Jake and Alma - A Meta Analysis

Heads up: this one's a theory, not a close-reading. It mixes the From the Ashes DLC continuity with the films, and the back half is speculation about where the game might go. Strong opinions, openly held. Disagree with me.

I know I'll have a load of people disagreeing with me on this. But here it is: Jake and Neytiri would absolutely not have agreed with what happened to Alma — even if they knew everything that happened at TAP.

And the reason is simple, once you see it.

This is the heart of it. Alma worked for the enemy. So did Jake. Before he was ever fully Na'vi — before the bond, before Toruk Makto, before any of it — Jake Sully was a man inside the machine, sent in to serve the people destroying Pandora. His entire arc is the story of a collaborator who turned.

So when Jake looks at Alma, he is not looking at an irredeemable enemy. He's looking at himself, earlier in the story. He, of all people, knows that the person who once wore the enemy's uniform can become something else entirely. He didn't just witness that kind of redemption — he lived it. There is no character on Pandora better positioned to vouch for Alma's, because vouching for her is, in a sense, vouching for the validity of his own.

That's the analysis I'll stand on: Jake would have seen himself in Alma, and he would have argued for her.

If Nor and the rest of the Sarentu ever actually met Jake, I think they'd be forced to reconsider their grievances on the spot — because Jake is, physically and theologically, the embodiment of nearly everything Nor stands against.

Think about it. Jake uses guns. He uses bombs. He has five fingers, not four — he is part human, marked in his very body as an outsider. He speaks English as fluently as he speaks Na'vi. By the standards Nor uses to measure purity and belonging, Jake should be unacceptable. And yet Jake is Toruk Makto. He is Olo'eyktan. He is the single most legendary living figure of Na'vi resistance.

But the physical and cultural objections are the ones Nor could, with enough effort, explain away — dismiss Jake as a tolerated anomaly, an impure outsider the People simply put up with. What he can't explain away is the theology.

Because by the Na'vi's own beliefs, Eywa chose Jake. Eywa made him Toruk Makto — a thing that has happened five times in recorded history. And Eywa gave him a Na'vi body: accepted his consciousness, let him be reborn through the Tree of Souls as one of the People. That is not the People tolerating an outsider. That is Eywa Herself reaching down and declaring him hers.

So Nor's purity standard doesn't just collide with Jake. It collides with his own god. To reject Jake, Nor would have to argue that Eywa was wrong — that She chose incorrectly, that the goddess at the center of his entire worldview made a mistake. And the instant he says that, he isn't defending the faith anymore. He's contradicting it. Jake forces Nor into an impossible position: either Eywa's judgment is sound and Jake belongs, or Jake doesn't belong and Eywa is fallible. There is no version where Nor gets to keep both his hatred and his devotion.

That's the contradiction I'd love to watch land. Jake is living proof that the things Nor despises — human origin, foreign weapons, a foot in both worlds — are not disqualifying in the eyes of the one authority Nor cannot question. Meeting Jake wouldn't just challenge the Sarentu's principles. It would make them choose between their grievances and their goddess.

Everything below is me guessing, not reading. But I think there are threads the game has deliberately left live.

Now that Alma is dead — along with several key members of the resistance — I can't help wondering what happens on Jake's side of things. Alma was a contact on the western front. At some point, surely, Jake notices the silence. He wonders what's become of one of his key communications out there. That's a thread I'd love to see the game pick up: the consequences of TAP rippling outward to the people who were counting on those contacts.

And then there's the truth itself. What happens to the rest of the Sarentu when Ri'nela finally tells them what Nor did? I have a hard time believing Tamtey and Teylan take that quietly. They clearly cared about the people who died. Learning that Nor played a key part in that death isn't the kind of thing that gets absorbed without fracture. The fallout among the Sarentu themselves — once the truth is out — feels like the most charged unresolved tension the game's left sitting there.

I genuinely don't know what they'll do with it. But those are the threads I'll be watching.