memo-ruley hole

That's a neat strategy for uploading an unedited film on YouTube

The title text in papyrus was pretty impactful

None of the rest of the film was though

I can still remember the overall plot, which puts it ahead of rise of Skywalker
- I can still remember the overall plot
  I could remember the overall plot the first time I watched Disney's Pocahontus 14 years before Avatar came out.
- Damning with faint praise, there.
  The Rise of Skywalker made me retroactively hate Star Wars for a while. I still can't bring myself to watch any of the sequel trilogy again.
- It’s just because you remember Pocahontas re-enacted by the blue man group.
- #9 didn't have an overall plot.
Did you... did you say Papyrus?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://www.piped.video/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Why didn't this movie develop the nerd following of other properties?

It seems to check all the boxes. Why isn't there a huge Avatar fandom running amuck on the internet?

It was very pretty, but not all that memorable. I remember thinking it would make a good video game, which...didn't one just come out? [checks] Yes! Let's see..."Alien Far Cry." Not a fan of that series, unfortunately.
- Supposedly it's actually pretty decent if you just turn off all of the quest markers and whatnot in the settings. Turns it into more of an immersive story driven exploration game instead of an Ubisoft clear the map checkbox game.
First one was a generic story with some interesting ideas and world, just isn't much to discuss once you get past the visuals. I think with the sequels coming and the expanded lore there will be an uptick in fandom size, but Cameron needs to take bigger risks in the story telling. Avatar hasn't really had a Vader/Luke reveal or "avengers assemble" moment
Compare to Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings. I'm pretty sure you know what those were about, and usually they had multiple layers of meaning.
I cannot for the life of me tell you what specifically the Avatar team thinks about deforestation, genocide, etc. It feels like they just put objectivelt bad things in the movie for the bad guys to do.
- I think the difference is world building. In the stories you listed there's a sense that you're only seeing a tiny fragment of everything notable going on. History is being made by everyone concurrently.
  In Avatar, you see everything notable. We don't care what's going on on Earth (they never hint anything), we don't care what's going on outside this one tribe, the only thing happening right now is the conflict on screen.
Because it's just Pocahontas but blue.
- Star Wars is just Treasure Island in space, being derivative shouldn't have prevented it from being popular
Because it's a shallow prog-rock scribble with no faith in its audience. Two and a half hours of one-note characters yelling at one another to explain the blindingly obvious.
Cameron says he started writing this movie starting in the 70s, and I believe him. You can picture him sitting in his dorm room, listening to Tarkus and Olias of Sunhillow until the grooves wore out, doodling weird furry giantess smut, imagining all the claymation he was gonna do to make the bestest sci-fi film since Dark Star.
What the prequels were to George Lucas, Avatar is to James Cameron. This was his stupid childhood dream project. Somehow it made an entire billion dollars. Introspection will not occur.

Tail sex

Huh. My take from Avatar was that the mighty whitey trope was less about distaste of non-whites, but insecurity of European colonial imperialists.

Remember: Imperialism is ok, unless you are European or caucasian.
- I don't think that's the case. It's just that Europe was able get the upper hand. The ill behavior that comes with that power is an indictment of the human species. China, Japan and Russia were happy to crush and exploit Korea without a European in sight, leading to the current fractured state. (It's practically the setting of an RTS game.)
  But maybe we'll figure out a sociological trick that allows us to maintain an egalitarian society, but that's for the survivors of the next few centuries to figure out. (And they may not be human.)
- Where'd you come up with that shitty-ass straw man?