Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s Namor Brings Native Rage to the MCU

They don’t know what Namor is. Black Panther: Wakanda forever emphasizes this about its villain, a mysterious superhuman man who emerges from the depths of the ocean to threaten the film’s heroes.

“His people,” Winston Duke’s M’Baku says in one of the film’s most memorable lines, “don’t call him General or King. They call him K’uk’ulkan: hairy snake god.” It’s a level of mystery that Namor lives up to until he first speaks out on his own, sneaking into the hidden lands of Wakanda. In less than a minute, Tenoch Huerta’s performance added to the myth, imbuing his first short monologue with wonder, curiosity, history, and threat. He’s like nothing we’ve seen before. He is K’uk’ulkan, as his people call him. He too, as he told Queen Ramonda, Namor towards his enemies.

This is a strong, first hint that there is an aspect to Namor that is both different and familiar, an aspect that, upon close scrutiny, will derive the character’s cartoon fury. comics he’s based on and rooted in something real. Like some of the other good villains in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he’s angry about something important, both to the other characters in the movie and to the real-world cultures he’s in. are supporting. And like the best villains in any novel, he simply cannot avoid the effects of causes that should not have been forgotten.

Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther films are not just adaptations, but reinventions. This is necessary: ​​Much of the comic book source material is ill-suited to modern sensibilities, trading stereotypes and dated hoaxes in dire need of an update. Along with the re-launch of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze’s popular comic series, Coogler’s film gives Black Panther and his kingdom a creative and radical refresh, while at the same time. highlights much of what was already there, to make Wakanda the more perfect African diaspora’s dream.

What? Wakanda forever with Namor and his people is something more radical. In the Marvel comics – where Namor, also known as the Sub-Mariner, was one of the publisher’s first esper explorers – the origin of the character lies in Atlantis, where he was born the son of a human explorer and an Atlantean princess. Inheriting the throne of the mythical kingdom, Namor will quickly uphold his Atlantean legacy after witnessing the surface world’s neglect of the ocean, with superpowers to back up his frequent threats to Earth’s land-lovers.

Namor comics are also an absolute pill. He’s arrogant, rude, arrogant, fully believes in his superiority and isn’t afraid to tell you. This means he’s happy to be part of a story and why he’s been around for almost a century. It’s also really pointless: This arrogance doesn’t necessarily stem from anything; it’s merely who he is.

All this is different in Wakanda forever. The film’s biggest twist is a small one: it’s revealed that vibranium, the mysterious metal that powers Wakanda’s technology and economy, exists somewhere else on Earth. This new version of Namor comes from Talokan, an underwater nation founded on and around this other source of vibranium. Midway through the film, Namor explains that Talokan dates back hundreds of years, when European colonists arrived on the Yucatán peninsula, bringing with them a disease that spread among indigenous peoples like wildfire.

Image: Marvel Studios

In desperation, a tribe discovers a plant modified by vibranium that, when consumed, turns them into superhuman water-breathers, allowing and forcing a retreat to the ocean floor. Namor’s mother was among the mutated, and it changed her pregnancy, turning her son into a mutant: He had wings on his legs and distinctive pointed ears. along with people’s newfound powers, while preserving their natural skin color and ability to breathe air. His people imbued his birth with divine meaning, a link between their past and future was made in the flesh, and the boy was destined to be king.

Here’s the subtle difference that changes everything: Namor, unlike the late T’Challa or the people he survived, represents and leads a nation born of loss, and loss. that shows everything he does and believes in — and also allows the character to rise above his complicated four-color origin and become The perfect foil for a movie about grief. It also gives him a specific, powerful kind of rage that isn’t present on the comic page, its origins. Wakanda forever presented briefly but in painful detail.

Namor, now a boy, returns to the face of the earth with the others to bury his mother in the land she was born in, only to find it settled by Spanish colonists, who enslaved the natives of the region. In a fit of rage, the boy and Talokanil ravaged the colony, killing everyone and reinforcing his hatred for the surface world. He takes his name from the anguish of the colonists he kills: In Wakanda foreverNamor is a compound word of the Spanish phrase sinful loveor “without love” – ​​a name for his enemies to fear.

Image: Marvel Studios

In it, Namor became a metaphor for the Latino community, a vast mosaic of people and cultures united by colonial plunder and the obliteration of nations. native. He embodies indigenous backgrounds largely excluded from the world, a quiet but powerful rage that is one of the few things in common that a distinct and diverse ethnic group has. His anger comes from the bones of the Earth and the fragmentary cultural memory of Latin America. No different than Killmonger before him, he is an extreme response to the fundamental crimes that make today’s prosperity – and injustice – possible.

In the comics, Namor has a catchphrase. It’s classic comic book content, the kind of thing he screams when he walks into a dramatic entrance or throws a punch so loud that it breaks the boundaries of a single page. “Imperius Rex!” he bellows, a phrase roughly translated as “emperor king”, a meaningless shout of his own title, like a producer about to lower the beat on a hip-hop track. Read enough comics and you’ll cheer whenever it’s used.

Wakanda forever not the genre of film in which that quote is meant, but it finds a moment at the end of the film, when Namor is defeated in battle and falls before making a choice about how his fight will go. he will finish.

Image: Marvel Studios

He doesn’t say it in Latin, but in his people’s Yucatán Maya, a language director Ryan Coogler notes, doesn’t have those words. Literally translated, the phrase is a bit different: “eternal king.”

“He was made king before he was even born; It was something he had no choice about, it was fate,” Coogler said. “He will live a very long life. And it’s his job to make sure that he sees that the Talokan are so prosperous that they never have to worry about anything else.”

It is a beautiful dream for a world that no longer exists, a perfect omission for a man who will always be king. It was the dream of both K’uk’ulkan and Namor, the god of his people and the man without love. That’s exactly what you say when your people have been forgotten by the world, and you’re ready to flood every last acre to bring back their memories.