Paris' defence minister on Sunday condemned the latest instalment of Marvel's Black Panther franchise, which depicts French troops caught trying to steal resources belonging to the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda.

:data-laughing: :data-laughing: :france-cool:

I guess I have to watch a marvel movie now

  • macabrett
    ·
    2 years ago

    I guess I have to watch a marvel movie now

    You mean the movie about how black people shouldn't use their advanced technology to free black people around the globe, so the CIA sends an agent to help them merc the only good guy in all the Marvel movies?

    • Ligma_Male [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      no this is about the second one where oppressed people fight eachother instead of the oppressors for no reason

      • culpritus [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        The plot is a really convoluted mess that exists only to show black-on-brown super violence that is resolved via a strange truce between the monarchs of the factions after they spend a long time trying to kill each other. I didn't watch it too closely.

        • Remicita [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          So are all of Marvel's advanced super sci fi poc countries also despotic monarchies where u become king by beating up the other guy

          • SaniFlush [any, any]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Dr. Doom's country would be one of those too if Disney and Sony weren't having a custody battle over him.

            • Remicita [she/her]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Where does Dr. Doom live

              Is it called like Doomistan or something terrible

              • SaniFlush [any, any]
                ·
                2 years ago

                Latveria. He's also Romani, which would really change the political landscape a LOT

                • NPa [he/him]
                  ·
                  2 years ago

                  Critical support to the Romani People's Republic of Latveria and their struggle against the pogroming Latverian White Army :cat-com:

                  His exploits attracted the attention of the dean of Empire State University, who sent someone to the camp.[52] Offered the chance to study in the United States, Von Doom chose to leave his homeland and his love, Valeria, behind.

                  nevermind he's leading a colour revolution :deeper-sadness:

          • culpritus [any]
            ·
            2 years ago

            I don't watch enough of them to say for certain, but I'd imagine that's a safe bet. Anyone able to chime in on this?

            • RangeFourHarry [they/them]
              ·
              2 years ago

              He’s king cause he’s a mutant and is effectively immortal. There’s no trial by combat cause the king never dies

      • LENINSGHOSTFACEKILLA [he/him]M
        ·
        2 years ago

        Watched it last night and it floored me how fucking insane the plot is.

        Namor goes to Shuri and is like, "hey, this is proof they are coming for us. Its here. Its already happening. Can we form a defensive alliance and be ready for when the shit really kicks off?"

        And Shuri is immediately like "omg you're insane, you want to kill people?"

        And then Namor basically just says "Yes."

        • DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I haven't bothered watching the second one, but I'm both unsurprised and flabbergasted that they couldn't come up with a better reason for Atlantis and Wakanda to throw down than the usual libfest of "killing people trying to colonize you is bad, actually :^)"

          Like, those two have fought on and off in the comics (and also against Latveria) for eons; make them fight over resources or tech that the rest of humanity can't even fathom or something.

        • Ligma_Male [comrade/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          yeah it started really cool with the queen owning france and pointing out the gross hypocrisy of the west but then it turned into a marvel movie

  • Aryuproudomenowdaddy [comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Is this like the British being mad about RRR. Didn't France collect reparations from Haiti for freeing themselves from slavery until a few years ago?

        • culpritus [any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I thought the debt was still ongoing, it was just owned by private banks now.

          • MoreAmphibians [none/use name]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Haiti paid off the last of it's original debt to Citibank in 1947. Haiti's current foreign debts are just normal neo-colonial debts now.

            Haiti's debts were always to banks. France demanded basically immediate payment of reparations for the farms and slaves that Haiti stole and forced Haiti to take out loans from French banks at high interest rates to repay that debt. This is what people mean when they talk about Haiti's "double debt". The first debt is the reparations that Haiti had to pay to France and the second is the interest payment and fees that Haiti had to pay to the banks.

            • culpritus [any]
              ·
              edit-2
              2 years ago

              Thanks for the accurate details. I'll file away the factoid that Haiti paid the equivalent of $21 Billion USD (2004 value) for doing a slave revolt, and this payment continued well after slavery had been made illegal in all the debt-holding nations.

              • MoreAmphibians [none/use name]
                ·
                2 years ago

                There's one more weird part I forgot to mention. France got kicked out of Haiti and definitively lost the war then they came back 20 years later to demand reparations for the war that they lost. War reparations are normally paid by the loser to the winner but I guess things are different when you're a Great Power.

    • TheLepidopterists [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      IIRC, they sold Haiti's "debt" to Citibank; of course this doesn't make France better, just also makes Citibank also culpable.

      EDIT: I oughta read the thread before commenting.

  • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I guess I have to watch a marvel movie now

    Don't. It pits two Indigenous communities against each other while glossing over the fact that the side who is afraid of the western world was legitimized by the scene being discussed and some of the others that followed.

      • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        X = The State is literally being the bad guy but because the Characters critiquing The State use violence the audience doesn't need to be concerned with it.

        It's actually rather interesting because

        spoiler

        the "good" cia guy is now on the run and the US gov was very open about wanting to coup Wakanda, as well as the cia director associating with the "bad" Captain America wannabe. So the US is kinda being setup as a bad guy, but it's almost certainly going to lead to a "bad actors" plot point like with Hydra in SHIELD. Probably shape-shifting aliens or something.

        • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          also maybe a plotline about shape shifting green aliens secretly running the government in the middle of an antisemitic revival is not a responsible narrative to promote.

          Like How Shakespeare made that play about witches to be performed for the king who had thousands of people tortured to death on suspicion of witchcraft

        • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          The USAF glowy space lady jesus one was before the big endgame offramp so I saw it.

          Yes. They introduced shape shifting aliens in that one. You can't even make a joke about this series.

    • World_Wario_II [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Journalists need to be whipped and flayed whenever they use the word “slam” to describe anything besides an actual physical collision. Whenever you read it you just know it’s gonna be a whole goddamn article written about a tweet

  • World_Wario_II [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I’m sure the moral of the story is that Wakanda should still continue to provide the resources to the colonizer countries, just through a layer of neo-colonial compradors instead of directly through colonial extraction

  • Ziege_Bock [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    It be sick if there was a black panther movie that was just a Wakandan general trying to do a coup or color revolution. Like, it's flying gunboats and forcefields and lasers intercut with the most boring paint dying on the wall scenes of M'Baku of the Jabari tribe talking with French economists about integrating the CFA Franc into the Wakandan economy. The Super villain is Charles Schwab talking about making Wakandans into "stakeholders" in the global economy, and funding Wakandan youtube channels that ask "why do we have a king, again?"

      • Wertheimer [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I've only seen a few African cinema classics but can recommend most of them.

        Sembene and Djibril Diop Mambety are the two titans of Senegalese cinema. You can find several of their films here: http://rarefilmm.com/tag/senegal/Sembene's other films are well-regarded; Black Girl is a masterpiece, and was the first sub-Saharan African film to be released worldwide. Mambety's Touki Bouki is iconic but it's a difficult watch because of its animal cruelty and homophobia. I haven't seen any of his other films yet. His niece, Mati Diop, is a successful filmmaker as well (Atlantics). Here's a nice essay on Mambety and the golden years of Senegalese cinema: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2988-touki-bouki-mamb-ty-and-modernity

        Soleil O is an excellent anti-colonialist / anti-racist film by a Mauritanian-French director, with a brilliant lead performance by Robert Liensol.

        Sambizanga is an Angolan film set during the War of Independence.

        Check out solidaritycinema.org , too - lots of great anti-colonialist films there for download.