While Neytiri’s rage against Spider makes the climax of Avatar: The Way of Water more impactful, Avatar’s story makes this character choice hard to justify. In the original Avatar, Neytiri took a long time to warm up to Jake Sully. The heroine of the 2009 movie was right to be suspicious of the interloper, since Jake was only joining the Na’vi so that he could tell the humans how to defeat the native population. However, Jake gradually realized that he was on the wrong side in the fight for Pandora’s survival, and, by the end of Avatar, he was a heroic Na’vi warrior and madly in love with Neytiri.
However, Neytiri seemingly forgot about this between the Avatar movies. In Avatar: The Way of Water, Neytiri is consistently depicted as the character who harbors the most suspicion toward Spider. The human son of Miles Quaritch, Spider is a rambunctious but good-natured friend to the Sully family, or at least, to most of them. Neytiri insists that he belongs among his kind and is consistently distrustful of Spider, an attitude that eventually culminates in her holding a knife to the child’s throat at the end of Avatar: The Way of Water. While this gambit ensures the safety of her daughter, it also proves Neytiri has a wholly baseless problem with Spider.
Neytiri’s Treatment of Spider Is Hypocritical
As Avatar: The Way of Water’s screenwriters noted, it is understandable that Neytiri thinks so little of humans, given their history on Pandora. However, since Avatar franchise hero Jake Sully stole her heart in the original movie, it is harder to excuse when Neytiri’s bias in Avatar: The Way of Water. After all, now that she has not only fallen in love with, but also started a family with a human in the form of Jake Sully, her fear of Spider’s kind is out-of-character. Neytiri’s children are part-human (as is her adopted daughter Kiri) and Neytiri doesn’t take any issue with this, so her view of Spider is hard to justify.
In plot terms, it makes perfect sense for Neytiri to distrust Spider. If Spider was wholeheartedly accepted into the Sully family from birth, it is likely that he wouldn’t have felt so drawn to Colonel Quaritch after his father’s Avatar abducted him. Spider’s Avatar: The Way of Water role requires the character to warm up toward his father, and this is more believable when he never really felt like part of the Na’vi thanks to Neytiri. However, while it makes sense for some of the Na’vi to regard Spider with suspicion, it seems bizarre that Neytiri does so when she is in love with a human, has children with a human, and adopted someone who is half-human.
Neytiri’s Avatar 3 Plot Will Make Her Spider Story Harder
While Spider didn’t actively do anything to specifically make Neytiri hate him before the sequel movie, saving Quaritch’s life at the end of Avatar: The Way of Water certainly justified some of her distrust. Ironically, Avatar 3 could prove Neytiri was right to be suspicious of Spider if the character ends up defecting to his father’s side of the conflict. That said, this wouldn’t be entirely Spider’s fault. After all, Neytiri gave him the cold shoulder in Avatar: The Way of Water, despite the experiences she went through with Jake in Avatar.