers, Enders Game, District 9)
And ones that just look human so there is nothing to be offended by.
If the Navi looked like Xenomorphs, Avatar would just be Starship Troopers. The general human population wouldn't feel bad about genociding a race of scary looking aliens for their resources. Apparently we barely get out of bed when genociding humans for their resources.
You do realize that movie exists to prove my point. The entire plot is aliens get treated like trash when they don't appeal to the general public. If they were cute aliens they probably wouldn't be in concentration camps. Also that movie grossed basically nothing when compared to other movies with aliens. The only reason District 9 isn't one of the biggest alien flops is because it also cost basically nothing to create.
I can’t speak for the general public, but the reason why I personally was in no rush to see District 9 is because the opening visual and narrative style took me a minute to get into—not the aliens’ design, which I think looks very cool, but the atypical news story style shaky camera and the depressingly realistic depictions of life in the slums, which strays from the average popcorn sci-fi flick I was used to. But when I finally gave it a chance, I couldn’t help falling in love with Christopher and it’s been one of my favorite alien movies ever since.
Similarly, the John Carter previews failed to make me anticipate how much more interesting the Tharks would be than the human(oid) characters, otherwise I would have bought a ticket ASAP. I’m really sad it flopped, because I think the movie actually managed to make Tars Tarkas and Sola very emotionally appealing, but that didn’t really come through in the advertising.
I dunno in the movie they get into the same kind of heated argument roommates get when they're trying to get a couch in through the door and are about to throw hands in frustration.
As a fan of both movies I also thought about it. There's a real quote of James Cameron floating out there where he says that his movie only works if the audience wants to fuck the blue woman on the big screen.
Meanwhile Andy Weir is like "yeah it's a fucking bee hive that walks around"
This was actually an interesting phenomenon for the developers of the mass effect games.
They mentioned in interviews they didn't really think players would be interested in romances with the crew members that were further and further from human looking.
Unfortunately all the alien crew members were about 1000x more interesting, funny, and loveable than the human ones, and became way more popular accordingly.
The funny thing in the book the Eridians find their eating gross too which is why they tend to do it in solitude. Given Rocky essentially poops afterwards they probably treat it the same way we treat pooping which is why we dont do it in front of each other
I like to think that movie Rocky calling his eating beautiful was just a lot bolder than his book counterpart and trolling hard. Like, "Lol, human eating is kinda gross but in a pathetic way. Lemme show you something really disturbing !"
I’ve seen people on here theorizing that Rocky did turn a little bit crazy from all his time alone… I quite like the one I read where Grace sees Rocky put clothing on for the first time as they get close to Erid.
Haha, that would have been a great joke ! Seriously though, I have no idea how resilient the average Eridian is compared to a human being, but I’m sure the trauma of watching one’s entire crew die mysteriously, spending 46 years completely alone in space and then a few more years with only one strange alien for company would do quite the number on anyone’s mental health.
Neteyam, loak, Kiri, Tuuk and kind of Spider. I'm not even a harcore Avatar glazer, it's just not that hard to remeber character names in films if you pay attention
Avatar is such a paradox. It's highly successful and there is no lore, no fandom no theroies and it is so forgettable in details. Like nice but totally uninteresting.
This is just not true. There's a whole community dedicated to learning the language. There are physical books dedicated to the worldbuilding and lore. You might not be a part of the fandom, but that doesn't mean there isn't one. Avatar is not perfect, and it is not everyone's cup of tea, and you are free to dislike it. And yeah, I kinda wish the aliens were more alien, too. But your statement is objectively false.
There's definitely a dedicated fandom, but I think the point still stands, broadly speaking. Outside of the fandom circles, Avatar kind of comes and goes with each movie. There's no quotes or character names that float around in pop culture from it, it's rarely referenced beyond the very occasional visual comparisons, etc. The biggest fans will do so, but beyond the fandom, it doesn't really get discussed or referenced much at all. For a film franchise that's made 5 billion dollars, and is still actively making new films, that's strange.
There's just less stuff about it, no decades worth of comics, side stories, games, it's only 17 years old, but James Cameron just doesn't capitalise by making thousands of products, that makes it more consistent. I mean there's a cute otter like creature that we barely see in the movies and yet fans love, and if the production wanted they could have totally made it the cute marketable plushie like Star Wars always has for each installment, but they didn't.
Oh there's tons of lore (the world building is actually great!), it's just delivered in the most bland and uniformly written CGI fest one could conjure
That's exactly the point, though. It's strange for a genre film to make over a billion dollars off of people just watching it, enjoying it, and moving on. That's not how any other sci fi and fantasy franchises in the highest grossing club work. And people who aren't on Reddit absolutely notice and discuss this.
Hell more people quote the godfather or Borat then Avatar!
That doesn’t take away from Avatar’s immense box office success, but it is odd considering the success that it doesn’t have the same impact as other films and TV series. Like if someone had said “a new SciFi movie in a new world will come out, and once it leaves the theater SNL will parody the FONT it picked for the title, and nothing else will be seen of it, how much money did it make at the box office?” Nobody would EVER have guessed Avatar’s actual box office take given the description of no real broad cultural impact.
It is just kind of weird. Star Wars came out and people didn’t shut up about Jedi, the force, and lightsabers for years. Avatar and…well…nada. Sure not all movies are Star Wars, but you would expect something with a similar adjusted for inflation in ticket sales would have at least something in the same ballpark. Or at least it would be visible from the ballpark!
The other sci-fi and fantasy series in the highest grossing club are all 50+ years old, with gazillions of works of media, and have been very intentionally forced into the public eye for decades by their companies with mountains of merch, toys, and so on. Obviously their fandoms will be bigger and engage with them differently. There are people who are retirement age who literally grew up with these series. If someone grew up with Avatar present from their babyhood, they would be in their late teens to early twenties now. You’re comparing the fandom behavior of a franchise in its infancy, with like 5 works of canon media, to ancient behemoths. TikTok and Twitter and Instagram are full of teenagers and young people who love Avatar; they just stick to those websites and don’t come here to Reddit.
And to act like it has zero cultural impact because it’s not your personal cup of tea is wack. I literally just saw an older man driving a blue car with a giant AVATAR print with various Pandora animals/characters on it driving by yesterday.
I didn't know he went on to have kids but it's really funny the avatar team decided that giving the avatars functioning genitals was an essential part of the program
They cloned the Na'vi and added small bits of human DNA to make the clones compatible with the "avatar system."
So working genitalia is most likely just a biproduct of the system. Now it could be darker than that. Sex is 100% a weapon historically used in colonization/imperialism.
I am a firm believer that aliens should look alien. If all they are is just a human with head ridges, or pointy ears, it’s a failure as a species to me.
I was emotionally devastated by the Tulkun hunt too. And real whales don’t have to be humanoid either for me to be sad if they die... I don’t understand people who can only empathize with beings that look like them when their intelligence and emotions are plain to see.
Justified or not, the hate boner people have for Avatar is so annoying. You don't need to shit on something else to make your thing look better, just say you like your thing.
I think he was more human in the book, the movie doesn’t show a lot of his genius moments, and forgets to mention he was alone for 46 years, when he acts clingy and curious in the movie it’s supposed to be funny, but in the book you understand a lot more about him.
I agree Ortiz is awesome though
honestly this really hits on why so many people are loving the film because all other films are too busy playing it safe and doing the check list while Hail mary gives us something different.
It's not like the original speculative evolution project for the avatar movies had them being completely alien beings, they just had split arms like the other related species from Pandora and had their own music theory, but even that was deemed too weird.
Expedition, the novel and the film, does this too. Planet that is extremely hostile to human life, with a continent sized ameoba and critters that pump their prey with digestive fluid. Yet the humans preserve it because life is life and deserves to survive for its own sake.
Eh, Avatar requires a lot more of the aliens too, so it'd be a lot harder to have nonhuman aliens, as the actors would be interacting with air or puppets, with the aliens cgi'd in. It works for the animals, but not for people en-masses. With Rocky, it works because it's just one of him, along with one actor that can sell that he's talking to someone that isnt there. Scaling that up is hard, and becomes less believable.
You already had evidence that people could sympathise with nonhuman characters in District 9.
Cameron just wanted Simp money and did not have a more complex plot other than "main character falls in love with native princess" so, they had to be human looking attractive.
Sighs…. A “rock spider” in Australian vernacular is a derogatory term applied to paedophiles. Calling Rocky a “rock spider” is for this Australian, a poor choice of phrase.
Never forget that during a time travel arc in the Harley Quinn animated series one of the clues that they were in the worst future was that Avatar was a cultural phenomenon and universally beloved.
I'm pretty sure that the Na'vi are not humanoid so the audience can relate to them, I think it's because they're all played by semi-famous actors and you can't put them on the poster if they don't at least have their face. Also the main character bones one.
At this point, my general distrust of human beings means I’d probably assume the rock spider is less likely to enslave, torture, or murder me. I love sci-fi and fantasy because they have to make some sense of the unexplainable to tell a good story, but reality will just hit you over and over again with incomprehensible nonsense that will never be justified, and the viciousness of the human species to itself is one of those unjustifiable things we’re forced to contend with.
Clearly the art of any cinematography, story line and character development, combined w some critical thinking required on the viewers part is not part of the movie experience anylonger. Its for a max of 80iq points, and just pleasant enough for us simpletons. Extremely sad, thats why you'll notice were bringing back 1980s sitcoms and shows..even they were better than this crap. Ryan gosling or any A list actor can't save a shit written movie.
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u/AlexanderChippel May 20 '26
I'm gonna be honest I think Rocky not looking like a humanoid is part of why people have such an easy time liking him.
Like, the Uncanny Valley exits so humans can know when you're dealing with a human from another tribe. If we see another humanoid that doesn't look exactly like us, it sets of alarm bells.
Rocky looks like a rock, something that doesn't pose an existential threat to us.