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.

Favorite Characters: Xu Xialing (Shang-Chi)

*A few Xialing-related spoilers.*

With Eternals coming out this weekend, I figured I’d better get in another Shang-Chi post. As the sibling of the main hero, Xialing joins such fine company as Shuri and Loki in kicking butt and stealing scenes.

When the Ten Rings comes after Shang-Chi in San Francisco, his biggest worry is that they’ll go after his younger sister next. Like Shang-Chi, Xialing eventually left Wenwu’s compound and made her own way in the world. While Shang-Chi fled to the West, Xialing settled in Macau, where she aspired to make a name for herself.

Xialing is a character fueled by resentment and anger. As much as Shang-Chi suffered under Wenwu’s attention in their childhood, young Xialing longed for it, wanted to train like her brother, wanted her father to notice her. So, Shang-Chi hides when he runs, but Xialing does no such thing. She makes noise, establishing her own underground fight ring in Macau, where sorcerers in the mystical arts battle gamma-radiation creatures and former Widows fight Extremis-enhanced soldiers. She claims no powers, but her skills still place her in the center ring, winning both acclaim and notoriety. “If my father won’t let me into his empire, I’ll build my own,” she explains to Katy.

Xialing, and her establishment, are both impressive – not to mention, the MCU timeline means she would’ve been doing most of this during the Blip, quite the time to be venturing out on your own. But her grudges are what propel her accomplishments. She resents Wenwu for ignoring her, favoring Shang-Chi over her, and she resents Shang-Chi for leaving her alone with Wenwu when he ran away. When Shang-Chi comes looking for her in Macau, hoping to protect her, he finds a young woman who doesn’t need protecting and who isn’t ready to forgive.

All this places Xialing into an interesting gray zone in the story. She’s not a villain – when they find out what Wenwu is planning, she sets aside her grievances with Shang-Chi just enough so that they can team up to stop their father – and she fights alongside the good guys when it counts, but you can’t quite call her a good guy, either. There’s a lot of darkness and pain in her that she needs to deal with before she can truly put it behind her, and in the meantime, that anger over what she feels she’s owed will guide some of her choices.

This positions her closer to Loki or Nebula. She has yet to reach either of them at their worst, but she’s teetering – it remains to be seen how far she’ll let her hurt drive her down a dangerous path, or what she may do if Shang-Chi tries to stop her. Within that, though, there’s still hope. After all, both Loki and Nebula, in time, come to stand beside their sbilings and fight with them, and Xialing already has an important breakthrough with her brother on the battlefield at Ta Lo.  While it’ll be interesting to see where her continuing anger takes her, I hope she’s eventually able to pull herself back from the brink with Shang-Chi’s help.