I certainly got the impression the Director was pretty sympathetic to Killmonger's 'Black Hitler' position - but I also thought that this sympathetic portrayal was what made him a powerful villain, as opposed to the usual Hollywood Nazi stereotypes. You see the same effect with Magneto sometimes.
Do orcs in gaming display parallels to colonialist propaganda?
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I certainly got the impression the Director was pretty sympathetic to Killmonger's 'Black Hitler' position - but I also thought that this sympathetic portrayal was what made him a powerful villain, as opposed to the usual Hollywood Nazi stereotypes. You see the same effect with Magneto sometimes.
Celebrim
Legend
I never got the sense that was so from the movie. To me the center of the conflict was who was the rightful king, and if you wrap that up successfully it's a simple act to countermand Eric's order before any death and destruction occurs (considering an hour or two flight to London at supersonic speed, plus a couple hours to get organized, because no military operation just happens instantly). And on the other hand, if you don't wrap that up successfully, then Eric can just try again.
Frankly, I thought the writer's just hadn't given it much thought. They felt the need to find something for the white guy to do in the finale, and concocted something that never felt particularly tense and didn't add to the story, and I still insist leaves up in the air whether Erik's view of humanity is in any way justifiable. The whole fight is staged as if it was Red Skull's weapons of mass destruction flying toward New York, and not merely high tech small arms headed to intelligence cells.
Killmonger explicitly wants to escalate to a total war of World vs. African Diaspora. Killmonger's plan is not, "We arm our operatives." Killmonger's plan is, "We send arms to our operatives and they will in turn arm the 2 billion persons with skin color like ours."
Sure. I've heard plenty of similar rhetoric from white Neo-Nazis - everyone else really thinks like us, we just need to wake them up - so I found Killmonger perfectly credible as a Hitler-esque villain. I agree the film gave him a lot of leeway but I don't think it fully validated his position.
Celebrim
Legend
Oh wow. Ok... I don't even know how to respond to that, other than to say I hope you are wrong, and I hope more in the audience didn't have a take away that extreme.
Yet, comparable to Hitler? I think Erik could have made a much more powerful villain had he been more sympathetically portrayed and been more nuanced. I had sympathy for the character owing to his background and his anger over injustice. I had no sympathy for his actions at any point. I sincerely hope we don't live in a world where the over the top unsympathetic portrayal of the character - shooting his own allies for example, cowardice when confronted by T'Challa at the end - was necessary because otherwise the sympathy for his actions would be too great.
Hm, the more common reaction I saw in Internet discussion when I called Killmonger Hitler-esque, was "Killmonger's not that bad a guy really, he had a point, just a bit over-enthusiastic..." - and this is in discussion typically with mostly-white fellow D&D nerds.
Getting back on topic, personally I thought the film was a clever inversion of white colonialist
tropes, right down to Black Paternalist Saviour (T'Challa) saves the helpless Whites from the Racist Black
Hitler (Killmonger).
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Celebrim
Legend
Well then, I rest my case.
I insist I'm not actually off topic, but that it is necessary to establish a few points before I attack some points that are axiomatically assumed by the earlier discussion.
[MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION]
I didn’t miss any of that. I think you’re missing my point- raised by your friend: Wakanda- an advanced nation that escaped the yoke of European colonialism- still had visual aesthetics and internal dynamics that played into very old, stereotypical narratives. Killmonger didn’t sue. T’challa wasn’t under a threat of impeachment. Instead of a codified, legalistic approach, the struggle between the two was “settled” by personal combat.
AFAIK, the last time this was proposed in Africa was in 1978 when hulking former Olympic boxer (and accused cannibal) General Idi Amin challenged the much older and frailer President Julius Nyerere to a boxing match to settle the war between Uganda and Tanzania.
Not necessarily the best context into which the Killmonger/T’Challa fight nestles. It’s jarring.
BUT, because it’s a superhero movie in a superhero context, that doesn’t matter. We handwave it away because comics.
I didn’t miss any of that. I think you’re missing my point- raised by your friend: Wakanda- an advanced nation that escaped the yoke of European colonialism- still had visual aesthetics and internal dynamics that played into very old, stereotypical narratives. Killmonger didn’t sue. T’challa wasn’t under a threat of impeachment. Instead of a codified, legalistic approach, the struggle between the two was “settled” by personal combat.
AFAIK, the last time this was proposed in Africa was in 1978 when hulking former Olympic boxer (and accused cannibal) General Idi Amin challenged the much older and frailer President Julius Nyerere to a boxing match to settle the war between Uganda and Tanzania.
Not necessarily the best context into which the Killmonger/T’Challa fight nestles. It’s jarring.
BUT, because it’s a superhero movie in a superhero context, that doesn’t matter. We handwave it away because comics.
Celebrim
Legend
My friend, I handwave nothing away.
And ok, with that further explanation, I think we are actually on pretty close to the same ground.
Yeah!
I mean, if you take away the comic book genre and look at the story as straight up sci-fi? That fight between the two is profoundly disappointing. How is it that, in one of the most advanced nations on the planet, the question of who gets to lead the country is settled in a fistfight? Oh yeah, and it’s an African country.
Ouch!
But within superheroic genre conventions, we wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see that in any other fictionalized nation regardless of continent or ethnicity. (I mean, Latervia has a straight up quasi-medieval power structure, and Doom would probably HAVE to be removed by personal combat.)
I mean, if you take away the comic book genre and look at the story as straight up sci-fi? That fight between the two is profoundly disappointing. How is it that, in one of the most advanced nations on the planet, the question of who gets to lead the country is settled in a fistfight? Oh yeah, and it’s an African country.
Ouch!
But within superheroic genre conventions, we wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see that in any other fictionalized nation regardless of continent or ethnicity. (I mean, Latervia has a straight up quasi-medieval power structure, and Doom would probably HAVE to be removed by personal combat.)
I think you may have left out (4) Did the author deploy certain racially/culturally-laden tropes?
JRRT may or may not have intended (whether consciousuy or unconsciously) orcs to stand in for generic "eastern hordes" - that is a question of individual pscyhology which I'll leave to his biographers.
But whatever his intentions, I suggest that it is crystal-clear what the anser to(4) is - he absolutely did deploy certain tropes which are very racially and culurally-laden.
The contrast between (1) and (2) on the one hand, and (4) on the other, is not just of relevance in relation to past authors. I live in a country (Australia) where satirical cartoonists fairly regularly produce derogatory depictions of people of colour (especially Black people). The defence that they and their publishers run is always (1) and (2) - they're not bad people. Whereas the criticism being levied at them pertains to (4) - they are drawing on and perpetuating a racist body of ideas and tropes, and appear quite indifferent to, or even exult in, doing so. This is the phenomenon of "casual racism", and of "structural racism", at work.
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