In Defense Of Unobtanium

thegamer.com:

For reasons that still aren’t entirely clear to me, it’s cool to hate Avatar, AKA the most successful movie ever made. People that love Marvel hate it because they see it as a threat to the MCU - which is apparently the only franchise that’s allowed to be successful anymore - and people that hate Marvel hate it, well, for the same reasons they hate Marvel. It’s cool to hate popular things, but with Avatar, there’s a pervading narrative that it was never even popular at all, despite the many billions it put in the bank.

There’s only a few common criticisms levied at Avatar, even after all these years. People like to say it’s too archetypal, and that it simply repeats the story and themes found in FernGully, Pocahontas, and Dances With Wolves. If this is your perspective - or you borrowed this perspective from South Park - I’d recommend that you work on your media literacy and then watch it again. Just because two movies share common themes doesn’t mean they’re the same movie, and Avatar is about a lot more than conservation - but that’s the subject of a different article. Secondly, people accuse Avatar of perpetuating the White Savior trope. This is a lot more nuanced than the first complaint, and while I think there’s important ways that it subverts the trope which make it a valuable commentary on these kinds of stories, once again, that topic is beyond my scope today.

The final complaint most commonly thrown at Avatar is that unobtanium is a stupid name for the rare earth mineral found beneath the surface of Pandora and coveted by the RDA. Unobtanium, a portmanteau of unobtainable and the -ium suffix commonly used for names of metal elements. This was either a placeholder name they forgot to change in the script, or