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Avatar Theory Time: What if Eywa's "plan" for humanity is similar to the Swarm from Love Death & Robots? 🤔
So I was watching Love Death & Robots the other day (great sci-fi show, highly recommend!) and the episode, "Swarm," got me thinking about what Eywa will do in the future of the franchise. Also, I put "plan" in quotes because it's still unclear what Eywa's capacity is to understand and react to the world around her. Regardless of if Eywa is a rational, intelligent being that can plan ahead or is more like a non-sentient super-organism just reacting to stimuli in its environment, my theory about what Eywa will do in the future remains the same.
To give an overview, "Swarm" is about a pair of human scientists who go to investigate a diverse insect-like alien colony they refer to as the Swarm. The female scientist genuinely wants to learn about the Swarm, but the male scientist sees potential in exploiting the Swarm to create an army of alien slaves. Eventually, he talks the female scientist into helping him, arguing that the aliens aren't sentient so it wouldn't really be cruel to enslave them. Little do they know, the Swarm does possess a hidden hivemind-like intelligence. This intelligence senses the threat they pose and reacts by gruesomely assimilating the female scientist into its hivemind, which gives it access to her memories and lets it better understand the threat humanity poses to it. The Swarm tells the surviving male scientist that it will use them to breed its own "humans" to protect itself from humanity, revealing that some of the insectoid members of the Swarm are actually descendants of once-intelligent races that tried to exploit the Swarm, but ended up being absorbed into it just like the female scientist.
In light of some of the leaked info we've found, I think Eywa and the actions she will take to protect herself from humanity might be similar (though more benevolent) to the Swarm.
Just like in the LD&R episode, humans came to Pandora to exploit its resources, and were surprised when Eywa reacted to their presence with her "immune response." Eywa only triggered her immune response after she absorbed Grace's consciousness/memories and Jake warned her that humans would do to Pandora what they did to Earth, giving her a better understanding of the danger humanity posed and the necessity of fighting back against them. This is similar to how the Swarm gained a better understanding of humanity after absorbing the female scientist into its hivemind.
Now to get into some of the speculative territory: by now, most of us have seen the leaks about Spider gaining the miraculous ability to breathe the Pandoran atmosphere despite the fact that humans are in no way adapted to breathe in that environment. This concept felt completely far-fetched for the Avatar universe when I first heard it, however, it came from a real script accidentally shown in the Avatar BTS footage, confirming that its a concept they currently are or previously were considering in the Avatar universe. Ever since I first heard about it, I've been turning it over and over in my mind wondering how and why this would happen to Spider, especially since it there is no precedence for something like that being possible in the Avatar universe.
Watching "Swarm" made me wonder if adapting Spider's body to survive on Pandora is part of some greater "plan" to protect Pandora from humanity. With how technologically advanced the humans are, it's clear that Eywa's immune response won't cut it anymore, and she'll need to do something more drastic if she's going to keep Pandora safe. In LD&R, the Swarm protected itself from multiple intelligent races that wanted to exploit it by assimilating them into its colony. The races that were assimilated ended up evolving from their original forms to be better suited for life in the colony, which included losing their intelligence and becoming mindless drones just like the colony's natives. I think Eywa might do something similar to the humans that come to Pandora (or only to the friendly humans), assimilating them into her biosphere where she'd have sway over them just how she has sway over the Na'vi and discourages them from harming the environment. Sort of a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" situation. The main difference being that the Swarm is doing this aggressively whereas Eywa seems like a more benevolent entity.
To be clear, I am NOT a believer in the Eywa-is-evil-and-controls-the-Na'vi-by-forcing-them-to-stay-in-the-stone-age theory. I see it more like a symbiotic relationship, where the Na'vi have free will and choose not to harm the environment because Eywa connects to them and provides them with everything they need. If humans were given everything they needed, it would remove the incentive for exploiting the environment for resources, and they would be able to coexist with Eywa like the Na'vi do.
All this would ultimately result in an ending with a positive message where some of the humans stay on Pandora and can live there without being dependent upon technology to survive, and the rest of the humans return to Earth and do some Wall-E type stuff to reverse the pollution damage and make the planet livable. And if the Earth humans ever get too greedy and want to exploit Pandora again, the Pandoran humans are there to act as diplomats or soldiers to protect Pandora from exploitation. The fact that they are human themselves means they can react to any human threats with more intelligence than simply throwing wild animals at them until the problem goes away.
TLDR: Eywa has a long-term plan to protect Pandora from the human invasion by assimilating friendly humans into her biosphere, similar to how the Swarm protected itself against humanity by breeding its own "human" soldiers.
What do you guys think of this idea? Am I onto something or am I just slowly going crazy waiting for Avatar 3 lol? Do you have any other theories for the long-term fate of humanity in the Avatar franchise? And why the heck is Spider going to be able to breathe the poisonous atmosphere???