by VorJack
According to an article by CNN, some of the fans of Avatar are having a hard time coming down.
James Cameron’s completely immersive spectacle “Avatar” may have been a little too real for some fans who say they have experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora.
Over at Avatar Forums, the thread titled “Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible,” has been extended four times, and has something like 1,800 replies (some of that stemming from the CNN article, of course.)
The article quotes one fan who has it bad:
“Ever since I went to see ‘Avatar’ I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it,” Mike posted. “I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in ‘Avatar.’ “
A separate thread by a “helvetica” made me laugh due to the contrast: “As strange it may sound I don’t feel like to play [World of Warcraft] anymore after seeing Avatar. I tried to log in the day after I saw the movie but it’s seemed all empty and useless…”
Let’s not get crazy here …
It’s amazing to me how easy it is for us to become caught up in worlds of our own creation. I remember a period where the author Mercedes Lackey refused to go to science fiction conventions because she kept having run-ins with fans who thought her “Diana Tregarde” series was real in some way. We’re probably lucky that Avatar is so fantastical, since otherwise I suspect that some folks would consider it to be non-fiction.
I think you can draw your own connections to religion here.
NoYourGod: Yerp – nuthin’ saiz “patriotic” like “love it or leave... 
LawnBoy: Gee.. when exactly was this golden age of pureness in politics and the reign of common sense? 
Daniel Florien: So why aren’t you out in Montana with a bomb shelter, stocked food, and tons of ammunition? 
nazani14: Things that can’t go on forever don’t. Following the record heat, the power outages in the D.C.... 
Nelly: my apologies for using “duplicate” way too many times………..I really wish... 
Ty: Please. A moon hoaxer talking about good science? “I personally do not believe that we can prove that... 
Mike: Mythbusters did not demolish the assertions made by the denialist. I personally do not believe that we can... 
71 Comments
there is a solution for those who suffer depression after seeing Avatar. Larping.
http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/831411/05ab9c55/live_avatar_role_playing.html
…Poe?
(i hope)
I avoided that problem by never going up.
well now we know how the world is going to end. after we invent perfect virtual reality everyone will die because they’ll never leave.
I saw Avatar once in 3-D and once in 2-D. Really enjoyed it both times. It definitely deserves some technical awards, but that’s about it. I wasn’t sad when it was over like I have been with some really good TV shows or books, but I was left wanting more of Pandora. Do I want to go there and be eaten by ferocious wildlife? Not so much.
This is a great parallel to how religion is created. Imagine a world where the only fiction entertainment is story telling. Then imagine a world where there is no science, to knowing what can and cannot happen escapes most people. Then imagine a story teller who doesn’t bother mentioning that his story is not real. Then imagine the people who would believe him, and pay him/worship him/praise him so they might be a part of his fairytale world.
Then you have yourself a good old fashioned religion. It seems so obvious, why can’t so many people see it?
This reminds me of the people who practice the Jedi faith.
Do these Na’vi wannabes really treat their obsessions as reality? I’d like to think that the depression and suicidal thoughts are more of a way to reduce the cognitive dissonance of wanting Pandora to be real and knowing deep down that it really isn’t.
And in the same way, do religious people behave the way they do because they know deep down that their God is fictional?
Dang, I should have lurked outside theaters and handed out lit for the Arbor Day Foundation:
http://www.arborday.org/shopping/trees/trees.cfm?trackingid=526
(Not to be confused with the Arbor Society, the low-cost burial/cremation folks.)
I thought this was going to be about an Appalachian version of Avatar… “with drawl.”
“Withdrawal” has another “a” in there.
So it does. Fixed.
I loved it, but it was nowhere near as bereft as I felt by the end of Lord of the Rings and The Matrix.
People are still crazy, I see.
This sounds like a great money-making scheme right here. We start rumors that the Avatar movie was actually based on a true story. Then we establish the Na’vi religion and make people worship us and give us their money. In turn we promise them that when they die, we’ll put them in one of those capsule’s and they will enter pandora. GENIUS
that sounds oddly like scientology, only that was based off a book some guy wrote in the 80’s.
Exactly! If people were dumb enough to follow scientology, they’ll definitely follow us!
You are trying to make us believe that pandora is not a real world, but we know better than that! I could feel it when I saw the movie, it is about our long forgotten past and we will remember it when they come to save us! You are surely part of that government’s conspiracy with big economical interests (and pharmaceutical companies, of course) who wants us to believe this is the only world we have! But there are a lot of stars out there, how can you know Pandora doesn’t exists?
You radical scheptics were proved wrong when you didn’t believed Galileo but quantum physics proves the plausability of PANDORA!!111!!!11 And the latest research in neuroscience also proves that we can communicate by telepathy!!111!!11
Ok, ok, I’ll take my medication now :-p
I’m going to take a moment to vent. That article is ridiculous. I saw it a month ago when it was first posted and it was just as ridiculous then. When people want to know why I have no respect for CNN.com, this article has become my go-to example of the silliness of the “journalists” who fill copy for the site. It’s an article about a forum on a fansite. That’s it. The writer takes excerpts from a forum thread from random people on the Internet. That’s the core of his story “fans on a forum board obsessed with Avatar”. And then he gets a couple of quotes from a psychologist to make it sound like he did some research.
“Obsessive fans obsess about their obsession” is not news. It’s not news when you add “on the Internet” to the end of it. And it’s STILL not news when you insert the word “Avatar” here and there in the sentence. It’s not even “dog bites man” level of non-news because at least there you have the possibility of some interesting questions to be answered. This is at the “I had a bowl of Corn Flakes for breakfast this morning” or “Today I breathed” level of non-news.
@Jer
Take a chill pill buddy. I think the article is very relevant to UF because of its similarity to religion (and the ridiculousness that ensues). This is a blog, not CNN. Your issues with worldwide media are not applicable here because this is not a news source.
Also, you are exaggerating the situation. While it is true that many fan sites have true lunatics that post on their forums, the number of Avatar fan sites and number of insane fanatics that have posted there is very large compared to the amount of time Avatar has existed and the huge following it has produced in a short amount of time. It is news. Its not particularly exciting news to you but it does give us a gauge of what society cares about and what people are spending their time doing.
If you want to see stories about murderers, rapists, and child abuse; tune into your local news at 11pm. If you want something a bit more lighthearted and discussion worthy, please keep perusing the UF forum (I don’t represent anyone other than myself with these words, just advice from a fellow no-body).
…I think you need to read Jer’s comment again. Jer is referring specifically to CNN wasting time and space for stuff that isn’t news–not UF.
I don’t mind Vorjack bringing it up or the link to religion – my complaint is the shoddy “journalism” that CNN foists off on their website (their TV networks are marginally better – but only marginally). This isn’t news. This isn’t even human interest. This is what obsessive fan communities do and how they go about doing it. It’s been true of obsessive fan communities as long as I’ve been aware of obsessive fan communities – even pre-Internet, though the Internet made building an obsessive fan community much, much easier since you no longer had to organize conventions to find like-minded obsessives.
Also, you are exaggerating the situation. While it is true that many fan sites have true lunatics that post on their forums, the number of Avatar fan sites and number of insane fanatics that have posted there is very large compared to the amount of time Avatar has existed and the huge following it has produced in a short amount of time.
This is an unproven assertion. Did you watch the obsessive World of Warcraft communities build as the game grew? They grew FAST. The Avatar groups might have cropped up faster, but that’s because the marketers are getting better at figuring out how to create obsessive fandoms. When you have a group of corporate marketers out to build a brand and you couple that with a product that is even mildly compelling you can astroturf obsessive fandom fairly quickly these days. The internet makes it so easy to do.
But my complaint isn’t any of that. My complaint is the content of the actual story – which is literally a summary of a single forum thread off of ONE fansite and a token call to a psychologist. You can’t generalize that to anything more than “here’s a forum thread where Avatar obsessives are all getting emo with each other”. That’s the actual content of the story – there’s nothing there. It’s worse than you’d find in a People or US magazine. It’s poor craft, and the journo who wrote it should be ashamed of himself.
“I’m going to take a moment to vent. That article is ridiculous. I saw it a month ago when it was first posted and it was just as ridiculous then. ” I understood this to reference the post here on UF. If not, I apologize.
By and large I agree. This is just another example of some insignificant occurence which is presented in the news as if it were a much larger trend. News agencies do this all the time. Which is also evidenced by the fact that this story about “Avatar addicts” was repeated by countless other news services around the world. It’s a great story, so never mind that it’s blown all out of proportion.
I agree with Jer. CNN.com and the televised form are virtually useless. Their need to fill 24 hours with “news” leads to focusing on every fringe moron and their one-eyed dog, hence, an obsession with teabaggers and, apparently, people who find “Avatar” to be the end all of their lives. I can’t watch or read CNN anymore.
It may be worse than non-news. If you did see it a month ago it may have been more like an ad for the movie itself. The ‘news’ organizations have to take their cues on what to hype from somewhere,
People need to learn to accept reality and appreciate the beauty of the world we live in now and attempt to preserve it. Go to a museum. Go to a park. Go camping if you want to see flora and fauna. If you have the money go to a foreign country and look at ancient runes or the Sistine chapel or something. Or spend a moment enjoying your own friends and family.
You mean, like going OUTSIDE??? It’s cold and dark out there!
The great yellowface in the sky burns us!
On the other hand, the frame rate and the 3D effects are very impressive.
Yes, but I have HD TV, it has higher resolution than reality.
Gotta get me one of those. Apart from the risk of causing the space-time continuum to implode in a recursive paradox every time I turn it on, it sounds sweet.
Sorry, was a Futurama quote. I forget that not everyone memorizes that show.
WHERE’S MY HUD???
Damn it, my sprite’s fugly. I’m calling a GM!
Who wants to go outside? Nature tries to kill us with heat and cold and sunburns and water. LOL
“That’s the problem with nature, something’s always stinging you
or oozing mucous all over you. Let’s go and watch TV.”
— Calvin
I think, from my personal experience with the film, that the real draw for all these miserable, wretched people is the sense of togetherness that the Na’vi had with their world and each other via their weird nerve-braids. Everything on that planet had biological USB. You plug into a tree, you can hear the whole forest whispering. You plug into a creature, it’s instantly domesticated and bonded with you. You plug into a lover? An emotional connection deeper than anything any human has ever experienced.
It’s no coincidence that it’s internet-addicted, hopelessly antisocial people who find themselves in tears at the idea of experiencing a true connection with someone, anyone, anyTHING. It points out to them how desperately separate they are from their people and their world.
Yes.. I can see this becoming a religion of sorts.
Me and my coworkers call it their ethernet cable :p
Very good point you make.
Going out and making some real connections would be too hard, I guess. Daydreaming does not require effort.
isn’t real life 3D enough? jeeezzz…
I think that most of the people who suffer from “Avatar Withdrawal” had underlying psychological problems prior to seeing the movie.
As a huge sci-fi fan, I loved the movie. Was the story anything special? Not really. But technically it was and remains the most immersive film experience I have ever had. I could have sat through a movie more than twice as long as was in theaters because I enjoyed every minute of the film. I cannot wait to see what other stories and worlds are brought to the big screen with this new technology. However immersive the experience, though, I can reenter the real world. After all, if I want more Avatar, I can simply go back to the theater.
That being said, if you or someone you know is suffering from Avatar Withdrawal, please seek professional help.
I didn’t get any noticeable immersive effect from the film. There was not a single element in that whole farce of a story that captured my interest. Yes it was superbly made. That’s it. No sympathic characters, no interesting plot or even sub-plot, a cheap copy paste and stick it together job of a world design, cardboard cutout motives, bland and superficial dialogue, tell don’t show background, unimaginative critters…
I could go on. A huge waste of my money and time. Definitely the last Cameron for me – the only difference between Cameron and Boll is the budget they get. For the money I spent I could have bought two mediocre paperback hack-n-slash or fly-and-shoot fantasy/sci-fi novels and gotten far more entertainment and originality.
““Ever since I went to see ‘Avatar’ I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it,” Mike posted. “I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in ‘Avatar.’ “”
As cliche as this quote sounds, I think it’s forthcoming given the wanting of these people to escape reality:
“Be the change you want in the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi
Suicide so you can escape to Pandora? I find that quote to be equal parts retarded and cowardly.
This reminds me of an old Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin pretended to be on Mars, and frightened away an “alien.” When Calvin tried to explain that he was just a human trying to start a new life because his world got too polluted and overpopulated, that’s when he realized WHY the alien was running from him. XD
I enjoyed Avatar, for the excellent storytelling, the beautiful world-building and effects, and, well… it was just an epic movie.
I also enjoyed the message that all life is interconnected, something we here on Earth have yet to learn. Sure, the Na’vi are fictional, as is Pandora, but I think we could learn a lot from them.
I enjoyed Avatar as I enjoyed Star Wars the first time I watched it, back in 1977. Ground breaking technology to tell a story. I’ve only seen it once and that was in 3d. The story was “Pocahontas” meets “Dances with Wolves”, so if was very predictable, with. I was amazed by the depth and richness of the world James Cameron created and showed us, and the 3d effects were amazing. Do I feel depressed because I can’t be a Na’Vi, nah, It was a good distraction from my life, but it won’t bother me a bit if I never become one of them.
Although the idea of creating a religion to make money, now that’s pure genius! *evil laugh*
I know how they feel. (But with enough sense not to take it to such extremes!)
I’ve felt very similar after reading Lord of the Rings, and to a lesser extent, the Harry Potter series. Once I’m able to get in and see Avatar when it stops being sold out, and if I played online fantasy games, I would probably have similar feelings.
I think part of the draw in fantasy games, besidews the exciting lives with exciting missions they choose to accept, is that the characters get to wear all these fabulous and sexy costumes. Especially those skin-tight superhero things, with cool arm cuffs and leggings and capes and all. I mean, c’mon, jeans and T-shirts just don’t have the same appeal. (We forget that the beautiful people probably lost all thier teeth, and the beautiful ladies had to drag those lovely skirts through the horseshit on the dirt streets.)
After all these decades, I still can miss the world of the the Lord of the Rings. Not the movie, nice as it was. The BOOK!
Instead of drawing a connection from fantasy to religion, I drew one from religion to fantasy. I think christians are just pining away for some lovely (to them) fantasy world of a different sort, albeit with robes — and, of course, at last!, someone who finally unconditionally loves their pathetic sorry asses.
Avatar sucked. Sure the effects were great, but the story itself was weak.
Though I cannot say I am not familiar with the feeling. There are many books I was immersed into so much, I wished they were true. The latest entertainment product to peak my interest was Mass effect, I played that game through and through and still cant get enough of that fictional universe.
Sometimes fiction can be so much more entertaining than the real life.
A fellow Mass Effect fan :D
I haven’t played Mass Effect, but I am deeply engrossed in Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2. It’s then off to Bioshock 2 to immerse myself in an entertaining rebuttal of Ayn Rand’s philosophy XD.
Yeah Bioware is awesome. :)
But you made a big mistake by not playing Mass effect, because Mass effect 2 is so much better in its gameplay, it may be painful to return to it if you ever wanted. But the story is worth that. :)
At this point, all I ever really need from Mass Effect 1 is Garrus. Everything else is just an icing XD
Me, I need more of Tali’Zorah vas Normandy. :) I hope new DLC’s are released soon.
Seriously????? You have *got* to be kidding!! Depression after “Saving Private Ryan,” sure… but after “Avatar”??? Really??? The only Avatar depression I’ve experienced was when The Last Airbender ended. LOL!
To paraphrase the great interstellar womanizer…….
“Its a plucking MOVIE you bunch of plucking losers!!!!
Get a plucking LIFE!!!!
Geeezzzz!
Haven’t seen the movie. But since we are discussing avatars. Does it bug anyone besides me that avatars are called avatars? What are we that we should have avatars? Gods?
By this point, ‘avatar’ has already come to the point of simply meaning “replacement images”, rather than anything spiritual.
That’s kind of my point. Why not choose a term not charged with spirituality in the first place. Like “replacement image” or “persona” or “agent” or “doppelgang” ect. ect. There is a lot of hubris in the choice of “avatar”.
Well the term avatar comes mainly from cyberpunk books. Mostly from Snowcrash.
Not to mention in the MMO community.
What is MMO?
MMO is short for MMORPG which stands for Massively Multi-player On-line Role Playing Game.
And what about that other religious term appropriated for use with computers? “Icon”? I’m beginning to sense a pattern here.
Who cares, it’s not like anybody owns words.
So I guess I’m free to talk about them.
Looks like the next blockbuster movie is going to be “iphone”. I did not watch avatar, I thought it was boring without 3d.
Next blockbuster movie? How about “We”? I can see it now. Somehow the protagonist is (literally) absorbed by the game.
That would be awesome. I’d pay to watch it.
I was thinking about “Tron”, the movie that started all of this. Turns out there’s a “Tron 2″ coming out soon.
“Do you believe in the Users?” lol.
I think it’s good we’re desmistifying (spelling?) religious words by making them utterly commonplace. Like ‘icon’.
And let’s face it, avatar is a whole hell of a lot easier to write than doppelgänger, a lot shorter than “replacement image” and much classier.
Then again, we all know the machines will eventually pwn us, so they’ll be our gods anyway. [/Matrix]
First it was Dungeons & Dragons.
Then it was general videogames.
Then it was MMOs like GaiaOnline and (famously) World of Warcraft.
Then it was general videogames again.
Now it’s Avatar. And still World of Warcraft and videogames. Oh, and now it’s mobile phones too.
I wonder what comes next…rehab centers for virtual reality addicts?
They already exist. At least over here in Brazil.
Seattle has a technology addiction center called ReStart.
When I was a very small child in Primary, our CTR teacher was teaching us about what we had to look forward to as devout Mormons. The most righteous and devout, we were told, would join Heavenly Father & Mother in the Celestial Kingdom, and if we had lived very righteously, we would be made stewards of our own worlds. She told us to draw a picture of the kind of world we would create, and we spent the rest of class eagerly drawing and coloring pictures.
Then she looked at our pictures — “Oh, what lovely horses! Oh, what a pretty house! Is that your family?” Eventually she made her way to my picture — a dragon flying over a dark forest, accompanied by fairies. Of course, given that I was a kid drawing with crayons, I had to explain it to her. She shook her head sadly.
“No, Lana. You must obey the laws of the universe — you can’t have dragons or fairies.”
A clamor of dismay rose from myself and my classmates — no unicorns? What about flying cats? Could we had dinosaurs? There used to be dinosaurs on earth, so could we have dinosaurs?
To each question, the teacher gravely shook her head. Apparently magic doesn’t actually exist, unless it’s god doing it — we couldn’t create magic on our little worlds.
That was when it all began for me, all the questions. If I could actually become a god, why couldn’t I make my world however I wanted it? Why did I have to obey the stupid rules of some other world’s god? It made no sense. It was around this time that I also accepted, fully and completely, that Neverland, fairies, magicians, witches, dragons, demons — none of them, as glorious and rich as the mythologies are — none of them exist. They never have, and outside of books they never will.
Oddly enough, as an adult I feel no pangs at the non-existence of God. But I do sometimes feel a sharp, aching sense of loss when I think about how awesome it would be to fly on the back of a dragon, or say a few careful words to forever silence an enemy. I do wish fantasy and mythology could be real.