#marvel shang chi

Shangchi spoilers below, you have been warned!

Quick illustration on the morning before the Iron Gang came attacking, back when the family was still whole and happy.

Not me realizing that if Ta Lo had let Wenwu in, then Ying Li wouldn’t have died and Wen Wu would not have turned evil, thus rendering this story a fable on what happens when you cast judgements on people without giving them a second chance. THEY COULD HAVE LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER!!! But also as the movie points out, the mother’s death can be blamed on so many people, and in the end is really no one’s fault.

I’m never going to get over this movie.

Go watch this movie (if it’s safe) folks, it’s really freaking good. I think this just beat Iron Man 1 as my fav origin story holy cow. And easily the best Marvel villain of all time.

xu wenwu: blood debt needs to be paid in blood

me: YOURE DOING GREAT HONEY

if only shang chi was a John Wick styled action flick

shangchi spoilers: thinking about wenwu and revenge and what it meant to the kids. and shangchi realizing how fucked up his father was and escaping even after he took revenge. but when i first thought that shang chi didn’t kill his mother’s killer, for a moment i thought, “but his mom died, how can he let that person go?” 

and then after the final confrontation i realized that of course revenge isn’t intrinsically bad, but at that time as a single parent you can only focus on one thing. either you devote your entire life and your children’s health and wellbeing into this justified manhunt, or you let go for a while and swallow that pain while you focus on being there for your kids because their mom isn’t. 

of course everything wenwu did was justified he justified it by looking hawt

I’m sad that shang chi the movie is hated by most of the Chinese internet, because the narrative there right now is that “storyline of Asian American defeating his evil Chinese father is demeaning and symbolic of western ideals defeating china,” when the movie obviously isn’t about that at all. the climax isn’t about shang chi defeating his father through fisticuffs, they fight but it’s not a good versus evil combat.

you don’t defeat your parents when you’re in a standoff like shangchi and wenwu, you come to a resolution, or you don’t. it’s either a double win or a double loss, it’s the opposite of a zero sum game. they’re both blinded by grief (which, as we all remember, is love perservering), and it took shang chi resolving his inner conflict for wenwu to start seeing his own way out of the maze (and also some other spoiler stuff, but the point still stands).

and thats very clear in the movie, and I loved that wenwu wasn’t your traditional antagonist, because everything hes doing is out of crippling grief.

the one thing marvel couldve done though, was to also hire an actual Chinese director alongside with Cretton. because as a different language system, obviously chinese dialogue requires certain experience to direct. so much of the movie was in Chinese, but the diction and the way people spoke their lines were a bit off, plus the chinese script was a bit too straightforward, it felt more like an English translation most of the time. you need to know chinese, know about acting in Chinese, and a really experienced grasp of what good Chinese dialogue sounds like. and that’s not anything a western director would know about no matter how much research marvel did.

otherwise the only character whose chinese lines sound natural and good in the film is going to be Wenwu and thats not because of directing or the script that’s just because hes played by Tony freaking Leung. (this became a simp post again lol)

WIP of a thing I got inspired to draw after watching Shang-Chi … still figuring out the hands