Peter, crying: It’s the Curiosity Rover’s birthday and he has to sing happy birthday all by himself on Mars and thats sad
Tony, already building a rocket: Say no more
Peter and Tony: *arrive and hop out of there rocket, only to see shuri in a super high tech space suit, holding cupcakes, and standing next to T’challa in his black panther suit because of course shuri made it so it could withstand a vaccum*
T’challa: she made me come here. It’s not too late for you if you run.
Tony, who loves all robots so fucking much: Ummmm why would we leave
Peter, holding up a gift: yeah, we brought presents!!!!
Wonder Woman greeting T’Challa with the Wakanda Forever salute, but forgetting what happens when she clashes her gauntlets like that
Accidentally blowing him through three walls, a car, and M’Baku
He is, of course, completely fine, but that was certainly not the greeting he expected from the suddenly VERY apologetic Princess
Bonus: T’Challa runs back to Diana and does the salute again, channeling the power from the improved kinetic absorption and redistribution on his suit, and launches Diana straight into the sky. They laugh about it later.
This is the wholesome content I signed up for
Further bonus: during a later team-up, the villain has T’Challa by the throat and is threatening to snap his neck if Diana comes any closer. She hesitates, at which point the villain laughs and asks if T’Challa has any last words. Of course he does:
Shuri gets wind that T’Challa is considered a sex icon and immediately dedicates her social media presence to videos and pics of T’Challa that disprove that Erroneous opinion
Shuri sprinting away after she posts a video of T’Challa dropping a muffin on the floor, looking around, and picking it up to eat it: BROTHER I AM MAKING YOU SO RELATEABLE, OKOYE STOP LAUGHING AND PROTECT YOUR PRINCESS
Queen Ramonda is very happy to supply whatever baby photos Shuri needs
she posts the video of T’Challa kicking the Black Panther suit and getting blasted across the room, and someone replies “he’s still daddy af” and she doesn’t shut down the internet so everyone can think about what they did but she considers it for a really really really long time before sending that tweet to Nakia with the comment “joining the world was wrong”
The movie is brilliant. They didn’t leave a stone unturned.
Ok not only that! but! I’m feeling like the reason why N’jobu wasn’t in Wakanda in the ancestral plane is because 1. he wasn’t buried the right way, (if you remember several times throughout the movie, the burial process is mentioned to be extremely sacred and important), and 2. because N’jobu hadn’t died in Wakanda.
This was another reason to point out what Erik and his father were talking about being lost and away from their home. Because N’jobu would never go home, in his former life and the next, he’d always be trapped, forever lost from finding his home
^^this gave me chills.
I also thought it could be relationship to how black men in America encouraged to not show emotions, not cry or hug, as they make it seem to show a since of weakness.
When N’jobu asked Erik,” No tears for me?” You could see how Erik was holding back tears and just left it as,” the world is hard, men don’t have the chance to cry” in so many words.
I really almost cried because he could finally see his father and they didn’t share a tender embrace as T’Chaka and T’Challa..
☝damn, NOW I’M CRYING AGAIN 😭😭😭
They didn’t hug because Killmonger’s father was disappointed, both in himself and in his son. And yes because toxic masculinity defines our society.
T’Chaka was proud of his son because T’Challa was a good man despite T’Chaka’s mistakes. N’jobu failed his son utterly and completely. He was estranged from Wakanda and so, in turn, was his son.
It was a beautiful scene, full of regret and the ways in which the mistakes of the past can be visited on present generations. The scene was supposed to be our clue that Killmonger was not going to be king. He was not a product of Wakanda. He was a product of that sad, angry room with both the guns and the history hidden behind a painting on the wall.
He was a product of a hidden history and a violent society. So that is where he went, and that is where he met his father forever trapped by the mistakes of men who could not see beyond their own needs. T’Chaka, his need to protect his vision of himself and Wakanda and N’jobu, his need to heal the world by defying his King and country.
The thread running through Black Panther is estrangement. It is the stylised story of a people whose history has been hidden for far too long. It is the story of a people estranged from themselves and their history. It is the story of the Diaspora. It is also a story of choice. We, the Diaspora, choose every day and in every minute our response to that estrangement. Are we defined by the wrongs visited upon us as a people? Do we hold the anger in? Do we explode? Do we make people pay for the hurt, the pain, the indignities? Will we be Killmongers?
Will we meet our ancestors in the sad, dark places of our pain?
That was one of the points of that scene. Erik Killmonger met his father in the sad, dark place of his pain.
I hope that the original cut has another scene. One in which Erik Killmonger joins his ancestors in Wakanda, because in the moments before his death he got it. He finally became a child of Wakanda. He would have freed himself and his father from those chains.
I mean look at how that scene began. Erik learned his history by finding it in the hidden place. His father wanted him to find it, but that is not how you teach children their history. You hold them in your lap and say this is who we are. You tell them stories. You take them home.
Ryan Coogler is trying to show us in a few scenes what estrangement means. What being cutoff from your history means. You are not supposed to find it in a cutout behind a painting sitting next to the guns. And that wasn’t his fault. Other people made bad choices. A society made bad choices and he paid for their bad choices with his soul.
But then there comes a point when you choose who you will be, despite the bad choices that formed you. Killmonger made the correct choice in the end, or at least the only choice he could have made.
His story is heartbreaking. It is Shakespearean. He is the first beautiful villain in the MCU, and I adore his story.
Black Panther is such and complex and compelling story with such rich text and undertones and themes that I’m thoroughly convinced that we’ll be discussing its meaning for, possibly years to come.
Another thing I love that I’ve probably already mentioned on here is how T’Challa woke up the second time with his back turned on his ancestors symbolizing he was turning his back on their old ways. The symbolism running through the entire movie is intense.
imo any scene where Erik joins his Wakandan ancestors would ring false to me. He specifically rejects Wakandan burial rites, asking instead to be buried at sea like his ancestors. Wakanda is a landlocked country, so whatever their rites, they won’t ever include a burial at sea. That choice alienates him one final time from Wakanda, and explicitly aligns him with the African diaspora instead of his Wakandan heritage. Which is probably also symbolic because he can probably trace his Wakandan ancestry back centuries if not millennia, but we don’t even know his mother’s name. She’s just another nameless, faceless black woman sadly unmoored from her own history due to the violence of the slave trade.
jinlinli 