Black Panther Thought of the Day

[beatrice_otter]

Chadwick Boseman is 41, having been born in 1977.  I generally count characters as the age of their actors unless canon says otherwise.  This makes T'Challa 41 years old (pretty old for a crown prince to get without having married and sired heirs, especially when they don't have lots of brothers and sisters).

Shuri is sixteen.  She would have been born in 2002.  Unless T'Challa is a LOT younger than the actor who portrays him, he would have been 35 when she was born.  There's enough of an age gap that she could have been his daughter.

One wonders about this.  Do Wakandans not go in for the "heir and a spare" thing that so many monarchies do?  Were T'Chaka and Ramonda trying to have more children, but had fertility problems?  Or do Wakandans practice strict birth control, to keep themselves from outgrowing their relatively small land area?  Did T'Chaka and Ramonda always plan to space their kids out, or (after seeing how loooooooooooooooooong and drawn out T'Challa and Nakia's courtship was, did they decide "welp, we're not going to get grandkids any time soon, and we want another baby to spoil"?

(You could do a number of great fics where Shuri is, unbeknownst to her, actually T'Challa's daughter, not his sister--maybe the result of a youthful dalliance and failed birth control with someone who didn't want to be queen and was not particularly maternal?)

Comments

[monanotlisa]

Oh, interesting idea! I do think T'Challa is not duplicitous enough for this charade, though. And as for the heir-and-spare thing, doesn't that only make sense in royalties with automatic succession? Wakanda allows the crown prince (or, I hope, princess) to be challenged, and it seems that in the past that has happened, and the line of succession switched. So just popping out kids does not seem to be a winning strategy anyway.

[beatrice_otter]

Yeah, but you still want extras in case somebody falls off a cliff or gets sick or something. (Maybe having had generations of REALLY AWESOME medical technology has kept that less of a concern.) And just because the crown doesn't have to pass to the king's child doesn't mean that the king wouldn't PREFER to keep it in the family, you know? And if you have more than one kid, and THEY have more than one kid, you end up with a situation where future claimants are likely also descendants of yours, one way or another.

[domarzione]

In the comics, Ramonda is T'Challa's stepmother -- Shuri's biological mother, but not his. They have a close relationship regardless. Which makes the age gap more understandable -- T'Chaka's first wife passed, eventually he remarried and then came Shuri.

[melannen]

I was just about to come in and offer to do the "--in the comics" thing! Although of course age gaps don't mean much in comics canon where everybody just converges on 29.

Do you know how comics!Shuri fits in to comics!T'Challa's timeline? I know she turns up fairly late in canon, in one of the runs I haven't read, and I also know Ramonda spent quite awhile late in T'Chaka's reign/early in T'Challa's out of contact with Wakanda, but I don't know how comics!Shuri's childhood fits in there.

[oracne]

Shuri came in during the Hudlin run - I am pretty sure she is his character, and did not exist before that. Would have to check the Marvel wiki to be sure. She seems older than a teenager to me, in the comics, especially since she's already been Black Panther, died, and came back.

[beatrice_otter]

Oh, that makes a lot of sense.

[lilacsigil]

25, not 35 when Shuri was born! But that doesn't change the rest of the post.

[beatrice_otter]

ooops.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I take it as 'given' that there is for male characters a plus or minus to their actor of about 15 years permissible. So, Chadwick could still play Hamlet. Michael B Jordan is likely playing slightly 'older' since he's just 31 and thus wouldn't have been a tween in 1992. Likely as not T'Challa and his cousin are close in age, possibly 'flipped'.

[beatrice_otter]

Sure, but it's more fun to take the actors ages in this case unless canon gives us a reason not to.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Admittedly. But we can See that Michael B. Jordan is not as old as his character would need to be to be the age the flashback kid is in 1992. There are posits that Erik Stevens would have rolled through some of the same operations theaters as Sam Wilson.

I want to know how Klaue didn't figure out 'the strange American' was the same Killmonger Ross was knowledgeable about.

[tielan]

I mentally went with the comics canon of 'Ramonda is T'Challa's stepmother, but he thinks of her as a mother'.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I accepted that T'Challa is not like Jossed Thor dismissive of family bonds.