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.

Relationship Spotlight: Xu Wenwu & Xu Shang-Chi (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings)

*Spoilers.*

Okay, so I only did one Marvelous Wednesday post that was mostly unrelated to Wenwu before sliding right back into it. But hey, baby steps! The relationship between Shang-Chi and his dad is the heart of the film, so it’s only fitting that we talk more about it.

Dads, and daddy issues, have loomed large throughout the MCU. Whether the characters are alive or not, their impact on their adult superhero (or villain) children is strongly felt. We’ve got evil adopted dads like Thanos, distracted/disinterested dads like Howard Stark, and ostensibly well-meaning dads that still screw up their kids like Odin. As for Shang-Chi, he’s got a real doozy of a dad – his first film devotes extensive time to flashbacks depicting his messed-up childhood with Wenwu. It’s weird enough when your dad is a 1000-year-old former war lord who only recently stopped wearing the Ten Rings that grant him lethal power and immortality, but for the first few years of Shang-Chi’s life, his childhood is about as normal as it could possibly be under those circumstances. I remain obsessed with the brief flashback of the Xu family playing Dance Dance Revolution and then cozying up on the couch together as the kids fall asleep. For me, that’s the “Avengers hang around drinking beer and trying to lift Thor’s hammer” scene of The Legend of the Ten Rings, and I love it so much.

But after Shang-Chi’s mom is killed (in retribution against Wenwu for something he did in his war-lord days,) any pretense of normality is forever gone from the family. Wenwu decides to rebuild the Ten Rings army, takes his 7-year-old son to watch him murder some gangsters in revenge, and then trains said 7-year-old son to be an assassin, again in service of revenge. While Shang-Chi eventually runs away from home and tries to start a new life for himself away from his dad’s influence, it’s not until after he takes his first life at the age of 14.

The two don’t see each other for 10 years, and when circumstances/Wenwu bring them back together, it’s a real head trip. First Wenwu sends Shang-Chi a postcard that appears to be from Shang-Chi’s sister Xialing, then he sends some of his men to recover Shang-Chi and Xialing’s Ta Lo pendants by any means necessary (but he’s confident that his men “couldn’t kill [Shang-Chi] if they tried,” so let bygones be bygones, right? Right?) After picking them up in his helicopter and flying them back to his compound, Wenwu has dinner with his kids, drops an unbelievable bombshell on them, and then has them thrown in his dungeon when it looks like they’re going to get in the way of his plans. It’s not a surprise when Shang-Chi comes to the conclusion that, because Wenwu needs to be stopped at all costs, Shang-Chi will have to kill him.

All that is classic hero kid/villain dad dynamics: the manipulation and abuse, the “join me on the Dark Side” invite, the “I’ll never be like you!” defiance. But this isn’t a Luke-Vader situation where the one redeeming moment comes at the eleventh hour. Wenwu is objectively terrible, but he’s also bizarrely, sincerely loving too, and that makes the whole thing even harder for Shang-Chi (and Xialing, but more on her another day) to deal with. As Shang-Chi is telling Katy about his twisted upbringing and his father shaping him into an assassin, he admits, “I would’ve done anything he asked.” And the way he says it, it’s not out of fear. It’s a kind of admiration, a kind of love that Wenwu engendered from his son. Wenwu draws it out of Shang-Chi with the way he kneels down to 7-year-old Shang-Chi’s eye level and earnestly entreats Shang-Chi to help him avenge Li’s murder. With the way he tenderly cleans Shang-Chi’s bloody knuckles after training, with the way he tells Shang-Chi about the family legacy of the Ten Rings with just the slight hint of a fairytale. Wenwu is powerful and imposing, but he’s magnetic too. He knows when to use a light touch, and for many years, that kept Shang-Chi caught in his orbit. A huge part of the reason Wenwu is so compelling, as both a dad and an antagonist, is that all of his menacing scenes are about 10% tender and all his tender scenes are about 10% menacing. It’s love and care and power and possession and rage and grief and vengeance and longing all rolled into one. No wonder he throws Shang-Chi off-kilter.

This is why their big fight scenes in the second half of the film are dramatically engaging as well as being excellent action. You can feel the force of the emotion on both sides. Shang-Chi defiantly insisting he’s not afraid of Wenwu and Wenwu coolly replying, “Yes, you are.” Shang-Chi’s accusation that Wenwu chose the Rings over his family when his children needed him the most and Wenwu hurling back that Shang-Chi should have protected his mom on the night those men came for her. Shang-Chi’s taunt, “Is this what you wanted?” as he faces down Wenwu, preparing to imitate his dad’s own ruthlessness, and then Shang-Chi choosing to be better when he’s positioned to land the killing blow. Shang-Chi trying to get through to Wenwu as he tries to break down the gate in Ta Lo (thinking it will free a still-alive Li when really, it’s the Dweller in Darkness luring him in,) sadly insisting, “She’s not back there, Dad,” Wenwu’s desperation as he avows, “I have to save her!” These fights are charged and personal, and they illuminate Shang-Chi (and Wenwu) for us in ways that the spectacle of the climatic battle with the Dweller in Darkness just don’t.

By the end of the film, Wenwu is gone, having pulled the classic last-second redemption move of putting himself between danger and his son when the Dweller in Darkness escapes the gate, giving Shang-Chi the Ten Rings with his dying breath. And I mean, I get it. 1) Marvel probably didn’t want to bank on getting an actor of Leung’s stature to sign on for more than one movie, and killing Wenwu off is the cleanest way to get him out of the picture. And 2) Wenwu is such a foundational presence in this film and in Shang-Chi’s life, so for Shang-Chi to ultimately be established as his own hero, he needs to get out from under his dad’s shadow, both personally and narratively. But it’s still a damn shame. Even if the MCU is littered with sons and daughters who have complicated relationships with their dads, this was one was done spectacularly well, and I really wish we could’ve seen more of it going forward.

(Quick side note, because I can’t help myself: not to mention, I just kind of wish we could have Wenwu in everything. I would watch the hell out of a movie/Disney+ series/whatever that showed the rise of the Ten Rings, and I saw this fan art of Wenwu facing off against Tony Stark (the Mandarin is primarily an Iron Man villain in the comics) and was blown away by the sheer thought of all that coolness we won’t get. Unless… What If…? Maybe? Leung enjoyed working with you, Marvel – if you play your cards right, you might get him to make more appearances in the universe!)

Further Thoughts on Wenwu (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings)

*Full and complete Shang-Chi spoilers ahead*

I promise that I’ll get around to talking about other aspects of Shang-Chi at some point, as well as circle back to talking about the Disney+ shows some more, but right now, my brain is still utterly focused on Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Wenwu. Critics and audience members have been freaking out over the character/Leung’s performance, and rightfully so (it makes me wonder what it’s like for people who are seeing Leung for the first time in this movie,) and in amongst all the praise, admiration, and thirst, I’ve seen a lot of people commenting that Wenwu isn’t really a villain at all. Just as the character/performance is stuck in my head, so is that remark, and I’d like to explore that today: Wenwu as a villain, or not.

So, is Wenwu a villain? That depends on how we define it. Is a villain a bad guy, someone who wreaks damage on the hero’s life? If so, Wenwu is most definitely a villain. He’s a grieving widower who’s let his anger and loss fuel him for the last seventeen years, and Leung’s performance lets you feel every inch of that pain, making him a pretty sympathetic bad guy, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s also terrible. In response to his wife’s murder, he trains his 7-year-old son to be an unstoppable assassin of vengeance – who does that?

In short, someone who was a powerful, selfish war lord for 1000 years, someone who only spent ten brief years looking outside himsef and his own power when he fell in love with Li and put his conquering ways aside to raise a family with her. I think it’s important to note that you can’t really call Wenwu “redeemed” during this period. He may have stopped murdering and seeking power, but there’s no evidence that he tries to atone in any way for his past deeds, no suggestion that he’s trying to put active good into the world aside from being a caring husband and father. With such a long history of violent self-gratification and such a short period of being “good,” the war lord is still lurking beneath the surface of the husband/father. As such, when Li is killed, it’s a very short jump for Wenwu to return to his old ways, putting the Ten Rings back on and taking his vengeance in blood, viewing his son as a weapon he can shape for that purpose and hardly noticing his daughter at all.

(Side note: this is the fatal flaw of the “redeemed by the love of a good woman” trope. When a villain’s “goodness” is conditional on another person, it can be shallow and risks being cast aside when that person is removed from their life.)

On the other hand, if you define a villain as someone with an evil plan, Wenwu would not fit the bill. In the film, he has to be stopped at all costs, but his actions aren’t in aid of conquest, destruction, or even vengeance (although the latter does factor into the overall showdown somewhat.) Wenwu wouldn’t even be considered a villain in the vein of Killmonger or the Vulture, two of Marvel’s other more successfully-executed antagonists. While the two of them are doing wrong for good/understandable motives, Wenwu’s actions need to be viewed from two different perspectives: what he thinks he’s doing versus what he’s actually doing. By Wenwu’s understanding, it turns out that Li is actually alive, that she was kidnapped by the people of Ta Lo all those years ago and held there, imprisoned behind the gate. If that were really the case, then Wenwu certainly wouldn’t be the villain. He’d be the romantic hero moving heaven and earth to save his wife who’d been held captive for 17 years. Hell, even his intention to raze Ta Lo to the ground if he can’t recover Li from them, while not “good” in an ethical sense, wouldn’t be straight up villainous in terms of Hollywood morality. How many movies have there been of an action hero laying waste to dozens of bad guys who are holding the woman he loves prisoner? Again, if the people of Ta Lo have done what Wenwu thinks they have – magically fake Li’s death and then hold her prisoner for 17 years, all because they disapproved of her marriage to Wenwu – they’re the bad guys, and in a different framing of the story, Wenwu would be positioned as well within his rights to defeat them.

However, that’s not what’s happening. In actuality, Wenwu is being tricked by the actual captive behind the gate, the Dweller in Darkness. He isn’t the first person the Dweller in Darkness has deceived with the voice of a dead loved one calling out to them for rescue, but thanks to the Ten Rings, he’s the first with enough power to actually break the seal on the gate and release the creature back into the universe. That’s ultimately why Shang-Chi has to stop his dad – not because Wenwu is an evil villain trying to destroy the world, but because he’s a widower whose grief has been exploited by a malevolent force that’s fooling him.

I find that so interesting about Wenwu. A lot of Marvel’s better villains are people who’ve been corrupted or radicalized by harsh circumstances, decent people whose experiences have twisted them until they take their sympathetic goals to extreme lengths. By contrast, Wenwu is a decidedly-bad person who thinks he’s actually doing good for once, having been unwittingly manipulated by an unambiguous evil. There isn’t really another character like him in the MCU, and that makes Shang-Chi’s conflict with him all the more fascinating.