But That's Kind Of The Point - Tumblr Posts

Yes! It's definitely not an "act" or his way of "pretending to be Na'vi." Hissing and growling is completely natural for him because he was raised around a species that hisses and growls. We humans are social animals and a big part of the way young human minds grow is by mimicking the behavior of those around them, especially their peers, and in Spider's case, his ONLY peers were other Na'vi kids.

There's a real life example of this too. In the 1930s a pair of psychologists, the Kelloggs, adopted a baby chimpanzee and raised it alongside their human baby to see if they could teach the chimpanzee to be more humanlike. They stopped the experiment after like a year or so. There were many reasons they stopped, but one of the reasons is that their human child started to demonstrate chimpanzee-like behaviors. Here's an article about it:

Smithsonian Magazine

This Guy Simultaneously Raised a Chimp and a Baby in Exactly the Same Way to See What Would Happen

When treated as a human, the baby chimp acted like one—until her physiology and development held her back

So yeah, I always roll my eyes when spider-haters use his na'vi-behavior as another excuse to hate on him, when it is completely logical for his character. If anything, it would be weird if he DIDN'T show any Na'vi behavior!

Let Spider be feral

Let him hiss and claw and fight for his siblings like a wild animal

Let his humanity be something held together by scraps - he doesn't care to be one, na'vi are kinder and stronger and better

Let him act like an angry Neytiri when he's upset

Let him crouch and hunt like his body is 8' taller

Let him bite like he has fangs to tear with

Let him be the stray na'vi trying to hard to feel like his body is home