Okay... talking with Ash and following this thread has massively shifted my assumptions and preconceptions concerning Neytiri and Sylwanin, and I'm still reeling a little from the vertigo. But I think I've thought it through enough to weigh in and organize my thoughts about the competing interpretations.

Before I do that, I want to point out that figuring out someone's age just by looking is an extremely subjective thing and can be swayed by crazy numbers of years by context, preconceptions, facial expressions, behavior, etc. Even if you're still young and changing, it's very hard to judge someone's precise age once they've hit puberty. I have a wealth of examples from my personal life, having a sister who is eight-and-a-half years younger than me. Back when I was in high school, when I took her out in public, people would either assume we were sisters... or they would assume I was her mother, and this was highly correlated with where we were (I.e. in certain venues, people always, always thought I was her mother). I would've been 16-18 at the time; my sister would've been 8-10. Now she just turned 14, and we've recently been mistaken for twins... it was a lot of fun explaining that, no, I'm actually almost a decade older than her. And no, my sister isn't freakishly tall or womanly for her age... her friends look pretty similar. And I'm not freakishly youthful-looking either... I'm frequently mistaken for being late twenties in certain contexts. Back when I was 13, I took a test-prep class where everyone thought I was 18 for weeks, because that's how old everyone else was.

And now I'm going to weigh in on the Neytiri/Sylwanin age question in the next post, as it might get long...

(reserved)

On that note, maybe you should read this, or at least look at the abstract:

Public Health Implications of Altered Puberty Timing -- Golub et al. 121 (3): S218 -- Pediatrics

I was using "society" because I didn't want to go into all the details about what's causing it. It's a real issue, and its affecting a lot of teens/children in developed nations, especially the U.S.

All I was saying was that since the Na'vi haven't been exposed to anything that could cause this, they would comparable to humans before the advent of food/medical/etc. products that caused it.

Oh, trust me, I well know that our (Western, first world, not sure why you needed to add the 'especially the us' bit) current rate of puberty is odd. Girls developing earlier* and the infertile period that girls have after getting their first period is shrinking (probably due to iron levels in our food - ironically enough intended to help, given amenia is such a chronic problem with women).

(*generally, anyway - girls throughout history have been known to give birth at twelve, so it's not all modern doom and gloom.)

BUT I fail to see why that would mean that the pattern of girls developing before boys, of girls consistently being BIGGER than boys at the onset of puberty in both genders, is anything to do with our style of food production. It seems to be a consisent thing, and one that makes biological sense - as I said, girls are bigger than boys at the same time that boys are suddenly being hit by a sex drive. Being bigger, the girls could - if needed - have a much better chance of fighting off a boy of their own age who got too aggressive, thus not risking getting pregnant too young, which could lead to death and/or mean a much harder life for her children, which doesn't help them survive. For our species to reverse our sexual dimorphism, there has to be a cause, and I really don't think that it's additives. Additives are triggering girls' bodies earlier, yes, but not changing the pattern.

(all of which is getting a bit off-topic, anyway.)

And yep, Sothis, I know it's all very subjective - I've been accused of being my five-year-younger sister's mother, too. Like I said, I thought the two getting their banshees were younger than Neytiri because a) they were getting their banshees, b) they seemed younger to me and c) the girl is still with the kids, as if she's still part of the kid-pack, not the young-hunters. I've made a bunch of icons of her, all through the movie, which I still have to upload, and I know it's all subjective, but her face is VERY young.

But, you know, subjective!

Grace hadn't had any contact with the Omatikaya since then.

Exactly. Technically, even Neytiri isn't explicitly stated as being in the picture either.

...Yes, I know. That's why I assume the pictures were taken shortly before the school shooting. Then the shooting happened, and then she was ousted from the Omaticaya for around two years. She returns after two years, and Neytiri's appearance hasn't changed much. Makes chronological sense.

I do agree with you on the sequence - that's my logic, too - but just wondering, where are you getting the two years from? Wondering if I missed something, because I always put it at less than a year ago - maybe eight Earth months or so. Gives Trudy time to meet the kids before things bust up, which from the Pandorapeda interview with her (which...I do actually loathe and despise, but it is useful for some things) she did. And also, it keeps the tension between the clan and Hell's Gate up. But! yeah, wondering if I missed somewhere where it says two years or so.

I'm honestly just guessing.

*laughs* Fair enough! But that's what I like about this, really - we can all have our own takes on it.

I know that Grace describes in the CE: "Neytiri's sister Silwanin stopped coming to the school, she was angry about the clear cutting. Then one day she and a couple of other young hunters came running in all painted up...they had set a bulldozer on fire..."
Hunters, not warriors. It was implied also that she may have been younger when Grace and Jake argue that Selfridge doesn't want to have blood of children on his hands in a tone that given the new scenes that Silwanin and the warriors would be considered 'children' in human terms.
No age implied but if the pictures are to be taken for pictures of them, then it had to be taken before she stopped coming to the school. Grace 'put 10 years into the school', so that photo could have been taken several years before.

The Avatar wiki lists Sylwanin as being older than Neytiri.

I don't tend to trust the wikia - it's based on the same information that we have via various scripts and sources, and there are a number of things on it that are wrong (Grace and Jake's birth years, for example, don't take into account the seven years date-wise they spent in cyro) or they haven't thought through, and thus have bias in them (for example: in their list of RDA employees, they list only the villains of the movie, ignoring that every single human on the moon is an employee of the RDA)

And yep, I found Grace's use of the term 'hunters' instead of warriors very telling - implying that they were kids and teenagers who didn't have the experience to know when to NOT do things like that. Regardless of her age in relation to her sister (somewhat annoyingly, I can now think of arguments for Sylwanin being older, the same age, AND younger), Sylwanin was young, inexperienced, angry and impulsive. Regardless of age, given Neytiri's fairly young, they seem to be quite close in age.

Sorry, I misread your post and thought you said after. It was clearly slightly before it, although this still offers no explanation for the fact that if it is Neytiri, then she has not aged at all.

As for the wiki, it is based on the games - they aren't 100% canon but I think they should be considered when there is nothing contradicting them, such as in this case.

I took the fact that she hasn't aged to be that it all went down not that long ago - Neytiri is fully grown, and it seems that the Na'vi don't age much for a long time once they are grown.

And yes, I know the wikia is based on the games, and I do consider its points, but there is wriggle room for justifying other points of view on this, I think.

But this could be because I come from a different culture of fandom to most of you, being a) based on writing and b) having the analytical side to justify things if we want to in fic and such.

What if James Cameron made an editing mistake or didn't want to put in the time and energy to render a younger Neytiri? The telltale evidence for me that points to the Neytiri-like girl in the picture being the actual Neytiri is her stripe patterns. As Woodsprite noted, they look exactly the same. Not similar, exact. I've looked closely at her face, arms, abdomen, legs, and her stripe pattern matches. I highly doubt that sisters can have phenotypes that match like that.

Another way to look at it is that in the original theatrical release, we had no knowledge of Sylwanin as she wasn't even mentioned. Thus, I believe that the photo wasn't meant to have Sylwanin in there, but rather to show that Neytiri is acquainted with Grace.

That is an excellent point - JC did not know that he would be able to finish more scenes later, so the detail for the photo likely wasn't specified and as such, didn't include Sylwanin.