Wakanda has a more beautiful sunrise than I see from my window

[schneefink]

Day 5: Getting up earlier without external pressure is really fucking difficult for me. So far, my success rate is 1/5, and on that one day I got out of bed only to immediately curl up in my reading chair in my pajamas. Doesn't help that I'm having a few bad brain days. Whatever, I'll have to get it together. Classes start this week, I got the material to prepare today and it's more than expected.

I saw "Black Panther", and it was a lot of fun.

- I loved the look of Wakanda. The land, the buildings, the clothes, all of it.

- Shuri and Okoye and Nakia were all great and I love that we got all three of them. T'Challa and Killmonger and M'Baku were fine, and I didn't dislike Ross even though he was played by Martin Freeman.

- I'm not sure how old the characters are supposed to be: apparently Shuri is meant to be a teenager, while T'Challa's actor is forty. I got the impression that Shuri is around 20, and T'Challa in his early thirties, just a few years older than Erik and M'Baku. T'Challa went to university elsewhere, but the older the is the more I feel like he should know more about his country and what different people and groups want and why and pros and cons etc.

- My favorite part was possibly the conversation between Okoye and Nakia, where Nakia asks Okoye to help her oust a warmongering outsider from the throne and Okoye says that she is loyal to whoever sits on the throne. Maaybe they'll get a clue that an absolute monarchy where the king is decided by ancestry and fighting prowess is not an ideal system of government. To be fair the ritual combat seemed more ceremonial, everyone was surprised when M'Baku took up the challenge and it seemed to me T'Challa accepted N'Jadaka's challenge more because he was still rattled by what he learned than because he had to, but even without that it's still an absolute hereditary monarchy. A massive societal upheaval like revealing Wakanda to the world is maybe not the best time to change the government structure too, but in the not-too-distant future that is definitely something they should do.

- As for the plot, it seemed pretty standard for superhero movies, same with the action scenes, but high quality. All of Okoye's fight scenes were my favorites.

- I want ALL the canon-divergence AUs. What if anyone found out about Erik much earlier? What if M'Baku won his first challenge? What if Killmonger was captured while breaking out Klaue? What if T'Challa declined N'Jadaka's challenge? What if T'Challa actually died, and/or Killmonger was king for longer? What if Nakia is of (distant but) royal blood and challenges and defeats Killmonger after he defeats T'Challa? (Shouldn't the tribes anyway also have had an opportunity to challenge the new king, like they had at T'Challa's crowning?) Or what if it was set a few decades earlier: what would it have meant for international politics if Wakanda was revealed during the Cold War?, etc.
I would also like post-canon Okoye fic.

Comments

[naye]

Nakia is totally of royal blood - she's the daughter of one of the chiefs who declined the challenge. :D

[schneefink]

But that just makes her the equivalent of a noble, doesn't it? I thought the tribe chiefs had the right to challenge because of their position, not because of their blood. Actually, if I remember correctly the chiefs didn't have to fight themselves, so could her parent have asked to challenge and have Nakia fight? Hm, except maybe N'Jadaka's challenge still counted as part of the first crowning ceremony because he wasn't there (that would make more sense than any member of the royal family being able to challenge the king whenever), and maybe each tribe can only challenge once and her tribe already declined and so could not challenge the new king. Or maybe Nakia always used to lose spars to T'Challa so nobody thought she had a chance, but she did keep up with her training in those years away...

[genarti]

The combat didn't read as ceremonial to me. To me, it read that everyone who didn't challenge was opting not to do so because they respected T'Challa and felt that he would make a good king, but that if they hadn't felt that, they would absolutely have felt both free to challenge and morally obligated to do so. Whereas the surprise about M'Baku wasn't that anyone challenged, but that he showed up and that he chose to do so with a king whom everybody figured was a shoo-in for unchallenged coronation.

I agree about T'Challa's intended age being very unclear, though. I assume not actually 40ish, but is he supposed to be in his 30s? Early 30s? 20s?? He doesn't look like he's in his 20s, but... Hollywood.

[schneefink]

I'm useless at guessing age so I'm always relieved other people also find it difficult.

I agree that each tribe absolutely would have challenged if they hadn't respected T'Challa, but I meant ceremonial more in the sense of that it was known that T'Challa is respected by the tribes and it would be a big surprise if they'd suddenly declared otherwise. T'Challa has been training to be a person the tribes respect all his life, and he should have had a good sense of whether or not the tribes would challenge in advance.
(If the kingship went to a different tribe, I wonder which tribe the royal family would belong to. Ramonda's?)

[anotherslashfan]

Re: the getting out of bed thing - sylvaine and I used to ring each other in the mornings so they would wake up and get out of bed. Maybe make a pact with someone close to you? It would be somewhat external still, I guess, but why not ease the process with something nice?

[schneefink]

That would make sense, except I kind of don't want to because I'm embarrassed and also it would be very tempting to lie.
...yeah it's getting bad again, I'll have to figure something out.

[anotherslashfan]

Plenty of people struggle with getting out of bed, it really isn't anything to be ashamed of. Though as you say, that you feel this way seems like an indicator that maybe you're not doing great mood-wise in general. *hugs*