The game is so disinterested in the other Sarentu TAP survivors- it made me laugh. Here is Yefti, according to me.
She got out of her cryo chamber when it failed and woke up alone in the abandoned base. She wandered out into Pandora and disappeared there. Is she alive? Maybe. Sheâs not coming back, though.
Design notes
Iâm aggressively not an Avatar fan, but my feed started filling with really creative oc designs and I wanted to put a spin on it.
I donât like their stripes, they look like Blaschko stripes and donât seem to provide any kind of evolutionary advantage.
Maybe itâs genetically tied to a trait that DOES, but Iâd rather just make the stripes more purposeful. So theyâre tiger stripes.
To be strict, they arenât dark enough or positioned well enough to truly work as well as tiger stripes do. Real tiger stripes are black and vertical to break up a tigerâs shape in between trees and tall grass. Naâvi stripes arenât dark enough or contrasting enough for that, plus theyâre horizontal. So Iâm bending rules a bit to avoid falling headlong into a complete reworking. Theyâre tiger stripes that work when a naâvi is hunting in the way theyâre evolutionarily designed to- in a crouch that rotates the stripes vertically. I made them a touch darker and upped the contrast a bit, letâs just pretend the contrast is good enough.
I gave her an extremely choppy ponytail because itâs strange that TAP didnât shave these kids. Itâs a fairly straight-forward residential school metaphor, why didnât they do a uniform cut like what was soooo common in those schools? The writing at the beginning is kind of hard to parse out. TAP is ruthless enough to murder a kid in front of all her peers, but didnât remove every culturally significant artifact they had? Or aggressively punish things like singing or speaking Naâvi? Or wearing traditional hairstyles and decorations? (that path leads down a never ending sinkhole of âthey didnât research historic examples of ethnic cleansing well enough to pull this topic offâ so Iâm leaving it there).
Yefti here is growing out her bowl cut but doesnât know what to do with long hair anymore. Sheâs mimicking what sheâs seen others do, with mixed results. The braids are mostly hair twisted around thread to keep the overgrown length out of her eyes while the rest is shoved through the center of a large hair-bead. Wooden, or from a large seed pit idk. Sheâs wearing random things sheâs found from abandoned campsites to look more naâvi than she feels. The woven chest piece sheâs wearing is meant for a boy child, but how could she know that.
She doesnât like being recognized as Sarentu. When sheâs unable to answer basic questions about her clan she feels a silent accusation from the naâvi asking, like sheâs a liar and a particularly bad one. Eventually, sheâll learn to cover the mark.
Maybe when Tamtay revives the clan, Yefti will hear and feel less like sheâs pretending to be a dead person.