Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Gender Roles

-

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was an extremely hyped up and successful Marvel movie, and it is in ninth place for worldwide-gross at the box office in 2021. Overall, this was a great superhero origin movie with an amazing cast, amazing fight sequences, and a great story as well. However, I'm not here to write a movie review about it. I'm here to (yep, you guessed it) analyze the gender roles in Shang-Chi. 


By the way, there are probably going to be spoilers, so if you want to get the full experience of watching this great movie, don't read my blog post.

Anyways, the antagonist, Wenwu (who is very cool), is the immortal leader of the organization the Ten Rings, and he strictly believes in tradition. For example, he trains his son Shang-Chi to become an assassin, but leaves Xu Xialing out of the training because she is a girl. In many ancient cultures, prohbiting women from joining the army and fighting was very common (see Mulan, for example). However, Xialing later overcomes this by secretly teaching herself martial arts to become an assassin as well. She then creates an underground fight club from scratch to become extremely successful, once again going against stereotypes. 

Another example of going against these age-old gender roles is Shang-Chi's mother and his aunt being trained fighters too (hmm, I think martial arts sort of runs in the family). Shang-Chi's mother managed to match, and eventually overcome Wenwu in an epic fight before falling victim to his charm and marrying him. Later on, Shang-Chi's aunt fought at the front lines against the Ten Rings in the final fight as well. She is portrayed as a strong, authority figure whose importance is felt throughout the fight. These roles counter the still-existing culture in some areas that refuse to change their outdated ways.

Comments

  1. VictoriaFebruary 6, 2022 at 11:26 AM

    Although I have never watched Shang-Chi, this post did a good job explaining how characters overcame gender norms. I liked when you mentioned Mulan as another example of women being prohibited to fight in war because I’ve watched that movie and I can get a general idea of the gender roles in this movie. I love you when you said “still-existing culture” because gender stereotypes still exist today.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Aatreya MaktalFebruary 6, 2022 at 11:52 AM

    Your informal language was definitely fun to read, and reading the piece felt like a movie review more than a tirade on gender roles or a rant on how you felt about the plot. I did enjoy how they made the females equally as strong as the males in the movie, fixing the gender disparities that were once made by Wenwu.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shooting People is Fun!

-
Image
Shooting people in real life isn't a very viable option -- there are way too many repercussions. So, people turn to another form of media to do it. Here, you can shoot as many people as you want, without any repercussions! In fact, killing more people is encouraged and even praised. Another plus is that it also prepares you for the real world. When you ultimately get drafted to fight in a war, you'll be dominating on the battlefield. It trains you to make split-second decisions in real life. It improves your reflexes immensely, so if you get shot at in real life, you'll be able to flick and BANG -- headshot, instakill. Not only that, but if you're really good at this, you can get paid handsome amounts of mula by letting people simply watch you play.  Sound familiar? I'm talking about the world of videogames and esports. In fact, about a quarter of all videogame sales in 2016 were first-person shooter games. And by my experience on Twitch, they are definitely the mos...
Read more

Sunny Side Up is Always the Best

-
"The Diamond in the Ritz" is a novella by F. Scott Fitzgerald which, again, like The Great Gatsby , explores the American Dream and how greed corrupts even the best men. The interpretation we talked about in class discussed how happiness was an illusion because both rich and poor people cannot be happy. The rich constantly hide their wealth and live in fear of losing their wealth. The poor, on the other hand, don't have any money to get by, which is the polar opposite of the rich. At the end of the short story, when Kismine and Jasmine leave to go live with John, they will finally experience the freedom of not having to worry about money. They think it'll be fun and are actually excited about what comes next, their naivety not realizing the hardships that come with poverty. This then implies that no matter where you are on the social hierarchy, you will be unhappy. Harsh. However, that's not necessarily how I first saw it. The story ended with "[John] fell of...
Read more

The Face of Gatsby

-
Image
I usually dislike classics that are required reads in school, simply because many of them don't appeal to the reader inside me. Many of the books I have read in school such as The Book Thief, and To Kill a Mockingbird were mildly interesting with decent plots, but weren't very enjoyable reads due to the overanalyzing we were forced to do in class. However, one must take note of the word "usually" because there is one exception to this. The Great Gatsby is an iconic work of literature that transcends time and will inspire generations to come. In fact, this book is one of the most widely taught in American high schools. For this reason, I did not come into this book with high expectations: overhyping things usually results in letdowns. Although this book started off slow, the book quickly gained traction until I actually started to enjoy the assigned chapters everyday. The method of analyzing in class also added to my enjoyment of this book because we weren't force...
Read more