I know I harp on this a lot, but y'all really need to understand that fictional characters, like real-live people, sometimes lie about their intentions and motivations. Killmonger's intent was not to "liberate marginalized people." You can tell because, when he had power, he did not do that.
Killmonger's intent was to destabilize a foreign government during an election cycle as he was trained to do by the CIA. His intent was to do imperialism with himself as the Emperor. He secured his power base and began preparing an invasion force.
This isn't reading between the lines. Everett Ross *literally says this in the film.* He also mentions that Killmonger served in Afghanistan and "wrapped up confirmed kills like it was a video game," and I know 20+ years post-9/11 we might be inclined to see that as a compliment, but it's not.
There *is* a character in Black Panther whose genuine intent is to liberate marginalized people: Nakia. We're introduced to her using her privilege as a Wakandan to liberate marginalized people. She uses her proximity to T'Challa to convince him to liberate marginalized people. Eventually he agrees.
I'm not going to be so blunt as to say "Killmonger was Right" is a discourse born out of misogyny/misogynoir, but there's something suspicious about how it's able to notice when a woman is used as a prop in a man's story ("Killmonger's dead gf") but not when she's the story's moral compass.
Anyway, like, you all realize that Donald Trump ran on "drain the swamp, end corruption in Washington" and once in office immediately installed all his friends and family as cronies, right? Like, did you also think that was the writers trying to keep you from being sympathetic with him?
Now, does this kind of thing happen in media? Absolutely. There is bad, lazy, and sometimes blatantly anti-revolutionary writing all over. I think Falcon and Winter Soldier is an infinitely better example of this kind of thing, even though it also illustrates stuff that *does actually happen*.
I recently watched "Death and Other Details," a fun whodunnit miniseries that turns into a conspiracy thriller that eventually kind of ends up down this rabbithole and left a really sour taste in my mouth. It's a real phenomenon!
But Killmonger? Thanos? Vulture? These ain't it, dawg.
Okay, so, I'm going to dig into this, but to be honest, I have zero interest in any kind of back-and-forth with that creep. So here goes that long-overdue block, and maybe it's time we all did a quick little walk down memory lane about why we unfollowed him back on the Bad Site.
So, in order:
I know Killmonger is not a real person. Which is why if we're going to discuss him as a character, we have to consider him *as a character*, not as a person who exists as a series of events along a timeline in reality, but as a construct who is fully formed before the film begins.
We have to consider that his words, his actions, and what others say about him *are all deliberate choices*. While we can absolutely interrogate those choices and the reasoning behind them, we need to take them as a whole, not as though each event in the film was written and filmed in sequence.
The implication of these arguments—"oh no, the audience is going to sympathize too much with this character at this point because of the things they've been saying, we need to have them do an evil thing here to show they're evil" often reflect this simplistic view of storytelling.
As though they didn't go into this story knowing that Killmonger was going to be the villain, as though his name isn't "Killmonger," as though they surprised themselves at some point and were unable to rewrite or re-record his monologues so they had to add in some new scene. It's ludicrous.
When we analyze Killmonger, we need to consider more than just what he says about his motivations, which is the entire thrust of my original thread. People put way too much stock into the flowery self-serving speeches of the villains as though that's not a tactic as old as narrative.
Which leads to point two: The movie *doesn't undermine Killmonger's point about liberating marginalized people*! It validates it! The end of the movie is Wakanda revealing themselves and sharing their technology to help liberate marginalized people. But they're doing so *without being imperialists*.
Is that a counter-revolutionary message? Absolutely. And if you want to excoriate the corporate capitalists at Disney for that, go right ahead! The movie ultimately takes a more center-left approach to liberation than what Killmonger's rhetoric suggests.
But *Killmonger's rhetoric is false*.
We know this because he says so. We know this because of the actions he takes. We know this because of the things others say about him. He doesn't liberate people, he installs himself as an absolute monarch and *explicitly wants to build an empire* under his boot heel.
These are fictional characters, but again, there is a real-world precedent for people who publicly proclaim revolutionary, even leftist goals and values and ideals, but when given the reins of power, use that power in imperialist and totalitarian ways! Sometimes they're also CIA-trained!
The part that suggests that you don't know how movies work is when you ignore all the explicit text that foreshadows and explains this, that shows this to be entirely consistent with Killmonger's character and methods, and claim that it's "shoehorned" or "dissonant." It's not! It's the point!
People find it "dissonant" because they fall for Killmonger's schtick. They think the story he tells and the ideals he espouses represent the "real" Killmonger, so any actions he takes that seem at odds with those espoused goals are somehow illegitimate. But the "real" Killmonger is *what he does*.
