Well, it seems like James Cameron’s Avatar 2 (not to be confused with the Avatar: The Last Airbender) is getting quite a bit of hype these days. And what more hype can you get by showing off Jake and Neytiri’s adopted son? Even more so when their son is not only human but has a rather bizarre name of Spider.
Jake And Neytiri Have A Son?!
As you can tell by the logo in the top right corner, this image of Spider from Avatar 2 came straight from Empire magazine. The picture shows a dark-skinned boy with some kind of scuba mask on his face. The boy’s face is only halfway out the water, so we only get to see the top half of his head for now. What we can see of the top half is covered with a nice head of dreadlocks. Said dreadlocks also look suspiciously dry, suggesting that he’s right in the middle of diving into the water. This is quite appropriate, given the film’s new aquatic environment.
The Empire article also has more details on Spider, whose real name is actually Miles Socorro (played by Jack Champion). Other sources like Collider though name him as Javier Socorro, so you might want to keep an eye open for info from official sources for this. Anyways, Spider was apparently born at Hell’s Gate (the human base from the first Avatar film), but was somehow too small to return to Earth with the rest of the human military. Since then though, Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) have raised this abandoned human kid as their own. In fact, he seems to prefer the bioluminescent jungle over the stark metal and concrete human buildings.
Avatar 2: A Story of Mixed-Race Parenting?
It isn’t just sugar, spice, and everything nice on Pandora during Avatar 2 though. Apparently, there is at least some friction between Neytiri and her newly adopted human son, mostly due to his race. According to producer Jon Landau via Empire:
“Jake took him in but Neytiri always saw him as one of the people who destroyed her home and killed her father. So you have all these dynamics playing out.”
Oof, so Neytiri views her human son as one of the enemies. Or at least, has a lot of trouble shaking her image of him being an enemy. That’s quite a thing to foist upon a kid by his new mother. Also according to Landau, it’s apparently symbolic of a modern mixed-race family “raising kids who perhaps feel they don’t belong to one world or another”. I guess we’ll just have to see how this dynamic plays out in Avatar 2 when the film comes out on December 16, 2022.
Source: Wikipedia, Empire, Collider
