Favorite Characters: Katy (Shang-Chi)

*A few Katy-related spoilers.*

It might feel like strong words to go for a Favorite Characters post over a Character Highlight, considering she’s a supporting character who’s only been in one movie so far, but honestly? I kind of love Katy. I’ve talked before about her relationship with Shang-Chi, and I think she deserves some space for herself too.

Relationships factor big into pretty much any MCU property, and I really appreciate that, amid the familial connections and the romances, the friendships never get the short shrift. Over the years, I’ve sung the praises of many a non-powered best friend of the hero. Katy fits into that group well, joining the likes of pre-Winter Soldier Bucky, Foggy, Malcolm, Maria, and others.

I like that, for all that she’s an underachiever who’s well aware that she’s disappointing her mother, we also see qualities in Katy that will come in handy in a superhero movie. Her penchant for fast cars and claim of being “the Asian Jeff Gordon” is instrumental to their survival more than once. When Ten Rings members attack Shang-Chi on the bus and the driver gets knocked out, when they make their escape from Wenwu’s compound, and when they travel through the moving bamboo forest to Ta Lo, they wouldn’t have made it if it weren’t for Katy’s adrenaline-fueled driving skills. And in Ta Lo, she turns out to be a quick study in the bow and arrow, making a crucial shot at a critical moment.

(By the way, I’ve decided that Katy shooting the Dweller in Darkness isn’t all that unreasonable. You could argue that a novice archer might have trouble shooting that far, but in terms of aiming for it and hitting it? The Dweller in Darkness is huge. In this case, the target basically is the broad side of a barn. Honestly, it probably would’ve been harder for her to hit all the mini-soul suckers flying around than the ginormous dragon demon that, at the moment, was mostly stationary.)

Those skills and that ability to perform under pressure doesn’t mean she instantly rolls with all the punches, though. She’s thrown for a loop, hard, when she realizes that her best friend was raised by an immortal war lord who trained him to be an assassin, and there are plenty of, “Wait, say what??” moments for her. Similarly, she doesn’t become an immediate badass who can handle herself in every situation. When they’re attacked in Macau and need to climb across the scaffolding to escape, she has to dig deep to find the bravery to just keep inching forward, and the only weapon in her arsenal at that point is to start shouting the lyrics to “Hotel California” in the hopes of distracting the martial arts assassins who are after them.

She doesn’t have it all figured out—far from it—and she seems to move between a nervy bravado and criticizing herself with her mother’s voice. But she’s there. From the moment the Ten Rings come back into Shang-Chi’s life, she’s at his side and won’t be dissuaded. Throughout, she offers Shang-Chi what help she can, whether that’s her wild driving or just her willingness to let him open up without fear of judgement, and she takes the time to recognize and affirm Xialing too. Katy isn’t someone who was “meant” to get tangled up in any of this, and she doesn’t have the same tools/training as anyone around her, but by the end of the film, she’s more than proven her place.

I’m so happy that, when Wong comes for Shang-Chi in the last scene, he comes for Katy as well. It can be hard to say when the threads are really going to start coming together in these next phases of the MCU, but I’m excited to know that Shang-Chi and Katy both will have a place in things going forward.

A Few Thoughts on Li (Shang-Chi)

*Li-related spoilers.*

In Shang-Chi, Li has a complicated presence. It’s undeniable that she’s more a function of the plot, and a tropey one at that, than a character in her own right. And when we see a character solely through flashbacks, it can be easy to pigeonhole them as just one thing—in Li’s case, the ethereal, serene dead mom who personified all the goodness in the Xu family. Without her, everything fell apart pretty spectacularly. And yet, I do think the film allows her to be a little more nuanced than that.

For starters, let’s just get this out of the way. Li was absolutely fridged. Her death affects the whole family, but most prominently, her murder shatters any notion of Wenwu leaving his warlord days in the past. After she’s killed, Wenwu falls into a heavy depression, and, blaming himself, he puts the Ten Rings back on and sets out to get revenge on those responsible for her death. She’s killed specifically because of him, by a gang who comes to the house looking to settle an old score with Wenwu, and in the present-day storyline, the Dweller in Darkness manipulates Wenwu with a lie that she’s still alive and in need of rescue, coopting his power for its own escape from Ta Lo. Major plot device.

Meanwhile, Li’s death kicks off Shang-Chi’s origin story, with Wenwu deciding to craft his 7-year-old son into a deadly instrument of vengeance against her killers. The loss of her filled Wenwu with single-minded bitterness and rage, and for Shang-Chi, it was the start of his own road down a dark path at his dad’s bidding. And yet, Shang-Chi also equates his mom with anything good in him. His only happy memories back home are from when she was still alive, not to mention the only times he can remember seeing any goodness in his dad. In flashbacks, she’s airy and light, soft-spoken but radiant with life. On the surface, she appears every inch the saintly dead mom.

But the film, aided greatly by Fala Chen’s gentle but strong performance, resists letting her be just the idyllic memory of a lost parent, just the Fridged Antagonist Motivator. Obviously, I love the opening sequence of the movie, where we see her meet Wenwu and watch a fight between them start shifting to love before our eyes. I like how calm and steady she is in her fight scenes. Even when those men come to kill her, she softly tells Shang-Chi and Xialing to go inside, then faces them with a steady gaze, only a flicker in her eyes to betray her worry. I enjoy the way she tells Shang-Chi stories of Ta Lo like they’re fairy tales, brightly passing on the beauty and pride of her people to her son in a way that a child can take in. And I really appreciate that, even though she’s a nigh-unflappable warrior from a mystical dimension who grew up carrying the magic of a dragon, she’s also just a woman. She lightly teases Wenwu when she corrects his tai chi stances, she laughs when she plays with her kids, and she curls up on the couch with her husband and children at the end of a long day. These are just tiny glimmers of moments, but they do a lot to make Li feel like a person instead of a figure or a saint.

A Few Thoughts on Wenwu and Xialing (Shang-Chi)

*Xialing-Wenwu-related spoilers.*

I’ve already written on the relationship between Shang-Chi and Wenwu, but I wanted to write about the Xu patriarch’s relationship with Xialing too. This won’t be a full-on Relationship Spotlight, since any discussion about these two is going to be more about their lack of relationship. So much so that the above image is the only still I could find from the movie that had both of them in it.

When Shang-Chi and Katy go to Macau to warn Xialing that the Ten Rings are coming after her, Shang-Chi is amazed to see all that his sister has accomplished in the ten years since he last saw her. She ran away from home a handful of years after he did, but while Shang-Chi laid low, Xialing started her own underground fighting ring, where she commands both power and respect. Shang-Chi wanted to get as far away from their dad as possible, living an “ordinary” life where he can’t be found, but Xialing all but puts a spotlight on herself and her achievements.

Both children’s actions are very much in response to Wenwu, albeit in different ways. Shang-Chi’s primary feeling toward his father is fear; Xialing’s is abandonment. After their mom was killed, Wenwu took Shang-Chi under his wing to mold him into the perfect assassin, but Xialing couldn’t see how Shang-Chi was suffering and how their dad was traumatizing him. She only saw how Wenwu shut her out, how she wasn’t allowed to train with “the boys” and was left on her own, watching their moves from the shadows and training herself in secret.

When Wenwu brings them all back to his compound and Katy admits how afraid she is of him, Xialing’s advice is brutally simple: “Just nod. Don’t talk. He’ll forget you’re there.” This was her childhood in a nutshell. But even as she explains, “That’s how I survived,” it’s clear that growing up outside of her father’s notice hurts her too. Upon their arrival at the compound, Wenwu triumphantly announces to his men, “My son is home!” Of Xialing (and Katy,) he just says, “Take the girls to their room.”

For the most part, the movie treats this difference in how Wenwu regards his children as originating in sexism. Xialing was barred from training with the boys. Ta Lo is different from Wenwu’s compound because men and women are trained equally. When Xialing takes over the Ten Rings in the post-credits scene, we see both men and women running drills in the courtyard. #TerroristGirlBoss?

Which, I mean, on one level, it does make sense. There are still a lot of sexist traditions and attitudes out there, in China and around the world. Not to mention, Wenwu is a thousand years old—he’s literally “from a different time.” But personally, I prefer the secondary explanation for his seeming disinterest in Xialing. This one is only mentioned once in the film, but it seems to fit so much better for me. Xialing tells Katy that she didn’t lose her dad’s love or attention until after her mom died, that Wenwu couldn’t look at Xialing without thinking of his murdered wife.

This is the one that I think tracks better on the whole. For one, we already know that Wenwu has been riddled with grief since the day Li died. Ten years later, he’s still so deep in his grief that he’s prepared to raze Ta Lo to the ground on the fantastical off-chance that she’s still alive and they’ve been hiding her from him. His head and heart is stuck in the past, in what he lost, so it makes sense that he wouldn’t be able to deal with the present-day Xialing standing in front him and looking so much like Li. And second, Wenwu fell in love with Li as she was kicking his ass. She was a serene warrior and he adored her for that. How could he love her like he did and perpetuate a tired “fighting’s for boys only!” paradigm? I don’t think I buy that.