Blog Post #4 assignment

 The trope of the white savior is one wherein a white protagonist is portrayed as a messiah or savior who is usually shown to have more knowledge and are able to learn the cultures of the nonwhite characters that they are saving in short amounts of time. In the wake of Avatar: Way of Water Being announced as the sequel to the original Avatar (2009) film directed by James Cameron, I will be talking about how the main protagonist Jake Sully, portrayed by Sam Worthington, perpetuates the white savior trope.

Avatar takes place in the world of Pandora where an alien species called Na'vi live. Humans in the year 2154 have depleted the world's resources and so have set course towards other planets to harvest more. Humans are unable to withstand the planet's atmosphere so are tasked to pilot human/Na'vi bodies called avatars like mechas in Gundam or Pacific Rim. Jake Sully, a retired paralyzed former marine is tasked to take over his deceased twin's place in this operation and is sent to Pandora to become an avatar. Over the course of the movie, while Jake is an avatar, he comes to respect and fall in love with the Na'vi as he ends up fighting other humans and saving them. The plot is quite similar to the 1990 movie Dance With Wolves in which another white former soldier is brought into a tribe of native people, learns their culture, and saves them from other white people. Both these movies enforce the idea that a group of primitive people needs a white savior to save them from other white people as without the protagonist they would have been helpless.

Although the plot does show that without Jake's inside intelligence of the military, the Na'vi probably would have lost, the importance of his character made it feel as though other characters had less relevance. A Na'vi character by the name of Tsu'tey is shown to be one of the strongest warriors in his tribe but whenever Jake is on screen was usually shown to be a petty person who would try to get the upper hand upon him but is bested every time. How is Jake, a man who seemingly appeared out of nowhere, able to learn cultural techniques of the Na'vi, presumably thousands of years old in a few weeks, whereas Tsu'tey one of the finest warriors in the past couple of generations bested by him so easily every time? It just feels like Tsu'tey's character was butchered and made to look incompetent and untrustworthy of Jake for simply wanting to help in the tribe and was only really given an honorable showing of his character when he dies fighting off human marines. In simplest terms, Jake does fit the role of the white savior quite well: he was a white man who sacrificed his old life to become a leader of an indigenous group of people and teaches his ways to defeat the colonizers and lead them to victory in the end. Without Jake they would have never won, AKA, the Na'vi would have never won without the white man. He is also the sixth person to ever tame a Leonopyteryx, a dragon essentially on this world, and is revered as the chosen one so this also did not help his case in not being a white savior that much either. 

Jake Sully is one of many white savior characters across history who will show up to save helpless minorities. Although these tropes might have been done inadvertently in recent times, they also perpetuate many negative aspects of these minorities while reinforcing positive ones of white culture. It makes minority groups seem helpless and at times less human because of their lack of western morals when the white protagonist teaches them their ways. Avatar did not feel like it was a white savior film made intentionally although many aspects of this film's ideas and plot elements may lead some to believe otherwise.