selling their culture

Like many postcolonial people, the Na’vi now support themselves by selling a version of their culture to outsiders. --‘Avatar’ and the Mystery of the Vanishing Blockbuster

довольно интересная статья, в частности объясняет, как работает franchise и показывает разницу между prequel, reboot и spinoff.

Today it has been thoroughly demonstrated that superhero and fantasy movies are the best forms of intellectual property for the endless reiteration necessitated by the franchise model.

там же сравнение нескольких franchise. забавно описаны попытки сотворить пандорскую еду для ресторяна в парке развлечений:

This prompt was made even more challenging by a mandate that the food appear alien, while also looking and tasting familiar — or, in the words of one Imagineer, “like chicken” — enough to satisfy the average Disney visitor.

Imagineer - wow! и далее еда и напитки в Satu’li Canteen забавно описаны. и многое другое:

Waiting, by that point, seemed more entertaining than spending the rest of my evening in the park. As it turns out, a 3-D simulacrum of a 3-D movie kind of cancels itself out.

у автора определенно неплохо с чувством юмора.

Divorced from the dazzle of visual effects, I could see the aesthetic universe of “Avatar” for what it was: a glorified World Market sale section. The Na’vi alone were just a tiki-bar mishmash of traits that white people perceive as foreign: dreadlocks, beadwork, body mods, loincloths, feathers, cowrie shells. Compared with that of Hogwarts or Tatooine, the logic of their world seemed to lack imagination: What were the odds that, galaxies away, a society not only had two genders, but those genders were “male” and “female” — and the females were stacked?

феноменальная статья:

Here is probably a good place to disclose that when I first started working on this article, I had never seen “Avatar.” The film came out my senior year of high school, when I was still committed to the thought that nothing popular could ever be good. (I have spent my life revising and re-revising this position.)

и политика, и экономика - там все есть. и даже философия. комментарии тоже интересные. хорощо бы перевести, но текст слишком сложный для меня во многих отношениях.

похоже, автор - Jamie Lauren Keiles - nonbinary: I use they/them pronouns.