Iconic Avatar

Learned Volume 5, Issue 41

This week: Avatar: The Way of Water is the movie du jour but it’s not the first pop culture property to use the term. In fact, avatar is a word on the way up, so let’s talk about it.

Iconography

Ganesha has at least eight avatars, each one dedicated to a different purpose. One way of worshiping Ganesha is to walk around a figure or statue of him three times.

Welcome to 2023! My year is off to a great start in that I've done very little except eat too much and catch up on a bunch of movies and t.v. shows. One of those movies was full of tall, blue people, one of whom used to be human.

Here’s my ten-cent review: Avatar: The Way of Water was good. Not great, not amazing, but good. Amazing visual effects with a by-the-numbers story and world-building that leans a little too heavily on actual Earth cultures all come together to form a pastiche only elevated by the aforementioned effects. What’s most interesting to me, though, is how the protagonist, Jake Sully, embodies the idea of an avatar in a wholly new way.

So, before we continue, here’s a spoiler warning. I’m not going to go into detail, but I will be referencing the endings of both of James Cameron’s Avatar films. Consider yourself warned.

By the time James Cameron’s first Avatar film debuted, in 2009, the word avatar was already taking hold in the zeitgeist. On kids’ t.v., a popular animated show called Avatar: The Last Airbender had just finished it’s three-season run and online gathering spaces like Second Life offered users the chance to create their own avatar as part of the service. And yet, given that all three properties were using the same word, they didn’t seem to be using them in the same way. And, as usual, a quick look at the dictionary can show us exactly why that is.

From Merriam-Webster:

1: an electronic image that represents and may be manipulated by a computer user (as in a game)

2: the incarnation of a Hindu deity (such as Vishnu)

3a: an incarnation in human form

3b: an embodiment (as of a concept or philosophy) often in a person

4: a variant phase or version of a continuing basic entity

One of these definitions is not like the other. Ironically, it’s the one we won’t be discussing very much¹. But, let’s do our due diligence and examine that stand out definition at number two as that’s where our English word comes from. As Etymonline puts it:

1784, "descent of a Hindu deity to earth in an incarnate or tangible form," from Sanskrit avatarana "descent" (of a deity to the earth in incarnate form), from ava- "off, down" (from PIE root *au- (2) "off, away") + base of tarati "(he) crosses over" (from PIE root *tere- (2) "cross over, pass through, overcome").

Cool. But back to pop culture.

Second Life, the game-like service I mentioned above is a bit of an odd duck. It’s not a game, but you can play games within it. It’s not design or animation software, although you can use it show off or display things you’ve made. And it’s not really a gathering space although it has certainly been used as one. What Second Life is, is one of the earliest and best attempts at creating the metaverse.

Now, you remember the metaverse. It’s what Facebook and a ton of other big tech companies are trying to create. It’s supposed to be the next, better version of the internet, an internet you can inhabit instead of merely view. And it’s not a new idea.

Here’s Wikipedia on the origins of the term metaverse:

The term "metaverse" originated in the 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash as a portmanteau of "meta" and "universe".

And here’s Etymonline again, still talking about avatar:

In computer use, it seems to trace to the novel "Snowcrash" (1992) by Neal Stephenson.

That’s not a coincidence. Snow Crash is, along with William Gibson’s Neuromancer², one of those books that has shaped the future almost since the day it was published³. In the novel, Stephenson's central character, named Hiro Protagonist⁴, enters into the metaverse:

He is not seeing real people, of course. This is all part of a moving illustration drawn by his computer according to specifications coming down the fiber-optic cable. The people are pieces of software called avatars.

Sound familiar? Stephenson later describes avatars in more detail, informing the reader that avatars can look like anything the user wants them to. Anything at all. Which leads us back to Merriam-Webster’s first definition - an avatar is a way of representing a user in a digital space⁵. But what about those other properties I mentioned? Which definitions apply to them?

I remember playing the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles role-playing game back in the day and being an elephant was cool. You got, like, all the hit points.

The animated t.v. show, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and its sequel, The Legend of Korra, used avatar in a sense much closer to incarnation. In the first series, we meet Aang, a young boy who is the latest in a long line of singular individuals who are gifted the ability to control all four elements when most practitioners can use only one. Korra, in the second series, is Aang's spiritual, but not literal, descendent. She, too, is able to use the four elements but she is in no way related to Aang. She is just the current avatar. Both characters, however, are emblematic of usage four in the Merriam-Webster dictionary entries above.

So, for those keeping track, that’s definitions one, two, and four. How about three? Well, that brings us to the movie that prompted this whole article, Avatar.

In the original film, we're introduced to the Na’vi, an alien race on an alien world. In order to interact with them on their level, humans have created avatars - Na’vi bodies that can be piloted by humans through a complex computer interface, kind of like me running my avatar in Second Life. Only bigger⁶.

By the end of the movie, however, Jake Sully, our hero, has abandoned his human body to become a full-time member of the Na'vi. Jake's consciousness transfers over and his original body dies while Jake is reborn in his new body, much like the original avatar (er, definition two) and much like the way the word is used in the animated t.v. shows. Now, thirteen years later, we’ve got a sequel and, finally, someone using avatar for its third definition, the embodiment of an ideal.

Or rather, we someone resisting becoming the embodiment of anything except a devoted father and husband. In The Way of Water, humans have continued to colonize Pandora and not in any humane way and Jake, leader of the Na’vi leads the resistance. When things get too personal, he takes his family and flees. But, and here’s the spoiler, at the end of the movie, Jake decides that he can no longer run and so he and his family must fight. In doing so, Jake becomes an avatar of righteousness. Boo yeah!

Where does this leave us? As with so many of these articles, I think the word avatar is interesting and worthy of discussion because I think we’re at a moment where the lines between the definitions are becoming a bit blurred. Specifically, I think the popular image of what a virtual avatar is may be changing. In the days of Second Life, my avatar was a 3D character I played, like I would a game. In recent years, services like Zoom and Tik Tok allow users to disguise their faces through the use of filters that move and change in concert with the user.

So, while I think it is good old usage number one that I think most of us engage with on a regular basis as we move through the continual expansion of digital services that allow us to use virtual representations of ourselves, that of an avatar being, “an electronic image that represents…a user.” But how it does so, and what that means for us as social animals is still so far up in the air it’s in orbit. Already questions of ownership and privacy around online avatars are being raised, and rightly so, as companies bring more and more avatar-adjacent technologies online.

In the next few years, I feel fairly certain we’ll all have more opportunities to create avatars than we’re any of us really ready for, but I’m also curious to see what new opportunities for connection and creativity they afford. In the meantime, have you seen any good movies lately? I have…

Down the Rabbit Hole

Less a rabbit hole and more of a simple recommendation this week - my daughter and I recently discovered the work of Katie O’Neil, an illustrator and writer who makes charming and sweet comic books. Her Tea Dragon series seems to be getting all the attention, but my daughter has been fascinated by Aquicorn Cove for a couple of weeks now. So, if you’re in the mood for some gentle and sweetly illustrated comics or games based on those comics, take at look at O’Neil’s page on Oni Press and enjoy!

From the Archives

New Year’s in Japan is a rather sedate affair, with much time devoted to sitting around in front of the t.v. and eating snack after snack. However, everyone in my family is a writer of some stripe and so, for us, New Year’s is all about getting out all the new journals and pens and stationery and doing a bit of techo kaigi. What’s that you ask? Well, it just so happens I wrote about that very thing two years ago in Learned, Volume 3, Issue 41. Enjoy!

Techo Kaigi

1. And, to clarify, we won’t be discussing it very much because it is a topic on which I very quickly am out of my depth. Hindu mythology is deep, complex, and absolutely, incredibly fascinating. One day when I’ve done more proper research, I hope it’s a topic to come back to. In the meantime, I suspect the reason avatar’s second definition is still relevant is due to mainly to its use in English-language newspapers targeted at Indian people.

2. Just as an incredible number of idioms and vocabulary can be traced back to the days of tallships and ocean voyages, an amazing number of concepts and terms relating to the internet and all its myriad branches can be traced back to these two books. Throw in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and you have a trinity of holy books for the modern age.

3. This is a familiar cycle and one that is less about the author’s prescience and more about what happens when young geeks read a book that has really cool ideas and then grow up to become engineers who invent technologies that use those really cool ideas. The lesson for us is simple: get your kids to the library and into STEAM classes.

4. Every once in a while you run into something so clever you can’t enjoy it because now it’s out there and it’s been done and you can never experience it for the first time again. Hiro Protagonist is one of those ideas for me.

5. Presumably, by ranking this usage as first of the four, Merriam-Webster believes this is the most common usage of the word at the moment, which makes sense. I have actually emailed them to ask how they rank their definitions, but I haven’t gotten an answer back as of time of writing.

6. Although still blue. I don’t really have a good reason for this, but my avatar in Second Life had blue skin and a white mohawk. He travelled everywhere on a surfboard, too, regardless of whether there was any actual water about. Man, I kinda miss him.