“’I Want Complex Characters’ But You Couldn’t Handle Her - Blog Posts

I am so glad to see a nuance take on their relationship where neither of them is demonised.

Especially when we uave someone like Jake who sjould kbow what PTSD is like and how to deal with it but I feel like he's just pushing the problem away abd hoping it would fix itself.

Just some reflections on Tiri idk—

It’s tragic how Neytiri doesn’t actually have any way of expressing her trauma or PTSD. The few times she tries to bring up her thoughts and concerns and inner pain, in her own way, Jake either takes offense to it or tries consoling her, when it’s not what she needs. What she needs is to be heard, to process what happened and to be given validity for what she feels. She doesn’t get any of it, so Spider inadvertently becomes her tool for that; an outlet.

Neytiri needs Spider, because he is the only person she can express her trauma through without being dismissed or sounding crazy (in her own mind at least). He becomes a way for her to, more or less safely, express distrust and anger at humans, not for what they are, but for what they’ve done and the destruction they caused, as well as fear that it might happen again, which is a normal reaction to a deeply traumatic event.

What people miss when they feverishly defend Neytiri tho, is that this isn’t a healthy coping mechanism. Spider is a living, breathing individual and a child. He and Neytiri don’t stand on equal ground, and he doesn’t owe being the vessel for her emotions. The things he says in upset, or in that argument scene in high ground, might sound like Spider isn’t getting the bigger picture yet, but how can he, when both he and Neytiri have been blindsided by people who have the education to explain to them the complexity of their emotions and the scars left behind certain experiences?

Tiri is a victim of horrible events, and more so, of emotional neglect, but she also seems to have placed herself and Spider into a relationship where her anger and trauma is projected and managed directly through him. It seems to alleviate some of her anger, temporarily, but doesn’t actually remove it. She just keeps suffering, hence she’s not in the right for this.

(Image source — @/cappedseries)

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Anyway, might delete later if I’m wrong idk.