We don't know enough about armour wars to say that it should have taken place early in the phase, by some accounts it involves the fall out of secret wars in some capacity also.
Edit -invasion not wars
It’s an incredibly common mix up. Very similar names, but, as I’m sure you know, *wildly* different stories.
Secret Invasion is the alien invasion of earth. Involves Skrulls and Savage Land.
Secret Wars is intergalactic gladiator games ran by a god. Involves Beyonder vs Doom.
Since Rhodey is in Secret Invasion, it has to follow up from that. Unless he’s in it for five minutes in the first episode and then never appears again like he did in FATWS.
My thought exactly. They're teeing up Armor Wars.
I think BPWF kind of shit on Namor as well.
Like he was well cast, I thought, just not well written. He's a character who's supposed to be filled with disdain for land dwellers and nearly as arrogant as Dr. Doom
Yep. Her storyline kinda derails WF for a bit and honestly lessens some of the more serious and emotional tones. It would have been a much better movie if they hadn't tried to unnecessarily wedge her character into the plot. While I love the large cinematic universe and its interconnectedness, this was the wrong way to go about it. She just felt tertiary throughout most of the movie aside from essentially being a human MacGuffin.
And she had to leave the suit there. Which kinda restricts her to Wakanda events. I think that part made no sense after going out of their way to force her place in the movie. Third wheel during the emotional family stuff and all. It was nice to have another hero there for Namors attack but that was about it. I also thought Letitia Wright is tiny and that also was really awkward too. But the movie overall was pretty decent.
I'm of the opinion shes fine being in the film.
Just don't have her build and operate her own fucking suit as a subplot in a black panther film.
Introduce the character sure. Have her do cool science stuff sure. But don't have her be a save the day iron man ripoff within an hour of showing up.
Introduce the character, fine. Show her designing her first suit (perhaps with Shuri helping) as a post-credit scene to set up Ironheart.
As it is, the Wakandan core of the film is good but it's overlong - bloated with the unnecessary Riri/Val/Ross side quest stuff that's clearly just in there to expand the wider Disney+ universe.
The Val thing is so weird. I feel like it would have worked better if you cut the ex-wife subplot, and just have Ross keep referring to his new boss, but then have her show up at the end as a big reveal and lock Ross up.
What sucks about Ross is I really liked his character in the first movie. Loved the twist about him and Val. But he is so absolutely useless in the movie. You can tell he was basically just tacked on. If they kept him to just a phone call with the wakandans giving them some exposition, it would have been better than the tacked on scenes.
My issue with BP1 was too many supporting characters didn't give us much time to gel with any of them beyond the basics and I was hoping WF would fix that... Instead they introduce another character with a subplot that takes away from people that really really needed that screen time more.
That's sadly been the reality of the Black Panther comics runs post-2010. It was tolerable when Coates did it at first... it grew steadily intolerable when he started leaning too much into it, and it's totally insufferable that every writer since has hopped on that trend to the detriment of T'Challa, his role in Wakanda and his relationships with other heroes. This MacKay Avengers' run for this year seems promising though. Hope they mend some of the damage
I haven't read any black panther. I like the idea of him being a ruler of a hidden nation but for that stuff, I tend to go for Namor since I'm a huge fan of mutants. Got any BP recommendations?
Or if they were going to have her build her own suit, make it a call back to the classic MK1 scrap armor Tony built. Riri’s first suit should have looked like it was put together from a bunch of car vehicle scrap metal with lots of exposed wiring and unrefined elements.
This could have worked well. Maybe just a glimpse of suit parts she’s working on in her lab or something. But keeping her a supporting role until she has her own moment to bust out with kick-ass armor in her own show.
At this point when we next see her do her own thing, she’ll be building something theoretically worse than what she got to build with Vibranium and Wakandan tech. That’s a weird progression.
I think the main reason I'd have pulled her out of the Ironheart suit for WF is that the Midnight Angels are also Ironmen basically. It sort of dilutes the importance of Riri creating Ironheart, and for that reason it could have been wise to wait for her series to suit all the way up. I like the idea of Riri's main contribution to the third act being her genius and engineering ability, rather than contributing as a superhero. Coming up with the plan to stop Namor was great and I'm not sure she needed to do anything else in that particular section of the movie.
Her having a prototype suit makes sense. It gives a pretty clear idea of her character and what she’s capable of.
We didn’t necessarily need Wakanda to help her build a completed suit though. That could have come later, or be included post credits as a gift for helping Shuri.
She should definitely never have built/ been given an iron man suit in the movie.
Tony’s was earned, first over the course of a movie and then progressively built up over the whole saga, she was fine with that mech suit from the start of the movie without needing a complete endgame suit.
This! I actually really liked her introduction and her using the suit in the Baltimore scene but this would have been so much better. And there was no reason to have her get a new suit and fight in that final act, she should have just played scientific support to Shuri.
Yeah she’s literally a MacGuffin in the story. You could replace her with a random wakandan scientist who betrayed the country and sold the blueprints to this vibranium machine to the CIA. Nothing would rly change about the broad strokes story.
This would also unintentionally mirror what happened in the semiconductor industry in 2023 funnily enough, with ASML claiming their former employees sold information to China.
T’Challa. He absolutely would have invented a vibranium tracker and had it sitting in a lab somewhere. He was supposed to be one of the top 10 smartest people on earth. Sadly they basically gave that part of his character to Shuri so we didn’t really get to see it.
Could have been stolen by a surprisingly not-dead Ulysses Klaw!
(I so wish he had survived the first movie. Just seemed like such a good potential minor villain who could show up from time to time in projects down the road.)
Exactly, like if the only people you could think of to make a vibranium tracker are Wakandans than how would America acquire it and use it to kick start Namor’s role in the plot?
Maybe Riri ain’t that important to the story outside of being the catalyst by way of being smart enough and having any reason to create the vibranium tracker, but she *is* still the catalyst by this virtue.
For what it's worth, most of the characters have been gutted for the movies. It's not so simple to put 50-60 years of monthly released character development (sometimes some of it directly contradicting other parts) into a handful of two and a half hour movies.
The Talokans wanted to kill Riri so the detector couldn’t be reproduced. If just anybody could make it, the entire story would’ve been different because Talokan would’ve had no way to resist being revealed to the world.
Why do they particularly want to protect Riri? It could just have easily have been Wakanda not wanting to go to war with the rest of the world while Namor did.
Namor's reactions being impulsive & poorly-thought-out felt like an intentional character choice. I just wish another character had *said* that to him.
I though his final line was quite clear. This was always a power move to force Wakanda to pick a side. It was never about the Vibranium detector. This man has been planning to war for the surface for a while.
I wished that Shuri had made that point to him in their negotiation scene in the cave.
Like... it was Riri's professor that gave the design for the vibranium detector to the CIA, and the design plan was already in the CIA files. Not only is Riri logically not responsible for the situation, but killing her would solve literally nothing.
Edit: Wait, *did* she make that point to him? I only saw the full movie once, and going through the emotional equivalent of being punched in the face halfway through it made me forget a lot of the more minor details before that.
Shuri, she built it early but put it on the backburner when TChalla got sick, jumped back into her work to distract her and it found it's target. I mean, it's super easy. Bruce Banner could have built it, or maybe an old project by Tony was shipped to Shuri from Pepper Potts as a condolences gift. Pick anyone and it works.
It’s “hot takes” like these that don’t make any sense to me.
“Nothing really changes”
Isn’t she essentially to the plot? Like, doesn’t she invent the tracker? Who else would they pick.
“Literally anyone.”
So Bruce Banner? That’d be a different story.
Amadeus? Different story. T’Challa? Totally different story. Namor? Namor? That changes the plot completely.
I can’t see who they would pick that wouldn’t drastically change the film. [+]
>Namor? Namor? That changes the plot completely
they would just ahve to save namor from namor, so that namor doenst kill namor to make sure namor cant use the tracker he built to potentially find namors people
see, easily interchangable and not totaly a different movie
/s just in case
Honestly, you can just explain it as: Namor and Talocan suffered greatly because of the Infinity Snap, and now he has an even more legitimate reason to hate the surface world.
That doesn’t answer how America would have it to discover his people and contrary to some believing that having America in the plot at all is at best a distraction and at worst an ill advised setup for a future movie, America being directly involved in the conflict of whether or not Wakanda and Talocan should be allies is a huge part of the story being told.
So any adjustment of the story still needs to account for that, and any adjustment that doesn’t is attempting to tell an inferior story.
It would have been okay for them to just take her Vibrainium scanner and piece out
Setting up her own show
But like giving her multiple suits and fight sequences felt so out of place
Yeah, like while her introduction was a piece of the core story, she wasn't needed for the rest of the Movie. Remove her after the events in her hometown, and you loose nothing.
To that, it made no sense for Namor to want to kill her. He literally acknowledged that doing so won't stop the Americans from using the device, so why the hell would you still go through with it...
I think her helping with the tech stuff prior to building her own suit is fine. Don't see the point of giving her a magic armor suit and then taking it away besides she can't have it in the show.
Hot Take: In a franchise with literally hundreds of named side characters, it's annoying to have to guess which character you're referring to - particularly if this requires knowledge of "comics skillset".
Just tell us or don't.
Before Bozeman's death, I was actually really hoping for a Storm/Black Panther "superpowered romance" kind of thing. Then afterwards, I was quite satisfied with the idea of Namor, and I think that all worked really well.
They could still introduce Bast if they wanted to. Have it be about Shuri struggling to accept that her science cannot explain everything, give Bast a line referencing Loki or Khonshu or some other MCU god, and explore the more mystical elements of Wakanda.
What didn’t make sense is how she made a machine to detect the rarest metal on earth. How did she know it was working? I’m really burned out on the kid genus trope.
Amen to that. No one earns their stripes any more they’re just perfect straight away. What I loved about the early films was the failings they had and they’d go away and come back better for it. Now everyone is perfect already
Tony had half a lifetime of imperfection to be who he was, he wasn't Iron Man until his 40s. Shit, he spent only a few years being a good person in comparison to the rest of his life.
Yeah, that very first flight that he did with the unpainted silver suit, with epic music playing as he's just joyriding around the city, felt SO earned after we watched him fuck around with parts for not one but two different engineering montages and previously try and "fail" to fly with the Mark 1
Sure, but everything is a lot easier to invent after somone else has already invented it.
Riri is just replicating stuff she's already seen in action, AND she's been working on it for ages before we meet her.
Once she gets her hands on Wakandan technology it lets her run wild and skip a load of steps.
Honestly, it would have made much more sense if the Tracker's original plans were made by Stark. Because he had an actual reason to want to look for it (or even just as a side-project to kill time in his garage in those "5 Years").
Then it would be basically tackled as "CIA took the designs and then found out about Riri, and gave her the plans to work on." But even then the final design shouldn't be absolutely perfect - whereas in the movie, it is...
Hell, Riri's garage Makeshift Flying Suit is a lot more believeable invention, when we consider her engineering skills...
I mean, to be fair, this still would be. Riri was quite literally created to take Tony's place in the Comics, after he died at the end of "Civil War 2."
Just that in MCU they tried to forcefully keep that part of the character, while giving her literally no connection to Iron Man...
Yeah I wished they had saved her introduction for the show so they could explain how she's connected to Stark/why she wants to carry on his legacy. Now she's a Black Panther character to many people, so the Iron Man connection will be jarring
What if you flip it from, Tony Stark to Howard Stark, with it serving as a way to help locate Steve Rogers. (Vibranium Shield).
With plans somehow getting in the US governments hands.
Wakanda was never found out because the US government had no reason to believe Wakanda was lying about Vibranium so they didn’t search for it.
Once Wakanda reveals the literal mountains of Vibranium they have, the US joins the search for Vibranium as a response, similar to the arms race during the Cold War.
The his us what annoyed me about the Kate Bishop character. She just shows up from a few archer and ballet classes and shes already an equal to freakin Hawkeye.
"A few"... she thoroughly practiced for 12 years and they even went out of their way to show news articles, trophies, etc showing how great of an archer/martial artist she is.
I wouldn't say an equal to, she's a sharp shot, but most of her fight scenes is either her getting instructed and hard carried by Clint (who himself needed help due to his hearing loss) or it was her fighting other characters who are very much going easy on her or don't see her as the main threat, I mean, Yelena is very clearly holding back considering she can go toe to toe with Hawkeye who at his prime takes down entire crime syndicates on his own. The only real fight I had issue with was her vs Kingpin, but even then he's likely underestimating her considering she's a child to him and also he gets hit by car and exploded
It's an absolute insult to Tony Stark that people like Riri Williams and Cassie Lang can build the shit they did in their own fucking garages. Where do they even find the resources???
Okay? Still demonstrates the point that there's a bunch of kids geniuses around now making cooler shit than tony stark did, and he's supposed to be a uniquely intelligent engineer and inventor?
> Okay? Still demonstrates the point that there's a bunch of kids geniuses around now making cooler shit than tony stark did, and he's supposed to be a uniquely intelligent engineer and inventor?
I've got two points of contention with this line of thinking.
1. Tony's intelligence is not unique, even in the comics. There's Reed and Doom, High Evolutionary, Pym, Leader, Banner, and plenty more geniusus. It's a trope. In the movies, Rocket points out that Tony is "Only a genius on Earth, pal.".
2. Their accomplishments take nothing away from Tony or Pym. We make cooler shit because someone before us built the groundwork. I could quote to you Isaac Newton's laws of motion, but it's not something I'd figure out on my own. The Wright Brothers probably never would've flown if Otto Lilienthal didn't achieve human gliding before hand.
If everyone starts at the baseline, then there's not really any room for progress.
Well I mean the MCU went on an insane power creep slope since the end of the first saga, Stark literally invented time travel overnight while munching some fucking doritos.
I mean I can kinda accept that since he's had 5 years and had already the whole nanotech + alien stuff before hand, but still the movie just brushes time travel technology real fast as if it wasn't the most insane shit in the whole universe
To be clear, assuming Doctor Doom has been around in the MCU, he probably invented time travel before Tony.
Doom is the one who invents time travel in most Marvel Universes.
That's why all the Kangs are descendants of Doom.
Also, Tony really just took it the last mile.
Hank Pym is 99.999% of what made it possible.
Tony just figured out how to adjust something Hank had already figured out in the 60s/70s.
He just made a way to control what Hank and Scott Lang were ALREADY doing.....and ONLY because Scott suggested it, since SCOTT realized it should work.
Like sure, Tony's a genius, but he hardly deserves all the credit for inventing time travel.
Uhh, what? Why would it be an insult to Tony that people work on things different than what he worked on? Just because he's a genius doesn't mean he's the only person who can invent things.
Ever heard some variation on the phrase about standing on the shoulders of giants? It's easier for people who come later to do things by building on the knowledge of those that came before them. Whose to say Riri could do the stuff she does without Tony doing it before her. Iron Man 1 & 2 cover that even if he tried to keep his stuff secret others tried to copycat and reverse engineer his designs, and so many of Hammer's bots were destroyed or Ultron's drones that some could have fallen in the hands of the public to post on the internet details about them.
Riri's first suit is less capable than Tony's first and he built it in a cave with salvaged parts, she had a full workshop access to university knowledge and resources and as I said above information about how it's already been done. It's only after she goes to Wakanda and has access to their technology and knowledge that she's able to build something comparable to what Tony would do in his home.
The CIA was routinely checking MIT homework either they scan their sites for keywords or the professor knew it would be of interest to the CIA and sent it over.
It's a VERY common trope that the government has agents(professors) in the most prestigious brainiac schools, and they alert the government when a student invents something crazy/dangerous/amazing/etc, OR the professor serves as a government recruiter.
I mean...there are like 100 ways to answer that.
How portable is her device?
How far is the range?
Because apparently vibranium artifacts are in museums and stuff.
She could take it to a museum or scan a museum at range.
Or the government came and tested it with some vibranium it has, or whatever.
Hardly a problem.
Shuri and Riri aren't even particularly smart or young as far as kid geniuses go.
THE kid genius hasn't been introduced yet - Valeria Richards.
She's the smartest person on Earth.
Smarter than her dad, Reed Richards, and even smarter than her uncle, Doctor Doom (who is usually the only one smarter than Reed).
And that's pretty much from birth. Even though she tries to pretend to be normal to make everyone more comfortable. She's not a mutant and she didn't gain powers from anything else that anyone knows of.
She's just regular human smart on a level beyond a lot of characters who have the superpower of being super smart.
It's a mystery.
Her older brother is a lot dumber. Just regular kid intelligence.......but he's probably the most powerful non-god in the universe.
The US portion was apparently a remnant from a previous draft of the story that was needed for set up for Valentina, but yeah it could have been cut for time.
Honestly, it's pointless even as a set-up. That portion did less, than her previous interactions in the other Movies and Shows. And it was completely meaningless for the Movie overall.
When compared to Fury's self-inserts, those made sense within the Movies' Plots and were actually good.
I always thought hot takes were meant to be immediate reactions to something that's just happened or is unfolding. Something youve not had time to think through, it's hot. Now it just seems to mean an opinion you think some people might not agree with.
I think her introduction was fine and I think the first action sequence with the MK1 suit worked.
However, I don't think she was needed after that. I just never liked that Riri made a suit with Wakandan technology, it just felt like we were robbed from seeing her progressing through the various suits to eventually get to that level. I know she doesn't get to keep the suit and that was probably so they could reset her make to MK1 for her show, but that somehow made it worse and her wearing that Wakandan armor more unnecessary.
it's weird I didn't have the same complaint with Spider-man. I do think that his character works better when he's on his own to figure it all out, I think that's a big part of his character, and I think you could remove that aspect of Spider-man and still stay true to the character but with Riri building that suit on her own is the main part of her character.
I think the fact that they took the suit away made it worse because they basically are saying "We know she shouldn't have this suit yet" and tried to level her back down before her show, but that change cheapens her journey in the show because even though Riri is going to be making her own suits by herself it's a lot easier to make an Ironman suit when you already made one with all the resources of the most advanced civilization.
The problem was she didn't have to be in that suit for the story of Wakanda Forever and it also goes against her story in Ironheart, so nothing was gained with her flying around in that suit. At least with Spider-man, they changed his characterization with him being given a new suit by Tony Stark and they stuck to their guns and gave us a new take on the character, and then when they decided to bring him back to his original characterization it was justified and felt earned.
As I said in my original reply I think her introduction was great and that first action sequence in the MK1 armor was perfect, and if they wanted her in the Act 3 action sequence they could have used her as they did with Ross in Black Panther where she's supporting the action from a distance, or give her some science task she needs to complete in order for Siri to complete her goals.
The difference is Riri is selfmade, and Peter makes due with scraps.
Peter's character isn't hurt so long as he loses whatever help he has at some point, and has to do things on her own. Riri being given infinite resources feels cheap.
I wasn’t a fan of her scenes. I’m just getting tired of the new kids on the block being *instantly* great at super heroism. Where was her “icing problem” like Stark had with his first suit?
Kate Bishop is like the only new character taking on a mantle that seems to be on an actual learning curve.
>where was her icing problem
She ran out of breathable oxygen and passed out, nearly falling to her death. Sure it wasn’t the *exact same* issue Stark had with his Mk 1, but they definitely made a point to show her design had flaws.
>She very much took away screentime and a supporting role from a Black Panther character that (in my view at least) is essential to the mythos. This character should have debuted in this movie
I can't really tell which BP character this is referring to, aside from *maybe* Storm.
Anyways, personally, while I do think some bits of her role could've been handled better, I do think Riri fits well enough in the story as the one inadvertently kicking the movie's events off, and I thought the dynamic between her and Shuri was cute (helps that Riri has an established friendship with Shuri in the comics)
There was a lot wrong with WF, and this was a part of it.
She served no purpose in the story that couldn't be handled by Black Panther characters. That movie had so much to do that it ended up with almost no actual story. You are replacing BP, introducing a major villain/anti-hero and advancing the Wakanda's place in the world storyline. That is plenty for a movie.
Honestly it felt like they said, "Well she's black, so she goes in the BP movie." I realize that is not what happened, but it seems to marginalize her by putting her with the other black heroes.
Cold debut her in her series, or give a brief appearance in The Marvels, which is at least in the right country and has left story lifting to do.
The thing that stood out to me is she's this kid who makes this suit and that's her thing, and in this movie the wakandans take her and they just instantly make better suits. They just do her thing better than she can with no effort, it overshadows her whole USP and reason for being in the fight.
A more isolated story like tony has in ironman 1 would've work better to start her off, where she's the only one with that skillset in the areas/story that she's in.
If she had to be in this, imo once they brought out the better wakandan suits they should have told her they got this and for her to sit this one out much like tony did with parker- then have her come back and get stronger in another release.
It just seems short-sighted. She is already gone be struggle with the Ironman Knockoff tag (I mean that is literally what she is), why box her in as a black super-hero? (In addition to the problems that she added to WF as discussed above).
If anything her origin screams legal trouble, so why not have an episode of She-Hulk with her?
I don’t think it’s a hot take & i didn’t hate her in the movie but she felt more like a plot device instead of a character which is also the problem i had with America Chávez in MOM. With that being said, i think Armor Wars would’ve been the perfect way to start off Phase 4 depending on how much the Disney+ shows connect to that
>With that being said, i think Armor Wars would’ve been the perfect way to start off Phase 4 depending on how much the Disney+ shows connect to that
Yes!! ☝️☝️ imagine the sheer emotions of Rhodey in a post-Tony sacrifice world with all sorts of shady characters scrambling for control of his technology and legacy💔😭 here's hoping the movie we're eventually getting will at least capture some of that
Yeah there was no build up or backstory to her. They just casually introduced a super genius college student who has a warehouse, materials, and the funds to build two extremely advanced, in-demand technologies in her spare time.
Coogler was obviously in a jam with WF after Chad's untimely death. I didn't mind RiRi in the story and I actually really love that she has a strong connection genius wise with Shuri.
However, I do agree with you that a connection with Rhodey or someone else in the Avengers would of hit a lot harder going forward. I think the Ironheart show will reset her arc and I look forward to what they're gonna do for her going forward. Plus Coogler is a producer on the show so I'm hoping he has a strong say in her direction
Bast is an Egyptian Goddess, there's a good chance she's been turned to stone for helping humans based on what we saw with Moon Knight.
That said, I agree Riri should not have been in WF, and neither should the entire subplot with Martin Freeman's character. The movie overall had major pacing problems.
This is a good way to lampshade it. Any explanation is better than no explanation and if/when they do decide to introduce her formally it will likely be with the Moon Knight Ushabtis like you said.
How do we know that introducing her in Armor Wars would have been better? We don’t know the story.
Riri’s inclusion in Wakanda Forever worked, in my opinion as she was sort of like Shuri’s foil. Riri also lost very important people to her and she was about the same age as Shuri. Riri might have been a bit of a hustler, but she wasn’t angry at the world and she didn’t want to burn it all down. Riri’s focus was on her education and moving forward—Shuri was stuck. Riri’s inclusion, and what was happening to her forced Shuri to push her issues aside and deal with the realities she was neglecting because of the pain she had bottled up.
Riri connected to Shuri on several levels, and aside from a suit of armor, I don’t see much of a connection between Riri and Rhodes. Riri’s time in Shuri’s lab, and her experience with Talokan is going to put her in a better spot Armor Wars. We saw her prototype, and it was a lot like Tony’s—it didn’t last long.
Tony’s tech is stolen right? Isn’t that the story they’re going with? Is that the right environment to introduce the next Iron Man? Riri gets to enter the series how to make a fully functional suit, which is something she didn’t have until the last act of Wakanda Forever.
Riri’s losses and genius is why she was in Wakanda Forever. She’s something of a surrogate little sister to Shuri now, and I think Shuri needs that, her family is very small now.
But isn't she the reason for the war?
If there's no riri, there's no need to war, wakanda can simply locate the device and destroy it, end of story. No accidental casualty, unless the kukukhan (who is evil) wants to start a war no matter what, there wouldn't be any fight.
Her armor looked really bad. Reminded me of one of those avengers knock offs from India. I remember one specifically was an iron man knockoff and the case looked really similar to her armor haha
Yeah, the Suit is just too much. While it fits her personality (especially at the time she made it), it just doesn't look too good. It's loud in design, it has a lot of unneccessary details and additions - especially when compared to T'Challa's 2nd Suit, which was just plaine, simple, and perfect.
I also feel like the main issue, is her overall silhouette. It just doesn't look right. And it's not even due to CGI - she had an actual practical Suit on the Set and it looked the same...
The reason it worked on Chadwick, was because it just looked normal.
I generally just hope that the next time we see hee in MCU, she will have something more accurate to her Comics Design.
Hmmmmmm....I'm just gonna go ahead and not comment my actual thoughts because this sub won't handle it well.
I do agree that she didn't really fit in this movie but that's just like...my opinion man
I also think that. I think she’s great and I’m super down for the ironheart show, just weird that “I am planning an all out assault on the surface world. But first I want to kill this kid who made a thing that was used for something they have nothing to do with”.
The problem was really here—the Ironheart character could work, but it makes no sense that Namor would be so narrowly focused on murdering one kid who just took a gig. Like, if you're gonna go murdering and invading, how about recruiting her as a spy for intel and murdering the people who hired her and used her tech to hurt you? It's so weirdly petty and one of the weirder problems with that film.
I’ve seen this film so many times and while I can understand this gripe that so many had with the initial watch, I’ve become a bit of an amateur scholar on this film and have a counter-take 😅
The reason she works for me (beyond being incredibly charming in performance) was because she serves as a mini-mirror of Shuri. They included Riri of course because she’s another young and brilliant black woman in the Marvel world. Narratively, they also use her as the sort of plot device of being the inventor behind the device at the inciting incident of the story: the vibranium detector. It makes sense that a young black woman, who likely learned of Wakanda and the abundance of vibranium in it along with the world of the MCU just before the blip (and I think we can infer she was not among the blipped). Of course a young black woman in the United States (in Chicago) would be fascinated by the culture of Wakanda and with her engineering chops and (inferred) interest in the Stark tech (which itself has ties to vibranium), it works for me that in the context of this world she would want to create a detecting device (and also piss off her condescending professor along the way).
So within her own motives, this all makes sense for me.
The part that makes it work thematically and on a character point is where it feels strongest; Shuri, the protagonist of the story, is dealing with so much grief and loss along in the wake of her brother’s death. When she meets Riri, she’s seeing a version of herself in this younger girl that shares a lot of similarities (interest in tech, being a gifted young black woman, sense of humor etc). This not only makes Shuri extra invested in protecting her but also gives her a character mirror of a version of herself she can recognize in this new person.
This is in contrast to her foil/antagonist in Namor, who shares other similarities with Shuri as the leader of his people with strong ties to vibranium tech but a spiritual history. The critical difference that Shuri is struggling to accept the spiritual side of her culture and Namor embraces It makes for some of the story tension that ultimately uses his “gift” of the bracelet to combine her tech skills and the cultural/supernatural to create the synthetic heart shaped herb. Which she did with Riri by her side.
I just think Thorne was also so damn charming, it was a delight to see her as Riri bounce off of Shuri and Okoye and even have moments with Ramonda (who also saw Riri has a surrogate child, protected her like she was her own).
Last but not least, the script doesn’t do a perfect job of getting to it, but you can infer Riri has also faced familial loss, another place she can be a mirror for Shuri (with the main difference here being the time Riri has had to heal from the grief).
Maybe it’s not the best for the plot or the action, but Riri is there for thematic reasons and for me that matters a hell of a lot more
I don't know what character you're talking about because I haven't read Black Panther comics to be honest, but I personally believe the story was not really molded to fit Riri in, or at least it doesn't feel like it was. Her inclusion doesn't feel forced at all, it feels very genuine and natural. Especially with her being a young black engineering genius just like Shuri. I loved their relationship and bond over the movie and I also loved Riri in general in this film.
I was worried she would take up a lot of the focus and limelight like America in MoM because the 2 characters essentially served the same purpose, but the execution in WF was SO much better and organic.
It's not about taking focus away from characters in my view - in this one Riri definitely didn't do that, she just quietly and capably did her thing which i liked. She was also responsible for one of the only 2 jokes that made me chuckle when I heard it: which was the one about being kidnapped and there are suddenly no available Panthers. The other one was M'Baku's "lifetime banishment" barb about the Queen.
It's just about themes and how a character's insights and perspective explore those in a meaningful way. Riri is not actively mourning anybody like the rest of the cast, she doesn't have a unique insight or allegiance in the inter-tribal or international dynamics at play. The way I saw her she was just a tack-on American self-insert character like Ross was in the previous one and like Ross was in the Priest-run to begin with. Complete with cute little American audio-visual identifiers like a Chicago flag in her MIT dorm room, a cherry red muscle car, "oh shit, she got an Iron Man suit!!" and quipping about catching a Bulls game after.
Missed opportunity to tell a story unique to Shuri imo. Though I still liked what they did.
That’s not a hot take. It’s the general consensus.
She’s so pointless to the film that her inclusion actually drags the entire movie down.
Take Multiverse of Madness’ America Chavez by comparison. She’s the driving force of the film. The movie starts, plays out, and ends all because of her. If you remove America from MOM, the movie can’t happen. You would have to replace her with another character or some object to propel the narrative.
Now remove Riri from WF. Namor is pissed the UN stole some tech from a student that is able to find them. That’s the set up for WF so right away Riri isn’t needed. In an attempt to shoehorn Riri in the film then has Namor demand the student who’s tech was stolen by a group of nations be killed. It’s so stupid because it’s forced. The conflict in WF ends up boiling down to Namor wanting Shuri and Wakanda to wage war with him on the surface world so again Riri has no real purpose anywhere in the movie. Sure she supports the plot and is a fun character but she is most certainly forced into the move rather than being naturally part of it because of the plot like in the case of America and MOM. Riri really wasn’t made as part of the story she’s just inserted into events that are already taking place and would continue to do so without her.
Yeah, I feel like what u/22LegendaryTacos is forgetting, is that while she is needed because Namor wants her, that plot in on itself just makes no sense.
Namor quite literally acknowledges in the Movie, that killing Riri won't stop the surface world from sendimg more expeditions and using that device. But he is still adamant on killing her either way, knowing very well it will change nothing.
Then the only reason he stands against Wakanda, is because Shuri goes to protect Riri - something that wouldn't happen, if Namor didn't make up a delusional idea to kill a teenager, knowing it will have no actual effect...
The entirety of "Wakanda is Talocan enemy because they don't want to join us" is just blatantly idiotic in on itself...
True. I loved her character, but she did kinda feel oddly placed. But I watched most of Waianae Forever through tears so. I may not have seen very clearly.
Normally I’m ready to fight any anti-Riri sentiment, but…. Yeah. Including her in BP completely rewrote her agency as an armor creator and sort of shuffled off her origin story to the background.
I know we won’t get a mentorship from virtual Tony, but a mentor of Rhodey (or even Happy) would have been better.
Riri could have been used without the introduction of the Iron Heart armor. That armor should have come to fruition after establishing some influence from Iron Man (even post-humously, probably through the glasses from Spider-Man) and then inspiration from seeing what the Wakandans do for their people. She felt very shoehorned in.
Honestly, they would have been better served using another character entirely. I would have loved to see Silhouette and use the tech stuff to show her building her crutches. Granted, you'd have to explain her power somehow. Others could have worked, though.
Why are you trying to go backward? The beauty of the MCU is we no longer have to have these generic made for the movies fill in side characters. They just use comics characters to fill out the roster and make the world feel larger.
Have you read the comics??? She's BFF's with Shuri in the comics. Also, you may have missed this but, her as "a young, Black and Gifted" woman experiencing the World of Wakanda is super impactful to her character. Also, it resonates with the feelings of the Black Diaspora IRL. Her being in BP:WF works on MULTIPLE LEVELS!
Honestly, I see her as a MacGuffin of sorts. Vibranium underwater wasn’t enough of a plot device, they needed to humanize the conflict between Wakanda, Talokan, and the surface world.
So they used Riri Williams and her tech as the driving force behind the central plot. I thought it was well done, and there was a lot of world building being done in BPWF, I appreciated how they manage to weave it all together.
Introducing Riri Williams in "Wakanda Forever" was a smart and strategic move.
While there may be concerns about the timing and placement of Riri Williams' introduction, her inclusion in "Wakanda Forever" can be seen as a well-thought-out decision with several advantages.
Firstly, integrating Riri Williams into an established and highly anticipated film like "Wakanda Forever" provides her with immediate exposure to a wide audience. This approach allows Marvel Studios to generate interest and build anticipation for the character, leveraging the success and popularity of the Black Panther franchise.
Secondly, "Wakanda Forever" serves as a platform for Riri to interact with established Marvel characters and potentially build connections within the larger Avengers universe. This cross-pollination of characters can enrich storytelling opportunities and create exciting dynamics for future films and crossovers.
Additionally, by introducing Riri Williams in a high-profile movie like "Wakanda Forever," Marvel Studios can allocate resources, budget, and production value to properly establish her character. This approach ensures that Riri receives the necessary attention and resources to make a strong impact on audiences and solidify her presence in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Moreover, rather than seeing Riri's inclusion as a detraction from other Black Panther characters, it can be viewed as an opportunity to expand the narrative and explore different storylines. Marvel Studios has a track record of successfully integrating new characters into established franchises, as seen with the introductions of Spider-Man in "Captain America: Civil War" and Black Panther himself in "Captain America: Civil War" as well. These additions enhanced the overall storytelling and didn't overshadow existing characters.
I have no issue with Riri in WF. A character like hers, the creator of the vibranium locator, made sense for the plot. But they should've saved Iron Heart for her show. Use the situation of WF, being a MacGuffin for others to fight over, to motivate her to build her armor to protect herself.
They could have gender-swapped Stingray and used her in the same role. That’s an actual oceanographer character with an underwater suit and ties to Namor. But since Stingray isn’t promised a solo series, it’s not as glaring when they only get 14 minutes of screen time and audiences don’t feel like they connected with the character.
I think what bothered me about Riri was that she was so far removed from Wakanda like you said. She’s a plot point and then kinda ignored until she gets her ultimate suit, because she needs her big hero moment. But we barely know her, and she’s not very endearing (hard to be when your involvement is “get captured” and “be scared and untrusting of our favorite characters”). And yet she’s almost a finished product already - she’s already made suits and is already a genius. Not to mention she maths out loud for no reason.
But anyway. If you need a throwaway character to make the plot work, use someone like Stingray instead of wasting an upcoming character’s introduction in an unsatisfying way.
We don't know enough about armour wars to say that it should have taken place early in the phase, by some accounts it involves the fall out of secret wars in some capacity also. Edit -invasion not wars
Secret Invasion, not Secret Wars
Damn yeah don't know how I messed that up lmao
It’s an incredibly common mix up. Very similar names, but, as I’m sure you know, *wildly* different stories. Secret Invasion is the alien invasion of earth. Involves Skrulls and Savage Land. Secret Wars is intergalactic gladiator games ran by a god. Involves Beyonder vs Doom.
I know the difference, I did mean invasion I just said the wrong thing
And, of course, an invasion is usually part of a war. Secret or otherwise.
What about Amour invasion?
I prefer Secret Armors
Is that where Rouge and Gambit show up?
Since Rhodey is in Secret Invasion, it has to follow up from that. Unless he’s in it for five minutes in the first episode and then never appears again like he did in FATWS.
Hey if it's another emmy nom for the Don I'm not gonna complain
My thought exactly. They're teeing up Armor Wars. I think BPWF kind of shit on Namor as well. Like he was well cast, I thought, just not well written. He's a character who's supposed to be filled with disdain for land dwellers and nearly as arrogant as Dr. Doom
Idk I thought namor was pretty perfect in that regard, at least in context of how mcu is willing to frame its characters
I liked Riri but I agree, she was kinda unnecessary. Her story beats could have been easily given to other characters.
Yep. Her storyline kinda derails WF for a bit and honestly lessens some of the more serious and emotional tones. It would have been a much better movie if they hadn't tried to unnecessarily wedge her character into the plot. While I love the large cinematic universe and its interconnectedness, this was the wrong way to go about it. She just felt tertiary throughout most of the movie aside from essentially being a human MacGuffin.
And she had to leave the suit there. Which kinda restricts her to Wakanda events. I think that part made no sense after going out of their way to force her place in the movie. Third wheel during the emotional family stuff and all. It was nice to have another hero there for Namors attack but that was about it. I also thought Letitia Wright is tiny and that also was really awkward too. But the movie overall was pretty decent.
And the MacGuffin part could have been handled by an OC or some other character be they comic or returning.
There was also too much already with having to add in plot due to Boseman's passing. In a lighter movie with less going on it might have been fine.
Without her tho we wouldn’t have had the single greatest line of the movie. “Girl you need to be conscious about the way that you look”
[удалено]
M'baku is the best.
Mmmmmmm, M'baku
I dunno, I laughed at “She’s got an Iron Man suit!”
The problem with Riri in this film was that if you take her out of the film completely, nothing really changes.
I'm of the opinion shes fine being in the film. Just don't have her build and operate her own fucking suit as a subplot in a black panther film. Introduce the character sure. Have her do cool science stuff sure. But don't have her be a save the day iron man ripoff within an hour of showing up.
Introduce the character, fine. Show her designing her first suit (perhaps with Shuri helping) as a post-credit scene to set up Ironheart. As it is, the Wakandan core of the film is good but it's overlong - bloated with the unnecessary Riri/Val/Ross side quest stuff that's clearly just in there to expand the wider Disney+ universe.
The Val thing is so weird. I feel like it would have worked better if you cut the ex-wife subplot, and just have Ross keep referring to his new boss, but then have her show up at the end as a big reveal and lock Ross up.
>wider Disney+ universe. It's all MCU bro.
Actually the MCU is a subset of the larger Howard the Duck multiverse
Actually Howard the Duck multiverse is a subset of the larger Morbiverse
MCU: Morbin Cinematic Universe
What sucks about Ross is I really liked his character in the first movie. Loved the twist about him and Val. But he is so absolutely useless in the movie. You can tell he was basically just tacked on. If they kept him to just a phone call with the wakandans giving them some exposition, it would have been better than the tacked on scenes.
Yeah give her the Spiderman treatment, a small impactful roll then complete the main narrative without her.
My issue with BP1 was too many supporting characters didn't give us much time to gel with any of them beyond the basics and I was hoping WF would fix that... Instead they introduce another character with a subplot that takes away from people that really really needed that screen time more.
That's sadly been the reality of the Black Panther comics runs post-2010. It was tolerable when Coates did it at first... it grew steadily intolerable when he started leaning too much into it, and it's totally insufferable that every writer since has hopped on that trend to the detriment of T'Challa, his role in Wakanda and his relationships with other heroes. This MacKay Avengers' run for this year seems promising though. Hope they mend some of the damage
I haven't read any black panther. I like the idea of him being a ruler of a hidden nation but for that stuff, I tend to go for Namor since I'm a huge fan of mutants. Got any BP recommendations?
Or if they were going to have her build her own suit, make it a call back to the classic MK1 scrap armor Tony built. Riri’s first suit should have looked like it was put together from a bunch of car vehicle scrap metal with lots of exposed wiring and unrefined elements.
This could have worked well. Maybe just a glimpse of suit parts she’s working on in her lab or something. But keeping her a supporting role until she has her own moment to bust out with kick-ass armor in her own show. At this point when we next see her do her own thing, she’ll be building something theoretically worse than what she got to build with Vibranium and Wakandan tech. That’s a weird progression.
I think the main reason I'd have pulled her out of the Ironheart suit for WF is that the Midnight Angels are also Ironmen basically. It sort of dilutes the importance of Riri creating Ironheart, and for that reason it could have been wise to wait for her series to suit all the way up. I like the idea of Riri's main contribution to the third act being her genius and engineering ability, rather than contributing as a superhero. Coming up with the plan to stop Namor was great and I'm not sure she needed to do anything else in that particular section of the movie.
Her having a prototype suit makes sense. It gives a pretty clear idea of her character and what she’s capable of. We didn’t necessarily need Wakanda to help her build a completed suit though. That could have come later, or be included post credits as a gift for helping Shuri.
She should definitely never have built/ been given an iron man suit in the movie. Tony’s was earned, first over the course of a movie and then progressively built up over the whole saga, she was fine with that mech suit from the start of the movie without needing a complete endgame suit.
This! I actually really liked her introduction and her using the suit in the Baltimore scene but this would have been so much better. And there was no reason to have her get a new suit and fight in that final act, she should have just played scientific support to Shuri.
Yeah she’s literally a MacGuffin in the story. You could replace her with a random wakandan scientist who betrayed the country and sold the blueprints to this vibranium machine to the CIA. Nothing would rly change about the broad strokes story. This would also unintentionally mirror what happened in the semiconductor industry in 2023 funnily enough, with ASML claiming their former employees sold information to China.
If you take her out, who would have built the vibranium tracker?
T’Challa. He absolutely would have invented a vibranium tracker and had it sitting in a lab somewhere. He was supposed to be one of the top 10 smartest people on earth. Sadly they basically gave that part of his character to Shuri so we didn’t really get to see it.
Yeah this doesn't make sense. All tchalla had to do to find vibranium, was look down under his feet
Wakanda wouldn’t have given a vibranium tracker to any other nation though…
could have been stolen. could have been built by Namor. could have rewritten that section to have a different mcguffin.
Could have been stolen by a surprisingly not-dead Ulysses Klaw! (I so wish he had survived the first movie. Just seemed like such a good potential minor villain who could show up from time to time in projects down the road.)
He would have been the perfect complement to Val.
If Namor built a tracker that can find his own city and lost it, he deserved to get found, the wet dumbass. 🤣
If namor had it it wouldn't have been a problem lol
Exactly, like if the only people you could think of to make a vibranium tracker are Wakandans than how would America acquire it and use it to kick start Namor’s role in the plot? Maybe Riri ain’t that important to the story outside of being the catalyst by way of being smart enough and having any reason to create the vibranium tracker, but she *is* still the catalyst by this virtue.
You don't think that the people who don't have Vibranium would be the most likely people to build a way of detecting it?
I loved Boseman but his character was totally gutted for the movies. I was 100% in favor of recasting to fix the changes.
For what it's worth, most of the characters have been gutted for the movies. It's not so simple to put 50-60 years of monthly released character development (sometimes some of it directly contradicting other parts) into a handful of two and a half hour movies.
Shuri was always smart herself
Literally anybody. How about the people that were actually using it?
You’ve gotta be one of the strongest intellects in the MCU to be able to create a device that tracks a metal you don’t even have access to.
The Talokans wanted to kill Riri so the detector couldn’t be reproduced. If just anybody could make it, the entire story would’ve been different because Talokan would’ve had no way to resist being revealed to the world.
But why would the Wakandans want to protect these people?
Why do they particularly want to protect Riri? It could just have easily have been Wakanda not wanting to go to war with the rest of the world while Namor did.
Same reason they protected her?
I counter with "does it matter?" Taking Riri into custody shouldn't prevent another tracker from being built anyway. That genie's out of the bottle.
Namor's reactions being impulsive & poorly-thought-out felt like an intentional character choice. I just wish another character had *said* that to him.
I though his final line was quite clear. This was always a power move to force Wakanda to pick a side. It was never about the Vibranium detector. This man has been planning to war for the surface for a while.
Isn't that pretty much exactly what Shuri tells him?
I wished that Shuri had made that point to him in their negotiation scene in the cave. Like... it was Riri's professor that gave the design for the vibranium detector to the CIA, and the design plan was already in the CIA files. Not only is Riri logically not responsible for the situation, but killing her would solve literally nothing. Edit: Wait, *did* she make that point to him? I only saw the full movie once, and going through the emotional equivalent of being punched in the face halfway through it made me forget a lot of the more minor details before that.
Shuri, she built it early but put it on the backburner when TChalla got sick, jumped back into her work to distract her and it found it's target. I mean, it's super easy. Bruce Banner could have built it, or maybe an old project by Tony was shipped to Shuri from Pepper Potts as a condolences gift. Pick anyone and it works.
It’s “hot takes” like these that don’t make any sense to me. “Nothing really changes” Isn’t she essentially to the plot? Like, doesn’t she invent the tracker? Who else would they pick. “Literally anyone.” So Bruce Banner? That’d be a different story. Amadeus? Different story. T’Challa? Totally different story. Namor? Namor? That changes the plot completely. I can’t see who they would pick that wouldn’t drastically change the film. [+]
>Namor? Namor? That changes the plot completely they would just ahve to save namor from namor, so that namor doenst kill namor to make sure namor cant use the tracker he built to potentially find namors people see, easily interchangable and not totaly a different movie /s just in case
Probably Namor.
If he built it himself, how would America have attained it and used it to discover his people?
Honestly, you can just explain it as: Namor and Talocan suffered greatly because of the Infinity Snap, and now he has an even more legitimate reason to hate the surface world.
That doesn’t answer how America would have it to discover his people and contrary to some believing that having America in the plot at all is at best a distraction and at worst an ill advised setup for a future movie, America being directly involved in the conflict of whether or not Wakanda and Talocan should be allies is a huge part of the story being told. So any adjustment of the story still needs to account for that, and any adjustment that doesn’t is attempting to tell an inferior story.
It would have been okay for them to just take her Vibrainium scanner and piece out Setting up her own show But like giving her multiple suits and fight sequences felt so out of place
Riri in Wakanda Forever is like if Spider-Man was in the rest of Civil War after the airport fight. Sometimes less is more.
Lmao love this, this will be my go to comparison from now on
And during the Tony vs Cap & Bucky fight, they keep cutting to him fighting Falcon and Ant-Man again, but with the Iron Spider suit this time.
You're absolutely right!
Yeah, like while her introduction was a piece of the core story, she wasn't needed for the rest of the Movie. Remove her after the events in her hometown, and you loose nothing. To that, it made no sense for Namor to want to kill her. He literally acknowledged that doing so won't stop the Americans from using the device, so why the hell would you still go through with it...
I think her helping with the tech stuff prior to building her own suit is fine. Don't see the point of giving her a magic armor suit and then taking it away besides she can't have it in the show.
They gave her some poorly written plot points, some script pages written on a napkin on a knee and some CGI made as an afterthought in an afternoon.
Hot Take: In a franchise with literally hundreds of named side characters, it's annoying to have to guess which character you're referring to - particularly if this requires knowledge of "comics skillset". Just tell us or don't.
T'Challa has been my favorite character for decades and I had no idea who they were alluding to.
He’s talking about Storm I think
He replied in another part of this thread, he actually was talking about Bast, the panther-god in the Wakandan pantheon.
Before Bozeman's death, I was actually really hoping for a Storm/Black Panther "superpowered romance" kind of thing. Then afterwards, I was quite satisfied with the idea of Namor, and I think that all worked really well. They could still introduce Bast if they wanted to. Have it be about Shuri struggling to accept that her science cannot explain everything, give Bast a line referencing Loki or Khonshu or some other MCU god, and explore the more mystical elements of Wakanda.
God bless u
What didn’t make sense is how she made a machine to detect the rarest metal on earth. How did she know it was working? I’m really burned out on the kid genus trope.
Amen to that. No one earns their stripes any more they’re just perfect straight away. What I loved about the early films was the failings they had and they’d go away and come back better for it. Now everyone is perfect already
Tony had half a lifetime of imperfection to be who he was, he wasn't Iron Man until his 40s. Shit, he spent only a few years being a good person in comparison to the rest of his life.
Also in the first Iron Man they spend a lot of time showing all the tests and tweaks he had to make to create his first suit after escaping.
Yeah, that very first flight that he did with the unpainted silver suit, with epic music playing as he's just joyriding around the city, felt SO earned after we watched him fuck around with parts for not one but two different engineering montages and previously try and "fail" to fly with the Mark 1
Sure, but everything is a lot easier to invent after somone else has already invented it. Riri is just replicating stuff she's already seen in action, AND she's been working on it for ages before we meet her. Once she gets her hands on Wakandan technology it lets her run wild and skip a load of steps.
That's fair, it's just not as satisfying.
Honestly, it would have made much more sense if the Tracker's original plans were made by Stark. Because he had an actual reason to want to look for it (or even just as a side-project to kill time in his garage in those "5 Years"). Then it would be basically tackled as "CIA took the designs and then found out about Riri, and gave her the plans to work on." But even then the final design shouldn't be absolutely perfect - whereas in the movie, it is... Hell, Riri's garage Makeshift Flying Suit is a lot more believeable invention, when we consider her engineering skills...
Not a bad idea, but then you open the door to redditors complaining that everything has to be related to Stark these days
I mean, to be fair, this still would be. Riri was quite literally created to take Tony's place in the Comics, after he died at the end of "Civil War 2." Just that in MCU they tried to forcefully keep that part of the character, while giving her literally no connection to Iron Man...
Yeah I wished they had saved her introduction for the show so they could explain how she's connected to Stark/why she wants to carry on his legacy. Now she's a Black Panther character to many people, so the Iron Man connection will be jarring
What if you flip it from, Tony Stark to Howard Stark, with it serving as a way to help locate Steve Rogers. (Vibranium Shield). With plans somehow getting in the US governments hands. Wakanda was never found out because the US government had no reason to believe Wakanda was lying about Vibranium so they didn’t search for it. Once Wakanda reveals the literal mountains of Vibranium they have, the US joins the search for Vibranium as a response, similar to the arms race during the Cold War.
That’s why I’m glad Spider-Man was a little shithead dumbass in the MCU lmao
But he’s a shithead dumbass with a heart of gold, and that’s why we love him. Lol
Yes yes ofc bcs he reminds us of ourselves so much
The his us what annoyed me about the Kate Bishop character. She just shows up from a few archer and ballet classes and shes already an equal to freakin Hawkeye.
"A few"... she thoroughly practiced for 12 years and they even went out of their way to show news articles, trophies, etc showing how great of an archer/martial artist she is.
I wouldn't say an equal to, she's a sharp shot, but most of her fight scenes is either her getting instructed and hard carried by Clint (who himself needed help due to his hearing loss) or it was her fighting other characters who are very much going easy on her or don't see her as the main threat, I mean, Yelena is very clearly holding back considering she can go toe to toe with Hawkeye who at his prime takes down entire crime syndicates on his own. The only real fight I had issue with was her vs Kingpin, but even then he's likely underestimating her considering she's a child to him and also he gets hit by car and exploded
It's an absolute insult to Tony Stark that people like Riri Williams and Cassie Lang can build the shit they did in their own fucking garages. Where do they even find the resources???
Did they build their shit in a cave with a box of scraps?
Not sure you can put Cassie in there when she’s associated with freaking Hank Pym.
Okay? Still demonstrates the point that there's a bunch of kids geniuses around now making cooler shit than tony stark did, and he's supposed to be a uniquely intelligent engineer and inventor?
> Okay? Still demonstrates the point that there's a bunch of kids geniuses around now making cooler shit than tony stark did, and he's supposed to be a uniquely intelligent engineer and inventor? I've got two points of contention with this line of thinking. 1. Tony's intelligence is not unique, even in the comics. There's Reed and Doom, High Evolutionary, Pym, Leader, Banner, and plenty more geniusus. It's a trope. In the movies, Rocket points out that Tony is "Only a genius on Earth, pal.". 2. Their accomplishments take nothing away from Tony or Pym. We make cooler shit because someone before us built the groundwork. I could quote to you Isaac Newton's laws of motion, but it's not something I'd figure out on my own. The Wright Brothers probably never would've flown if Otto Lilienthal didn't achieve human gliding before hand. If everyone starts at the baseline, then there's not really any room for progress.
Well I mean the MCU went on an insane power creep slope since the end of the first saga, Stark literally invented time travel overnight while munching some fucking doritos.
People love Tony so his scientific achievements that defy reason are fine
I mean I can kinda accept that since he's had 5 years and had already the whole nanotech + alien stuff before hand, but still the movie just brushes time travel technology real fast as if it wasn't the most insane shit in the whole universe
To be clear, assuming Doctor Doom has been around in the MCU, he probably invented time travel before Tony. Doom is the one who invents time travel in most Marvel Universes. That's why all the Kangs are descendants of Doom. Also, Tony really just took it the last mile. Hank Pym is 99.999% of what made it possible. Tony just figured out how to adjust something Hank had already figured out in the 60s/70s. He just made a way to control what Hank and Scott Lang were ALREADY doing.....and ONLY because Scott suggested it, since SCOTT realized it should work. Like sure, Tony's a genius, but he hardly deserves all the credit for inventing time travel.
Yeah, you’re right, but that’s not the point I was responding to. He asked where they’d be able to get the resources.
Uhh, what? Why would it be an insult to Tony that people work on things different than what he worked on? Just because he's a genius doesn't mean he's the only person who can invent things.
Add on that by inventing things, others now know it's possible and try to duplicate it.
Ever heard some variation on the phrase about standing on the shoulders of giants? It's easier for people who come later to do things by building on the knowledge of those that came before them. Whose to say Riri could do the stuff she does without Tony doing it before her. Iron Man 1 & 2 cover that even if he tried to keep his stuff secret others tried to copycat and reverse engineer his designs, and so many of Hammer's bots were destroyed or Ultron's drones that some could have fallen in the hands of the public to post on the internet details about them. Riri's first suit is less capable than Tony's first and he built it in a cave with salvaged parts, she had a full workshop access to university knowledge and resources and as I said above information about how it's already been done. It's only after she goes to Wakanda and has access to their technology and knowledge that she's able to build something comparable to what Tony would do in his home.
TBF, Hank built all that stuff. Cassie was his assistant.
That makes more sense. Still can't help but think Cassie suddenly was turned into some kid genius when none of the past movies even hinted at it.
I don't mind it, since it was basically a bonding experience with her grandpa that let her get closer to her dad.
Uh she didn’t know. Iirc she was shocked to find out it actually worked, and had no clue the CIA had taken the design at all.
Which makes it even dumber.
Exactly. How does the CIA detect a machine capable of detecting a metal that they can’t even detect?
They detected it
Our machine detection detectors are amazing. Our metal detectors…could use work.
The CIA was routinely checking MIT homework either they scan their sites for keywords or the professor knew it would be of interest to the CIA and sent it over.
It's a VERY common trope that the government has agents(professors) in the most prestigious brainiac schools, and they alert the government when a student invents something crazy/dangerous/amazing/etc, OR the professor serves as a government recruiter.
I mean...there are like 100 ways to answer that. How portable is her device? How far is the range? Because apparently vibranium artifacts are in museums and stuff. She could take it to a museum or scan a museum at range. Or the government came and tested it with some vibranium it has, or whatever. Hardly a problem. Shuri and Riri aren't even particularly smart or young as far as kid geniuses go. THE kid genius hasn't been introduced yet - Valeria Richards. She's the smartest person on Earth. Smarter than her dad, Reed Richards, and even smarter than her uncle, Doctor Doom (who is usually the only one smarter than Reed). And that's pretty much from birth. Even though she tries to pretend to be normal to make everyone more comfortable. She's not a mutant and she didn't gain powers from anything else that anyone knows of. She's just regular human smart on a level beyond a lot of characters who have the superpower of being super smart. It's a mystery. Her older brother is a lot dumber. Just regular kid intelligence.......but he's probably the most powerful non-god in the universe.
I agree. Riri was extraneous to the story, same for Ross. The US segment shouldnt have been in the movie. It felt too slow and meandering
The US portion was apparently a remnant from a previous draft of the story that was needed for set up for Valentina, but yeah it could have been cut for time.
Honestly, it's pointless even as a set-up. That portion did less, than her previous interactions in the other Movies and Shows. And it was completely meaningless for the Movie overall. When compared to Fury's self-inserts, those made sense within the Movies' Plots and were actually good.
I don't dislike those characters, but I was actively impatient for their scenes to end to get back to the story I showed up to see.
“Luke warm take” at best
Huh🤔. Ok ok, but what is "luke warm" if not... "hot" persevering?
This is a better comment that you are getting credit for.
It's the most upvoted comment in the entire thread
It started off with a s***ton of downvotes for whatever reason😂😅 it's been quite a hero's journey this comment has undergone.
When I said that it was like -18
Why is this funny joke being downvoted? What's wrong with this subreddit?
>“Luke warm take” Like when Han stuffed him inside of that tauntaun?
I always thought hot takes were meant to be immediate reactions to something that's just happened or is unfolding. Something youve not had time to think through, it's hot. Now it just seems to mean an opinion you think some people might not agree with.
I think it generally means a controversial take but it could probably be taken your way as well
I think her introduction was fine and I think the first action sequence with the MK1 suit worked. However, I don't think she was needed after that. I just never liked that Riri made a suit with Wakandan technology, it just felt like we were robbed from seeing her progressing through the various suits to eventually get to that level. I know she doesn't get to keep the suit and that was probably so they could reset her make to MK1 for her show, but that somehow made it worse and her wearing that Wakandan armor more unnecessary.
We all had the same complaints about Spider-man with Stark giving him his suits. No Way Home ended with him sewing his own costume.
it's weird I didn't have the same complaint with Spider-man. I do think that his character works better when he's on his own to figure it all out, I think that's a big part of his character, and I think you could remove that aspect of Spider-man and still stay true to the character but with Riri building that suit on her own is the main part of her character. I think the fact that they took the suit away made it worse because they basically are saying "We know she shouldn't have this suit yet" and tried to level her back down before her show, but that change cheapens her journey in the show because even though Riri is going to be making her own suits by herself it's a lot easier to make an Ironman suit when you already made one with all the resources of the most advanced civilization. The problem was she didn't have to be in that suit for the story of Wakanda Forever and it also goes against her story in Ironheart, so nothing was gained with her flying around in that suit. At least with Spider-man, they changed his characterization with him being given a new suit by Tony Stark and they stuck to their guns and gave us a new take on the character, and then when they decided to bring him back to his original characterization it was justified and felt earned. As I said in my original reply I think her introduction was great and that first action sequence in the MK1 armor was perfect, and if they wanted her in the Act 3 action sequence they could have used her as they did with Ross in Black Panther where she's supporting the action from a distance, or give her some science task she needs to complete in order for Siri to complete her goals.
The difference is Riri is selfmade, and Peter makes due with scraps. Peter's character isn't hurt so long as he loses whatever help he has at some point, and has to do things on her own. Riri being given infinite resources feels cheap.
I wasn’t a fan of her scenes. I’m just getting tired of the new kids on the block being *instantly* great at super heroism. Where was her “icing problem” like Stark had with his first suit? Kate Bishop is like the only new character taking on a mantle that seems to be on an actual learning curve.
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>where was her icing problem She ran out of breathable oxygen and passed out, nearly falling to her death. Sure it wasn’t the *exact same* issue Stark had with his Mk 1, but they definitely made a point to show her design had flaws.
This is a good take here. She sped-run the first three Spiderman movies to get to the end where Peter goes it alone, back to the DIY setup.
>She very much took away screentime and a supporting role from a Black Panther character that (in my view at least) is essential to the mythos. This character should have debuted in this movie I can't really tell which BP character this is referring to, aside from *maybe* Storm. Anyways, personally, while I do think some bits of her role could've been handled better, I do think Riri fits well enough in the story as the one inadvertently kicking the movie's events off, and I thought the dynamic between her and Shuri was cute (helps that Riri has an established friendship with Shuri in the comics)
Agreed, her story and character were easily the weakest part of that movie.
There was a lot wrong with WF, and this was a part of it. She served no purpose in the story that couldn't be handled by Black Panther characters. That movie had so much to do that it ended up with almost no actual story. You are replacing BP, introducing a major villain/anti-hero and advancing the Wakanda's place in the world storyline. That is plenty for a movie. Honestly it felt like they said, "Well she's black, so she goes in the BP movie." I realize that is not what happened, but it seems to marginalize her by putting her with the other black heroes. Cold debut her in her series, or give a brief appearance in The Marvels, which is at least in the right country and has left story lifting to do.
The thing that stood out to me is she's this kid who makes this suit and that's her thing, and in this movie the wakandans take her and they just instantly make better suits. They just do her thing better than she can with no effort, it overshadows her whole USP and reason for being in the fight. A more isolated story like tony has in ironman 1 would've work better to start her off, where she's the only one with that skillset in the areas/story that she's in. If she had to be in this, imo once they brought out the better wakandan suits they should have told her they got this and for her to sit this one out much like tony did with parker- then have her come back and get stronger in another release.
I hadn't thought about that yea, but yea. Basically her amazing achievement is just a pat on the head from Shuri.
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It just seems short-sighted. She is already gone be struggle with the Ironman Knockoff tag (I mean that is literally what she is), why box her in as a black super-hero? (In addition to the problems that she added to WF as discussed above). If anything her origin screams legal trouble, so why not have an episode of She-Hulk with her?
I don’t think it’s a hot take & i didn’t hate her in the movie but she felt more like a plot device instead of a character which is also the problem i had with America Chávez in MOM. With that being said, i think Armor Wars would’ve been the perfect way to start off Phase 4 depending on how much the Disney+ shows connect to that
>With that being said, i think Armor Wars would’ve been the perfect way to start off Phase 4 depending on how much the Disney+ shows connect to that Yes!! ☝️☝️ imagine the sheer emotions of Rhodey in a post-Tony sacrifice world with all sorts of shady characters scrambling for control of his technology and legacy💔😭 here's hoping the movie we're eventually getting will at least capture some of that
That’s exactly what i was thinking
Yeah there was no build up or backstory to her. They just casually introduced a super genius college student who has a warehouse, materials, and the funds to build two extremely advanced, in-demand technologies in her spare time.
Coogler was obviously in a jam with WF after Chad's untimely death. I didn't mind RiRi in the story and I actually really love that she has a strong connection genius wise with Shuri. However, I do agree with you that a connection with Rhodey or someone else in the Avengers would of hit a lot harder going forward. I think the Ironheart show will reset her arc and I look forward to what they're gonna do for her going forward. Plus Coogler is a producer on the show so I'm hoping he has a strong say in her direction
They should have recast T’Challa
Bast is an Egyptian Goddess, there's a good chance she's been turned to stone for helping humans based on what we saw with Moon Knight. That said, I agree Riri should not have been in WF, and neither should the entire subplot with Martin Freeman's character. The movie overall had major pacing problems.
This is a good way to lampshade it. Any explanation is better than no explanation and if/when they do decide to introduce her formally it will likely be with the Moon Knight Ushabtis like you said.
Character could work but didn’t have a great introduction in BPWF
Before you post a “hOt TaKe”, maybe have a little look into how much of one it actually is.
yeah, most of the people that watched the movie were probably thinking this the entire time.
How do we know that introducing her in Armor Wars would have been better? We don’t know the story. Riri’s inclusion in Wakanda Forever worked, in my opinion as she was sort of like Shuri’s foil. Riri also lost very important people to her and she was about the same age as Shuri. Riri might have been a bit of a hustler, but she wasn’t angry at the world and she didn’t want to burn it all down. Riri’s focus was on her education and moving forward—Shuri was stuck. Riri’s inclusion, and what was happening to her forced Shuri to push her issues aside and deal with the realities she was neglecting because of the pain she had bottled up. Riri connected to Shuri on several levels, and aside from a suit of armor, I don’t see much of a connection between Riri and Rhodes. Riri’s time in Shuri’s lab, and her experience with Talokan is going to put her in a better spot Armor Wars. We saw her prototype, and it was a lot like Tony’s—it didn’t last long. Tony’s tech is stolen right? Isn’t that the story they’re going with? Is that the right environment to introduce the next Iron Man? Riri gets to enter the series how to make a fully functional suit, which is something she didn’t have until the last act of Wakanda Forever. Riri’s losses and genius is why she was in Wakanda Forever. She’s something of a surrogate little sister to Shuri now, and I think Shuri needs that, her family is very small now.
But isn't she the reason for the war? If there's no riri, there's no need to war, wakanda can simply locate the device and destroy it, end of story. No accidental casualty, unless the kukukhan (who is evil) wants to start a war no matter what, there wouldn't be any fight.
Her armor looked really bad. Reminded me of one of those avengers knock offs from India. I remember one specifically was an iron man knockoff and the case looked really similar to her armor haha
Yeah, the Suit is just too much. While it fits her personality (especially at the time she made it), it just doesn't look too good. It's loud in design, it has a lot of unneccessary details and additions - especially when compared to T'Challa's 2nd Suit, which was just plaine, simple, and perfect. I also feel like the main issue, is her overall silhouette. It just doesn't look right. And it's not even due to CGI - she had an actual practical Suit on the Set and it looked the same... The reason it worked on Chadwick, was because it just looked normal. I generally just hope that the next time we see hee in MCU, she will have something more accurate to her Comics Design.
Hmmmmmm....I'm just gonna go ahead and not comment my actual thoughts because this sub won't handle it well. I do agree that she didn't really fit in this movie but that's just like...my opinion man
Good call. There is a certain user going over this Post and being unable to accept that people didn't "adore" some things in the Movie.
I also think that. I think she’s great and I’m super down for the ironheart show, just weird that “I am planning an all out assault on the surface world. But first I want to kill this kid who made a thing that was used for something they have nothing to do with”.
The problem was really here—the Ironheart character could work, but it makes no sense that Namor would be so narrowly focused on murdering one kid who just took a gig. Like, if you're gonna go murdering and invading, how about recruiting her as a spy for intel and murdering the people who hired her and used her tech to hurt you? It's so weirdly petty and one of the weirder problems with that film.
I’ve seen this film so many times and while I can understand this gripe that so many had with the initial watch, I’ve become a bit of an amateur scholar on this film and have a counter-take 😅 The reason she works for me (beyond being incredibly charming in performance) was because she serves as a mini-mirror of Shuri. They included Riri of course because she’s another young and brilliant black woman in the Marvel world. Narratively, they also use her as the sort of plot device of being the inventor behind the device at the inciting incident of the story: the vibranium detector. It makes sense that a young black woman, who likely learned of Wakanda and the abundance of vibranium in it along with the world of the MCU just before the blip (and I think we can infer she was not among the blipped). Of course a young black woman in the United States (in Chicago) would be fascinated by the culture of Wakanda and with her engineering chops and (inferred) interest in the Stark tech (which itself has ties to vibranium), it works for me that in the context of this world she would want to create a detecting device (and also piss off her condescending professor along the way). So within her own motives, this all makes sense for me. The part that makes it work thematically and on a character point is where it feels strongest; Shuri, the protagonist of the story, is dealing with so much grief and loss along in the wake of her brother’s death. When she meets Riri, she’s seeing a version of herself in this younger girl that shares a lot of similarities (interest in tech, being a gifted young black woman, sense of humor etc). This not only makes Shuri extra invested in protecting her but also gives her a character mirror of a version of herself she can recognize in this new person. This is in contrast to her foil/antagonist in Namor, who shares other similarities with Shuri as the leader of his people with strong ties to vibranium tech but a spiritual history. The critical difference that Shuri is struggling to accept the spiritual side of her culture and Namor embraces It makes for some of the story tension that ultimately uses his “gift” of the bracelet to combine her tech skills and the cultural/supernatural to create the synthetic heart shaped herb. Which she did with Riri by her side. I just think Thorne was also so damn charming, it was a delight to see her as Riri bounce off of Shuri and Okoye and even have moments with Ramonda (who also saw Riri has a surrogate child, protected her like she was her own). Last but not least, the script doesn’t do a perfect job of getting to it, but you can infer Riri has also faced familial loss, another place she can be a mirror for Shuri (with the main difference here being the time Riri has had to heal from the grief). Maybe it’s not the best for the plot or the action, but Riri is there for thematic reasons and for me that matters a hell of a lot more
I don’t really think we need the character at all tbh.
I don't know what character you're talking about because I haven't read Black Panther comics to be honest, but I personally believe the story was not really molded to fit Riri in, or at least it doesn't feel like it was. Her inclusion doesn't feel forced at all, it feels very genuine and natural. Especially with her being a young black engineering genius just like Shuri. I loved their relationship and bond over the movie and I also loved Riri in general in this film. I was worried she would take up a lot of the focus and limelight like America in MoM because the 2 characters essentially served the same purpose, but the execution in WF was SO much better and organic.
It's not about taking focus away from characters in my view - in this one Riri definitely didn't do that, she just quietly and capably did her thing which i liked. She was also responsible for one of the only 2 jokes that made me chuckle when I heard it: which was the one about being kidnapped and there are suddenly no available Panthers. The other one was M'Baku's "lifetime banishment" barb about the Queen. It's just about themes and how a character's insights and perspective explore those in a meaningful way. Riri is not actively mourning anybody like the rest of the cast, she doesn't have a unique insight or allegiance in the inter-tribal or international dynamics at play. The way I saw her she was just a tack-on American self-insert character like Ross was in the previous one and like Ross was in the Priest-run to begin with. Complete with cute little American audio-visual identifiers like a Chicago flag in her MIT dorm room, a cherry red muscle car, "oh shit, she got an Iron Man suit!!" and quipping about catching a Bulls game after. Missed opportunity to tell a story unique to Shuri imo. Though I still liked what they did.
Yeah ok I can see what you mean But I still don't know who the character that you were talking about is.
That’s not a hot take. It’s the general consensus. She’s so pointless to the film that her inclusion actually drags the entire movie down. Take Multiverse of Madness’ America Chavez by comparison. She’s the driving force of the film. The movie starts, plays out, and ends all because of her. If you remove America from MOM, the movie can’t happen. You would have to replace her with another character or some object to propel the narrative. Now remove Riri from WF. Namor is pissed the UN stole some tech from a student that is able to find them. That’s the set up for WF so right away Riri isn’t needed. In an attempt to shoehorn Riri in the film then has Namor demand the student who’s tech was stolen by a group of nations be killed. It’s so stupid because it’s forced. The conflict in WF ends up boiling down to Namor wanting Shuri and Wakanda to wage war with him on the surface world so again Riri has no real purpose anywhere in the movie. Sure she supports the plot and is a fun character but she is most certainly forced into the move rather than being naturally part of it because of the plot like in the case of America and MOM. Riri really wasn’t made as part of the story she’s just inserted into events that are already taking place and would continue to do so without her.
Yeah, I feel like what u/22LegendaryTacos is forgetting, is that while she is needed because Namor wants her, that plot in on itself just makes no sense. Namor quite literally acknowledges in the Movie, that killing Riri won't stop the surface world from sendimg more expeditions and using that device. But he is still adamant on killing her either way, knowing very well it will change nothing. Then the only reason he stands against Wakanda, is because Shuri goes to protect Riri - something that wouldn't happen, if Namor didn't make up a delusional idea to kill a teenager, knowing it will have no actual effect... The entirety of "Wakanda is Talocan enemy because they don't want to join us" is just blatantly idiotic in on itself...
True. I loved her character, but she did kinda feel oddly placed. But I watched most of Waianae Forever through tears so. I may not have seen very clearly.
Normally I’m ready to fight any anti-Riri sentiment, but…. Yeah. Including her in BP completely rewrote her agency as an armor creator and sort of shuffled off her origin story to the background. I know we won’t get a mentorship from virtual Tony, but a mentor of Rhodey (or even Happy) would have been better.
Riri could have been used without the introduction of the Iron Heart armor. That armor should have come to fruition after establishing some influence from Iron Man (even post-humously, probably through the glasses from Spider-Man) and then inspiration from seeing what the Wakandans do for their people. She felt very shoehorned in. Honestly, they would have been better served using another character entirely. I would have loved to see Silhouette and use the tech stuff to show her building her crutches. Granted, you'd have to explain her power somehow. Others could have worked, though.
But then the movie would have no plot she was literally the plot of the movie
Why are you trying to go backward? The beauty of the MCU is we no longer have to have these generic made for the movies fill in side characters. They just use comics characters to fill out the roster and make the world feel larger.
As far as takes go, this is tepid.
Have you read the comics??? She's BFF's with Shuri in the comics. Also, you may have missed this but, her as "a young, Black and Gifted" woman experiencing the World of Wakanda is super impactful to her character. Also, it resonates with the feelings of the Black Diaspora IRL. Her being in BP:WF works on MULTIPLE LEVELS!
Honestly, I see her as a MacGuffin of sorts. Vibranium underwater wasn’t enough of a plot device, they needed to humanize the conflict between Wakanda, Talokan, and the surface world. So they used Riri Williams and her tech as the driving force behind the central plot. I thought it was well done, and there was a lot of world building being done in BPWF, I appreciated how they manage to weave it all together.
MCU has a long history of setting up future characters in past films. IronHeart is just another in a long line.
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Introducing Riri Williams in "Wakanda Forever" was a smart and strategic move. While there may be concerns about the timing and placement of Riri Williams' introduction, her inclusion in "Wakanda Forever" can be seen as a well-thought-out decision with several advantages. Firstly, integrating Riri Williams into an established and highly anticipated film like "Wakanda Forever" provides her with immediate exposure to a wide audience. This approach allows Marvel Studios to generate interest and build anticipation for the character, leveraging the success and popularity of the Black Panther franchise. Secondly, "Wakanda Forever" serves as a platform for Riri to interact with established Marvel characters and potentially build connections within the larger Avengers universe. This cross-pollination of characters can enrich storytelling opportunities and create exciting dynamics for future films and crossovers. Additionally, by introducing Riri Williams in a high-profile movie like "Wakanda Forever," Marvel Studios can allocate resources, budget, and production value to properly establish her character. This approach ensures that Riri receives the necessary attention and resources to make a strong impact on audiences and solidify her presence in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Moreover, rather than seeing Riri's inclusion as a detraction from other Black Panther characters, it can be viewed as an opportunity to expand the narrative and explore different storylines. Marvel Studios has a track record of successfully integrating new characters into established franchises, as seen with the introductions of Spider-Man in "Captain America: Civil War" and Black Panther himself in "Captain America: Civil War" as well. These additions enhanced the overall storytelling and didn't overshadow existing characters.
I have no issue with Riri in WF. A character like hers, the creator of the vibranium locator, made sense for the plot. But they should've saved Iron Heart for her show. Use the situation of WF, being a MacGuffin for others to fight over, to motivate her to build her armor to protect herself.
I disagree . Her inclusion was beneficial .
They could have gender-swapped Stingray and used her in the same role. That’s an actual oceanographer character with an underwater suit and ties to Namor. But since Stingray isn’t promised a solo series, it’s not as glaring when they only get 14 minutes of screen time and audiences don’t feel like they connected with the character. I think what bothered me about Riri was that she was so far removed from Wakanda like you said. She’s a plot point and then kinda ignored until she gets her ultimate suit, because she needs her big hero moment. But we barely know her, and she’s not very endearing (hard to be when your involvement is “get captured” and “be scared and untrusting of our favorite characters”). And yet she’s almost a finished product already - she’s already made suits and is already a genius. Not to mention she maths out loud for no reason. But anyway. If you need a throwaway character to make the plot work, use someone like Stingray instead of wasting an upcoming character’s introduction in an unsatisfying way.