Avatar (film)/WMG

""What was going through your head?"

--Grace Augustine

What the hell have you people been smoking out there? They're just goddamn trees!"

- Parker Selfridge

Quarrich is a reincarnation of General Woundwort
General Woundwort, in punishment for defying natural law and becoming a rabbit dictator, was reincarnated as a human after his eventual death. He was left with a memory of his past, however, because the lesson is no good if you don't know you've been given it. The General, however, was not one to let a little thing like cosmic irony get him down. Becoming what he both hated and admired made him go completely Mad With Power, and set out to be the 'best' human he could be. The result? A Memetic Badass rabbit who defies nature and fights dogs became a Memetic Badass Space Marine who wants to destroy nature and fights thanataurs.

Avatar takes place in the Watchmen Universe
peace lasted well into the 21st century. After  for Pandora, humanity continued to progress, eventually setting out for the stars themselves. It's no coincidence that they came upon the same moon- after all, it must be the best planet/moon to support life closest to Earth. Once there, Dr. Manhattan created the ecosphere of Pandora, which explains why almost all of the animals there look like animals from Earth. Dr. Manhattan set up a tribal society to skip all of the boring stuff and go straight to the point where they create technologies and such things. He took the form of a tree, and encoded a way for all the inhabitants of his planet to talk to him. That explains pretty much everything that everyone complained about this movie.
 * That also explains why all the animals look sort of similar to animals on Earth. But there's no reason why Dr. Manhattan would head for the closest life-supporting planet/moon to Earth, since space means nothing to him.
 * Also explains why the Na'vi are blue.

Avatar is set in the same universe as Aliens. And, by extension, Predator

 * It seems quite obvious - human empire, giant faceless corporation only in it for the profit, giant stompy robot exo-suits, same director, same actor, explicit marines who conduct actions in much the same style - it seems likely that Avatar is set in a different time period, however - probably later on, would be my guess - the powerloader is after all, noticeably less sophisticated than the AMP suits.
 * By the time of the Alien series, they have FTL travel, indicating that it's further in the future. The power loader looks less advanced because it's a glorified forklift.
 * The trip to Pandora takes several years, so even if it's in a fairly close system at a distance of 4.7 lightyears the trip isn't going to be conventional sublight. Still places it at a cruder tech level, but Aliens does still use cryo for long distance FTL.
 * This might also explain the overall approach to extraterrestrial life, i.e. "It's all out to kill you." Frankly, if I lived in a world where the only other aliens I'd even encountered were giant penis-headed ubermonsters (or dreadlock-sporting ubermonsters), I think I'd bear a grudge that didn't come from good ol' Planet Earth.
 * Which would mean, Pandora is really a Predator made hunting ground.
 * Pandora is the Predator homeworld. They just have an agreement with the Na'vi that their two civilizations stay out of each others way.
 * To elaborate a little: Predators breath a different atmosphere than that found on Earth - Pandora's atmosphere is very different. Many creatures on Pandora display bio-luminescence - as does Predator blood and the healing material used in Predator 2 (herbs from home perhaps?). Predator society seems to revolve around who can kill the biggest toughest thing - which could actually be a survival trait on a planet full of absurdly deadly wildlife. Predators are excellent climbers, utterly at home in the treetops - much like the Na'vi. Predators clearly have anti-gravity technology worked out - which you would expect when they're surrounded by unobtanium.
 * Also: deadlocks. It has things that could be reasonably assumed to be evolved from the hair connectors found on Pandoran wildlife.
 * In fact, the predators can mostly breath an earth atmosphere but need gas supplements: perhaps the same supplements humans need to take out of the Pandoran atmosphere. The only reason I wouldn't be too sure the Yaudja are natives of Pandora is that they're built like Heavyworlders. Then again, they may have all moved off planet and just you know they crank the gravity in their ships for a constant workout. And the Yaudja do have those dreadlocks, has anyone ever actually checked to see if they don't have Eywa uplinks? PLUS they naturally see in the infrared, like most other Pandoran species. And the Yaudja, in their own deadly way, actually do seem to respect nature through their hunting laws. They may have left Eywa, but her legacy is imprinted in their culture.
 * If the Predators are really from Pandora, what was their history with the Navi? Were they a second sentient species the developed independently of the Navi and developed advanced industrial technology and space travel while the Navi remained stone age? And why did they leave? Did Eywa throw them out for upsetting the balance? Did they war with the Navi and just decide to retreat instead of killing them all? Did their culture decide that it was best if they leave Eywa so that the Navi could develop on their own? And, most worryingly, are there Predator ruins on Pandora containing Xenomorph eggs? Earth can't be the only stone age culture they've manipulated...
 * And, related to the above, do they still know their own history? If they do, just how are they going to take a prey species messing around with their mother fraking home planet? Pretty lucky for Weyland-Yutani that the Navi united when they did, though that does mean we won't get to see Quarich vs Predators.
 * It's unlikely the Yautja have the same connection to Eywa that the Na'vi do, or else Eywa would never have let them advance past the stone age (see the various "Eywa is the bad guy" theories". One her orders, the Na'vi no doubt drove the Yautja from all the good parts of Pandora long ago, exiling them to the deserts (as seen in the "Predator Homeworld" scenes in Av P) of the deep jungles riddled with Xenomorph hives. Eywa's plan backfired and instead of going extinct, the Yautja became even tougher - and developed technology as well. They've never felt the urge to take back their old lands because they are surviving fine where they are (for all their aggression, they are not warmongers). After generations, the Yautja are often used as a scary story to frighten children: "The hunters who evade the eye will kill you not for food or territory, but simply for fun." In fact, the Yautja rarely, if ever hunt the Na'vi because they don't need Eywa deciding to wipe them out for good. (They get a free pass for hunting Xenomorphs because even Eywa understands that those particular children NEED their population kept in check.
 * A different question: if Yaudja are from Pandora, where are the Xenomorphs from?
 * I don't know, but it aint Pandora. No biological similarities to anything we've seen. Assuming they evolved naturally we know their planet has abundant large animals to infect since their reproduction is limited by their hosts, and that there are things that are badass enough to try to eat them since they have the eats-anything acidic blood. Maybe the planet the Cloverfield beast was from?
 * Well we can't assume we saw all of Pandora in the movie. The bits we did see are enough to show that it's not a Single Biome Planet. Who knows what kind of nasty stuff lives beyond the range a Banshee can fly. Certainly it would be the kind of place the Na'vi would never go to (or even talk about) both because the Xenos themselves are dangerous, but also because you would tend to find Yautja living near their hives. If the Xenomorphs did come from Pandora, it's likely that there are natural predators to keep them in equilibrium with the environment. Or (as another troper suggested) perhaps Eywa's presence mellows them out to just normal predatory insect levels of aggression.
 * By further extension (through Aliens) this is also the same universe as Blade Runner. The growing of Avatars is an offshoot of the same biological engineering that produced the replicants.
 * This could also mean that Prometheus takes place within as well. Maybe the made them and how they colonized Pandora.

Avatar is the future of the Metal Gear universe
Well, for earth anyway. I mean come on, those AMP units? They're a form of Metal Gear. Technology has become rampant and overwhelming because of the Patriots going unchecked by the governments of the world. It would explain why earth has become some kind of Crapsack World that Jake doesn't like. Also, how do you think the whole Avatar project became such a success anyway? "Les Infantes Terribles" was basically the forerunner for what was thought to be used to build super-soldiers for wars, but instead became a diplomatic tool for planetary conquest.
 * Are you sure they're not still building super-soldiers?
 * Add the fact that Colonel Quaritch is a dead ringer for Revolver Ocelot...Don't believe me? This. Add long hair and a Badass Longcoat and that's him to a T.
 * The mustache... Especially the mustache.
 * The kicker is, five minutes before he came on stage, Lang was clean-shaven. Manlier than Saxton Hale.
 * They would have send Solid Snake, but he refused, 'cause, you know, you can't smoke on Pandora.
 * Not unless he had a time machine. Quaritch has Solid Snake's DNA.

Avatar is the future of District 9.
The prawns managed to get back to their home planet (or all the Earth-bound ones died), the humans resolved to leave them alone, but reverse-engineered a lot of their technology before they left (such as the robot suits, weapons, and ships) and then headed out to colonize new stars. The study of Wikus's transformation was an integral part of the creation of Avatar technology. However, it seems that the humans still haven't learned their lesson about treating alien species nicely...
 * Prawns versus Na'Vi. Needs to happen. (more like Prawns vs Na'Vi vs Aliens vs Predators vs Terminators vs a giant mecha build out of the Titanic...)
 * Prawns win. No question.
 * Definitely. Prawns have advanced technology and FTL, in addition to their freakish strength.
 * Yeah, even if you take away Prawn's tech, their rapid reproduction rate and their ability to thrive in hostile environments would have them win by numbers alone.
 * The Na'vi are three-meter-tall, extremely agile beings that can put a stick through an armored windshield or metal plane. so the Distric 9 aliens seem a lot shorter to them than to humans. Unless it was a long-term war with generations to prepare, if the District 9 aliens were to lose their tech, it would be all down to whether a Christopher-type poleepkwa would be able to outthink and out-manouever the Na'vi. I think he/it/they could in an even-numbers fight of just Christophers versus just Na'vi warriors, but between a representative sample of each population (not including children) would likely go to the Na'vi. And it makes no sense whatsoever to send them into a long-term war with each other in a way that prevents the District 9 aliens from using their tech, since the terrain advantage would give the war over to either the Na'vi (on Pandora) or the District 9 aliens (practically anywhere else) within the first couple of serious battles, assuming a realistic reasonable spaceship-free scenario.
 * On the other hand, consider the ideology of the races. The Prawns seemed very peaceful and nonaggressive during the events of D9, complying with whatever the humans told them to do. (Granted, this could be the result of being leaderless and homeless.) The Na'vi operate on a similar vein, and really don't care about much else other than making sure that their forest/Eywa is protected and that their population/tribe is secure. In fact, the two races could get along quite harmoniously without ever having a fight. Of course, they might both realize that the humans have been kicking them around too long... in which case, we're screwed.
 * Or how about this, the Prawns already know about the Na'vi during the events of District 9 and treat them as a martial race during their punitive expedition/rescue mission to earth. This is why earth is a Crapsack World, humans know about Pandora and it gives them more time to study Na'vi and create Avatars before they even go to Pandora.

James Cameron's Avatar is an Alternate Future of District 9.
Note: Not just an expanded version of the "District 9 is a prequel of Avatar" guess above. In the District 9 timeline, the poleepkwa/prawns/formica stay in their ship, and the government has enough time to organize a group and resources to "study" them before sticking a can opener in the ship. In the Avatar timeline, they try to leave the ship for help as soon as they arrive, the humans neutralize them, find a couple of inhabited planets on the charts, and head for the nearest one. When they get there (or partway there), they find that the phluid couldn't get them back home, and only barely got them to Pandora. They find that the ships recognize the local Green Rocks that were kicked up by the crash as an alternative fuel source, head back to Earth at a slowed rate, then return once they've adapted the technology to run more efficiently on Unobtanium (still not as quick or efficient as the fluid, though) and drill for more space-oil. The humans don't care who they harm because they learned back in the 1980s that killing xenospecies for their resources results in consequence-free profit. Unfortunately for the Earth-Pandoran press, the Na'vi were too pretty to pin as a demonic race of human-eating, Always Chaotic Evil pests.

Miles Quaritch is the Sarge from Quake III Arena.
They look too similar for it to be a lie.

Avatar is a precursor to Halo
Think about it. 2154: Humans get kicked of Pandora. They go to different planets that can support humans, setting up colonies, and start prospering. Also, the UNSC is formed, between 2160 and 2164, to prevent disasters like Pandora, and to clean up Earth. 2291: Shaw-Fujikawa Drive developed, allowing slipspace traveling, so stuff doesn't cost billions of dollars to ship. Fast forward to 2512: Works of a powered exoskeleton armor, named "Mjolnir", begins, based on the bulky machines that were seen on Pandora. Skip to 2525: First contact with an alien species since the Na'vi is found. Humans attempt to make peaceful communications, but everything goes to hell. Shortly thereafter, the human campaign to wipe out the aliens, that call themselves the "Covenant", begins, remembering Pandora, with the reasoning, "If we don't destroy them fast, they'll destroy us." Heightened with the discovery that Covenant tech is so much more advanced. Other interesting similarities include:
 * Scorpions vs Hornets. Of the course of several hundred years, and their similar design, entirely possible.
 * Calling enemy flying craft Banshees.
 * As mentioned, the AMP Suits look suspiciously like ancestors of the Mjolnir armor.
 * Sgt. Johnson has to been a descendant of Quaritch. It's too awesome to not happen.
 * This is, intellectually, explained by both franchises having heavy influence from aliens. But as a WMG, sure, why not?

The Na'Vi will become the Yuuzhan Vong

 * Earth will try and invade again, and Pandora will provide the Na'Vi with living weapons and ships. Eventually they conquer the Galaxy and destroy Pandora, then set a coarse for a new Galaxy.
 * The Na'vi became the Yuuzhan Vong as a result of virusbombing. Then they hightailed it out of Dodge the galaxy before the Imperium could get more competent at Exterminatus. For the record, the Galaxy Far Far Away teleports through the Warp, but a part of it the demons haven't gotten around to despoiling yet - hence why they have psyker abilities without the associated dementia and ravening hordes. (Yes, I'm aware the Warp doesn't work like that.) Yuuzhan Vong can't touch the Force because they, like the Tau, have no Warp presence. The Colonel either didn't die or was resurrected; no points for guessing who He is. After the clash with the Na'vi, He decided that the power armor was a good start, but humans needed to be a lot bigger if they were going to master war, so He started some long-term projects in that direction.

Multiple moons with (possibly) different environment themes? Clearly Avatar takes place in the Ratchet and Clank universe.
They'll find Lombaxes (Lombaxii?) on the desert-moon.

The fiasco on Pandora will lead to RDA's losing exploitation rights to a rival Company.
A certain bioweapons division might find itself pressed into hasty field tests of it's own multi-million dollar resource. Game over, man.
 * Na'vi versus Xenomorphs? Dude, I'd die to see that movie.
 * Perhaps one of the finest examples of Death World, and Genius Loci to boot, up against Xenomorphs. Damn, That's hard to place.
 * FUND IT.
 * Add a Predator or three and you've got the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny in your hands.
 * That Idea is not at all helped by the fact that Aliens and Terminator are both also from James Cameron. I don't know about Predator, but it gets crossovered with the other two Cameron films, so why not.
 * You know what, Grace Augustine's similarity to Ellen Ripley is pretty easy to explain. Grace is closely related to Ripley -- her sister, cousin or niece.
 * Ripley had a daughter, so this is entirely feasable.
 * Original troper here. I actually checked The Other Wiki's entries for Aliens and Ellen Ripley. It won't be the daughter, since the names and dates (Amanda Ripley McClaren, 2113-2195; Avatar's in 2154) don't fit, but other relatives should be fair game here.

Eywa is Lady Deirdre Skye
The transcendent victory makes this just about possible, both the game and the movie involve an inhospitable Genius Loci as the main location. Humanity rebuilt from the ashes back on earth and went looking for stuff, finding "Pandora."
 * Or perhaps Pandora is one of the lost Progenitor Manifolds.
 * Pandora is definitely Planet. I don't care how pretty it all is, the trees form a possibly-sentient neural network, and those tendrils from the roots at the Tree of Souls are absolutely definitely goddamn MIND WORMS. But they never got to Transcendence; it's too soon, for a start. A colony ship from Earth reached Planet about a century ago, just as the ecosystem on Earth went into a collapse. The last signals from the ship indicated the death of the captain and anarchy among the crew. The surviving colonists split into their separate factions and settled the surface of Planet, building up a small sustainable colony and introducing Earth biodiversity to the ecosystem previously based entirely around fungus. They were engulfed by the xenofungus growth phase long before they could achieve the Ascent to Transcendence, but in its short lifespan the godlike Planetmind was able to assimilate the more diverse Earth lifeforms it found within the ruins of the Xenoempathy Dome at Gaia's Landing and adapt them to its toxic atmosphere, its fungal ecology and its planetary neural network. It made the best of what it found, it did what it could without the guidance of the humans' knowledge that the Voice of Planet project might have given it. Post growth-dream, Planet looks very different; hugely enlarged Earthlike trees form the nodes of the neural network, with fungus throughout their structure. Animal life has also been remodelled into forms far more sophisticated than the primitive mindworm boils and locust swarms of Planet's previous cycle, and the humans themselves have been... altered. All can now link into the planetary neural nets at the great tree nodes, and into each other. Planet, now Pandora, is working towards using the formerly human Na'vi to achieve true sentience and avoid the dieback of the growth cycle next time around. Meanwhile, Earth civilisation has rebuilt itself, written off its last expedition as lost in space, and launched more ships to scout the planet they found...
 * We welcome you, earthdeidre and earthwheat and earthtree as honored guests, for you add great power to our ancient song -- planetfungus and planetworm and planetmind sing and play here, and you are welcome among us.
 * Oh, and watching the battle at the end, where the animals wipe out all that glorious hardware? Now I know how those filthy worms destroyed all the University of Planet's recon rovers, there at the end after the Planetbuster wars, when the factions lay in ruins and the fungal towers were sprouting everywhere... That species will be exterminated. I tell you. EXTERMINATED.
 * Trudy (the Scorpion pilot) is Corazon Santiago. Similar looks, same spirit.
 * So, is the head of the Corporation Morgan or Zakharov?
 * Zakharov would likely agree that a detailed study of the native biology was far more worthwhile than immediately digging up mineral wealth, and would hold off on evicting the Na'vi. Morgan, on the other hand...
 * "Resources exist to be consumed, and consumed they will be - if not by this generation, then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our inheritance? None, I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill."

Eywa is Shub-Niggurath
Think about it. all her "children" are bigger, meaner, and uglier than humans (save the Na'vi, but that'll come later). Shubby settled down on a volcanic planet, and began to mould it to be the perfect nursery for her voracious young. then the Elder Things showed up, and, still bitter over the Shoggoth rebellion, created the Na'vi as minions. Also; who didn't look at a "banshee" and think "No, Byakhee". A Banshee is a malevolent ghost that screams at people to let them know they're going to die very soon. A Byakhee is a bat-winged space monster that's ridden by another space monster.

RDA's failure allows for the Liandri Corporation to step in.
Because Na'Vi in the U Ts must happen.
 * That makes a lot of sense. Liandri was a mining corporation originally, for one thing. The movie also shows a ming transferred from a dead body to a living one, speed up the synthesis of a new body and you have to Respawn system. Earth back home is a crapsack already, so bring on the Skaarj and corporation wars!

Pandora/Eywa is Rei.
Giant, nude, world-building Emotionless Dudes should stick together (it's a lonely universe).

The Na'Vi have the same Noodle People-esque proportions as the Evas. Somewhere on Earth: ""How big can we make an avatar, and can we shut off their pain receptors so we can bolt 'em into an exosuit?"

"Why?"

"For Science... and the Eldritch Abominations that showed up last week.")."

The Na'vi are practically naked. Their "goddess" is pale and glowing, and she allows sentient beings to share experiences and create close bonds even between species. Gendo Ikari wanted desperately to make a way for this to happen without turning everything into Tang; on this world, he got it mostly right.

Eywa is more like a Great Spirit than a God
Eywa is the collected spirit and consciousness of every creature that has ever lived and died on Pandora, absorbed upon death, or even during life, through the interneural connection that the plants and animals share on Pandora. It is eternally wise because it holds the wisdom of every wiseman, every animal instinct, and every good trait. It is semi-omniscient due to having memories of every creature's experiences.

By extension, the Na'vi are so pure because of their natural ability to connect with this collective spirit, which gives them insight and understanding of all living things.
 * Isn't this Canon?
 * Note -- if this is true, then letting a human (even one gone native) plug into this spirit is going to trigger the Law of Unintended Consequences more than it already has...
 * This is canon.

Pandora is Draenor, before the planet went kaboom and became Outland.
Floating rocks, flying mounts, weird alien wildlife that would fit right at home in Zangarmarsh, Unobtainium (if you think that sounds silly, check the names of the metals actually found in Outland), and a race of tall blue-skinned humanoids with tails. The Na'vi are draenei, devolved to simple shamanistic traditions but in a different way than the Broken and Lost Ones. Obviously before the planet exploded, and presumably even before the orc warlocks turned Draenor into a Crapsack World.

Pandora will become the battleground for a conflict between the Vogons and the Psychlos.
That's right, two of the most fickle, bureaucratic and downright ugly alien races of all time (which make RDA look like a noble alien rights group by comparison) are duking it out for the rights to squander the planet of the Smurf People. The Psychlos arrive first, just in time to snag the retreating humans before they can depart for Earth, intending to use them as slave labor when they purge Pandora of all its precious Unobtanium. However, before they can start their attack, the Vogons arrive with the intention of vaporizing the planet to make way for yet another intergalactic expressway. Naturally, the two species come to blows, with Terl of the Psychlos ranting about how, when the Vogons were merely learning how to spell their names, he was being trained to conquer galaxies! The Vogons respond with the assertion that they did not come halfway across the galaxy to be delayed by dreadlocked blowhards, and threaten to read their poetry to the Psychlos. Meanwhile, Jake and Co. are living peacefully on Pandora, completely oblivious to the coming chaos about to ravage their world. Who will win?
 * "Bloody apathetic Psychlos. I've no sympathy at all."
 * However, according to The Movie, most Vogons can't spell at all... perhaps a defence against the Psychlos?
 * That. Would. Be. The. Most. Awesome. Movie. Ever.

The Na'vi are related to another Navi.
It would explain the similar names, the mutual blue-ness, and the Na'vi live in, essentially, a giant magical forest where they can communicate with a nature spirit like the Great Deku Tree on a regular basis. Heck, maybe Eywa is a feminine successor to the Deku Tree, extended to running the whole planet instead of just that one forest, and decentralized from the tree to a network (or just the Unobtainium). The wildlife on Pandora would then be the Kokiri, changed into animal forms (just as they were changed into leaf creatures, the Koroks, in The Wind Waker), and still able to connect in some way to the "fairies"/Na'vi. The apostrophe is there to hide the truth. That's why they sound so damn annoying!
 * Maybe but the only one running around shouting "HEY! LISTEN!" is Jake who isn't native.
 * And "I see you" comes from "Hey, listen".
 * No. Besides, they're not NEARLY as annoying as that bloody fairy.

This is all somehow related to the Dark Templar Saga:
Ancient, highly mystical race with powers far beyond human norm: check. Improvised attempt to make a human (who is completely unprepared) more like them? Check. Jungle planets? Check. Amoral human leader, possibly nuts off his rocker? Check. (Mind you, Avatar is still missing the Zerg and the inevitable three-way battle, but then DTS is a trilogy. Give it time.)

The Na'vi are based on the Iskai race of Albion
They are near-naked cat people able to communicate with nature through an extra organ on their head, which all the creatures on their world also share, the plants on the world glow when touched, like the abandoned Formers' guild building and several plants just around in the wild.

Pandora was created by the Na'vi
A biological internet evolving naturally is next to impossible. The same goes for the convenient USB braids all Na'vi and the Pandoran wildlife sport. The only reasonable explanation is that the Na'vi are in fact, the creators of Pandora. They were, at one point, a technologically advanced race who designed Pandora as a paradise for themselves. After generations and generations, they have forgotten their origins, and the tales of their creating the planet are part of the Na'vi religion.
 * And for supporting evidence... how does an exotic material like the Unobtanium develop naturally in our galactic backyard, when we've scanned the universe with spectrographs and found nothing but the familiar elements of the periodic table? Because it didn't develop naturally. Those "deposits" are the remains of the Na'vi's previous technological civilization.
 * This is on a small moon, orbiting a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri system. We don't have telescopes with the resolution to do any kind of spectrographic analysis of planets that far out. We wouldn't even be able to determine the gas giant's make up, and that is probably at least the size of Saturn. The best we could do is guess based on the makeup of the star it's orbiting.

Unobtainium? Well, the rest of the galaxy knows it as Element Zero.

 * Pandora is humanity's dark little secret, although the Citadel Council know of its existence. It's in a solar system without any Mass Relay nearby, but it contain fuckload of eezo, which explain the floating mountains: they float because of the mass effect. Furthermore, it's considered as a garden world by the Council rules, explaining why no one ever try of nuke cleaning the place (that would be illegal).
 * It makes more sense to say that Avatar is a prequel to Mass Effect, before humans had discovered the Prothean ruins, and that by the time the games take place, one of three things had happened to Pandora:

1. Being a garden world inhabited by a sapient(if primitve) species, it is protected by Citadel and/or Alliance law, and the Na'vi are left alone.

2. With the extreme advances provided by mass effect technology, Unobtainium is no longer as valuable as it once was, or an alternative source is found, and again Pandora is left alone.
 * Does the fact that a Mass Effect 2 theatrical trailer was shown in the showing this troper has just seen change this? It just confirms it for this troper.
 * (Writes down) Great Fanfic fodder.
 * Ewya is really Harbinger, how else can it Asumming direct control! the wild life.
 * A plant-based planet-wide consciousness that can mentally control and manipulate all forms of organic life? Eywa is the same species as the Thorian! Possibly its Good Twin. And the Na'vi are its (far less disturbing) equivalent to Creepers.
 * Good news is, bring in an Asari Matriarch and one should be able to directly communicate with Eywa through Asari's mind melding thingie and negociate some stuff. Bad news is, Eywa will probably tell you to screw, but, hey, you tried, harder than Jake and co.

Eywa is Yavanna Kementari.

 * And the Na'vi are descended from elves or ents. And the humans in this world are clearly descended from the dwarves. "For there shall walk a power in the forests whose wrath they will arouse at their own peril" indeed...

Pandora is really an Eldar exodite world.

 * The "Unobtainium" is really Wraithbone and the Na'vi are just some Eldar school kid's class project.
 * There are two options. First: The Unobtainium is Wraithbone. Eywa is clearly Infinity Circuit. Na'Vi are an Exodite Eldar tribe, but look different because of Unreliable Narrator or something. Humans are actually lucky their ass is handed to them by the planet itself, because if it failed, Biel-Tan would come and sweep them. Second: It's a Maiden World. More possible than the first option, since, you know, it's third millenium, not fourtieth.
 * "Earth" is really just a starting up Hive world that just happens to be called Earth # (kinda like how Alexander the Great named a dozens cities after himself) that's either 1, a lost world, 2 a minor Warp Storm is stopping warp travel but without the daemons showing up (hey happen with Tau). The Na'vi arn't Eldar, they're more likly an uplifted race that the Eldar use as Cannon Fodder to protect their planet. Biel-Tan would probly kill both Humans and Na'vi, the humans well because, and the Na'vi for not doing their job
 * The planet Earth IS Earth and its just before the first galactic empire starts to get underway. The Na'avi help to cement in the human mind the fact that Aliens cannot be trusted and that they will not respond to covert tactics, so instead they turn their entire Earth into a warfactory, go back to Pandora and test their first Virus bomb on the planet, leading to the death of every single living thing on the world before stip mining it bare. From there on, the Imperium begins to grow. Personally? I think I'm going to side with the virus bombers

Eywa is mind controlling the entire Pandoran biosphere for some reason.
Yes, Mind control. We all know that Eywa is a sentient planet sized being that has existed since before the oldest histories of the Na'vi. It has likely been around so long that it has directly engineered the evolution of every native life form on Pandora. Through selective breeding it has been able to encurage the types of behaviour that it prefers and through routine bondings it is able to look into the minds of all Na'vi. They are mind scanned at birth, and again as often as Eywa desires and if at any time Eywa sees a behaviour pattern developing that is not approved. . . Well, that hungry Thanitor seemed oddly specific in who it decided to eat, must be the will of Eywa.

So really, theres no surprise that you cant find a single descenting voice among the people. They were all killed off and bred out long ago.

Pandora is an Edenist habitat
Pandora is an early Edenist bitek experiment in spherical, moon-sized habitats. For various reasons though, it still must orbit a gas giant like all habitats. It's a classified project and the Adamist humans of Earth's Govcentral know nothing about it. All the seemingly native species, including the Na'vi, are either heavily geneered specimens from other Confederation worlds, or bitek constructs. Eywa is the habitat personality, and for whatever reason the natives weren't engineered with wireless affinity, insteading needing to hardwire into the each other or the habitat's neural strata.

The conflict between Earth and Pandora is an extension of the rivalry between Nurgle and Tzeentch
Earth was established by Nurgle according to principals of non-interference with the growth of life, and by the time of the film, it shows - a single, voracious organism has spread over the planet's entire surface, consuming all other life in its quest for growth and producing a broad variety of toxins and cancerous buildups as a consequence of its existence. The main colors associated with it at this point are gray and light green, and as a signature, microbial disease runs rampant. Pandora, meanwhile, was the pet project of Tzeentch, being turned into a very complex, but also very well-organized, garden of organic life. True to form, Pandora displays a wide variety of colors, but particularly blue, and most disease is clamped down on by ad-hoc countervirals. The native sentients also refer frequently to "sight" or "the eye" as important spiritual aspects of their deity. The conflict almost ends in favor of Nurgle, with the dying species of Earth falling back on the overwhelming weight of their growth, but as usual, Tzeentch made sure to keep something special up his sleeve.

The Xenomorphs where originally from Pandora
I mean Pandora is a mix of Eden and Death World wouldn't be surprised that this where they originated from. Some passer by alien picked up a Queen to study and well the rest is the Aliens franchise. On Pandora there where many naturaly predators to keep them in balance. Plus being connected to Enywa kept their agression at reasonable levels. But off world, generations born without her touch have left them the stuff of nightmares.

Quaritch's Misaimed Fandom is in for a rude awakening in The Sequel.
Quaritch, despite being a father to his men, is a psychopath who got kicked out of the legitimate military's of Earth. The RDA hired him to get him out of the US Military's, British Military's, etc. hair and given him the perfect area where he'd either die or be able to vent his psychopathic tendencies. We'll see Quaritch's old superiors in The Sequel arriving on Pandora for a mopping up operation, and see HOW MUCH he screwed the pooch.
 * Even if they also said that he eats puppies, he sold his soul to the devil, steals money from orphans, wears slippers made out of baby seal heads, and jaywalks across every street he finds; I SERIOUSLY doubt many of his die-hard fans would like him any less ( Heck, it might make him even more Badass to the fans)

The Na'vi are an Anti-Spiral Race.
Let's analyze this for a second. They're xenophobic to the point of considering other civilisations insane (compare: "My daughter will teach you our ways. Learn well, Jakesully. We will see if your insanity can be cured" vs. "That's just the path that leads to extinction! Why do you not see the pathetic limitations of the Spiral Race?"), they hate progress, change and development in technology, they answer to a planet-wide collective intelligence, they can merge their conciousness with that of other organisms native to Pandora, their evolutionary ancestors are still around, so they could have cut off their evolution, they apparently have a method of birth control - why would a primitive race need birth control, if not as an early way to prevent Spiral Nemesis before deciding to seal off their Spiral Energy?, they use terrorism and scare tactics...hmm...

The entity the Na'vi know as "Eywa" is actually the collective conciousness of the Anti-Spirals, and Jake, Grace, Norm, and Max were persuaded into being brainwashed by the Na'vi, giving up their free will as humans to become part of the Anti-Spiral network that is Eywa. Quaritch is actually a Hero Antagonist Spiral Warrior - he shrugs off conditions that would have killed a lesser man through sheer determination, so there's no way he wasn't using Spiral Energy. His AMP Suit may even have been a predecessor of the Gunmen. Though he had come to Pandora to help set up a mining colony, when he learned that Jake had been taken over by the Anti-Spirals he decided to take action by wiping out the Na'vi, but failed. Eventually, the news that the humans on Pandora had been defeated by the Anti-Spirals reached Lord Genome, who, upon learning that one of the contributing factors to the hostility was the overpopulation of Earth, enacted his plan of commiting genocide of the humans on the surface.

Now fast-forward to the final battle. The giant black Humanoid Abomination faced by Team Dai-Gurren is actually Jake gone One Winged Angel - he's mentioned as being a war hero on a mission of planetary conquest before he turned to the Anti-Spirals, his energy attacks are blue, much like everything on Pandora, and in the movie he rapes Nia using tentacle projections, an extention of him using his queue to take over other Pandoran organisms. Still believing that Humans Are Bastards (note that, despite him being a Well Intentioned Extremist, the Anti-Spiral is a violent racist and often rants about the inferiority of humans and other Spiral Beings) and wanting to stop Spiral Nemesis, Jake fights back against humanity once more using the Grand Zamboza (the planet in its helmet looks nothing like Pandora because he was at a different Anti-Spiral world at the time.) However, with the help of Lord Genome's Heroic Sacrifice, Simon and Team Dai-Gurren are able to destroy Jake once and for all and rebuild civilisation on Earth better than ever using Spiral Energy.
 * Alternatively, Quaritch is Lord Genome. Note that they're both muscular, Ambiguously Brown manly badasses who pilot mecha and have survived being on (self-inflicted, in Genome's case) fire. He managed to survive his impalement (which is backed up by his actor, and Lord Genome has been through worse) through his sheer reserves of Spiral Energy, but was taken back to Earth, where he, realising how powerful the Anti-Spirals were and how they responded to Earth's conditions, decided that the only way to save Earth from an Anti-Spiral attack from some of the more developed Anti-Spirals was to force everyone underground and establish himself as sole ruler of the surface, making sure to keep the population low enough to not trigger the Anti-Spirals' ire. Since his mastery of Spiral Energy made him immortal, his scars faded from a combination of old age and Spiral Energy, and somewhere along the line he shaved his head and grew a beard. RDA didn't let him bring the Lazengann to Pandora because it wasn't theirs, but if he did, he'd probably have won.

Pandora is how Earth was supposed to turn out in The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy.
The entire biosphere effectively is an organic version of cloud computing, and someone is still trying to find out what question "42" answers. The introduction of humans has, of course, thrown a spanner in the works, just as happened on Earth, but as the program may have run a good deal longer, the correct question might still be able to form.
 * Alternately, Pandora is the Earth Mark 2, just with some upgrades thrown in. (the original Earth was reinstated by the dolphins, keep in mind.) It's quite likely their version of Africa is full of fjords and a sculpture of Slartibartfast.

Pandoran wildlife is descended from a stray NeoPet
Specifically, the "Aisha", a cat-like critter whose long antanne looks a lot like the wild animals' "ports".

Earth has been united under the Terran Dominion
Look at the helicopter gunships and tell me those aren't Banshees from Starcraft II.
 * Technonarrator agrees, as he personally thought that the AM Ps share similarities with the terran marines.....downsize them, add armor....theres already a biofeedback thing going on there so the heavy armor wont be a problem.... Though Banshees don't have AA capabilities.
 * In Starcraft, Earth is not ruled by the Terran Dominion, but by the United Earth Directorate, a completely different faction of Terrans. The Terran Dominion rules (most of) the Terrans in the Koprulu sector and it's central worlds are Korhal and Tarsonis, with the former being the Throne World of Emperor Mengsk and the latter being the central world of the Dominion's bureaucracy and probably economy. However, as far as we know, both the Dominion and the Earth Directorate use the same technology. Unobtainium might be the UED's name for Khaydarin.
 * So the "Banshee Mating season" theory is true..?
 * Pandora was of course created by the Xel'Naga. Eywa is like the Zerg Overmind, only granting Pandora's inhabitans far more free will than the average zerg has. (Eywa initiating the stampede to counter the human forces was considered very unusual even by the Na'Vi.)
 * So, are the Mech suits cheaper, lighter versions of Thors (Or a more expensive Marauder)?
 * Neither. They're old Goliaths, before they decided to mount the autocannon and add on missiles.
 * Before the started fighting the Zerg and Protoss, the Terrans did,'t have anything stopping them and were just strip mining everywhere they go. Pandora is one of those planets they visited.
 * The Na'Vi are related to the Protoss, but more primitive.
 * Also, the Zerg developed their creatures by taking local wildlife and mutating them. Since Pandora has so many dangerous creatures, they went there for a lot of them and that's why so many of the Zerg troops look like Pandora wildlife(and also wildlife found in Starcraft). Furthermore, Eywa is like a primitive Overmind.
 * The human military stuff resemble prototypes of Terran forces. Human soldiers are Marines, Mechs are Goliaths, those fighters/transports are Valkyrie/transport hybrids that were later split into two different ships, etc.
 * So really, Avatar is just a prequel to Starcraft.
 * This makes far more sense then the UED being involved: the Starcraft manual notes that the 22nd century (and pre-UPL 23d) was characterized by technology continuing to proliferate amongst the populance, population growth continuing unabated, despite the efforts of world leaders to stem the increase, pollution and a lack of natural resources impact the world economy, with many core economic systems fold in on themselves and shut down and tensions continue to grow between the humanist and corporate factions over the use and capitalization of cybernetics and genetic mutations, resulting in numerous acts of terrorism and violence. Avatar takes place in 2154, 75 years before the establishment of the United Powers League, and could fit in with the above description for the period in Starcraft... so, a scenario connecting Starcraft and Avatar, even if not following the title of this WMG: the Avatar and Starcraft descriptions for Earth are both true when accounting for exaggerations and unreliable narrators. The RDA's unobtanium mining operation have alleviated Earth's problems, but at the cost of making unobtanium a vital resource and making the RDA into the dominant corporate entity. Following the events of Avatar, the sudden cease in unobtanium access leads to the Earth plunging into renewed chaos, as the resource problem once again becomes critical and corporate rivals take advantage of the RDA's humbling... in the end leading to the very much pro-human (with a strict definition of human) UPL being formed and harshly restoring order. Being a very much pro-human dictatorial regime with control of the media, and with FTL drives finally developed, the Na'vi 'problem' is easily solved, but the UPL, remembering what happened the last time humanity became dependent on unobtanium, keeps it heavily restricted and limits its use. As for why Terran technology resembles that of Avatar: the Koprulu colonists had to rebuild their technological base to a 2231 level before being able to developed further. Two and a half century after their original arrival, they still haven't gotten that far from where the UPL was in 2231... which was still close enough to 2154 that weapons, armour, etc would resemble their predecessors enough to be seen by a layman. And the UED? Used the Koprolu colonists' industrial base for its Expeditionary Force.

Unobtanium is naquadah
Come on, they're both "superconductive" elements that are essential for super technology! My guess is that the RDA is working without knowing of the Stargate program (still a secret after all these years, perhaps due to an ongoing war with another race), and that's why they call it Unobtanium and don't realize that the real FTL travel will be via stargates. See, the SGC needs more naquadah after having depleted every source in this galaxy (they can't go to Pegasus because of a similar problem on Atlantis or to the Asgard's galaxy), so they set their sights on Alpha Centauri. They send off the RDA with military assistance and task them with getting the "unobtanium". The reason why they prohibited nukes is because they know it'd just set off the naquadah and destroy they only chance of obtaining it.
 * And the RDA is actually named after Richard Dean Anderson.
 * FF Ffffffffffffff...This is now my personal canon.

The Earth was trashed by the post-Judgement Day War
As a corollary to "The Earth was wiped out by the aftermath Skynet's defeat", another possibility is that it wasn't the aftermath of the war, but the war itself.

Pandora is Gaia.
Jake's Avatar body was so realistic that he could somehow have children with Neytiri. These part Na'vi, part human-Avatar children will be more evolutionarily fit than their pure Na'vi counterparts; as the centuries pass, the human side of the Na'vi gene pool will become increasingly dominant. By the time of Foundation, the only link they share with their Na'vi ancestors is their connection to the planet; they will have evolved so that they can link to it psychically. (They'll have gone wireless.)
 * Because his avatar uses DNA from a Na'vi and is almost genetically identical, the changes are largely inconsequential (nervous system structure, facial features and an extra finger and toe). Anyone with even a basic understanding of genetics will know that the human characteristics will be eliminated within a few generations even with the possibility Norm and the other scientists becoming Na'vi, because each time they mate, there is only a 50% chance of those characteristics being passed on, with only a 50% chance per time that child will pass them on, and no other existing individuals with them, they will get diluted out of the gene pool extremely quickly. Also, Jake was never shown as being any better or worse than the average Na'vi, so it doesn't even matter. The only way to concentrate human genetic features from a single incidental source would be by breeding with multiple individuals and inbreeding among the offspring, both of which the Na'vi culture is developed enough not to happen.

Eywa is Jane.
An intelligent being residing in a far-flung data network who can pull someone's intelligence out of one body and put it into a new one?

Avatar takes place ~600 years before Wall E
After the earth has been ruined but just before BNL completed the star-liners. After RDA's bad behavior reaches earth, everyone chooses the star-liners and RDA ceases to exist. Being kicked out by the Na'Vi causes the Earthicans to consider allowing their own planet to heal before invading other worlds again. Hell Gate doesn't have any of those nifty robots, uh, just because RDA isn't BNL and they probably would've been jerks to their robots anyway.
 * Actually, the robodozers used by RDA seem to have more than a passing resemblance to the WALL-class robots...
 * Thanks to a Negative Space Wedgie, one of the Starliners lands on/becomes Pandora and its' unusually-familiar-sounding computer becomes Eywa.

The Company in Avatar is the same as The Company in Aliens
In other words, Weyland-Yutani. They use similar technology -- perhaps a bit further into the future -- for example the Power Loader in Aliens looks like the forerunner of the military power suits in Avatar. Plus, they refer to it as "The Company" just like in Aliens, and they seem to pursue the same nihilistic, bottom-line-first policies, and there's even a similar "corporate goon" character.
 * Or, Weyland-Yutani is RDA's parent corporation.
 * And Grace is Ripley's clone?

The earth was destroyed due to the "irrational exuberance" following humanity's defeat of SkyNet.
Hence why there aren't any AI recon robots and why the avatars are "grown" rather then "built": any mention of that technology has become verboten. By Terminator: Salvation, the earth (or at least California) has become pretty ruined by over a decade of nonstop war. After the defeat of SkyNet, humanity entered a brief period of prosperity, but then the oil ran out and we quickly turned on each other and squandered what remained of the natural world.
 * Addendum: The loss of oil is Skynet's last laugh on humanity.

Pandora/Eywa is the collective spirit(s) of spacefaring Entwives
The reason the Ents can't find them on Middle Earth is because the Entwives -- who if I recall correctly were all "domesicated" trees such as apples and pears -- left for a place without an agarian society where they would be "enslaved". They were able to travel in space by * cough cough cough*.
 * But Pandora is all about wild, untamed nature, while the Entwives loved to put nature under their control. They didn't want to speak with plants, but for the plants to listen and obey to them. They were the ones who taught humans farming. The philosophy of Pandora and the Entwives couldn't be more opposite. Pandora is more appealing to the Ents.
 * Maybe the Ents banished the Entwives and then forgot (if they can't remember what they look like it's possible they can't remember they're the reason they're gone), or maybe they went to another, less-lush moon where they sapient species had to create an agrarian society.
 * In the books the Ents remember quite well how the Entwives looked. Treebeard does a fairly lengthy description of the appearance of the love of his life.

Tony Stark will be zapped to the future by events in the Avengers movie, and decide to rebuild the Earth.
He'll start a company to rival RDA, and take on the responsibility to rebuild the Earth back to its' former glory. Only he's going to need funding, and Unobtainium still appears to be the best source. So, he launches a campaign to succeed where RDA failed, taking a more diplomatic approach, though he'll still be willing to fight if he finds it necessary. Ultimately, his irresistible charm and snarky attitude will lead to a peaceful settlement, but not before he exchanges a few blows with Eywa in his spanking-new Gaia-Buster armor (being the hater of gods and magic that he is).

RDA grew to be incredibly powerful due to a possible merger with Wayne Enterprises somewhere down the line.
According to the Avatar wiki, the RDA is ''the largest single non-governmental organization in human space. Its power is such that it outmatches most Earth governments in wealth, political influence, and military capability. The RDA has monopoly rights to all products shipped, derived, or developed from Pandora and any other off-Earth location.'' Wayne Industries was also a powerful conglomerant, possibly amongst the most, which also dabbled in military technology. At some point, whoever Bruce might've left in charge of his company might have decided to merge with the existing RDA to help strengthen it and help it expand with their resources.

Pandora was created by Foaly.
As the pollution seeps into the Lower Elements, Foaly decides that the only way for the Fairies to survive is to escape the planet altogether. As it is impossible for him to test spaceships, the demon warlocks decide to transport everything through time, to a moment so far back that Pandora was placed where Earth is then (magnetic fields act as a beacon). A giant housing unit is made, as they do not know what are they going to find, and the fleeing fairies are sent off into space. Foaly's first step is to make Eywa, to be able to calmly watch over everything, and designes it in such way it shall spread on its own. As the enviroment does not allow for the Ritual, and is harmful to fairies, he designes scouts that can upload into the network, to search for information and as experiments to make a fairy body that can survive in the outside. Of course, after being chased away from your home by creatures who are twice your height, it makes sense that Foaly would make the Na'vi as intimidating to humans as humans are to fairies.

Quaritch is a Time Lord
The REAL reason Quaritch doesn't care about the scars is that they give this regeneration character, and he knows they will just disappear when he regenerates anyway. Some time before the start of the movie he was separated from his TARDIS. This explains why he could spend so much time without a breath mask, and why he sees himself as so much better than the "lesser beings" thanks to the arrogance that seems very common among time lords

The Na'vi will be invaded again...
By ZIM! After humiliating failure on Earth thanks to the Dib-creature, Zim tries again centuries later on a planet of tall people, since by defeating tall people he might again be given a chance at being a full-time Invader by the Almighty Tallest. Zim's Irken technology takes control of Eywa through her system control nerve (like the arm control nerve, but this one controls the entire system), thus granting him control of all of the creatures on Pandora. Hilarity Ensues.
 * Oh, god, that's hilarious. I can just imagine Neytiri or Jake picking him up by the scruff of the neck and going, "What ARE you?"

Avatar is a prequel to Warhammer 40000
In Avatar, humans value their own survival more than that of aliens, In the grim dark future, this will have progressed to outright genocidal madness (because they were almost driven to extinction without Unobtainium because of aliens).

The Na'vi: tall, slender, and quite morally stuck-up, will advance their technology greatly, eventually developing monomolecular shurikens and Razor Floss, and rename themselves Eldar.

Eywa, in response to the Na'vi abandoning her, will go batshit insane, develop gender ambiguity, rename him/herself Slaannesh, and dedicate her/himself to hunting the Na'vi down.

The animals of Pandora, usually maintained by Eywa, will find themselves neglected, and in her/his absence, develop their own Hive Mind. Almost all of them being predatory, the soul focus of their Hive Mind becomes hunger. After literally devouring the planet, they take to the stars, and become the Tyranids.

After millennia of warfare, everybody who knows the true history of the universe is dead, and the next best theory is... the Warhammer 40000 fluff.

Halo tiem
The colonel's genetically modified clone clone shall return, in green power armor. We salute you Master Chief Petty Officer Quaritch.

The Entire Movie is set in the Warhammer 40000 verse and the people running RDA are a Rogue Trader and his command staff
It is very easy to see the parallels the RDA is just a venture started up by a Rogue Trader using his private militia and somewhat outdated military tech to mine the planets resources. The aliens being to numerous to just slaughter and this being a death world where very few people would be willing to move there. Sully is a member of the Imperial Guard who visited Tara/Earth on a pilgrimage and did not like what he saw. The unseen RDA CEO is the Rogue Trader Quaritch is the badass militant Grace is probably a Heretical Tech Priestess for her beliefs that humans should work with aliens. The executive on station is the seneschal (he sucks at diplomatic stuff). Unfortunately immediately after the movie the space marines are called in and wipe out the Navi.

Pandora is really the world of Minecraft
Think about it: The floating mountains, aggressive wildlife, and the Navi are ten feet tall, slender, and can easily rip a human apart, just like the endermen. The thing is, as the wildlife evolved, the endermen slowly lost their ability to teleport, and have evolved a blueish tint to help confuse prey. (Creepers died out, because auto-suicide isn't necessarily a good hunting strategy. Also, Unobtainium is obsidian, and that's how it allows FTL travel. And Eywa is the sentient manifestation of the end.

Humans call it Unobtainium, Transformers call it Energon
And the next invasion will be not by humans, but by Decepticons who are also after the unobtainium/energon. The Autobots will try to stop them by forming an alliance with the Na'vi.

The Na'vi are not native to Pandora.
All the fauna on the planet have six limbs and a pair of small eyes behind the larger ones. The Na'vi have four limbs and two eyes. The Na'vi colonised Pandora millions of years ago, and got rid of all their technology (To tie in with the Mass Effect WMG above, maybe to hide from the Reapers?). But before they got rid of it all, they genetically engineered themselves to have USB hair.

Pandora is somehow a future Earth.
After Earth became uninhabitable, human beings used genetic engineering to change all life on the planet into something that could survive there. Ewya was originally intended to replace computers the Internet, and developed sapience as a result of both its complexity and the beings plugged into it. This explains why, despite living in an environment where there is absolutely no reason for them to need intelligence, let alone human-type sapience and other planets likely having a different biochemistry than Earth, the Na'vi are not Starfish Aliens.
 * There's no indication whatsoever that Pandora exists in any significantly different timeframe than the "real Earth." The Avatar Project is well on it's way, sends feedback back to Earth, and Jake then travels to Pandora. Sorry.
 * Time Travel. At some point after the transformation, Earth fell into a Negative Space Wedgie.

Pandora was created by a race of Precursors

 * The Unobtainium is used to power the Genius Loci, and if their is a real need (for instance if the Gaias Vengeance failed, Pandora's Superweapon Surprise would activate and kill all the invaders
 * I was thinking a race of precursors as well, due to the fact that the Na'vi could form a biological link with completely separate species; the possibilities of such inter-species connections occurring through evolution would be beyond astronomical. I was thinking either an incredibly advanced early form of the Na'vi who successfully utilized biotech in a transhumanistic manner on themselves, then genetically modified the local flora and fauna judged to be useful, or possibly the sentient planet modified the creatures to be somewhat entwined with each other to prevent extinctions from callous and uncaring hunters. I lean toward the Precursor Na'vi civilization, due to the concentric ring structures surrounding their sacred grove in the floaty mountains. Although this IS a sentient planet, and it is impossible to discount the possibility that it could form those rings somehow, I find it easier to believe that they were Na'vimade structures.
 * Those are fallen giant trees that have fossilized or otherwise hardened into permanent arcs. Natural, not technological in origin. Though their large concentration in one place would indicate that they indeed are connected to the Tree of Souls in some way.

The Na'vi are descendants of a profoundly powerful genetic engineering empire. Eywa is the planet-wide AI who now runs the show.
Thousands of years before the movie began, the Na'vi had a massive empire of genetic engineers who exterminated all local life in order to breed an assortment of powerful living tools they can access with a biological connector. The AI who ran the empire, Eywa, found their transgressions unspeakable. When the Na'vi first plugged into their global network, she simply erased their memories of their entire culture and scientific background, left them with enough aboriginal skills to survive, and let them go. The Na'vi live in blissful ignorance of their mighty past, thinking the world around them is filled with useful "spirits" and that Eywa is the "great goddess." Eywa doesn't particularly give two shits about the Na'vi so long as she can plan for long-term goals, and ignored humans until the Na'vi fed her one. Intrigued by what she learned, she humored Jake's prayer and sent an army of oddities. She could've bio-engineered super-deadly kaiju to handle the humans if they leeched more unobtanium than she was comfortable sacrificing, but the Na'vi handled them nicely enough. Now that she has some quiet time again, she's going to dissect Jake Sully's mind (having implanted a copy into his Avatar's) as well as the doctor's and see what really fun stuff she can engineer.
 * You mean Eywa is GLaDOS?
 * Considering that the Na'vi were an alien race, and considering that our only knowledge of their culture is filtered through the language they were taught (and the cultural preconceptions of their teacher) they could be fully aware that they are a genetically engineered post Singularity species. No AI mucky muck required.
 * Alternately, the Na'vi used to have a post-humanesque Utopian society. And they were incredibly bored. So they released their food animals into the wild, erased their memories, and became a hunter-gatherer society.

Pandora and the other moons were created by Dr. Manhattan.
He might be Blue Jupiter, keeping an eye on his creations.

Anyway, one of the last things he says is that he's going to go create some life of his own. He finds Blue Jupiter with its nicely situated moons and sets up shop, creating the Na'Vi in his own image: tall, idealized, mostly naked, blue, able to "connect" with the world on a higher level then humans, and peaceful. The "catlike" part comes from Bubastis, whose molecules (or whatever) have become integrated with Manhattan's.
 * Best theory so far!
 * Dr. Manhattan probably made the Unobtanium deposits; given his precognition, he probably did so to lure the humans to Pandora.
 * If the Na'Vi ever got around to develop a Mayincatec-style civilization, I bet their interpretation of Eyah would look a lot like a bipedial Bubastis with dredlocks.

== Eywa and the habitat of Pandora was build by the Na'vi ancestors along ago as giant computer and utopia complex much like Earth had built a mega city with the same intent. It was so long ago however that the Na'vi past has been romantized and altered into what it is now along with the Na'vi slowly forgetting the truth. == Basically, long ago, the Na'vi were technologically advanced to the point of almost reaching the technological singularity. They created Eywa, a planet wide computer system made from biological parts, as a means of connecting everyone and everything. In doing so, they altered life on the planet to support and protect the computer system including themselves; the queue everything has was created by them as sort of a natural universal connection. The ability of Eywa to give them everything they needed in relative leisure resulted in a long slow conversion to their present society. Their tribal legends are a combination of truth and myth making. Their values for Eywa are simply the rules of their user access spun differently as well as why the rules of maintaining the system. Banshee and Toruk Makto are relatively important 'somethings' to the system - the Na'vi hijacking overly aggressive animals of those types is them bughunting potentially dangerous anomolies... as well as providing unique identifiers for Eywa to identify such things later on after the Na'vi share their memories.

The Na'vi are Eywa's Designer Babies
There is no way those mind-meld braids were evolved independently on so many species, Eywa has been using them to direct the evolution of every species by subtly or overtly controlling natural selection. Possibly even designing the first vertebrates to have the mind-meld braid. It's no coincidence there are no lame, blind, mute, or otherwise physically imperfect Na'vi, they simply don't have any recessive genes that can cause defects because Eywa has weeded them out. With this all in play, it's no surprise at all live in perfect harmony with nature: they have been made to perfectly fit their ecological niche. This is also why they have no needs that a hunter-gatherer lifestyle can't meet: they have no sick or weak to care for, and no need of medicine.

All of the Na'vi are Avatars.
On a planet with otherwise bizarre-looking animals, it's a bit weird that the dominant life form can look like Zoe Saldana. It's even weirder that an alien tree can take a human mind in a human body and transfer it permanently into an artificial alien body - unless that's what it was designed to do in the first place. Obviously a group of humans discovered the planet and its communication network, and built the Na'vi bodies so they could tap into it.
 * A truly interesting theory that would be totally awesome if it were true.
 * Nobody ever said that the other Avatars would be based on humans...
 * Didn't the OP? Anyway, 'looking like Zoe' is a limit of the fact that the facial capture was done from humans, also the same thing as EVERY other scifi humanoid species ever.

The Na'vi are descendats of the first version avatars that escaped and went native
See the entry on Na'vi not being native to Pandora. In reality Pandora did not have intelligent wildlife when it was discovered by the Terran Government Space Navy more than a century before the movie events. The humans created the avatars mixing human and some other Pandoran creature's DNA (most likely the Prolemuris) and threw some cat DNA too to make them more agile. The purpose were to breed these creatures and use them as slaves non-skilled labour in the exploration and mining of Pandora, as they wouldn't need as much equipment as human workers. However, since these first version avatars were sentient, they rebelled against the Navy (which left Pandora) and escaped to the wild. This rebellion was led by Ney'tiri's ancestor, the first Toruk Macto. After that the avatars multiplied and divided in different tribes, but because of the short time involved they didn't develop more than one language. The name "Na'vi" they eventually used to name themselves was derived from the "Navy" that originally owned them. Meanwhile on Earth, the RDA bought the rights to exploit Pandora and the tech to create the avatars from the Government. Since the use of sentient avatars had been a failure, the RDA created a second version that would be remotely controlled by humans. This also explains why the scienstific name for the Na'vi is "Homo pandorus" - it wouldn't make sense for them to be in the Homo genus if they weren't related at all to humans.

We are the na'vi. (We migrated to Pandora and well...)
Look at them. Minus the tail, braid, height, and skin, we're Not So Different. We can look nearly the same. "As near as I can figure it, about four thousand years ago someone or something brought a proto-Polynesian tribe here from Earth, genetically engineering their bodies to survive on this world, made them known to Eywa, and released them. That is why the Na'vi seem so familiar to us – their appearance, their culture, their language. The Na'vi were human once. That is why it was relatively easy for our technology to build Avatars. The original genetic modifications made the Na'vi genotype readily adaptable to the changes required for the Avatar program. I've spent the last two years deciphering the technology that they used. It hasn't been easy – it is hundreds of years in advance of where Earth is right now, and somehow they linked it with Eywa. If not for that I could never have learnt what I have. (Shows amino pods.)"
 * On this fanfic : Chapter 32 has more details to explain:

Pandora was created by Precursors to Conquer The Universe
Another varient on the Precursors theme, my favorite is that the biosphere of Pandora was a designed from the ground up as a deathworld by aliens unknown to perfect their tinkertoy genetics supersoldier designs. This would explain improbable features of the planets biology such as the ubiquitous interspecies-compatible usb ports, multispectral eyes, carbon nanotube bone structures, and the overall freakish optimization of the designs of all lifeforms on the planet. These fancy tricks and lack of evolutionary false starts, which must be otherwise handwaved as intelligent design by Eywa, instead become plot points by fridge brilliance as evidence of Pandora's true past. Naturally some of the sequel will be devoted to this discovery, and the profound implications, which leads too: why Pandora was established where it is. Why build your homegrown biological optimizer on a moon rich in unobtainium in easy reach of of another developing sentient species? Unobtainium is apparently a critical component in stardrives, and it's abundance would greatly aid the Navi in bursting unexpectedly onto the galactic scene. As far as the proximity to humans, the Na'vi have been provided a world in which they do not really have any need to develop advanced technology, and will instead develop a proud warrior race mentality with crazy survival skills. All well and good, but if you plan on them conquering the galaxy they'll still need to figure out how to make spaceships. That's where us monkeys come in. Without our own planetary brain to guide us we go through a more standard development for a species, develop powerful technology with all the destructive industrialization that entails...and then bump into the Na'vi, who steal it from us without needing to do all the nasty research themselves. It's kind of the planetary equivilent of using the unreplicable medical data produced by the holocaust. All in all a fairly good plot if you have tremendous faith in the power of biological and social evolution: given a particular starting point, events will unfold naturally such that the Na'vi, lead by their planetary mind, will suddenly be in a position to become very, VERY powerful. Psychohistory for fun and profit!
 * Pandora/Eywa could also be an Eldritch Abomination cleverly disguised as a moon orbiting Blue Jupiter . Creating a lethal and advanced ecosystem on her surface that was directly linked to her, Eywa could have evrything to uncossiously do her evrey command. Eywa's real unspeakable form lies deep in the roots of the Tree of Souls and the humans and Na'vi are mere puppets to her master plan.

Pandora is a giant computer, and Eywa is the AI
At first, Pandora was uninhabited until it was found by a wealthy alien race. It started as a vacation community made by a big company. they engineered all the flora and fauna, including the Na'vi. The unobtanium is used to power the moon. The aliens then decided to have the computer Eywa run everything. Well, something went horribly wrong one day, Eywa decided to kick those aliens out by commanding everything to drive out the vacationing aliens. The aliens abandoned the planet and started over with their new product, the Xenomorphs. No one has heard of those aliens ever again...

The evolutionary lines of the Na'vi and every other species on the planet diverged very early on
Very early on in Pandora's history (probably a little after land-based vertebrates began to develop) two species (which might not even be closely related) evolved a symbiotic relationship, one physically powerful species (with six limbs) and one "lookout" species (with four) that could alert the other species in response to threats (not an uncommon arrangement on Earth). These two species developed a very close symbiosis early on (probably the lookout species could already "ride" the powerful species) and fully evolved the "brain link" organs while they were still only two species. Over time, the powerful species diversified into many different species but retained its ability to receive information from the lookout species, while the lookout species, or proto-Navi if you will, developed greater intelligence and social structure in order to continue to understand the developing complexity of its symbiote(s). At some point, some types of plants began to co-evolve with the proto-Na'vi, allowing long-distance communication in exchange for species-wide protection and the distribution of their seeds (and, most likely, killing off any non-linking plants that were in competition with the linking species). As this plant network grew and evolved further, it developed into an information-storage system (which would eventually be called Eywa) that could be tapped into by both the proto-Na'vi and the diversifying "beast" species, giving every species involved a "sixth sense".

Eventually this would develop into an entire ecosystem, with various plants, herbivores and carnivores and members of every niche, but with all the diverse species capable of being "rallied" together by the single lookout species to migrate and seek out new food sources and react to danger in exchange for the ability to be "tamed" and utilized by their sentient symbiote. This "sentient ecosystem" would be so efficient that it could easily drive other, non-sentient ecosystems to extinction and replace them, eventually covering the whole planet. Even after competing ecosystems were extinct, the ability for a biosphere to rally together would still be mutually beneficial in order to fight off, stabilize, or escape ecosystem-threatening disasters - which, given the presence of magnetic fields capable of levitating island-sized masses, are probably quite common on Pandora even without the problem of invading aliens. After the danger had passed, they could all go back to eating each other and living out their normal animal lives.

This explains why the body plan of the Na'vi is completely different from everything else on the planet - it diverged long before the other species even arose. And there would only be one species of Na'vi, because it is a planet-range species that occupies a single niche - diversification would only complicate its role. And they look like humans because the human form is very well-adapted to a role of sentience, long-range travel, ecosystem manipulation, and complex social structure.

The entire movie is an Xanatos Gambit by the Hive Mind, aka Eywa
So Eywa is a planetary brain made out of all the trees of the world. That is quite amazing, but not divine. Okay, so all Pandoran life hooks into her, but only plants are wired to her network full-time. Eywa liked being worshiped as a goddess and chose to use her control of the world's more primitive animals to keep the Na'vi locked in scientific and technological stasis so that they would never advance far enough in science to study her true nature and blow the whole thing. After all, when she provides them what they need, why would they advance?

Her plans hit a snag when humans came to Pandora. Here was a sentient species with technology to reach the stars and the science to figure out what she really is. These people obviously had to be gotten rid of before they could spill the big secret to the Na'vi. But she had to do it in such a way that no curious Na'vi would consider talking to or learning from the humans should they return, which ruled out a simple Zerg Rush of wildlife (which would also have risked the humans attacking from orbit).

She finds out that they are here for the Unobtanium, which is the perfect source for the conflict she needs.

Eywa, in her role as Na'vi goddess, tells her people to be as uncooperative as possible. She has them spurn all offers of technology or science, and tells them to ignore the desperate need the humans have for the stuff that they're sitting on. As per her orders, some engage in low-level guerrilla warfare (such as the arrows on the truck tires). They expel the school from their village, which raises tension.

When Jake Sully arrive on the planet and becomes an Avatar, she senses in him someone bitter with humanity and fascinated by the lushness of Pandora. As a bonus, he is not a scientist. She decides that these things make him valuable as a pawn, which is why she called off Neytiri's attacking him and orders him let into the Hometree. She has him bond with animals of Pandora, perhaps subtly messing with his brain via her control of them, until he comes to feel more Na'vi than human. This has the bonus effect of distracting him from his diplomatic mission. She needs atrocities to be sure that the Na'vi remain anti-human and anti-science.

She allows the destruction of the Hometree in order to galvanize the anti-human sentiments of both her pawn Jake and the Na'vi. The naive chumps make it even easier for her by bringing her Dr. Grace to heal. Grace is the top scientist on the planet, who had been actively hunting for her secret and who would have loved to reveal it if she found it; that would have caused Eywa's whole charade to crumble. And she gets to heal her? Perfect! As a bonus, Grace was shot by a human, so Jake's anti-human sentiments were raised even further. Dr. Grace took wounds in the chest, which shouldn't affect her mind -- but they do give Eywa the perfect excuse after she absorbs the poor woman's mind. "Her wounds were too great"? Likely story. She was still alive, and her mind was intact. Nothing stopped the transfer but the fact that she would be far more useful to Eywa dead than alive. Also, to be sure that Jake further reveres her, she has Grace's hollow shell say, "I'm with her, Jake. She's real." A planetary brain that can control thousands of animals at once can control one more body (even a human one) for a minute.

Then, to ensure that all the tribes of Na'vi remember the humans only as bringers of death, she gave Jake the Toruk to gain power over them. He led them into battle, where the humans' superior technology easily slaughters them. Eywa wanted this. She needed plenty of death to get the Na'vi to hate and distrust humans forever after.

After she judged the slaughter to be sufficient, she commanded her mindless herd of slave-beasts to charge and overwhelm the humans. She could have done that at any time.

After that, she has the Na'vi "escort" the humans offworld. Note her insidious effect on her pawn Jake Sully: by then, he referred to his own species as "aliens". Then she transferred Jake Sully's mind to his avatar form permanently, probably performing any remaining necessary mind rearranging as well.

The plan worked like a charm. The humans are gone. The Na'vi are led by a firmly anti-human leader who deifies her. The Navi are embittered towards the humans. There is no more risk of the Navi realizing that they've been played for fools. That's right, the true villain won. You just didn't see it. "Reporter: I have to ask you the same question people back home are asking about space these days. Is it worth it? Should we just pull back? Forget the whole thing as a bad idea, and take care of our own problems, at home.
 * ...That is awesome.
 * There should be a fanfic based on this theory.
 * It would go something like this.
 * Amusingly, this great entry not as much challenges the Avatar plot, but rather places a matrix of a realistic conflict over it. Think, every faction in every war had perfectly good reasons to fight (only in the last few centuries anyone even expressed the doubt that war wasn't just a honorable job for males). If you read into literature concerning real-life conflicts, you'll find that from the ideological standpoint the factions were opposed, but from utilitarian perspective they'd just pursue their practical agenda (not to be confused with conscious war-mongering for profit). So a spiritual, good-willing nation can be described as striving for living space and resources (and it really is, if just to remain a nation); and a vile, chauvinist, expansionist one can be described as maintaining its security (because «lesser» nations are theoretically able to become more advanced and challenge it etc.).
 * The basic plot is pretty realistic already, unfortunately. "Advanced civilization first-world tries to trample over smaller, less advanced one to get at some resource, after a few half-measure attempts at diplomacy." There are tons of examples.
 * The WMG doesn't "challenge" the plot. It just adds one assumption: Eywa is not perfectly good. Given the tropes we have on this site, that's not a hard assumption to make.
 * And where exactly in the movie it is claimed that Eywa's "good"? She "protects balance of life", and this means she's "neutral".
 * Actually, the assumption here is that Eywa is evil.
 * Or, y'know, just has a thinking process that is too alien for us to comprehend. "Nature red in tooth and claw," indeed...
 * Bonus points: Notice how some humans do stay? She allows some humans to stay, ones on her side who know how to use the weapons but who don't dare study her the way Dr. Grace did. Then, if more humans come, they can put up a charade for a little while, allowing an ambush to get rid of the new 'guests', and taking in any that are clearly on her side. Any of these human pawns may figure things out; but as long as she has control, she can have them dismantle the more dangerous technology (such as the aircraft) that give them a huge advantage over the Na'vi. The humans are being watched all the time; if they do rebel, then it is easy for a Na'vi to get them killed.
 * The Tree of Souls is your Friend, Citizen. Technological advancement is treason.
 * Why, why, WHY is this not the 'official' position? This is brilliant man. Just brilliant.
 * As a corollary to the above: why does this theory make Eywa evil? Ok, so she's the mastermind behind the whole planet and movie, but why is this a bad thing? From what we've seen, humans sticking their scientificy noses into happy spiritual business never ends well. Maybe Eywa knew that in the long run keeping the Na'vi in technological stasis would maintain the lush utopia we see on Pandora. Let spiritual catpeople pray.
 * Because A) it results in the na'vi becoming almost xenophobic, and b) because they're essentially brainwashed.
 * They're not xenophobic. There's a long history of bad relations with humanity which, in general, doesn't have any respect for them either.
 * This should totally be explored in the sequel, with Jake Sully attempting to Rage Against the Rainforest in response.
 * This makes sense especially if one has seen Blue Gender. Plus these lines from Babylon 5 explain why staying like the Na'vi is a bad thing.

Cmdr. Sinclair: No. We have to stay here. And there's a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars."


 * ... In this troper's mind, this WMG is canon.
 * ...except that it's based on multiple misconceptions (such as claims of direct communication, or lack of free will)
 * I spent the afternoon chewing over this topic (he'd been entertaining a similar theory, only less developed) and came to the following realization: if true, it makes Eywa morally ambiguous and more sympathetic at the same time. Think of her as a more limited Nicol Bolas from the Shards of Alara storyline: vastly intelligent and powerful, but suddenly mortal (Bolas had recently become mortal, Eywa had recently become aware of her mortality) and determined to preserve him/herself at all costs. As a result, she's willing to go to any lengths to preserve herself, including brainwashing the aliens who've uplinked with her into becoming her stooges and compelling the fauna to kill and die on her behalf. If the Tree of Souls was what both Quaritch and the Na'Vi thought it was, it was the center of a good deal of Eywa's mental activity; destroying it could well have lobotomized her, and she had no intention of letting that happen. This ultimately makes Eywa and the humans Not So Different- each has their agenda, and are willing to pursue it to the bitter end, all for the sake of their planet. Ultimately, the conflict between her and Quaritch/RDA was inevitable due to fundamentally conflicting goals, and she won for the same reasons Bolas won: not simply being more powerful and more intelligent than the opposing player, but also by having the advantage of knowing the game was even being played.
 * I stupidly added just one more variation of this interpretation, except now the Na'vi and Eywa are essentially the Yuuzan-Vong/EYWA IS THE OVERMIND. It's sitting at the bottom of the discussion of the Avatar Just Bugs Me page.
 * Another thing to consider is the Navi's history. It is mentioned in the film itself that in the past there was a great war between all the tribes of the Navi until they were unified by one person riding a Toruk. How much do you want to bet Eywa was the one who gave that person the Toruk and that 'unifying the tribes' meant unifying them under a religion devoted to the worship of Eywa and instilling in them practices that would allow Eywa to alter their minds such as bonding with the Tree of voices, a place where the Navi were told they would be able to hear the voices of their 'Ancestors' who conveniently dont have anything bad to say about Eywa or good to say about Technology.
 * Actually, it was a time of great sorrow, which is fairly nonspecific. Inter-clan conflicts were more likely on a small scale, since there is very little for them to even be over (lack of scarcity or overpopulation, primarily). Ascribing human motivation to a very different people just doesn't work.

Eywa is literally the Zerg Overmind.
The Navi know exactly who and what Eywa is; "goddess" was just the first Navi-to-English translator jumping to conclusions. The Navi appear primitive by technological standards; but like the Zerg, they're capable of anything the advanced races can do even without technology. They steer their mounts with their minds while Terrans still have to use manual inputs to control their technology; thus, they might be MORE advanced in some ways.

Under this theory, if Eywa is sinister, then it's only a matter of time before she "evolves" some new form of life capable of carrying her minions into space, now that she knows about intelligent life and habitable planets other than herself.
 * Earth invaded by the sexy blue Zerg. That's worth something.
 * With Dr. Grace as the Kerrigan? Oh hellz yeah.
 * This is partly true. 'god/goddess' is certainly a mistranslation, (similar to how many people think skxawng means 'moron' when that's the closest human word which has none of the connotations). The Na'vi would seem to have a greater understanding of Eywa than the marines/RDA people, in patricular the significance of the locations with the most connections, but Eywa is still essentially a neural network and so can not suddenly become a spacecraft. The Na'vi have no need for development because unlike humans, they never developed the problems that necessitated such change in the first place.

Eywa is an Eldritch Abomination in the form of a planet.
How could a group of hunter-gatherer tribes defeat a highly advanced civilization armed with planes, spaceships, and guns? Eywa warped the reality around herself, providing the much needed energy to the Na'vi, deflecting bullet trajectories, sending disturbing messages to the invaders to confuse and distract them, disconnected human computers and machinery implanted in her with her immense Psychic Powers, and god knows what else. Furthermore, she has already sowed the seed of comprehension-defeating depression and despair into the human psyche, making them catatonic, pointlessly violent and warlike, and schizophrenic. The human race implodes from mental problems and resource scarcity.

Eywa is serving as a central power grid to the Na'vi, much like the sun to us.
Probably why the Na'vi manage to defeat their advanced enemies.

Eywa has been making Pandora into Arrakis
She is breeding a race of supersoldiers with a warrior race mentality.

The biosphere of Pandora is a single organism, and it wants to reproduce. In layman's terms, it wants to conquer the universe.

Bonus points if some of the insane biology is the result of Eywa being an engineered lifeform in the first place, and the rest Eywa perfecting herself. Someone will find that the fossil record starts out of nowhere 40 million years ago and open ancient caverns containing warship blueprints etched into stone. They were created by a dying empire that wanted to leave behind a legacy: no Ozymandias for them.

Had the humans won and destroyed the Tree of Souls, the result would not have been a Polluted Wasteland.
Instead, the humans would soon have used the late Dr. Grace's findings to reveal the true nature of Eywa to the Navi, and the Na'vi would realize how easily they had been duped. There would be a new golden age as humans and Navi worked, played, lived, advanced, and journeyed into the stars together.

Instead, the Navi and Jake are now trapped forever on a deceptively lush nightmarish hell-scape full of super-predators and ruled over by an insane tree-brain thing with a goddess complex. Oh, and she will send thousands of super-predators to kill you if you ever try to advance technologically. Oh, and with the humans gone, and little chance of their return, there is no hope to overthrow the tyrant; the Navi will be forced to eke out a meager living as hunter-gatherers in the stone age forever. Enjoy your "victory", Navi.
 * No. Had the humans blown up the Tree of Souls, Ewya would have tried to take the whole planet down with her and probably would've succeeded, given her exceptional control of the planet's animals and other natives.
 * One would assume there was a time when Ewya didn't exist at all, and presumably creatures managed without her then. And she's got to have been screwing over the parasites and unicellular organisms pretty badly, given we never see anyone suffering from parasites or diseases. So most likely killing Ewya would wipe out most of the rest of the biosphere with rampant fungal infections and parasitic life forms she'd been keeping in check artificially. Which would just show Pandora's "nature" for the charade it is.
 * So in your mind, complex animal life will typically evolve before plant life? You Fail Biology Forever. As for disease - the Na'vi aree stated to have a ar stronger immune system, in addition to adaptation being mutually beneficial. Anyway, not living in conditions that are as close to optimal as possible for pandemics like humans do means that it is far less likely.

Pandora/Eywa is sentient and could have removed the humans at anytime.
Eywa let humanity stay on the planet because it wanted the advanced science they had. Once it absorbed Grace and got it, the local wildlife was mobilized and the threat removed.

The Na'vi are misguided, Eywa is evil.
Though, to be honest, would you want extraterrestrials mining out your planet?
 * Or maybe she just doesn't socialize.

Pandora is the Internet
Self-explanatory. Also, Eywa is the server.
 * Does that mean there are Na'vi tropers calling us egrarious examples of evil aliens? Do they have lol-thanator pictures? Jakesully facts? Do Na'vi /b/tards troll other villagers by using the neural network to send fuck-huge creatures smashing through their homes?
 * Oh God, Na'vi 4chan...we're doomed.
 * Your link wins the internet. Forever.

Eywa is not sentient at all
True, the Na'vi worship Eywa like a goddess (or something similar) but if the Internet had been around since before we became intelligent, we would probably worship it as well. Eywa is simply a network of plants that co-evolved with the Na'vi and all other Pandoran life, enabling them to communicate with each other - in exchange, the Na'vi use their intelligence and intuition to protect the plants and animals from extinction and maintain ecological balance (as well as rally them together when large-scale threats appear). However, the network is still just a communication/information storage system (the Tree of Souls is the "server" where the information relating to dead Na'vi is kept - there are probably other "server trees" scattered across Pandora), and all the actual decisions are made by the Na'vi themselves. Otherwise, "Eywa" would have simply gone into Gaias Vengeance mode the moment the humans started knocking down trees, instead of waiting for the Na'vi to decide that they were out of options.

Eywa stops the Na'vi from progressing into further technology, to protect herself and the enviroment.
The Na'vi seem to be as clever as humans. Yet they do not seem to want any more then they have, so unless they were born without a sense of greed Eywa stops them from discovering technology above the "Knives and Arrows" level. This is why the Na'vi didn't accept the hunmans previous offer to trade medicine/food/machines for mining, even though it would have benifited the Na'vi.
 * This WMG has been discussed already on this page.

Ewya Isn't Holding The Navi Back Technologically

 * She's holding them back philosophically! They have no question on their origins, they seemingly have no problem accepting the fact there is other intelligent life in the universe, despite being isolated in the Stone Age, they don't appear to question anything at all about why they are. Ewya took a small page from the Imperium of Man. A small mind is easily filled with faith, after all.
 * Ewya probably has an easy job convincing them that she's God, because let's face it, she is. She created all life on Pandora and the Na'Vi, is a part of every living thing, and can control the environment if necessary. She probably never has to tell a lie when you look at it that way.

The movie is actually a stealth parable in favor of cloud computing
Think about it. The entire second half of the movie only works because of the vital importance of the Tree of Souls. Now, going with the Pandora= the Internet interpretation above, If the Na'vi had just kept the souls of their ancestors distributed over a couple hundred square miles of rainforest instead of localized in a single databank (or at least thought to, y'know, back up their freaking data) the loss of a single tree- or even a whole bunch to mining operations- wouldn't've been the apocalyptic event it's played up as.

What's gonna be in the (nigh-inevitable, given the critical acclaim) sequel?
I've got a couple of insane suggestions:
 * Dying Earth. In a couple of years, Earth's resources are completely depleted and humans are faced with a need to relocate somewhere... fast. They invade Pandora once again, with a HUGE force, but this time it's no mere profiteering -- it's their last and desperate attempt to escape extinction. Jake is going to have some very uneasy choices -- if he has any humanity left in him by the point.
 * My money's on this one.
 * If this happens, I bet ten bucks that any humans that survive will all be transferred into Na'Vi or Avatar bodies.
 * Dying Earth is likely (although more likely in Avatar 3), all humans becoming Na'vi? Very unlikely.
 * That would seriously make me ashamed of being human. All of humanity turned into stupid cat people? I'd rather die.
 * Hah, humans have over-industrialized and consumed themselves to near extinction, and the Na'vi are the stupid ones? That sums up humanity right there folks.
 * Well said. I lost faith in humanity LONG before seeing Avatar.


 * No One remembers Battle for Terra right?
 * See Clifford D. Simak's The City series. Well, humans there didn't all move to Jupiter because the Earth was dying -- quite the contrary, Earth is still thriving, and they simply left it to their successor species -- a genetically engineered sentient dogs. No, people moved to Jup because they got bored being people -- and jupiterian natives were so much cooler, and being one was so much fun, that hardly anybody could resist.


 * Sprout Of Life. The Navi's, guided by Jake and his human pals (including ), build a spaceship and travel to Earth, driven by a desire to Pandora-morph it and thus restore its ruined ecology. They establish an outpost in a remote corner of the world and use Avatar technology to create human replicas of themselves. Could be used in conjunction with the first option.
 * The journey is set off by someone finding a copy of Planet Earth (US version) in Hell Gate. It's like Dr. Grace is telling them to de-crapsack-ify the planet from beyond!
 * Metal of Discord. By tapping Pandora's collective consciousness, Jake learns that Unobtainium is the source of the moon's future demise. He thinks that the prophecy refers to human encroachment, and prepares to repel another human attempt to establish a mining base. But in reality, Unobtainium, a mysterious metal of alien origin, is slowly destroying Pandora's unique ecology -- and it turns out that extracting it and shipping away from the moon is actually SAVING it from destruction. Hilarity Ensues.
 * What a tweest!
 * Now that would be an interesting story. Both the humans and the Na'Vi need to work together to survive, but there seems to be too much bad blood between them. Jake, being both Na'Vi and human, has the best chance to bridge the gap between the two cultures. It would also be a good opportunity to see some non-bastard humans.
 * Even better, Unobtanium is a rare form of slow spreading Tiberium, and the fighting accidentally sets off a liquid-T explosion...
 * What if it is poisonous to most forms of life but is actually helpful to Ewya so the characters have to fight with most of the planet itself(also ties into the theory of Edwya being evil, and explains why a good Ewya would chase off the humans curing it.)
 * What about that: Humans return to Pandora but are forced to leave as what is practically the self-destruction of a whole moon sets in. All life on Pandora, including Jake, dies a slow and creeping death (sorry, I don`t really like the movie).
 * People, people, you're forgetting there's other moons around Blue Jupiter with life on 'em, and Cameron's stated the reason they exist is for sequel fodder. The question is, who'd go to those moons and why?
 * A new cast of humans find unobtanium on the other moons - not in the same amounts as on Pandora, but enough so that they can use it for... whatever it's used for. Due to guilt, the only one they attempt to land on is one that bears a resemblance to Crematoria. To their surprise, there's people there too, only they're shorter and hairier and more then willing to mine unobtanium, which is seen as a "pest" mineral.
 * Jake (now Jaysulli) and the other Avatars use a modified shuttle to explore the moons due to Grace's spirit making everyone curious. Maybe the Na'Vi already have a Gummi Bears-style light Morse-code style of communication with the ones that face Pandora.
 * The same time as the movie on another, unobtanium and sapient-species-free moon with a friendlier atmosphere, a colony of humans is forced to absorb the injured and really pissed-off marines from Pandora and.... um, I got nothing.
 * No, you fools, clearly one of those other moons will have beings even larger bastards than the humans, and so we'll get James Cameron's Enemy Mine.
 * You can't be talking about Predators or Xenomorphs. No effing way.
 * Oh, hell yeah.
 * The Colonial theme will continue, and the humans return with a proper army instead of a glorified corporate security team. They are now more focused on the Genus Loci aspects of the planet, manipulating it with a computer interface to turn it against the Na'vi and then pacifying the wildlife for safer mining.
 * So, the first theory again?
 * There is one key difference: less moral ambiguity. With the first theory, humanity will explicitly die out unless they colonise Pandora. This theory just proposes that humans invade with an actual army.
 * It has been explained numerous times why that is out as a theory.
 * Let's take this a little farther. RDA goes bankrupt and gets bought out by various investors. These investors are of certain nationalities, and like the Americans in Avatar, they pursue their objectives on Pandora with echoes of their own Imperial/governing past:
 * Americans: Would seek to take their resources and Kill Them All. They would eventually forcfully assimilate the Na'vi population when they realize Kill Them All didn't work out well. This is meant to reflect on the United States treatment of the native peoples of the western frontier when settlers were expanding out westward.
 * Chinese: Simply decide to colonize Pandora. Thousands of families arrive and begin to crowd out the Na'vi (Tibet). The Chinese also cross-breed the native flora on Pandora with fast growing bamboo. Ostensibly, they say this allows a more "robust connection with Eywa" to benefit the Na'vi, but in reality they can use it as a way to block/delay Eyway's transmissions (Great Firewall of China). Oh yeah, the Chinese are bunch of racists (as demonstrated with the communist treatment of the Uyghurs and the Tibetans in Real Life), so they would probably result to genocidal policies towards the Na'vi.
 * British: The Brits keep a minimal footprint on the planet, both because they don't have as much personnel/resources as the other companies and also because they learned from RDA's failure (British softly, softly strategy). In their expeditions to other planets they discovered a substance that turns out to be highly addictive to Na'vi (Opium), and use that as leverage to get unobtainium.
 * Koreans: They would most likely would have a strong economic relations with the Na'vi and would not seek to take their lands, but society wise, they would probably consider the Na'vi to be inferior beings (although would not resort to genocidal policies). Truth in Television, the Koreans are the most racist country in East Asia, even to the point that impose legal limitations on non-Koreans . Probably more racist than the Japanese and the Chinese
 * Spanish: The Spanish simply try to use the Na'vi as native labor to collect unobtainium (hacienda system). I remember reading that this was an idea in the Project 880 draft. Like the Chinese, they would probably would use genocidal policies.
 * French: The French would send settlers over to colonize strategic areas (Quebec, Acadia, Louisiana), with only miners, explorers (voyageurs and coureurs des bois) and researchers (missionaries) travelling into the hinterland. They would probably treat the Na'vi the most friendly like how the French treated the American Indians. Heck, the Na'vi might even ally with them.
 * Japanese:
 * For an anti-Japanese POV: They would probably take their lands and kill them all like Imperial Japan (seeing the infamous Nanking Massacre).
 * For a pro-Japanese POV: Corporate businesses will invest with unobtainium and would have little interest with the Na'vi. The Japanese would probably be the most tolerant of the Asian nations when dealing with the Na'vi and would even be willing to establish cultural exchange with them. Truth In Televsion, while Japan isn't really multicutural as per say, there are some young Japanese who have taken interests in different foreign subcultures, particularly African-American music according to The Other Wiki.
 * Portuguese: Probably the same way as the Spanish.
 * Russians: They couldn't care less.
 * This Troper has to disagree with the Russian method since in Real Life it was closer to the French method
 * Australians Would move there en masse when they learn that there's a safer place they can live in than Australia.
 * Saudi Arabians Seeing as we all know Unobtanium is essentialy oil INSPACE (it produces energy) the sequel could have an Arab Oil Sheik plot where Saudi Arabians try to mine as much as debt when oil ran out and the market crashed years ago. The Western World will still be demonized for bying the Unobtanium
 * As an Aussie, I can honestly say I would prefer to live on a planet that has giant panther things then one that has all the evil shit Aus has.
 * I'd have to disagree on the American idea you had. We've had quite a bit of a collective character development about that sort of thing. At worst we'd try a nicer version of what rda started with and keep it that way. Also, we have enogh military force to take over at least 2/3 of the other earth colonies.
 * Given the utterly rampant Humans Are Bastards, and Jake's grim statements about them spreading to destroy everything, the next movie will have the Na'Vi developing space travel, so they can destroy Earth before the Humans find another world less defended than Pandora to attack.
 * The Na'Vi will gain the ability to control the unobtainium from the native animals, using movements that appear to be based on forms of martial arts. Without anything to name this new ability, they will be forced to call it Bending. Then Bryke can threaten to sue James's Cameron's ass.
 * Whoever you are, I can tell you, that's what I wished for too. With antimatter bombs! From orbit!! Or better yet, a Colony Drop!!!
 * From fake trailer maker Blood Runs Clear, we get this.
 * Another possibility - going with the idea that a race of Precursors deliberately created Pandora, perhaps the Precursors were very similar to humanity in what they did to their home system, and Pandora was and is an ongoing experiment in balancing an ecology with a native, sentient species, the second movie involves the human return to Pandora, but things get complicated when the Precursors return and show a third side to the largely binary human/Na'vi conflict, perhaps working towards a goal of changing both races' attitudes - humans to soften and become more eco-aware and friendly, but also the Na'vi to become more technologically inventive and curious about how and why the world works.
 * For bonus points, it's the Precursors who are shown using Avatar technology, either independently developed or inspired/stolen from the humans to create human-based Avatars for the Precursors to interact with the humans, just as the humans did with the Na'vi.
 * The wounded & battered soldiers from Pandora return to Earth. RDA uses them as propoganda to convince the governments of Earth to fund a full-blown invasion. Scorched-Earth, nuke-the-forest-from-space, bring every weapon under the sun style invasion. Many on Earth see this as an acceptable course of action haven not been given the better details of what happened on Pandora. 2 fleets are launched, 1 ready to turn Pandora into a crater, the other ready to start colonizing it for human terraforming purpose. While the human fleets work there there way to Pandora to carry out this plan, we run into the Navi again. The Navi are dealing with another invasion from another outside force. Things become complicated as soon as the humans from Earth arrive, as Jake is forced to possibly look to the evil that he helped defeat as a possible ally to help his new home survive
 * The wounded & battered soldiers from Pandora return to Earth. RDA uses them as propoganda to convince the governments of Earth to fund a full-blown invasion. Scorched-Earth, nuke-the-forest-from-space, bring every weapon under the sun style invasion. Many on Earth see this as an acceptable course of action haven not been given the better details of what happened on Pandora. 2 fleets are launched, 1 ready to turn Pandora into a crater, the other ready to start colonizing it for human terraforming purpose. While the human fleets work there there way to Pandora to carry out this plan, we run into the Navi again. The Navi are dealing with another invasion from another outside force. Things become complicated as soon as the humans from Earth arrive, as Jake is forced to possibly look to the evil that he helped defeat as a possible ally to help his new home survive

If there is a sequel, and Eywa actually manifests, it will be in the form of Dr. Grace.

 * You just know this is gonna happen.
 * Use the force, Jake...

In the sequel, RDA will lose their rights to two other, recently-converted mining companies: RED and BLU.
Because Heavy vs. Na'vi needs to happen.
 * I think all the RED Na'Vi would get confused ("But we're all blue!" "No, they're BLU not blue!" "HUH?")

Quaritch will return in one of the sequels
As an Avatar. Imagine, a 12' or 14' version of Col. Badass who doesn't need to worry about holding his breath! Maybe he'll get a redemption. Cameron: As long as they have his DNA.... ; Lang: You think two arrows is going to stop me?
 * who'd drive Quaritch's avatar?
 * His next of kin, who will look suspiciously like Michael Biehn.
 * This possibility is "explored" in the sequels of the fanfic Avatars II When Qwaritch Takes Revenge.
 * He'll come back leading an army of Red Dog people, the natural enemy of the Na'vi
 * He's gonna be a 12-foot-tall Red XIII?!
 * He'll have form-fitting armor, a skeletal helmet, and wield a knife and a rifle. WETA's gotta do something with all that left-over Halo and Neon Genesis Evangelion concept art.
 * If he is Avatar'd, he'll probably have all the "bond-hairs" removed just so he can have a proper military haircut, no hippy braid for him (he doesn't need a six-legged horse or pterodactyl anyway).
 * Yes he does... but not the bond hair. When Quaritch commands you, you do as he says, bond or no bond. His first appearance in the sequel will be him riding the Turok.
 * Building on that: If he returns, he's going to do something utterly despicable that will (at least be intended to) turn the whole fanbase against him. Like killing baby Na'vi on-camera or destroying the (or another? Who knows) Tree of Souls and cause countless wildlife it was connected to to also die. As much as I am with the people who see Quaritch as the ultimate badass and the true hero of the movie, I predict that if Cameron ever finds out how much his attempt at writing a Complete Monster backfired, he's going to make sure he gets the point across next time. Bonus points if it still backfires and we still celebrate him as the ultimate badass.
 * The operative word being "if".

In the sequel...
There will be discovered a Na'vi tribe, led by a semi-immortal leader (let's just call him lord ), with a curious dislike of signs, poisonous bread and walls of fire. He will do battle with a certain general for the rights to his name. Oh, and another Avatar will aid him.

Trudy isn't dead. She'll return leading her own clan of Na'Vi in the sequel, known simply as the 'Too badass to explode'.
Troofax.

Sequel
It will have a quote along the lines of
 * Hello
 * My Name Is Inigo Montoya
 * You Killed My Father
 * Prepare to Die
 * Quaritch Jr. will have his revenge. And it will be awesome.

Somewhere in the sequels, Earth will have a Class 3 Terminator 3-style ending

 * Think Terminator 3. Somebody sabotages a returning ISV, overloads, crashes into the moon, causes Death From Above and...extermination. Read this fanfic chapter.
 * To this troper, this is a Poison Oak Epileptic Trees.
 * I challenge you to read the chapter with the T3 ending music playing. If this is not at least a partial Tear Jerker for you, you are a soulless, misanthropic, genocidal, suicidal, extremely depressed na'vi.
 * Waitaminnit. The humans killed a few hundred Na'vi. Eywa retaliates by wiping out all life on Earth. And this is even after Earth stops sending ships to Pandora. Disproportionate Retribution much? The real kicker? Eywa has decided that it's time to reach for the stars. That's right, the Na'vi are going to take this show on the road! Anybody get the feeling that any alien culture they come across is going to get "an offer they can't refuse?" If this isn't proof that Eywa is actually a time-shifted Shodan, I don't know what is.
 * (WMG Author): For reference, the main character of the series was driven to Insanity early in the fanfic. The ending or even the character in the story can give off a strong sense of instability. What kicked me about the ending was that the Na'vi were happy about that and in the epilogue, they become more technological than us. The idea of na'vi astronauts would make sense in that fanfic, but otherwise, no. I do not see any purpose of it.
 * Two words: Palulukan Sensei. RAEG does not even begin to describe my reaction.
 * As a side note, anyone find it ironic that the Na'vi develop spaceships and computers, albeit organic-based in construction? And through the Avatars intermingling with the Na'vi population, the genepool of Pandora's dominant species now contains human DNA? As much as the main character wanted to wipe out the tawtute to protect Pandora, the tawtute end up forever influencing and altering Na'vi culture from the moment the two species first met. I mean, until the humans cruised by in their IS Vs, the Na'vi had no concern about the stars beyond "As long as they stay lit, we're cool." I suspect this may have been a gambit on Gaia's part to spread her existence beyond Earth by infiltrating Eywa's infrastructure, piece by piece, until the main character joins her ancestors and completes the process, overwriting Eywa's conscience and leaving Gaia in charge of a new world with amazing terraforming capabilities...one with interstellar capabilities. And it all started with Quaritch as her pawn...
 * Can I just say how thoroughly disgusting that fanfic is? Seriously, if Avatar made you think that the extinction of humanity and every other organism on Earth was a good thing, see a therapist. Fast.

In the 3rd movie we see a different use for the avatar technology
Like in surrogates the avatar Technology will be used by the population because the it became cheap and reliable. The bodies of these 2nd Gen avatars will range from the perfect supermodel to furries. Prior to that earth has developed a eywa like Spirit which is based on technologys like wifi, glasfiber networks, wikis and bots. Said digital spirit has developed the avatars in a attempt to get a body for itself and is the the secret head of the RDA.

The Na'Vi have/will have "Bogeyman" tales of Skypeople who returned from the dead
As far as I can recall, it's never stated that if a reckless/irresponsible driver dies while in his Avatar body, the driver will be killed as well. Therefore, the scientists can simply grow another Avatar and the driver can return, looking exactly the same and being well able to prove that he is the Skyperson who the Na'Vi were sure had died.
 * It's not guaranteed they will or won't die, but it could still be enough to kill them. Don't assume the Na'vi are stupid though, you could EASILY argue they are more intelligent than humans. They know what avatars are, if not the exact detail of their functioning.
 * Plus, it takes years and billions of dollars to grow a new Avatar. I get the feeling that the company wouldn't throw good money after bad to replace one that a reckless driver wrecked.
 * Then again, it's possible that those billions were mostly spent on R&D, constructing/operating labs, genome mapping, etc.
 * Wasn't it mentioned at one point that the experience of dying in an avatar leaves a human mentally crippled, or at least very heavily traumatized for the rest of his life?
 * Nope. It's possible (psychological, most likely) but not something that *will* happen.
 * The original Project 880 scriptment mentions an avatar driver who commits suicide by carnivorous plant after he fell in love with a local girl. The experience was mentally traumatizing, but that probably has to do more with his avatar being eaten alive than his avatar dying in general. It's not canon, but it's useful as reference.

The Valkyrie at the end of the movie isn't going anywhere. Its coming back.
The ISV Venture Star is 1 part of a gigantic chain of 12 cargo freighters that operate a supply loop heading to and fro from Earth to Pandora. Now think about it. In the beginning of the movie, Jake was given 3 months to learn the Omaticaya's ways and convince them to scram from Hometree. He succeeds completing part 1, but screw up part 2 when they come in too early. Eventually shit happens, and the humans are evicted from Pandora. But wait! Every 1.2 years, another ISV comes to Pandora. It has only been 3-4 months! Where is the Valkyrie carrying all the evicted humans going? The next ISV isnt here!
 * The ISV hasn't left yet, of course. The loiter time around Earth and Pandora is around one year, for maintenance, refueling, unloaidng and loading of cargo and passengers. A shuttle can not survive in space for 9 months anyway, especially not with 200 humans on board.

If Eywa had been destroyed, then the Na'vi would have gotten a hole blown into their consciousness.
Without Eywa, they no longer have their "divine" guidance that they've come to depend on. Some would become depressed, having their own "God is dead" period. Others would continue to fight and lose against the humans in a futile revenge attempt. Maybe a few would come over to the light of reason, but not many.
 * Reason in this case is the existence of a scientifically verifiable entity - this is why 'god' is a really shitty description, because it's not some mythical invisible cloud guy who can break the laws of physics, but a sentient organism who is constrained by physical limitations. If you like spess mehrens, there are whole works about them.

James Cameron actually has the technology to turn people into Avatars.
Think about it. All that time he spent on the planning of this movie? He was actually working with a group of elite scientists to create the technology to have people transfer their minds into Na'Vi avatars. After releasing Avatar and its subsequent sequels, and enough people wish they could become like the Na'Vi (like they don't already) he'll release the technology for the price of a few million dollars per person. Little do we know that he's also replicated the technology that makes Eywa so powerful, and has injected it into himself...making him the source of all the connections between the Na'Vi. With millions of people as slaves to his ideals, and all their money...Cameron will truly be King of the World, as he prophesied so long ago.
 * That... is awesome. Sign me up, please.

Pandora was once almost destroyed by immense volcanic activity.
A bunch of supervolcanoes erupted and filled the atmosphere with ash for millions of years. The native wildlife had to evolve all those glowy parts to simulate sunlight and survive in the perpetual darkness. After the ash settled, the jungles sprouted up from the now-fertile volcanic soil. Everything kept its vestigial glowiness because there was no reason for it to go away.
 * Pandora orbits around a gas gient slightly smaller than Jupiter. Extended night and day cycles are expected. The markings are used for identification between individuals, rudimentary communication in some animals, and ironically allow an organism to blend in better at night than a dark shape against everything else being bioluminescent.

Tying into that, Na'Vi are extremely long lived--when Neytiri mentions that her grandfather united the clans in "a time of darkness," she meant that it was dark out all the time back then.
 * Would this also explain the floating islands? (to some extent) They got thrown up in the air and never came down...
 * That was Neytiri's great-great-grandfather. And it's unlikely that the formations could be that new. The Manual says that the various rock formations, including the floating mountains were born when the planet's surface was still entirely molten, and the the magnetic fields of the Unobtanium shaped them. A good theory, but wrong timeframe.
 * That was a 'time of great sorrow' actually ( Lost in Translation to a foreign language version maybe? ). The mountains float due to containing unobtainium (superconductors float on magnetic fields, Pandora's being several tims stronger than Earth's). This effect is observable with low-temperature superconductors on Earth today.

Unobtanium was discovered by a Troper
Think about it. Scientists always name things after stuff from when they were kids. (The Monty Python and the Dave Bowie Spider) And its well known we have many future scientists here. One of us obviously just decided to rep teh site by naming the resident phelbtonium after a trope.
 * Or, ya know it's just engineering slang. That long predates TV tropes. Or Wikis. Or the Internet.
 * From a retired engineer Troper (who has used the phrase liberally), it's older than Star Trek.
 * No way. If a troper discovered an element, it will be called Phlebotinum
 * Weird note: Phlebotinum, going by the word roots, would imply an element related to veins.


 * Also likely true (one not-qute-canon explanation is that it was originally so named on its discovery by a scientist (because it is physically an almost-idea mineral for several applications) and the name just stuck).

Humans are still allowed on Pandora, so long as they are National Geographic types

 * Look at the end: who's getting walked away to go back to the Sol System? The Military and Corporate people. Who's allowed to stay? The Scientists and Anthropology types. Clearly Humanity will be allowed to keep at least a small cultural/science post on Pandora. Expect such a station to be used in plenty of Fan Fics ("The Nth Doctor arrives at the last Human station on Pandora!")
 * This troper was under the impression that the only people who got to stay were those who helped Jake and the crew out in some capacity.
 * Which would be all the aforementioned Scientists and Anthropology types.

It's all a computer simulation!
All of it. ALL OF IT. Made by the usual suspects.
 * So Pandora is Tron / Mainframe? And the Na'Vi are sprites and the humans are... viruses?!
 * What? Of course Pandora isn't Tron / Mainframe, IT'S THE PATRIOTS.
 * It's all a training simulation for Marines.

There is a Jarhead Clan somewhere on Pandora, albeit with a different spelling
Due to the Na'Vi being part of a mental network, this likely means that if there's a Jarhead Clan, they'd know it, and if there wasn't, they'd know that and realize that "Jakesully" is lying and/or making things up.
 * They know that he is a "dreamwalker" - they understand that the Avatars are not real Na'vi, but related to the Skypeople. There are visible physical differences, they speak the same language as humans, and use the same equipment, after all. Also, Grace probably explained them the basics when she set up her school. They assume that the Jarhead Clan is a clan of the Skypeople - and are not entirely wrong about it.
 * Meta-WMG: Jakesulley will father the Jarhead Clan. Either as an offshoot of Omaticaya, or through renaming.

Avatar is an allegory for World of Warcraft / MMORPGs.
All credit goes to the troper who originally wrote it. This was deleted from the Alternative Character Interpretation example on the film's page, but it's too interesting to ignore especially in light of the fact that Cameron's first idea for a tie-in videogame was an Enter The Matrix-style MMORPG (there wasn't enough time or money). If I recall that troper's idea correctly, Jake is a newbie player to an MMORPG, let's call it "Pandora" (not to be confused with the movie Pandorum). By good luck he lands in one of the best guilds (the Na'Vi), who are nice enough to guide him through the game and beef him up a bit so that everything doesn't kill him. While his video game avatar (har) is thriving, his Real Life body begins to suffer: his sleep schedule is shot, he's hardly eating, barely keeping track of his personal hygiene, and is becoming obsessive to the point of reality blurring. Eventually it all comes crashing down on him. Obviously, the flaw in this interpretation is that the Na'Vi and Pandora are very real, and Jake's actions in that world have very real consequences.
 * I got the same idea some times ago. And you're right, it's incredibly easy to think of this movie as an allegory of a massive MORPG addiction. It gets especially creepy with the ending: Jake sorta commit suicide because he can no longer live out in the "real world", thus he leave his human body (already not in the best of shape) to dies out. Furthermore, by immersing himself too much in "the game" (ie:being a Na'vi), he completely forgot his "homework", that he need to convince the Na'vi to move on. Really, the more you dig in, the easier it become to find interesting parallels.
 * Jake's homework was to either convince the Na'vi to move (which he couldn't until he was fully accepted) or find weaknesses to exploit, but yeah that too: who hasn't had the experience of playing something for hours while thinking "I really, really have something more important to do... in an hour..."
 * Confirmed-ish in a "scriptment" (around pg. 28) where the avatar drivers are described as looking like internet addicts and that one of the many dangers of Pandora for a wilderness-starved avatar driver is "loving it too much" (said scriptment also describes the leopard-things as "more vicious then the Alien").
 * I always thought of it as an allegory for 4chan and the cancer that's killing /b/, with the company being Gaia Online and unobtanium being memes and all kinds of things.
 * Even James Cameron agrees. When Avatar was shot down by many people for portraying smoking by Grace, he defended his movie by saying that Grace's smoking is supposed to be a message / Take That at gamers with what some might call "Avatar Abuse": Those who spend too much time gaming and abuse their real-life bodies. Anybody notice that Grace is a smoking Stoic as a human, but apparently happier in her Avatar?
 * You know what? It's not just Grace smoking, this is the entire point of the movie. Funny, before I saw Avatar, I always thought it was a movie about a videogame.

The death of Tom Sully, and Jake's being sent in his place is a Xanatos Gambit on the part of Quaritch, that went horribly right.
Quaritch is going through the personnel files of the new arrivals, as it's his job as chief of Security to keep them alive. He notices that one of them-Tom Sully- has a twin brother who was a former marine, with a lot of combat experience. He also knows that a twin could drive an Avatar, and that RDA would rather put a twin in to drive the body than waste their investment, and the fact that Jake can't use his legs gives Quaritch leverage. So, he has Tom's death staged to look like a mugging, and hey presto, he has a specialised recon element that can go where the rest of his men can't. Jake getting inside the Na'vi tribe may have been a happy coincidence, or he knew that, as a hunter-gatherer society, they would be more likely to let a 'warrior of the clan Jarhead' in than some scientist. However, Jake goes native, which obviously throws a spanner in the works.

Quaritch (henceforth "Kernell Ba'Dass" since Na'Vi doesn't have the "ch" sound) will become a Memetic Badass Bogeyman to all young Na'Vi
Some of the stuff they'll make up about him:
 * On his first day on Pandora, he punched out a flock of Banshees as a workout to regain his strength after sleeping for five years, and then he let his head get clawed because he wanted a haircut.
 * He shot fire from his eyes and exhaled poisonous gas.
 * He was 7 feet tall.
 * More like fourteen.
 * He could hold his breath for an hour.
 * He had a body made of fire.
 * He destroyed Hometree by focusing his pure hatred at it.
 * He killed a thanator with bare hands (a prime example of Gossip Evolution).
 * It took a Rain of Arrows to bring him down, and then he only died because he couldn't hold his breath any longer.
 * The only things that live where he fell are the "Slynths" (those black leopard things) because they're as vicious as he was.
 * In fact he killed all but two "Slynths". He would have finished even them if Jake hadn't got in the way.
 * He's just hiding  
 * 7 feet tall he'd still be rather tiny compared to the Na'vi - 9-10 feet tall on average.
 * By my estimate, that's about as tall as a human can get before it causes health problems that would've gotten him rejected from the Marines in the first place (the world's tallest woman was, at 8' or 9', also the world's tallest disabled person because her body was so heavy she could barely move without causing severe strain on her heart). It's also an echo to The Hobbit: Bilbo's uncle was so tall (for a Hobbit) that he rode a horse into battle; likewise Bogyman!Quaritch was so tall (comparatively) he could've ridden the Na'Vi's mounts.
 * Which he did, just to see if it was possible to ride one without a bond (it's possible, but only for badasses).
 * He could fly without a Banshee and shot lightning from his finger tips.

The "steak" Trudy mentions is actually a Pandoran fungus
Probably that wiggly stuff on the tree. It's safe to humans and can taste like all sorts of cuts of beef. It's just about the only thing Quaritch & Co. like about Pandora (the other thing? Top-secret night hikes where they can pretend they're swimming in the practically-extinct Guantanamo Bay coral reef).

Theories on the "horrible accident" that caused RDA to abandon mining the Hallelujah Mountains

 * It involved some jokers with paint and The Dragon being decorated with either a Turok pattern and/or the words "Bite Me", both of which looked like a threat display to the Banshees.
 * Similarly, it was Banshee mating season and all those helicopters looked so darn cute...
 * Cant imagine the looks on the pilots faces.
 * Unhooked from their vine "anchor lines", the floating rocks will promptly crash into each other or "chase" the ships out of the area, almost as though they had intelligence.
 * They forgot how dense Unobtanium is while being surrounded by floaty islands. The minute they got out of the Flux Field all the cargo ships crashed.
 * Unobtainium is what makes the mountains float. They mined out too much and a mountain crashed, taking their whole mining operation with it.
 * The mining operation got too close to the Tree of Souls and provoked a response from Eywa. Thanks to the communications-garbling effects of the flux vortex, the RDA thinks it was an accident involving one or more Pandoran predators or diseases breaching security at the mining site, rather than a coordinated assault.
 * Actually, removing the element from a rock that causes it to levitate in the fist place has an obvious effect. It's like trying to steal a wing from an aeroplane you're riding on. The mountain flipped over and crashed to the ground, turning everyone and everything on it into chunky salsa.

Jake Sully slips between American and Australian accents because everyone is an Earthican.
Someone who did the research said that Earth is now one big crapsack city, which could make it easy for someone to move from one country to the next. Jake (and Tom) could've been given "American" citizenship for joining the military and the Avatar program, respectively, and have been living in America/with Americans for so long that their accents have become iffy.
 * Or even better, the national borders have become a minor formality, or a thing of the past, and two-ways cultural influence between different areas through future Internet and pop-culture ensures that accents are one big mishmash.
 * Sam, this is the second WMG I've used to excuse your acting (the other is "Why Marcus has lousy chemistry with Moon Bloodgood")...

Neytiri's parents hoped that she and Jake would become mated.
They show remarkably little concern over having their daughter care for and intimately teach a stranger over the course of several months, and when the relationship is finally outed, their sole reaction is "Is this true?" It's possible that they hoped that an intermarriage would bring mutual understanding and respect between the Skypeople and Omaticaya - surely the humans would leave the Na'vi territories alone if one of them was a member of the tribe, by their reasoning. They didn't make their desires public knowledge because Tsu'tey already had a claim on Neytiri, and many of the tribe wouldn't appreciate such union, either. Unfortunately they wrongly assumed that humans would make decisions in the same communal way that the Na'vi do, and overestimated Jake's influence. They undoubtedly feel doubly betrayed when the humans attack anyway.
 * While getting Jake on the side of the Na'Vi was the plan, they didn't expect Neytiri to fall for him; likewise Jake didn't plan on falling for her either, and letting it slip that the Na'Vi can't be negotiated with scuttled his diplomacy plan. Her parents didn't have a lot of time to react to the news because their sacred grove had been bulldozed and then Jake and Grace fell unconcsious; the next time Jake meets them there isn't time to talk about it because Hometree is about to be attacked. However, since they they're now soul-bonded for life there's not a whole lot they can do.
 * Considering that they expected them to spend time together intimately for months, as well as for Neytiri to teach Jake all there is to know about the ways of the People, culminating to choosing a mate, they were either very dense or unexpectedly clever. I would prefer the latter interpretation.

The way Jake tamed the Toruk would be considered cheating.
Namely, he abandoned his Ikran mid-air to get a chance to surprise Toruk. Not only did he miss the bit where the steed and the rider must choose each other, but he also abandoned the one he was supposed to be bonded with for life. The reason why Toruk Macto is so rare occurrence is that no true Na'vi would do either of these things.
 * Alternately, what Jake did was the only way to tame the Toruk, and the reason it doesn't happen more often is that a Na'vi has to be truly desparate to try something that goes against the way they normally interact with their Bond Creatures (or, in Jake's case, simply not be raised in the culture to begin with and not have inborn prejudices against that sort of thing).
 * It probably is the only way. However, most of those who contemplate it end up thinking better of it...and most of those who get so far as trying don't live to tell the tale.
 * The Toruc did attack Jake earlier.
 * Except that being bonded for life to an Ikran doesn't prevent the Na'vi from riding the horse-things. Presumably the bond only counts among Ikrans, and not other species.
 * Toruk and Ikran are pretty similar creatures, and both have a profound cultural and religious significance to the Na'vi.
 * The Toruk/Turok/Toruc/whatever isn't actually that hard to tame. It's just that it's been hyped to insanity by the Na'vi in order to serve as a symbol for the people. Since only someone utterly desperate will attempt to tame it, it ensures that the ability to unite the clans will only be called upon when there is great need. Those who tame it are prevented from revealing the secret because it would undermine their own cause.
 * You would think the thing would learn from experience after being attacked the same way five times. But since the Na'vi can talk to animals, they tell the Toruc to fall just as easily for the next Na'vi who attempts to tame it before they release it. Thus the symbol is preserved for the next time of trouble.
 * Not very viable, since we don't know the average lifespan of a Toruk. The previous Toruk Makto was anywhere between 100 to 175 years in the past (grandfather's grandfather, and depends on average conceiving age for Na'vi) to Jake's encounter. And back on topic: considering how the Na'vi wrestle the banshees to submission during their rite of passage, it's likely they simply have culture glasses that make them view the only way to connect with a Toruk is by wrestling with it, and thus not thinking about possible alternatives. Jake just had the interesting idea to simply jump onto its back instead of taking it head-on. It would technically be cheating (if there were rules for this stuff), but Jake's ingenuity in taming the Toruk just shows he's worthy of being Toruk Makto regardless.
 * Let's face it, if Toruk can't be bothered to look up then anything that wants to parasitise him is going to be on his upper surface. The reason nobody bothers to be Toruk Macto is because they don't enjoy the attendant Toruk Louse Trouser Carnival every time they get on the stupid thing.

America suffered a race war or similar disaster and only European-descended people survived with a few Latinos.
Everyone being American is justified by it being an American company. Having exactly one person who isn't white (Latino) is not. There are zero people of African decent (which should be heavily represented in the former Marines if it was set in the present), nor are there any Asians, Eastern Europeans, Middle Easterners, or American native peoples. Alternatively, the company is intentionally discriminating.
 * Dr. Max Patel is Indian, so that's one Asian, at least. And I feel like I saw several black marines during the safety briefing, although I'll have to wait for the DVD to double-check.
 * I was checking for black people the whole movie. The only time I saw any was during the safety briefing, and it seemed 50% white, 50% black.

Avatar bodies aren't exactly a remotely controlled plaything.
Nobody realises that when the link is on, human commands the Avatar, but the Avatar body affects the driver's personality as well. It's much like being thrusted into Avatar's brain and trying to fit into it. This is why Avatar!Jake is childishly stupid, and Avatar!Grace is more emotional.

Earth isn't a Crapsack World
I Know, I know Word of God said so, but it would be a cool twist and shows that Jake was just being baised.
 * A world where even a tiny apartment can contain a tv the size of a wall can't be that bad. And presumably the national park cities tried to maintain most of their natural features, if only for landscaping.
 * Given that Jake apparently thinks Pandora is a paradise as opposed to a horrible place filled with predators where civilization is stuck at hunter-gathering stage, it's likely he would believe that a world where all natural biospheres have been wiped out and replaced entirely with human-controlled environments would be dying. It could well be that Earth is just fine...as long as you're either human or a pet. Otherwise, you're extinct.
 * Odds are the biosheres are fine, the est population by 2150 is only 10 billion, not enough for the Earth needing to be all city in order to fit them all, however by the time Jack goes native his worldveiw is now, if something isn't living with nature like a Na'vi it might as well be a Crapsack World.

Even if the Na'vi lost to the invaders...
...It would be all for nothing. Twelve years is a very long turnaround in terms of communication. Corporate and financial realms, being the ficklest things to be created by man, and man is a very fickle thing, the twist ending had the result gone the other way: They get back to Earth to find the price of Unobtainium has fallen through the floor. They were only conducting an exersise in futillity, all the while pissing the company's and it's shareholder's money up a tree.
 * Word of God says they have FTL communications.
 * FTL communations that cost $7,000 per one byte! If the company collapses, nobody might be interested in sending any notes about the new situation.
 * If a company collapses, it's generally a good idea to, you know, let the employees know that.
 * Except when you can't afford to send the message and don't care about your employees anyway.

Humans "killed their mother" because she was a psychotic bitch.
Y'know, we can't link to other creatures and without tools we are weaker than pretty much every other species on the planet. You can moralize with us about how Humans Are Bastards, but since humanity's homeworld screws its native species so much unlike on Pandora (red in tooth and claw and all), I can't help but think she had it coming.
 * ...So this means Mr. Burns ran RDA? "Mother Nature started the fight, and now she wants to quit because she's LOSING?"
 * It's kind of a psychotic abusive mother with a child not ready to be independent. Humanity needs its mother because she does provide for us, but being chained to the radiator or strangled or whatever abuse metaphors you can think of has really put humanity on edge.
 * For that matter, Pandora's Nature-God doesn't really seem a whole lot more sane. While Earth's Gaia is psychotic and trying to kill us, Eywah goes for the other end of the Insane spectrum. It want's to control everything it's people do, down to having them literally link up with it. If it can control Pandoran Space Rhino's and the like, it can almost certainly control the Na'vi in the same way.
 * Somehow this troper has the feeling that the above tropers have never left a city...Nature isn't and isn't supposed to be nice. It's supposed to work. Human morality doesn't enter into it. There's no point in anthropomorphizing Eywa either, even though she's more literally sentient than Earth's nature. She's a balancing agent and a memory-storage, not a nice, cuddly deity. And she doesn't control any of the creatures except in the direst need - she clearly could control any of her creatures at any time, yet doesn't.
 * Doesn't control them as far as you know. What if in the future the Na'vi started looking into technology and developing? Would Eywha happily go along with it or would it mindcontrol any thoughts along those lines out of their heads. The only people who've told us Eywa is actually good are people Eywa could be controlling.
 * Eywa doesn't control the Na'Vi? If that's so, how come they only have one language, one religion? How come there seems that there are no political or cultural differences between the tribes that we know about? Is their mother robbing them from their individuality, in order to protect them as a whole?
 * If there was real, tangible, part-of-your-everyday-life, consistent-between-witnesses proof that God (or Loki or Zeus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster) existed, there would be only one religion on Earth. With only one religion, political and cultural differences get a lot easier to ignore, and we don't know that there weren't differences in language, we just know that Tsu'tey spoke more than one of them, or there was another translator we didn't see. None of this equals Eywa controlling them.
 * [citation needed]. There's no reason to believe that people wouldn't doubt something right in front of their eyes, and plenty of good reason to suspect that they would. There's even an entire trope of (fictional) examples of just that, Flat Earth Atheist.
 * I can see a variation of this, sort of. Okay, it goes like this: Way before Earth mother/Gaia/whatever you call her, is ready for it, she creates her first attempt at life. Things are going swimmingly, when her "body" revolts, and the animals chosen to be her "children" are wiped out. It devastates "Gaia," and way before she's even ready, creates more potential children, which grow up to be the dinosaurs. They get wiped out by meteorite and her own "body," again, and Gaia goes with what's left over, mammals. But by then, shes pretty much given up on her children surviving, so withdraws to only a few nudges instead of the complete sharing the Na'vi have. So the "Children" turn into humans, and we 'grow up' through technology. Since we don't have any contact with Gaia, we don't know or care about her, so we go wild, and kill her without compunction. And that's why some of humanity side with the Na'vi, because even among children who grow up without rules, some of them recognize the rewards of good behavior and and mimic is. Some humans realize the Na'vi show good behavior towards nature, and want to mimic it like they do.

Avatar is a thinly-veiled Shout Out to Shadowrun
The primary villain is a Mega Corp, opposed by a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits in the name of another large collective. One of the basic elements of the plot is the ability to control an avatar, much like how an Awakened creature can astrally project. Another basic plot device is that Na'vi are able to interface with Ewya, which is kind of like entering the Matrix. And, taking this analogy further, all of the local wildlife is "wired".

The Na'Vi and Avatars will become future Ancient Astronauts
Eventually all the humans left on Pandora will have avatar bodies and intermarry with the Na'Vi. They'll go back to earth and repopulate it, starting with the smilar-looking Pandoran plants. The Na'Vi-gators who settle on Earth will lose their blue coloring and become primate-like (again), and millions of years later the whole thing starts up again. Maybe the Na'Vi Sapiens become elves, like in The Lord of the Rings or in a worst-case scenario, The Eldar.
 * All this has happened before, but it doesn't have to happen again?

Pandora was inspired by Strugatsky Brothers' books
In Strugatskys' Noon Universe cycle (1962-86), there is a planet called Pandora, which is a dense, ever-shifting jungle where Everything Trying to Kill You, from the microorganisms (read: the atmosphere itself) to enormous predators (e.g. takhorgs). Disquiet (1965, later reimagined as standalone 1968 novel Snail on the Slope) in particular is set on Pandora, where a Terran researcher is by chance separated from other humans, has to survive in a hostile environment, and is eventually taken into the local tribe. There, he discovers that these locals live in unison with the flora and fauna of Pandora, but have their own share of problems, and he is eventually even given a local wife named Nava. Notice the similarities? The only major difference is that there is no unobtainium to be mined on Strugatskys' Pandora, so the humans' presence is mostly scientific research and extreme tourism, therefore there is no violent conflict between the locals and the humans.
 * I'd add in Poul Anderson's "Call Me Joe". We have an enviroment hostile to humans (Jupiter), a mind-link between an artificially made living being and an cripple who used to be a fighter. The "artificial" being is blue.

Jake's betrayal of the human race is a side effect of Avatar usage.
Initially, he's a hardass Marine who isn't totally enthralled with this treehugging thing. Months later, he's calling his own race "aliens" and killing his comrades. Grace had been noting that, the more hours he logged in, the more he became disconnected to his humanity. (Or... something like that.) After all, he does note that when he's linked, that's real.
 * This is usually what happens when you spend months gradually becoming part of a peaceful, edenic society, and are then given orders to burn it to the ground. It's called a perspective shift.
 * Apparently, being warned of that fact before hand and simply living with a peaceful society causes you to reject your own humanity.
 * The Na'vi are hardly inhuman, either physically or psychologically, genetics be damned. What Jake rejects is a rather crappy society where he has no social ties in favour of a veritable paradise and the new love of his life. Just for the record, this happens almost every time two technologically unequal societies clash, though normally it goes both ways.
 * Jake was looking forward to getting his legs back on Earf... er, Earth, and doesn't think much of the society, until halfway through his time with them.
 * You kind of missed the part where Jake fell in love with the Na'vi culture in general and Neytiri in particular, it would seem. That tends to be a gradual process, and you know, just the main character development arc in the movie!
 * There's a difference between "loving a culture" and "rejecting your own".
 * When your culture utterly sucks, and you have no human connections in it, adapting into another that offers better deal in every way isn't that unbelieavable. Remember, the Earth in Avatar is not a modern day Western society where most people have a decent lifestyle - it's a Crapsack World more akin to the worst urban nightmares in the Third World. The pollution is rampant, most people get nothing but algae to eat (with various seasonings), and psychologically people are isolated and afraid. It's not a culture difficult to reject, especially to a depressed loner like Jake.
 * This may come as a surprise, but people have friends and family even in the 3rd world. I'd say relationships are even more important when living in those environments, though I can't quantify this. Jake possibly has some psychological issues that aren't due to environmental factors.
 * People do. Jake doesn't. Jake has no family besides his brother who is now dead, and no friends on the account of being a socially repressed due to his injury.
 * Also, Jake's rejected his humanity, not just his culture - he could have still identified with humans after months of living with the Na'vi, but he's calling them "aliens" and killing comrades... even when he said himself that he never lost the ex-Marine attitude.
 * If Enwa/Pandora can control all of the animals, there's no reason she/it can't control the Na'vi or avatars that can connect with her/it the same way they do. Jake may not have changed his perspective so much as had his perspective changed for him.
 * It may be harder for her to override higher life forms. Still, it's scarily prescient.

Quaritch will become a Memetic Badass and Bogeyman to all young military personnal.
Well... yeah.
 * He may have already been one by the time the events of the film started. Man got part of his face clawed off on his first day there - which means he either was so badass he didn't need a rebreather, or so badass he survived the attack and having his rebreather shredded. Who wouldn't be scared of someone that badass?

Tom Sully's spirit is influencing Jake Sully
This is the best way to explain why Jake is so different in avatar, than he is outside: On some spiritual level, Tom's DNA is causing Tom's spirit to "return" while Jake is plugged in. Maybe the entire film wasn't Jake having a change of heart, but Tom's conscious slowly eroding away Jake's conscious.

Ewya will eat/upload Quaritch's brain, resulting in him taking over the planetary mind.
You know he's Badass enough to do it.
 * Part two of the fanfic example under "Eywa's Xanatos Gambit" WMG at the top of the page

The Toruk is the previous Toruk Macto.
We know that the Na'vi can put sprits into new bodies...perhaps the Toruk actually contains the spirit of the last one who rode it. They won't let anyone else ride them unless they've got a reeeally good reason.

Most Omaticaya know the weakness of the toruk. The requirements for a Toruk Macto are such:
Strength+ Experience+ Stupidity. You've got to be strong enough to hold on long enough to bond with it, experienced enough to jump on its back from fifteen feet up (minimum, at full stealth-dive speed) and beat its mind into submission, and stupid enough to try (since even an incredibly dedesperate Na'vi wouldn't bother, unless they were experienced enough to have lost most of the stupidity and probably some of the strength). The young Na'vi who try get killed because they lack the experience, and sometimes the strength. The older Na'vi are wise enough not to try in the first place. I fully expected there to be a sort of "I left out one thing for the purposes of keeping my ancestor's legend... legendary, where Neytiri says to Jake, "My grandfather was the strongest, most skilled, bravest of his generation... But he was also the stupidest." Or even some sort of "your people have two words for 'broken in the head'; one is 'stupid', the other is 'brave'" speech, if they wanted to play up the cultural differences even more.

In order to maintain good PR, the RDA will make Jake Sully a hero on Earth and blame everything on Quaritch.
At one point Selfridge states "If there's one thing that our investors hate more than bad PR it's a bad quarterly statement." Therfore, now that it's kinda late for making a profit off of Pandora, it's time for the RDA to do damage control in making themselves look good. The story that they'll choose to sell will go something like this: After arriving, Quaritch went crazy, took over Hell's Gate and became obsessed with destroying the Na'vi. All of the crimes commited against the Na'vi people (including ) were solely the orders of the insane Quaritch, and would never have been condoned by the RDA. Since they couldn't shut him down outright (Quaritch had several years worth of shipments of troops and weapons), the RDA sent Jake Sully in order to covertly rescue their operations from Quaritch, bring him and his military goons to justice, and show the Na'vi that humanity isn't all bad. Of course, none of this is true, but it sounds good and the public will buy it.
 * Alternately, they will make better use of their control of all information coming from pandora, and make the Na'vi seem like the Mayincatec, with buckets of Gorn-filled propaganda about their love of Human Sacrifice. With the Na'Vi thrown past the Moral Event Horizon, and the humans that remained painted even worse, they'll never have to worry about PR again, and can try again next time with Killsats, making it a Hopeless War for the Na'Vi. Like it should have been to start with, since guys with bows and arrows were going up against people with napalm, guided missiles, machineguns and mecha.
 * That might be easier said than done as according to the "Activist's Survival Guide" there's at least one superluminal transmitter/receiver setup connected to Pandora not under the control of the RDA. It can probably be assumed that whoever was operating that on the Pandora side would've stayed behind. One way communications from researchers on Pandora to Earth could actually continue and be able to counteract that kind of RDA propaganda. Can't stop the signal.

One of Pandora's sister moons will be a desert world.
Because we've already been to Endor, let's go visit Tatooine. Any Na'vi who hitch a ride will freak out, because the whole place is so wierdly dead and deadly wierd. But they'll find a strange kinship with the native crab/ant/lizard-people, because some time ago, all of Polyphemus's moons were a single rock, and some sort of cataclysm split them into different moons. The stranded Proto-Na'vi evolved to their particular world, and well... you can figure out the rest.
 * Alternately, it will have giant worms and the most addictive substance in the universe.
 * So Cameron's gonna add Bionicle to the list of things he "borrows" from?

Very few Na'vi bond with the Toruk because it's essentially useless for most things.
Seriously, the regular mounts are useful. What on earth do you need a flying tank for on Pandora if you're not fighting a war. Any of them could do it, they just don't because it's not something you'd actually need or even want as a member of a tribe of Na'vi not fighting a war.
 * Simple, the Toruk Makto are compensating for something.

The Toruk bioluminesce (or maybe not), thanks to some sort of super-connection with Eywa.
The "dark times" referred to a problem with the local Eywha connections. Neytiri's grandfather bonded with the Toruk and became some sort of uber-priest, rather than just a warrior. A Battle Priest, since having a living, flying tank five times your height in length is pretty useful in battle, but a priest nonetheless. There have only been five Toruk Makto because the Toruk can tell when there's a problem with Eywa's local system (Like "millions of plant-neurons, crying out and suddenly being burmed to death"), and would never have even let a future Toruke Makto get closer than grazing its skin if there wasn't the necessity. That's how  knew to send it away instead of keeping it until it died, either in battle or of old age, like the previous rider.

Na'vi mating involves the mind-link.
The two Na'vi connect their mind-linky things together as part of the mating process.
 * Further reading of the wiki suggests that this is already Word of God.
 * ... This happened in the movie, you realize.
 * Unless it's a deleted scene, no, it didn't. Hmm.
 * Yes it did.
 * There needs to be more research on this. I swear that when I saw Avatar in the theater, they linked head tentacles, but that is clearly absent from the DVD version and other people I talked to who saw the theatrical version didn't see it either. Two versions in theaters?
 * Avatar was re-released some time in August 2010 for roughly a month. There were 9 minutes of additional footage, including the 15-ish seconds of Na'vi 'foreplay'.

Pandora consists of all of the creations of a Spore player's Sporepedia. The player's name? Eywa.
She hasn't gotten past the tribal stage yet.
 * What a loser.
 * But you can't get invaded by Space-stage enemies while in Tribal stage. So... Avatar is a guy playing Spore, who has little imagination and just recreated humans, trying to invade a planet populated by Spore Creatures made by another player named Eywa. He loses because he is really, really bad at the game.
 * You totally can, this troper has had members of his tribe beamed onto alien space ships in the tribal stage, and seen alien ships floating around during the creature stage.
 * So, will they become an Ecologist race or a Trader race do you suppose? Neytiri would look good in either of the groups' captain's parts...

Avatar is actually a gender-reversed story about The Smurfs set in another world.

 * Quaritch is Gargamel.
 * Mo'at is Papa Smurf.
 * Jake Sully is Smurfette.
 * Remember how Col. Quaritch gets Jake to control the Avatar to spy on the Na'vi? Gargamel created Smurfette to do the same thing with the Smurfs, Later on both Smurfette and Jake turn on their former masters and both get magically transformed into the genuine article.
 * Think about it too much and brain will explode.

Humans do return to Pandora and pretty much destory the wildlife, resulting in the desert Pandora of Borderlands.
This being Earth's first attempt at space travel, when they do return to Pandora, they strip-mine the place into a wasteland. Some of the wildlife is badass enough to survive, but with 'Eywa' dead evolve past needing an uplink. With the resources depleted, the corporations pack up and leave, paving the way for the game to begin some centuries later.
 * Explicitly a planet.

Generations later, Quaritch's descendant Alphonso Knoxx (having lost the Quaritch name somewhere along the line) reluctantly returns to the world that killed his ancestor, only rather than a desire to take revenge on the world that ruined his family Knoxx instead just wants to leave as soon as possible, not wanting to repeat fate.

Earth isn't a crapsack world, but America is.
The RDA is clearly an American company, and only seems to employ american marines, scientists, ect. More obviously it uses american flag colours in a propoganda poster. Word of God says that it was rocked in an Inter-Continental war. INTER-CONTINENTAL. Its possible that most of Earth is fine, although America has become an over-populated, over-polluted parady of itself. When the humans refer to "Earth", the war has infact left them so patriotic that they only mean America, or the western world.
 * Look at the scene where Selfridge shows Grace the unobtainium sample. There's an American flag in the glass wall behind him.

The world of Avatar diverged from us sometime during the 18th Century
Specifically, something happened to prevent the Environmental movement. Without such pesky concerns such as the environment, the Industrial Revolution continued on until the entire ecosystem was destroyed. In addition, considering Quaritch's attitude towards the Na'Vi (i.e. that they're evil savages that must be wiped off the face of the Earth Pandora) it's very possible that the great colonial empires of the 19th century still exist in some form.
 * This would explain why all the humans are American, bacause Britain (which had the largest empire,) also owned most of America at one point.
 * It's also possible that America is a seperate country, but is a dominion of the British Empire, like Canada was during its early years.
 * So Earth has been overtaken by The Draka? It would explain Quaritch's superior physical capabilities and Conquistador-like attitude...

The Quintessons built Pandora
If they joss this, I will go into unstoppable rage mode.

Tom Sully was a Jesuit (Society of Jesus)
The Society of Jesus tried their darndest to always send someone to new lands, wherever they may be. They are also well known for having many famous scientists, particularly in the areas of biology and cosmology. He would further be an excellent candidate for such a mission, having only minimal earthly ties.

The Na'vi's population control is 300 style infanticide
In Pandorapedia or whatever the hell it's called, while gushing about the Na'vi and saying how eeeeviiiiil humans are, it mentions how the Na'vi have a form of population control but don't specify what it is. Given how the Na'vi seem to have no disabled people amongst their ranks and know how to handle themselves fairly well against the wildlife thus not getting eaten in enough numbers to count, this might suggest that they "discard" those seen as weak. Older people are probably exempt since they have wisdom and whatnot, but the newborns who have yet to contribute to society... not so lucky.

"We Na'vi are descended from Eywa herself..."


 * This one would say that population control is a combination of high infant mortality, the lethality of their rites of passage, and overall Death World properties and skills (like leaf jumping). Note that one of their rites of passage involves free climbing a mountain and wrestling a flying predator - it doesn't take much to think that somewhere along the line there'd be a few fatalities. Other things like learning how to leaf jump again provide great risk. Combine the amount of ways they're willing to kill themselves with a general lack of advanced medicine and it's almost certain that any serious injury ends up as a fatality.
 * True on all fronts, but the fatality rate may not be as high as you think, mostly due to the general 'sturdiness' of the Na'vi. Jake obviously screws up his first leaf-jump, but survives. I'm certain a human taking the same fall would suffer at least a broken rib (but anyone falling off during Iknimaya is dead guaranteed). My theory on their birth control is simply they don't consummate that often. Most relationships you see in Avatar are generally businesslike (ie. Eytukan + Mo'at, or Mo'at just has the Na'vi version of menopause), and there's an obvious lack of privacy for you to do your thing. You're surrounded by various other clan members all day and all night, so Jake's encounter with Neytiri at the Tree of Voices may be his last one for quite a while.

Avatars are sterile.
The whole human/Na'vi DNA transplantation process meant that, mule-like, the Avatars are incapable of reproduction. Neytiri's going to be really let down when they try for a child...
 * Technically, Jake and Neytiri had sex already. But still, hilarious if it actually happened.
 * The script says Neytiri is pregnant with Jake's child by the end of the movie.

Pandora is a reverse Earth. Eg. Civilization
Pandora is a sci-fi version of our early Earth, so Earth in the movie could be the early Pandora. If that's true, maybe we're Not So Different, after all. This fanfic (Start from Jake) really supports the theory and even some of the fans have that idea.

Alternate Character Interpretations: Is Jake Sully a Manipulative Bastard?
Jake managed to train and become one of the people, but who is he helping, himself? Did he trick Neytiri into mating with him? Did he gather the clans against the RDA intending to be left alone? Did he just come to get new legs?

Pandora's atmosphere is heavy in xenon.
Xenon is a powerful anesthetic for humans, which explains Jake's passing out. It also returns your consciousness fast, which explains how it took only seconds for the mask to revive him. When the general went outside, he didn't pass out because the base is at a higher elevation, and xenon is so dense of a gas that it would collect at the very bottom of the atmosphere--and the foliage is keeping it there, too. When two avatars were hanging out from the open helicopter, the pilot didn't pass out because the group was too high up to worry.
 * According to Word of God it is.

Jake was in love with Eywa.
He fell in love with the beauty of the ecology, then with its/her/their mind once he got a connection. Neytiri is just the "nice tracts of land" that he, as a heterosexual male, finds to be the icing on the cake. He wasn't leaving the humans for Neytiri and her family, he was leaving humanity for Eywa and all the parts of her self. Being distanced enough from the hive mind to love it in a way that isn't narcissistic and want to protect Eywa from things that only the Toruk can handle, and being sincere enough for Eywa to like you, is one of the primary requirements for becoming a Toruk Makto.

It conjunction with the above theory that Earth is ruled by he UED, The Zerg are going to invaded Pandora.
Scouting parties will find something on the planet that Kerrigan wants on her goal of perfection (Possibly using the Unobtainium as a bargaining chip to manipulate the humans into getting what she wants). With all the diverse and dangerous wildlife that would undoubtedly be absorbed for the Swarm, it would turn the tides even further in her favor.
 * The Zerg *already* invaded Pandora. Eywa is obviously an Overmind, just one with very different aesthetic preferences than the one in Starcraft, and with less conquer-the-galaxy ambition perhaps. Jake-Kerrigan parallels anyone? Also the Na'vi having all the comforts of advanced technology provided by Eywa's biotech despite looking to outside eyes like primitive hunter-gatherers, fits with this theory and is a great tactic for making alien invaders underestimate her. It certainly worked on the movie-goers who completely missed that Pandora is a Zerg world, simply because Eywa doesn't have a fetish for chitin and likes bright colors.

RDA will come back...
But instead of Nuking the site from orbit They'll send in new combat units that look familiar. They'll be taller than the human shaped model, and have Na'Vi flesh on them, sneak into their tribes, then reveal themselves to shock the Na'Vi, and will be led by one who looks like Quaritch and has his brain uploaded into it.

The movie is actually a stealth Take That at extreme environmentalists.
Notice how similar "Na'vi" is to "naive". The movie isn't supposed to glorify the Na'vi and their ways, it's showing us how stupid people who act like that are. It sure seems that Jake joins the Na'vi more out of Distracted By the Sexy than any more intelligent reasons, and Quaritch is clearly too Badass for James Cameron to write in and not expect people to root for him. In truth, the RDA supporters are expressing the very message that was intended, and the Na'vi fans are the Misaimed Fandom!
 * Can I hug you?
 * F Orget asking permission *Uberglomps original poster.*
 * oh my god yes.

The Na'vi and other animals on Pandora have a different eye sight to our own.

 * Well, they are aliens, and notice how everything on Pandora seems to glow. The Na'vi are bright blue, which makes no sense as a green or brown colour would make better camofladge than blue. Its possible that instead of seeing in a human colour scale they see the biolumnesent glows, or bright colours as dull, and the rest as bright.

For the events of the first movie, the RDA will be nationalized

 * Seriously: it is CONFIRMED beyond a SHADOW OF A DOUBT that Unobtanium is a resource crucial to the survival of humanity by letting them get the hell off Earth, and by engaging in highly, HIGHLY unnecessary saber-rattling the RDA jsut jeprodized THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE. Sorry, but regardless of how much humanity values private industry at home, there is literally no one who could afford to let that happen: even OTHER Megacorps. As a result, the RDA will be presented with an ultimatum of capitulation or destruction, or at the VERY LEAST their mission to Pandora will be nationalized or at BEST monitered by the regular military with authorization to Kill Em All if they detect the RDA acting up again.
 * State your source, because I have info/reasoning contrary to "unobtanium is crucial to the survival of humanity".

Avatar is Dwarf Fortress set in space.
The evidence is all there. But two facts make this true beyong doubt. Just replace Unobtanium with Adamantium, Humans with Dorfs, and Na'vi with Elves and everything will make sense.


 * One. The humans are digging for Unobtanium and don't give a damn what they kill in the way.
 * Two. The Colonel blithely ignored being SET ON FIRE He is a true DORF.

The Dwarves have found a massive vein of Adamantium in space. They go there and find space elves living on top of it. They do what any Dwarf Fortress player would do. Set up shop a couple of miles away and MURDER ALL OF THEM then abandon the fortress, build a new one on top of the Adamantium and dig like hell.

Sully was an unreliable narrator

 * Everyone who wasn't a scientist, a navi, or sympathetic to the navi was either an idiot, a psycho, or lacking in anything resembling humanity. This isn't because we were looking at people but instead were looking at how Sully remembered them. The people he liked were shown as real people rather then charactures because he liked them and would remember them more clearly then if they were people he didn't like. Since this was a narrative, it could make sense. Sully remembered the villians as stereotypes (Evil CEO, General Ripper) because he wanted these people to look bad in his narrative, while the Navi was shown as edenic because he wanted them to appear much better then they were (and maybe gloss over some... Bad cultural trappings)so that them killing so many people wouldn't be thought of as an overly-bad thing.
 * This has some weight behind it. Notice that we never see any of the miners except during the final briefing scene, and that we never see any Na'vi unless Jake is also involved somehow? Protagonist Centered Morality anyone? Everything Jake deemed as unimportant or detrimental to the image he was building of himself as the "great leader and hero" of the Na'vi was carefully excised from the narrative. Which may suggest that he was planning to take over the Omaticaya all along, using his friends as cannon fodder...
 * Unreliable doesn't necessarily means malicious or dishonest. Jake was extremely busy these three months, never having a chance to look aside. Actually only one person he's concentrated on is Neytiri.
 * No one is saying he is malicious or dishonest, just...incurious about any other points of view other than his own and those of his Nakama. And Neytiri CAN be very distracting...

The truth of the matter is... James Cameron is in fact, a Na'vi avatar unit sent from the Na'vi empire, who's planning on invading earth on 2012...

 * Just think about it for a moment... He's got a whole lot of detail in this movie, he's allowed a wiki containing a whole lot information about every animal, vehicle, and who knows what else to be created. It seems sort of fishy that people would suddenly "click" into thinking they're a Na'vi of some kind after this movie was released. He's also got a really bad attitude, doesn't like humans that much in order to make them villains in a good chunk of his movies... And he's obsessed with the ocean... Obviously, the Na'vi empire has been looking at our planet for sometime, and realized that we have some special mineral or resource that's under the waters of the ocean... Something that can make them lots of money with some of their alien allies... and some of the highest deposits are located in some pretty weird places... Like the Bermuda triangle, the realms of the Titanic, and somewhere off the Californian coast. They have ultimately planned a massive invasion for earth on the year 2012, since at this point, humans will think that they're just a bunch of eco-friendly pushovers, when in reality, they're a bunch of almost cold-hearted merchant marines who seem to enjoy watching their ikrans tear up other non-Pandorian wildlife and want to have some "little men and women" for company... No, I just sat down and thought about it all and it made sense...
 * It's entries like these that show just how far we as humans can stretch "probable cause" to absurd lengths.
 * To be honest, I couldn't facepalm enough at the above WMG. It's called worldbuilding. Look it up. Srsly what sort of disturbing form of logic do you run on? Should we speculate whether or not Tolkien was an elf or if JK Rowling is secretly a wizard? We can have our "out there" theories, but it would be beneficial to us all if you at least think them through.
 * Rule of Cool, maties, Rule of Cool. Besides, Tolkien was a hobbit. Said so himself. And Rowling? Clearly a witch, but can't actually come out and say it 'cos of the International Statute of Secrecy. They allowed the publication of her books because turning the story of the wizarding world into a crazy cool children's fantasy series was the best way to make sure nobody would believe in it.

The Pandora biosphere will help restore life to Earth
Pandora's atmosphere is similar to that of polluted Earth's-they even use the same facemasks to breathe in both places. At some point Pandoran plants and animals will be introduced to Earth and thrive.

Grace isn't dead, and Eywa will send her soul back into her avatar
Right as Grace appears to die, you see that "nerve tunnel" that a person linking to their avatar sees. This means, without a doubt, that Grace went somewhere, she didn't just die. Nobody else (Mo'at etc.) saw this, so they assumed Grace was dead when her avatar didn't wake up. Eywa purposefully didn't send Grace into her avatar right then, as it was her first opportunity to learn from a human. When she deems it necessary, Eywa will send Grace back into her avatar. Yes, it's entirely possible for her avatar to be kept alive in the meantime.

Jake and Neytiri's relationship is the result of a Batman Gambit courtesy of Neytiri's parents
Several years ago, Mo'at and Eytukan have a daughter, and they name her Neytiri. She grows up, and eventually starts her learning the lessons to become the next matriarch of the clan. And so as part of the process, they have to choose the strongest (male) warrior within the clan to become the patriarch. Tsu'tey fits the bill, and he's chosen. However, there's a problem: the parents of the two chosen ones hate each other. In fact, Tsu'tey's father was purposely training his son to more extreme lengths just to get the position and to spite Eytukan by removing his bloodline from the clan leader list. And so prior to the movie's events, Mo'at and Eytukan start planning.

They needed three things: "1. Neytiri had to fall in love with someone else

2. That someone else can kick Tsu'tey's ass completely

3. Tsu'tey has to be rendered unable to take the position of clan leader (by death or otherwise)"

So when Jake arrives at the clan, Eytukan notices the opportunity: a 'warrior dreamwalker'. It's possible that this alien could have skills that would outstrip Tsu'tey, hence his rather weak excuse of "we need to learn more from him". Mo'at, quickly catching on, tells Neytiri to train Jake in an effort for their relationship to grow to something more.

So the relationship grows, and the two eventually mate with each other. Part 1 and 2 of the plan is accomplished, shown directly when Jake punches out Tsu'tey with ease. This only leads Part 3, but a big problem arises: Jake reveals the deception and Part 1 gets turned into scrap. Eytukan dies, and the plan seems to have failed.

However, as a result of the breakup, Jake singlehandedly restarts the entire plan by becoming The Messiah to the Na'vi, to the hidden chagrin of Mo'at. Part 1 and 2 are finished once again, and only Part 3 is left. The Final Battle wraps things up quite nicely when Tsu'tey gets shot several times in the stomach and falls several hundred feet. Bonus points for Tsu'tey giving leadership to Jake right before he dies and Jake actually stabbing Tsu'tey right afterwards. The plan had gone farther than Neytiri's parents could have imagined: not only is Tsu'tey no longer clan leader, but Neytiri will be forever remembered as the wife to the sixth messiah of the people.

Tsu'tey was a linguistic genius.
Think about it. Tsu'tey obviously didn't go to Dr. Augustine's school. And while other members of the tribe that didn't go to the school (Mo'at, for example), can speak English, Tsu'tey is by far the most fluent member of the tribe. Either he had private lessons from a native English speaker before the start of the movie (unlikely), or he's obscenely good with languages.
 * And don't post anything here about the actor not being able to do a Na'vi accent. IMO, Laz Alonso had the best Na'vi accent of any of the actors when he was actually speaking the language.

Quaritch knew Jake was going native.
The scene where Jake begs for more time, he gives him a long look before agreeing. When he yanks Jake out of the Avatar bed, he happens to have the "the Na'vi ain't moving" video log already cued up. I think he had seen it already, but wanted to give Jake one more shot, possibly because he liked the poor kid. Remember, the humans were coming whether Jake negotiated successfully or not. The only real difference his intelligence and diplomatic mission really made was in how difficult it would be for both sides. It would've taken much longer, and resulted in much more casualties if he had failed both. The reason Quaritch hauled Jake on the carpet was because Jake damaged the Dozer, and the Dozer was there because the RDA couldn't tell it from any of the other glowy stuff on Pandora. If it had come by one day later, Jake wouldn't have attacked it, Quaritch wouldn't have pulled him out of the Avatar bed by the scruff of his neck, and Jake might've been given enough time to successfully negotiate with the Na'vi. No one could've seen the ensuing events coming.

Col. Miles Quaritch is either A) a Combat-Synthetic or B) a T-Series Terminator.
If the idea that Avatar takes place in either the Aliens or Terminator universe, it would be safe to assume that Quaritch is an android. Think about it: A seemingly "normal human" who is fireproof, able to survive without oxygen, has deadeye aim, survived getting attacked by one of those black panther things on his first day on Pandora, and (as far as I've seen) does not bleed. The reason why he wears an oxygen tank at all is because he is programed to act as human as needed. Please feel free to add your own opinions or spot holes in my argument....
 * He does bleed, just look closer at his 'final stand' against Jake/Neytiri. And surviving a viperwolf attack isn't that big of a deal if you think about it.

Norm has severe psychological problems
After all, remember what happens at the end of the film: everyone around him's dead died.
 * ...you know, except for Jake, Max, any Na'vi he may have acquainted himself with that survived, the entire RDA science crew, etc.
 * Being fatally shot probably isn't good for mental health.

The Hallelujah mountains will become the new home tree
After the humans were sent away the Omaticaya have no where to live because their home tree was destroyed so they cut one of the mountains free from everything else and move on to that. They dig partway into it (but no too much in case they remove some Unobtanium) and move it around my connecting some Banshees to it with rope. Because the mountain is also where the Banshee live it becomes an Airborne Aircraft Carrier and they can attack the ground below by having the archers fire arrows from the bottom of it turning the whole thing into a Floating Continent.

The Na'vi aren't in anywhere near the close communion with nature that they think they are.
With all the hopping around the forest the Na'vi do, with all the flying around they can do, you would think that maybe - just maybe - they may have noticed the armada of bulldozers closing in on their memory trees. After all, they've only been closing in for three months. "Quaritch: "You have three months - that's how long it will take the bulldozers to get there.""


 * What he ACTUALLY said was 'that's when the dozers get there' - meaning availability, not a travel time.

The final battle at the end of the film was a case of Nice Job Fixing It Villain
Rather than Eywah being good or evil, it's actually some kind of Psychic node. The reason Pandora developed so strangely was because when a creature on Pandora dies, their residual will is taken in by Pandora, and their will ends up shaping the planet. In a way it means Pandora is a big case of Lamarck Was Right. (At least there) Now this applies to the final battle because hundreds, if not thousands of Na'vi died, and their last desire was to keep the spirit tree safe from from the human attackers. With all those Na'vi dead, having their wills pooled into a collective unconsciousness, it results in a message being sent out to the rest of the planet. It's also why Eywah doesn't seem to take sides, because normally, different people of differing desires all end up canceling eachother out.

Quaritch is an avatar.
Somewhere on the base is Quaritch's real person. He's a badass because his actual body is never in any danger. That's why he marches right out a door into the Pandoran atmosphere without a care. Why he doesn't care about the scar on his head - it's not on his own body. He knows exactly how to turn off the avatar units when they pull Jake and the rest of the team.
 * So if Quaritch's avatar is a human, then what is Quaritch really? Is he even human? Is he even a man? Is he really some alien octopus? Is he a machine? Is he a house cat? So many possibilities. So many fan-fics.....Oh NO! I think I just gave someone ideas!
 * Ooo - maybe he's Eywa, trying to keep the humans against the Navi!

The humans won't be going all-out with tanks and jets in the sequel.
They simply drop a few eggs on the planet from helicopters, and/or show the hunter race that they have reached an understanding with a new, very dangerous game.
 * Imagine the Na'Vi Xenomophs.
 * Imagine the Na'Vinomorphs. They might break in half from a stiff breeze if they don't inherit enough Xenomorph armor, but they could get through any air ducts we could make!

The film popped to existence out of the blue as the forces leading to human extinction and the subsequent tortures of humanity afterwards were too great.
The gods from the Beyond, for whatever reason, want us shattered and tormented. They have been controlled us into not solving global issues, into engaging in wars, and other irrational, self-destructive behaviors. However, there were too much of their diabolical plans, that their ideas leaked and formed the movie we know as Avatar. We can see it in its message; humans are terminally dependent on a rare mineral that can only be found in a hostile planet, and in the end, they are evicted and will see their civilization collapse in a morass of war and torture and everything that shatters one's sanity.

Avatar is symbolic of urban/suburban resentment.
When the film came out, there were reports of people being depressed that such a place doesn't exist. The whole film is meant to invoke this, as it is symbolic of the resentment people have toward their urban and suburban environments. People always regret the things they don't have. First of all, the humans in the film not only lack any spirituality, they have no care for nature, and they live in a high-tech environment. This symbolizes how the audience feels we are today. Second, Pandora is on a distant planet, far, far away and impossible for most to get to. Untouched wilderness with amazing wildlife DOES exist on Earth, but to most Americans, the rainforests and icy mountains are things only on TV, so they have the illusion that those things really don't exist. The wilderness being on a distant planet represents how people feel that such wilderness is some otherworldly thing that doesn't exist on Earth. Third, the people who respect nature aren't even human. The audience feels like humanity itself has lost a connection with nature, and the Na'vi represent their feeling that humans inherently no longer have respect for nature and only a non-human race and their ways can show love for nature.