Also, only one of the leader of the 5 tribes or a member of the royal house can challenge, so it’s not exactly a free for all. I found this part plausible, though I had a bit of my suspension of disbelief impinged on when the American special forces dude is able to come in, challenge the king AFTER the challenge was already over when the succession happened and the king was crowned, and basically kick his ass. I know our special forces guys are well trained and tough, but I don’t believe they are trained in the kind of fighting that happened in this movie. Also, if anyone from the royal line or whatever can challenge anytime it would be a really chaotic system, while at the time of succession made sense to me. I get that it’s a movie and they wanted to set this all up, but the movie almost lost me at that point as it seemed such a discontinuity.
That said, I loved the movie. I actually went to see it again today and that’s perhaps why the discontinuity (from my perspective) is so in the forefront of my thoughts ATM…on the second watching I was seeing all of the little things that kind of didn’t make as much sense (like, what do the people of Wakanda do for work, exactly, when the kings sister basically runs all the trains, lab, R&D and even the hospital, seemingly? And how do the folks forced to sort of pretend to be poor farmers feel about having to keep that charade up while the rest of the people get to live in the big city and by baskets and such?).
As with all the Marvel movies, when you dig in things start to break down…and it’s best to just munch the popcorn and enjoy than try and pick stuff apart. I can’t wait for Infinity War and the rest of the line up this year. Going to be an epic year for super hero movies!
Some people in any society like rural life. I don’t imagine they have a hard time finding people to carry on the goat-herd masquerade.
And Killmonger’s challenge wouldn’t have had any legal force behind it, except that T’Challa accepted. Which was probably unwise of him, but he was feeling guilty about the kid having been abandoned in the first place, and he considered his own authority to be on the precarious side. I’m guessing that T’Chaka would have told him “Your father was disowned from the royal line, and the time of challenge is past. To the dungeons with you.”.
That was my assumption as well. The challenge doesn’t happen at the challenge. The challenge has been happening for years. The king (& the heads of the tribes and anyone else on the council or with political or social power) knows that eventually they’ll need a replacement. So they have their eyes out for both the presumptive heir and anyone who might be a good candidate should the presumptive heir be utterly unsuitable for the job. By the time they get to the ceremony, the decision about the next leader a done deal; everyone is happy with (or at least resigned to) the new leader and the whole thing is just a formality.
Except, of course, when something dramatic happens between that long political decision and the coronation, like the old king getting killed when the heir was supposed to be protecting him. And even then, four out of the five tribes still didn’t challenge him, just the guys who usually don’t even show up at all.
But T’Challa didn’t HAVE to accept the challenge, by tradition. The challenge was demanded by Killmonger, but T’Challa still had the choice to decline. He accepted the challenge for a number of reasons, one of them being that he hadn’t quite recovered from the fact his father had killed his uncle and left his cousin in an American ghetto to fend for himself. I’m sure there was a bit of “there but for the grace of God go I,” involved in his decision, as well as pressure to “reward” the one who brought Klaue to justice. He would have lost face in front of his council for declining, but there was really nothing Killmonger could have done at that point.
I’m not sure I agree 100% with him, but we shouldn’t forget that this is a Disney/Marvel movie, not a movie written and produced from the perspective of someone who grew up in central Africa.
Yes and no. Wakanda is an fictional place and that’s hard to fully portray without bogging down the movie - all we see of Asgard relates to royalty and warriors, too. We know next to nothing about the galaxy the Starlord and his friends are guarding.
Wakanda is no more an African myth than Marvel’s Asgard is a Norwegian myth. In both cases we’ve got a quintessentially American take on another culture’s mythology, and while it might be fine for Americans, we shouldn’t mistake it for the mythology of the folks who live where we’re setting the story.
Minor hijack: seems to me that there’s a lot of really crackerjack science fiction/fantasy coming out of Africa and/or recent immigrants to the US from Africa. My favorite is Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch books, about a girl born in Nigeria who lives briefly in the US before moving back to Nigeria and discovering her magical powers. The author’s own family history is fairly similar to this, so while she’s not writing from a fully Nigerian perspective, that’s reflected in the character’s journey between the two cultures. It’s tremendously entertaining stuff.
And then there’s Kai Ashante Wilson’s gorgeous stuff set in a fictionalized Africa, including the lovely A Taste of Honey. He’s a thoroughly American author AFAICT, but his Africa-analogue feels a lot less Disneyfied.
Which is to say, I enjoyed Black Panther a lot, and I appreciate how meaningful it is to have a top-notch superhero movie with a primarily black cast; I just don’t think it’s escaped the American version of Africa.
The closest main character Marvel has to an “Ordinary Joe” was Agents Phil Coulson or Maria Hill. Everybody else are genetically-altered supersoldiers, master assassins, a scientist-physician-cum-giant-green-rage-monster, a genius/billionaire/playboy/philanthropist who is heir to America’s most advanced technology conglomerate, a literal Norse deity, a telekinetic mind-witch, a vibranium-bodied artificial intelligence, a Celestial-Human hybrid, a talking tree and cybernetically enhanced trash panda, an obtuse but apparently indestructible vengeance machine, and the enhanced murder-children of Thanos. I guess Rhodey, Lang, and Wilson are basically just really skilled people with highly capable technology and extensive combat training, but the claim that Wakanda is unique in the powers across its population is flatly wrong.
Do we know which Galaxy? Still Milky Way? Seems like it should be if they’re coming to earth, Star Lord can’t exactly expect them to follow him to his home planet.
And who’s to say that we don’t see some commoners in Black Panther? I can think of at least four major Wakandan characters who are never stated to be royal or noble. Sure, they hang out with royalty, but maybe that’s just because they’ve put in the hard work to rise through the ranks of Wakandan society and are good at their jobs, and if they didn’t hang out with royalty, we’d never see them on screen, because the main character is a royal.
I don’t think that’s the point. You remember in one of the Spiderman movies when I think the Green Goblin’s dastardly plan is defeated by a bunch of salt-of-the-earth New Yorkers who up with his shit will not put? The end of the Avengers when they’re in a shwarma shop? That’s what I think the author was talking about: the superheroes move through a world of muggles, and in this movie, the muggles were lacking.