Thorns

Various people have talked about the attitudes to disability in the movie "Avatar". Overall I thought it was middling, a mix of good and bad and much better at disability than it was at race omg. (EDIT: Though the moment the bad guy was introduced I thought "Oh, he has a scar. Well, I guess he must be the bad guy then"...)

But watching the movie I started wondering about whether or not the Na'vi were actually any better about disability than the military. Sure, Jake is treated a lot better by them, but his avatar is able-bodied. How would they have treated him if he was paraplegic in his Na'vi form too? (oh there's an interesting story idea)

During the dull patches of the movie I pondered how they might react to a Na'vi who lost their braid/queue and thus their ability to connect to the tree of souls. When I got home I was inspired to write a version of the story without Jake in it and in the process found the original script and in it is this deleted scene:
( Lots of spoilery text )

I just watched Avatar: the Last Airbender and it was awesome (see my lj for squee) but something struck me in the third season, when the teenage characters started to interact more with their adult allies en masse.

While many of the teenage/child characters are female, and are written really well, hardly any of the adult ones are. There's a lot in the world, in the form of off-screen or dead mothers etc, or characters who show up for a single episode. But I can think of hardly any female characters over 20 who appear on screen for more than one episode, and none who really DO anything apart from the grandmother who is only at the very beginning of the series.

( Spoilery listing )