Finally Got Around To Seeing Avatar: The Way Of Water And It Inspired Me To Revisit A Previous Old Take

Finally got around to seeing Avatar: The Way Of Water and it inspired me to revisit a previous old take on "what if the Na'vi weren't humanoid and had an anatomy more closely resembling the rest of Pandora's vertebrate-analogs?"

The Omatikaya would be more feline in build as they live in the jungle, with all six limbs capable of grasping to help them in climbing treetops. Their long thin tails are flexible and used for balance, and while their first pair of limbs are most often used as "hands", the back four can also grasp and use tools but are less skilled at it than the first pair.

The Metkayina are an aquatic subspecies, and thus have plenty of aquatic adaptations: their eyes are more high-set on their heads, their hairlike tendrils are shorter, and they have a more streamlined, somewhat otter-like build with shorter but stronger limbs and broad and powerful finned tails. Their neck-nostrils are located higher up on their backs to breathe at the surface easier, and their digits are, like some water bird feet, lobed rather than webbed, allowing them better swimming while still maintaining dexterity and the ability to grasp.

Recombinants are mixed with human DNA, and thus display a few more human-like traits, such as a rounder skull shape, more human-like eyes, five-fingered hands with a single thumb as opposed to the zygodactyl digits of the pure Na'vi, and plantigrade hind feet. They're clearly more Na'vi than human, but just slightly humanlike enough as to seem uncanny and "wrong" to pure Na'vi, and while capable of walking and running on four limbs or six, prefer instead to stand and walk on just their two hind feet while leaving their middle limbs hanging awkwardly to the sides: an effect of body dysmorphia of their human minds struggling to come to terms with an alien body.

If any of y’all didn’t know, there’s a free online library, aka

https://openlibrary.org/

and I found like, twelve ebooks I’ve been wanting to read on there, and blasted through like three of them during the course of a boring-ass shift.