Suits
Baze and Chirrut
Jyn Erso
Cassian Andor and K2S0
Bodhi Rook
okay, so everyone has set up the main rivalry in Black Panther as Killmonger vs T’Challa. And obviously that’s the main narrative structure of the story, not arguing with that. But I feel like from a purely character arc standpoint, the actual battle is Killmonger vs Nakia, and she obliterates him.
Erik Stevens is a CIA covert operative; basically, he’s a spy. So is Nakia. And when you look at their various actions through the lens of “who accomplished their mission better?”, it becomes pretty clear that Erik spent 20-some years preparing to destabilize T’Challa’s reign, including having inside knowledge and a birthright on his side…and Nakia spent roughly 36 hours successfully destabilizing his reign, in turn, with nothing but her incredible ability to network disparate resources.
Let’s just review her actions over those 36 hours okay:
– Gets the surviving members of the royal family successfully out of danger within seconds of the coup (aka the only living people with a competing blood claim to the throne aka the greatest threat to his regime)
– Sows enough doubt in the “greatest warrior in the country” about Killmonger’s ability to lead that when the time comes, Okoye and the entire Dora Milaje all defect (eventually saving hundreds of lives)
– Steals a heart-shaped herb from under his nose as he’s identifying it as the most important power resource in the country and trying to prevent it falling into anyone else’s hands, lol too late buddy
– Immediately identifies the person in the country with the best platform to mount a counter-insurgency (M’Baku), identifies what it will take to get him on their side, and casually resolves a centuries-long division in their country while she’s at it
– Correctly predicts Killmonger’s opening move of distributing vibranium to the war dogs, and assists in a comprehensive strategy that shuts it down cold–a strategy they wouldn’t have been able to use if she hadn’t gotten Shuri, Ross, and T’Challa all in one place with the right information at the right time
As soon as T’Challa is back she takes an immediate backseat again (she said it herself, she’s a spy, not the leader of an army), but, seriously, if you have to pinpoint the one person who took down Killmonger, it’s undeniably her. And she did it by clearly demonstrating that her skills as a war dog are miles ahead of his as a CIA agent (due in part, I’m sure, to being trained in a superior country, but also she’s Just That Good).
Yes! Erik’s real misfortune was coming up against a much better and smarter intelligence operative. She also gives the lie to the stereotypical spy narrative (embodied by Erik) that you have to be heartless and violent to achieve your ends. She is the moral center and touchstone of film, so filled with goodness it comes off her like a glow, but she kicks the ruthless Erik’s ass from Wakanda to Kinshasa.
Another thing Nakia was good at was identifying where the necessary resources weren’t, namely in herself. That was why she argued Ramonda out of the idea of taking it herself. It wasn’t self-effacement or modesty, it was a clear-eyed calculation of what it would take to win and the best chance was with M’Baku, not her.
And she did much of this while she thought the man she still loved was dead. She admits as much to Okoye, too. Think of how much sheer fortitude that took, to work through a grief like that to save your country. She is a hero and her heroism is no less amazing for not being flashy or center stage.
It’s also interesting and important to point out that, in moral views, she’s also a counter to Erik Killmonger. They contrast & compliment each other and are very much set up to be mirrors of the same cause. Killmonger believed in Wakanda using its vast & superior resources to liberate oppressed folk around the globe. He hated that a near utopian society existed while so many of their people and ancestors were left to suffer. This is what, in part, made Killmonger such a sympathetic villain. His means were wrong, but his ideas? He had the right ideas….W’kabi thought so too, thus why he took Killmonger’s side. It took Killmonger’s insurrection for T’challa to learn that lesson as well.
But it was a message Nakia had been preaching all along.
Let’s not forget that it was Nakia that first proposed the idea of ending Wakanda’s isolation. She refused to become a queen, she chose to remain a spy, because morally she couldn’t stand by while so many others suffered. In essence, Nakia and Killmonger mirrored each other in moral standing when it came to Wakanda needing to reach out and help their people. However, where Killmonger decided to kill relentlessly and take the throne, then find the solution in arming the oppressed to overthrow nations, Nakia valued life above all.
And you can say “Killmonger was right bc in the end, T’challa listened to him.” But did he listen to Killmonger, or did he finally listen to Nakia?
Some food for thought.
a robot may not talk about Fight Club or, through inaction, allow Fight Club to be talked about
A central feature of white settler colonial subjectivity is forgetting; we live whiteness in part as active ignorance and forgetting. In situations where facts of the matter are routinely brought to our attention, forgetting must be an active and ongoing thing. In general, I believe that systemic oppression is, in fact, present enough in our world that the kinds of ignorance and lack of knowledge running alongside oppression deserve explanation. Consider that some people think that they “just don’t see race,” or that poverty doesn’t exist in their community, or that Indigenous people aren’t part of their national consciousness. One way to understand what is at play here is through imagining a kind of benign ignorance — people just haven’t been taught the facts of the situation, and so they can’t be held responsible for not understanding how race, poverty, indigeneity, and more, are present in their lives. If this were the problem, just giving people more and better information would correct their knowledge problem. But we don’t just have a knowledge problem — we have a habit-of-being problem; the problem of whiteness is a problem of what we expect, our ways of being, bodily-ness, and how we understand ourselves as “placed” in time. Whiteness is a problem of being shaped to think that other people are the problem. Another way to understand this dynamic is to realize the very complex entanglement of practices and habits of ignorance, repression, and active disavowal that constitute an active settler process of not telling, not seeing, and not understanding the truth of the matter, which is a truth of being shaped as the legacy of the harms of the past.
[…] We white people might, on some level, like living with annihilated social and historical memories — we might like to think that the present can be innocent of the past that produced it. We might like to think, though we’re ashamed to admit it, that we don’t need to tell or hear the painful stories of the actions that created the world we live in. That feeling, of wanting to be people unmoored from history, of endorsing the pretense that we have nothing to do with the past that constitutes our material conditions and our most intimate subjectivities, is a feeling that defines us. The social organization of forgetting means that our actual histories are lost, and it means that we have a feeling of acceptance and normalness about living with a lie instead of an unforgetting.
Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (2016), Ch. 1.
7-7-7
tagged by @cynical-harlequin
The rules are as follows. Go to page 7 (or paragraph 7, if not that long) of your WIP then go to the 7th line, share 7 lines and tag 7 more writers to continue the challenge.
Bodhi crossed his arms, eyes narrowed. “And what if I just wanted to ask how you are?” he asked with all the indignance he could muster.
“Feel free to ask me now.”
Bodhi could almost hear the raised eyebrow in K-2’s tone, despite K’s lack of eyebrows. He faltered. “Er… How are you?” he asked awkwardly.
“I am perfectly neutral, thank you. And you?”
I never tag people though, not because I don’t want to hear your beautiful things but because I don’t want anyone to feel pressure. But all my lovely mutuals, feel free to add on!
Rebellions are built on hope 