Black Superheroes: Black Panther (Shuri)

MCU Shuri could never!

Name: Shuri

First Appearance: Black Panther #2 (2005)

History: Shuri is the younger sister of T’Challa, only daughter of King T’Chaka, and thus a princess of the nation of Wakanda. Because she is the younger child of the king there was no expectation of her taking the throne or the mantle of Black Panther but the young girl desperately desired the title. She trained for years to achieve this goal, particularly after her father’s murder and her uncle being chosen to succeed him. Unfortunately, her overprotective mother interfered with her attempt to challenge for the mantle and by the time she arrived she discovered that T’Challa had returned from his studies aboard and won the title, and the kingdom, himself

Undeterred, she continued training and hoping for the opportunity to present itself again (aside from a stint being a party girl due to experiencing a traumatic event, but there’s word limit here). The day came when T’Challa was mortally wounded at the hands of Doctor Doom and Shuri was unexpectedly chosen to undergo the trial to succeed her brother. She completed the trials, but she was denied the powers of the Black Panther by Bast the Panther God who declared her motives to be about pride and not about a selfless desire to protect her people. However, she proved herself worth by risking her life to battle Morlun in order to protect her wounded bother and the people of Wakanda, earning Bast’s blessing at last.

Shuri rose to become the new Black Panther and the Queen of Wakanda, ruling in her brother’s place when the need arises.

Beta Says: I know that the MCU is a little notorious for making change to characters they adapt into movies, but I’m not sure if we’ve seen many who have deviated from the source material as much as Shuri. In the comics she was a serious warrior who coveted the Black Panther mantle and went on a years’ long journey before she eventual earned it, while MCU-Shuri is jokey genius scientist who couldn’t be less interested in replacing her bother. This is all fine and good except that I fear we could be seeing another example of the original character being replaced with the movie version, with all the interesting aspects of Shuri pre-MCU fading away.

More about the deadlier of the species after the jump.

Beta's Top Ten Favorite Movies of 2025

I really wanted to post more in 2025, but I just didn’t have time. I started at a new job that absolutely DESTROYED my free time. I essentially had time to work on my podcast (Adult Siblings Versus …which you can listen to HERE) and that’s it. But I am still managing to get this Top Ten list on the anniversary of this blog, and I still plan on putting out my annual Black Superhero Month posts next month. 

For today we’ll focus on my top ten favorite movies of 2025. As always, these are my FAVORITE films, not necessarily the objectively best films. Also, as always, there were plenty of films I was unable to get around to watching things like Marty Supreme or One Battle After Another. While I tried to watch Frankenstein, I have never seen a movie that needed to be viewed on a big screen rather a TV more and I couldn’t maintain interested solely based on that. 

 I did watch Elio with my son last year, however, which is the most recent Pixar film. I want to take a moment to mention how much I liked it (he liked it too) and how wrong the modern idea that Pixar movies just not being good anymore is. It JUST barely didn’t make the list. Blame Benoit Blanc for that one.

My favorite movies of 2025 after the jump.

Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the second sequel to the original film from 2014. It’s based on the 2008 comic book of the same name but not to be confused with the 1969 comic of the same name though it does share some characters.

This movie has been a long time coming, as it should have come out some time ago, striking while the iron from Avengers: Endgame was still hot. The short version as to why it took so long stems from the public firing and re-hiring of writer/director James Gunn. I plan on writing a blog about the DC Comics movie woes and wins very soon and I imagine I’ll go into greater details then, but to keep this blog as short as possible, Gunn was fired when tweets from a decade prior resurfaced of him making many terrible, offensive, and tasteless jokes leading to a backlash from some fans but apparently mostly far-right conservatives and Russian bots (this all happened after months of Gunn publicly shaming then-president Donald Trump, but I’m sure that’s a coincidence). Gunn was then nearly immediately hired by Warner Bros. to direct The Suicide Squad. Around that time Disney, now dealing with a much larger and less bot driven backlash from fans and actors about their knee jerk decision, offered him his job back which he accepted but as he agreed to do Suicide Squad that had to come first. This fiasco directly led to Gunn becoming the one of heads of DC’s film studio, but we’ll talk on that more another day. Add the COVID-19 shutdown into to equation and today’s movie is many years later than it should have been.

[Also note that Gunn also directed a TV/streaming Holiday Special starring the cast which acts as a brief prologue to this move but luckily it’s not that crucial if you want to skip.]

With Gunn already waist deep in building out the next phase of a competing studio, this movie is, and frankly always was going to be, the final GotG film with him in charge and possibly at all, as several actors have mentioned that they plan on this being their final performance. But with all the waiting for this final chapter the question remains: is it any good, or were all the Zack Snyder fans on Twitter correct when they said everything he does is “mid.”

Full review after the jump.

Nerd Rage #17: Beta vs. Marvel Studios

They've come a long way from being a bankrupt joke

A blog in November? What madness is this? As I suggested a while back I have decided not to participate in National Novel Writing Month this year, partly because of all my work with my book earlier this year but main due to having recently started a new job that would not allow the time to writing 50,000 words in a month and still have anything resembling a life (actually my new job doesn’t leave much time for any writing at all, to my great chagrin).

Anyway Marvel Studios formally announced their movie schedule through the year 2019 (and for some reason this is considered a fine move) and apparently it made everyone I know go insane with anticipation. Some of the films sound pretty cool and others one sound kind of “meh”. I thought it would be fun to briefly at all of Marvel’s upcoming flicks and judge mercilessly despite knowing almost nothing about any of them. And hey, maybe you don’t know much about the characters in the film and this may be a nice learning experience.

Of course supposedly a list of Marvel movies was leaked earlier this year and I distinctive recall many people on my Facebook feed losing their shit over it; taking it completely at face value. I recall being very skeptical about it, especially with World Word Hulk, Captain America: The Fallen Son, and Avengers: Civil War as none of them really made any thematic sense to me based on what had already been established. (Though, let’s face it, Marvel could have easily changed key details of their films after the word got out but we either way it’s hard to know of sure) In any case I didn’t even want to talk about those rumors until things were verified. Now that the official list of films have come out I thought I’d go through them (and since I had a few friends who asked my thoughts about it I get it all out of my system at once).

Congratulations, suckers; you f**king fell for it!

So today we’ll look at all of Marvel Studios’ upcoming films. This does not include the upcoming X-Men, Spider-Man or Fantastic Four flicks as they are produced by different studios (Fox and Sony respectively) nor will be looking at DC Comics' line-up partly because they probably deserve their own topic and partly because I don’t want to angrily ramble right now. I mean, I may still do that today but at least this way I’m not starting out already being annoyed and pissed off at the source material. (Doctor Doom is an angry hacker? Really?)

Marvel Studios’ future after the jump.

[WARNING: While most of my ramblings are just conjecture I may be spoiling plot points for future films simply by taking about the comics they're based on. Read at your own risk.]