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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Wakanda, as a character, isn't exactly asserting itself either...Peasants are going by wooden boat while the royalty flies above them in tech-future spaceships.

If one thing is disappointing for me, it's this

Wakanda is a fairytale land so I guess there could be a worry that digging in too deep would undermine it's ability to function as such for everyone but it does feel very empty after two movies now.

A lot was made of the idea of a pristine, uncolonized African country but they haven't really explored it from the ground view.

I actually don't mind a deliberately archaizing nation with schizo-tech distribution...if you explore that concept*. There's lots to draw on there: Wakanda is one of the few left nations that actually seems to believe its supernatural founding myth (with good reason apparently) and apparently has had an unbroken continuous government longer than anyone else, despite what appears to be a highly rickety system of succession. This sort of thing could lead over-valuing of the past, a bunch of people who constantly LARP their ancestors' lives and have grown so indolent that they don't worry about the costs of this.

All of this is weird and absurd and would be fun to see an attempt to condense this into something that made sense.

But it's just sort of a potemkin country instead.

Oh well, this is why god made rational fanfiction.

* This is also my problem with their military. I don't mind that it's incredibly dumb; I mind that they don't explain this dumbness as a product of them being incredibly sheltered and coddled. Even worse: people keep telling us it isn't incredibly dumb.

A lot was made of the idea of a pristine, uncolonized African country but they haven't really explored it from the ground view.

I actually don't mind a deliberately archaizing nation with schizo-tech distribution...if you explore that concept*.

These sound like heavily mistake theory descriptions.

If all that stuff was put in there for wokeness, outside the process of normal storytelling, you wouldn't expect the concepts to be explored seriously.

I'm not really a mistake theorist on this, but I think the reason is more that it's a Marvel movie and exploring stuff like that isn't really their point anyway.

After all: Asgard isn't that deep either and it isn't a particularly "woke" region like Wakanda and has had more screentime. Deeper, but still.

I don't think any part of the MCU answers the GRRM question of "what's Aragorn's tax policy?"

(Though, obviously, some things that are "unrealistic" are in service of wokeness. Like the need for Wakanda to be the premier nation in the world as opposed to just a bunch of smart, lucky isolationists)

In the first film to feature Wakanda, the shepherds in poverty outside the invisible gates were actors as much as shepherds. It looks like the country has car-free cities and fast transit for people to get to their reed boat’s dock in the morning for work. They seem to deliberately have chosen a philosophy which eschews all the bad things about cities (anything which causes alienation) and embraces only the good: economic concentration and opportunity.