James Cameron’s Sequels May Be Spoiled By … Chinese Philosophy?

In the Wuxing system, there are five agents or phases whose interactions with each other are used to explain everything from politics and medicine to music and martial arts. The five phases that make up the Wuxing system are fire, water, wood, metal, and earth, and scholars use the way these phases create or destroy each other to account for different phenomena within their respective fields.

Fans have previously hypothesized that James Cameron could be centering each of the «Avatar» films around the four classical elements, a Greek philosophy that was proposed by Empedocles who was born around 490 BC. The four classical elements consist of fire, earth, air, and water, and fans have pointed out that while the second «Avatar» film was clearly focused on water, the first might have been thematically linked to earth or air. It’s a solid argument, but thanks to a new point made in u/Impacatus’ Reddit theory, more of Cameron’s narrative arc might be falling into place.

The argument u/Impacatus makes on Reddit is that if the «Avatar» universe is following the Wuxing system rather than that of the classical elements, the first movie was thematically framed around the concept of wood and the second around water. Going forward, they suggest that the third movie might be based around fire, the fourth around earth, and the fifth around metal. And there are certainly some good arguments to back up this assertion.