Black Panther VS Global warming

[doctornone]

From this month's Black Panther annual

Comments

[locuatico]

Okay. I don't necessarily disagree with T'Challa's assesment that, if he gave the rest of the world the means to fix global warming, that the US would find a way to screw it up and make things worse but...... i hope he was being sarcastic with that "a bureaucrat. the world need warriors" claim because it reads like "the world needs warriors, but I won't try to fix global warming because the warrior mentality of your country would try to weaponize it".

[nightauditguy]

Black Panther dickery

[owlbrigade1]

How is he getting on the cure for cancer issue, lately anyway?

Are we still pretending that didn't happen or are Marvel doing something to fix it?

I've never been impressed with Wakanda, I must admit. As much as I want more diversity in comics, I want it done in a way that isn't so creepy. Wakanda is basically the nation North Korea wants to be, has superweapons, is a hermit kingdom controlled by a family dynasty, can operate on anyone elses turf with impunity. I've never seen that as a terribly good thing, and it just gets worse the more I think about it. Can we not have an African Kingdom that, while still providing strong Afro-centric role models, is an open and cooperative state which is driving for a better world through being an idealistic team player?

I feel much the same about Namor, but at least Marvel doesn't expect us to feel particularly friendly to him and his Atlantis.

[janegray]

I'm constantly amazed by the way greedy billionaire opportunistic corporations in Hollywood have shown that they are better at understanding and portraying heroism than Marvel is.

Take Civil War, for example. In the movie version, Tony's side actually makes sense (IMHO, it actually makes the most sense, personally I thought he was the one in the right whereas Cap was well-meaning but wrong). In the comics version, Tony is an outright facist who has people kidnapped over the "crime" of simply having superpowers (even purely benign ones, like that teenaged girl who could fly in the clouds) and thrown into a demonic prison that brainwashes the prisoners into committing suicide, who has an ambassador shot by a brainwashed criminal in order to use the threat of war to terrorize the populace into supporting increasingly inhuman laws (and then has the balls to claim that the Reg laws are right "because the people asked for them"), who creates a team lead by freaking Norman Osborn to hunt down heroes, and so on and on and on.

And now Black Panther, where...
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SPOILER SPOILER SPOILERS
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T'Challa comes to the no-shit realization that hoarding all resources while people outside suffer and die is wrong, and like a week after he becomes king he starts working hard with foreign aid to atone for what his ancestors did.

[goattoucher]

In the movies, half the Avengers had to deal with that lead to so much destruction were potential world ending threats that would have killed -far- more if left to go unchecked, and the other half were caused by Tony Stark.

As the Civil War HiSHE said, change the cover to say "The -Tony- Accords" and everyone will sign right then and there.

[janegray]

Fair is fair, Ultron was caused by Tony Stark After Wanda used her powers to mess with his head. Considering he was already suffering from PTSD (which he got for saving Manhattan from a nuclear holocaust, while none of the other Avengers could do anything to stop the missile) when she forced her way in to make his worst nightmares come to life, it's impressive he managed to keep it together at all.

In fact, Wanda was also responsible for forcibly turning Bruce into the Hulk and unleashing him at a city full of innocent civilians. How many people died, how many were crippled and lost their home, before Tony arrived to stop the rampaging Hulk? Tony also paid for the reconstruction and medical aid to the destroyed city out of his own pocket. And while we are at it, Wanda and Pietro helped Ultron steal the stuff he needed to built his army and WMD.

Yet, when Tony rather sensibly points out that letting Wanda out could trigger a massive armed response from the government (and probably a lynch mob from the enraged public), and wants her to stay inside a huge super luxurious mansion for a little while until the furor calms down, they act like he is a tyrannical abuser.

And yes, Wanda and Pietro were radicalized by an attack that used Stark missiles. But even if we assume that, had the Stark company not sold them anything, the attackers wouldn't have just bought missiles from Hammer or any of the other hundreds of weapon manufacturers (not like they used high-tech weapons, those were just normal bombs), the point is that Tony has been working himself to near death precisely to atone for what his company did in the past. The attack on Wanda and Pietro's village is over a decade old, any regulations to keep Tony from doing that again would do anything at this point because he already stopped before the MCU even begun.

If we are talking unexpected consequences caused by long past actions, the government started seriously messing with the Tesseract after Loki's attack on Jane's town terrified them. If Thor hadn't acted like a reckless dick, he wouldn't have been banished to Midgard, Loki wouldn't have followed, the government wouldn't have reactivated the Tesseract, Thanos wouldn't have perceived its reawakening and sent Loki to Earth, and the invasion of New York never would have happened. And Tony couldn't have used the scepter to create Ultron.

Of course, I'm not blaming Thor. He has grown into an awesome hero who puts his life on the line to save people. I'm saying it's more complicated than HiSHE suggested.

[sadoeuphemist]

Eh, the Civil War movie doesn't have any ideological or moral basis at all for the fighting. The UN gets blown up before anything can be ratified, so the Sokovia Accords stop mattering after a certain point. There's no way to implement them within the timeframe of the movie.

The fighting is because Cap doesn't want to turn in Bucky, and also inexplicably doesn't want to warn the authorities about the Winter Soldiers threat. Tony's side is, hey, Bucky is a wanted terrorist who escaped custody, you have to turn him in, and also I'm going to bring in this kid Peter Parker to fight you even though it was a kid dying in a superhero fight that set me down this path to begin with.

[janegray]

Should be pointed out that that kid died in a fight between the heroes and Ultron, and Ultron was very very willing to kill.

Tony brought Peter along in a fight against people that Tony knows for a fact would never really hurt a kid (and ok, you can't see Peter's face, but from his built and voice it's obvious he is a teenager, plus Tony introduces him as Spider-Boy). Also he explicitly tells Peter to stay back and to only use the web from afar, and when Peter disobeys him and joins the front line Tony uses the first breather to order him out of the fight.

As for Cap, again fair is fair, he had good reason to suspect that the government didn't want to take Bucky alive, and indeed they would have killed Bucky if Steve had not intervened.

I think that he should most definitely have sent a message to Tony to warn him that the psychologist was a mole. When he finally told Tony at the airport, it was too late. They were all in a race against time (Cap to stop Zemo, Tony to stop the government from declaring them war criminals and send in swat teams with orders to kill), so everybody was high strung and all out of patience.

Buuuuuut... at least the first time Steve refused to let them handle Bucky alone, it did end up saving Bucky's life.

[sadoeuphemist]

Are you really defending bringing an underage combatant into a superhuman fight? No one intended to hurt Rhodey either, but he got hurt anyway, because they're a bunch of superpowered people blasting each other and flinging each other around and blowing up stuff and collateral damage is inevitable. Given Tony's supposed motivations, it's just indefensible to bring a child into this.

And as for Steve, the government had already taken Bucky alive. He was being held in custody without Steve being worried for his safety. I mean, Bucky broke out, and everyone there was just hand-to-hand fighting him, not riddling him full of bullets. If Steve and Bucky just return to the facility together and turn Bucky in, it's irrational to think they'll suddenly murder him, considering they've had plenty of opportunity before that.

Now, if Bucky is a dangerous fugitive and they come at him with lethal force, yeah, sure, intervene, but a way to avoid that would be just turning him in to the authorities directly.

In any case, my point is the plot of Civil War didn't have anything to do with morality or heroism. It was just people being high strung and out of patience and being dicks to each other unnecessarily. In the comics, at least, it's inevitable that they fight, because they actually are morally opposed to each other.

[janegray]

Yes, given the very specific context, I'm really defending bringing an underage combatant into a superhuman fight.

Because here is the thing. We all know that it's not possible to keep a superpowered kid from fighing crime. In the whole history of superheroes, every single time an adult superhero has tried to stop a kid from going out to fight, what actually happened what that the kid sneaked out to do it on his own, alone and with no training and no equipment, putting him or herself at hugely higher risk than if the adult superhero had just accepted to supervise them. Every. Single. Time.

But, what is different this time? The difference is that, if Tony fails to bring Cap in, the government will pass a law to ban superheroes. And that means that next time Peter sneaks out to fight crime (which he will absolutely do), he could get gunned down by a swat team.

So here are the options:
1) Go fight Cap without Peter. Tony's team will be numerically inferior and much more likely to be defeated, which could bring about the "gunned down by swat team" scenario above.
2) Go fight Cap with Peter. Not a single person in Cap's team would ever intentionally hurt a kid. There is the possibility of an incident, but it's very low (Rhodey only got hurt because he was chasing a jet in the air, none of the on-ground combatants reported more than a few bruises). However, the possibility of bringing in Cap, and therefore avoiding the disaster of a zero-tolerance legislation, would greatly increase.

YMMV, but I believe the bigger picture makes it defensible. It's all about taking a small risk now to avoid a much greater risk later, when you know that avoiding the risk at all is impossible.

I won't argue with your second point about Steve, though. Hey, I did say that I think Tony's side was the one in the right.

[sadoeuphemist]

What the heck, where are you getting these arguments?

Tony wants to work with the government. Tony wants superheroes (ie, vigilantes acting outside of official channels) to be banned. He can recruit Peter as an intern for his StarkTech Defense Initiative or whatever they're going to call it, where he becomes a government agent or a contractor or whatever, and they tell him where to go and what to do and so on.

Tony is pro-banning superheroes. This idea that the only way he can avoid a child from maybe being gunned down by SWAT at some point in the future is to involve that same child in a massive superhuman fight in the present is just bizarre. The way he plans to avoid this bad future is by putting everyone under government control.

Also, hey, the focal person on Cap's team, the reason they are having this fight to begin with, is the Winter Soldier, a man who has been brainwashed into an assassin/terrorist/killing machine who flips out uncontrollably at times, so.

[janegray]

Tony doesn't want superheroes to be banned nor does he want the government to have control over the Avengers, you are confusing movie!Tony with comics!Tony.

In the movie, Tony specifically says that he came up with the pro-reg laws as a compromise with the goverment to get them to back off. The government wants to shut the Avengers down, Tony convinced them to let the Avengers continue their work as long as the Avengers accept some new rules (like "no invading foreign countries without permission," which sounds reasonable to me). When Tony and Cap argue about Wanda's temporary confinement in the mansion (which also sounds reasonable to me, Wanda just killed a bunch of civilians and there are mobs crying for her blood so laying very low for awhile is definitely the non-idiotic thing to do), Tony says that Cap rejecting this compromise would result in the government shoving Tony aside and outright shutting them down.

Hum... Good point about the Winter Soldier though, I hadn't thought about that. Allright then, I still think Tony's side was overall in the right, but I'll step down about the bringing-Peter-along part.

[cyberghostface]

Apparently in the BP annual there’s a story where someone he knows dies from cancer and he bemoans how he wasn’t able to save her despite his abilities so maybe that’s their way of showing he doesn’t have a cure.

[owlbrigade1]

Marvel used "Retcon"... It's not very effective.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

Have we actually seen the cure for cancer in action, or otherwise have proof it exists beyond "yo, we got a cure for that"?

If not, it could be some sort of bluff.

[cyberghostface]

This is really the problem when you try to have characters who are super duper awesome at everything in something that’s supposed to resemble the real world. Although this justification makes more sense morally than the cancer one.

*** movie spoilers***
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Given how MCU T’Challa is aiming to share his technology with the rest of the world to make it a better place I wonder if the comics will follow suit and have him realize what a dick he’s been.

[locuatico]

You don't even need to say it like these.
"We DO fight Global warming. we are pioneers in it. we have regular meetings with Sweden about it. But as it turns out, ONE SINGLE COUNTRY cannot fix global warming when THE OTHER MAJOR SUPERPOWERS have a hard time doing so as well. Specially is one of said superpowers actively fights against it and even calls it something like a Hoax or the like"

[laughing_tree]

But then there’d be no story. The whole conflict in this story comes is various parties either trying to get their hands on the technology or trying to prevent it from getting out.

[dcbanacek]

What intrigues me is if Stark will start sharing the ARC reactor tech as well, something he's been adamant about not doing.

[janegray]

Although this justification makes more sense morally than the cancer one.

I was thinking jus that. This time, you can agree or disagree with his point, but at least you can see his point.

[owlbrigade1]

This would be a major step forward, IMO. Comic's Wakanda is not a place that I have ever felt comfortable cheering for the way Marvel thinks I ought to.

[jaxjyls]

The advantages of not having to follow a status quo

[crinos]

So, things that Wakanda has but wont share with the rest of the world because we would use them as weapons:

*Cure for Cancer
*Way to reverse Global Warming

You know, you could just say "We have this technology, but since it runs on Vibranium we can't really use it widespread, but we do use our tech to at least reverse climate change somewhat, and every year we allow hundreds of foreigners in every year for cancer treatment. We are doing as much as we can with the resources we have available."

I mean, just because they have the means to cure/reverse these things doesn't necessarily make them a button that gets rid of it forever. And its well established that Vibranium is a rare commodity found only in Wakanda, so its not unreasonable to go "Yeah we have the technology to fix stuff, but the supply to fix it with is in short supply so we can't fix it everywhere."

[locuatico]

That would be a reasonable solution.

[bmaryott]

I actually agree with T'challa. I've thought about what would happen if we actually just GOT a lot of the SciFi tech we see (super armour, inertialess drives, energy shields) and there isn't a country or leader I'd trust with it.

[cainofdreaming]

Yeah, can't really fault him for not giving a short term fix that'd most likely result in the very thing it is trying to prevent. I mean, it's not the only possible version of the solution anyway.

[thatnickguy]

"Global warming? NOOOOOOOO!!"

-Super Kami Guru

[astrakhan42]

OH GOD! Natural light!!!

[thanekos]

" Leave my brother out of this! "

[goattoucher]

"If I release my global warming shield, the US will weaponize it, somebody will create a counter and then it won't work as a global warming shield anymore!"

"That does not make -any- sense. I appreciate that the U.S. weaponizing it would be bad, but it would still work as a global warming shield. You are allowing the Earth's ecosystem to be irrevocably damaged year by year."

"Yes... But... Wakanda is the perfect society..."

"Yeah. Awesome. Maybe work on a way to keep the shield from being weaponized instead of throwing up your hands and giving up and letting -all- life on Earth gradually die out? Maybe?"