incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

Andrea: regarding the mish-mash question: that characterization is from the assumption that the audience is white and ignorant. Instead here we have creators who use all that they know and riff on it. Ruth Carter is doing that to create new culture through costumes; Baaba Maal and Ludwig Göransson are doing the same for the music. They are not trying to set the record straight or teach African history, not doing that post-colonial labor: and so inevitably they run into the danger of people who assume that they know is all there is to know.

Jadie: canonically Wakanda is between Ethiopian and Kenya; close enough to coast, central Africa to have influences from both and generally be pan-African

Jadie con't: compare to Namor and undersea world: bleh. Movie doesn't even tell the viewer what culture he is from, what country it was. He razes one village instead of going all over. The design was also very superficial, no cultural moments of ritual like funeral, royal challenge that we see in Wakanda.

K.: I've seen actors talking about powerful the representation was against the utter lack nevertheless

Andrea: I was clear that it was Yucatan, but I saw three times; the movie didn't front load that, needed more time there

Marianna: thought change to Talokan from Atlantis was clever to build on rules knew from Wakanda, thereby reducing exposition needed

K.: a lot of these characters were created at time when celebratory representation was also denigration (e.g. Luke Cage), world is different now

Andrea: not just that characters revised in this movie, been a constant development and change

audience q: really uncomfortable with fighting between black and brown people

K.: reactionary/revolutionary question from panel description: really thinks about centrality of rage to movie

Andrea: it's popular culture therefore it's both. The French try to steal, the CIA wants to exploit ... never goes anywhere. OTOH when people are depicted in full humanity, groups don't have to be in concert and these groups, in particular, don't have precedent for dealing with other groups. Hopes that next movie leads to growth not tragedy

Jadie: went out of way to give Western hegemony good (Martin Freeman's character) and bad people, not for Talokan

Marianna: interested in how decentralized Europe and America were in story, thought they were players but irrelevant. References commonality of cultures, so much time spent establishing that: so the conflict is heartbreaking

(as I think I said in my post, to me it made it hard to take seriously because it was so obviously forcing the story into the necessary MCU format; I spent most of the movie hoping for a third-act mutual enemy to appear because they so transparently should be on the same side)

K.: rage, self destruction, aggression: think we're used to seeing pain depicted in a different way, this movie was bringing something different to the table, it was almost healing to sit in that question of what if we burn it all down, what are the options

K.: discusses significance of Haiti, recognition of its history and the deliberate choice to situate the future there

finally: women

K.: so much more central; web of relationships, complexity

Marianna: mentions Riri asking Ramonda if can call my mom

K.: Ramonda reaction to Okoye coming back without Shuri, navigating layers of trauma

Andrea: so many variations on being a woman, didn't cater by putting in more men

K.: M'Baku role remained authentic to him

Jadie: irritated about Riri's role, as African-American inventor, would she really not think through the consequences of her invention and/or why should she be given that burden? What if she was the inventor of a protection against that detection technique?

Andrea: thought she was a critique of the oppressed internalizing oppression, as she was on the verge of "oh capitalism rules." Shuri v MIT. Gives a personal anecdote about pressure to sell her soul by making money. Again, it's pop culture, it's doing both things at once.

(me: see her comics origin which is tied into Tony Stark instead)

K.: points out that Riri was completely alone, had no community network

And that's where I had to leave, so I didn't get to ask whether they also thought Shuri's origin story was truncated or deflated by the reveal of T'Challa and Nakia's son!