I remember first watching the Black Panther movie in 2018, I had just got for me It was a damn near magical experience, from the hype surrounding it, to seeing people dress up in dashikis and for my nerdy ass high school self to see a Black led superhero movie since fucking blade. After watching it, I spent my first paycheck of my job on a bunch of back Black Panther issues and immersed myself in the lore. The point is that I've always loved black panther and that will remain until I die.

As I got older, I took an interest in historical African Cultures and Kingdoms, and developed my love for writing and storytelling and as I look back on that fictional African nation that started my obsession, I can't help but feel a bit disappointed in what feels like a lack of subsatnce lacking in the worldbuilding

Don't get me wrong, I understand that the idea of "Wakanda" was already a projection of western ideas about what "Africa" is mainly for Black American but the problem was it never evolved beyond that .

Gripe No 1: Aesthetics

Wakanda itself has a vaguely Bantu aesthetic, based on personal names, place locations, clothes, and yet we have Yoruba, Tuareg, Hausa, and Igbo cultural elements just randomly there despite how different these cultures are. It kinda made sense when Wakanda's location was implied to be in West Africa in the comics, but even then, for an isolationist nation, it's still pushing it. And if you use the MCu location it just becomes ridiculous. Clothing, hairstyles, and names mean something even if it fades into the cultural subconscious or adopted from something else. How the hell is this isolationist, socially conservative, borderline ethnostate that was supposedly never expansionist in the continent have these random African cultural elements thrown in despite the context not really existing for these elements to exist. Why not go full in with the bantu aesthetic or make an entirely new aestethic to reflect how their culture developed without much outside influences

Gripe No. 2: Wakandan Culture???

If I asked you what Wakandan culture is, you'd probably say "The Black Panther Mantle" and I'll give you that, but if I asked you what the average Wakandan would wear, eat, drink or even what language they would speak, the blanks would start getting drawn. Royal Wakandan culture is pretty well defined but when you zoom out people start looking lifeless. How do these people feel about isolationism, Does the tribalism inherent within Wakanda's social structure even cross anyone's mind? They don't even have their own language for fucks sake!

This is even more egregious in the 2018 movie where they speak Xhosa which is a southern Bantu language and only evolved under specific conditions that Wakanda doesn't have. If you pick up a random Black Panther issue, they likely will touch any of these issues. Then immediately after they use it as a lifeless prop for another good king/bad king conflict for the hundredth time, and never actually provide any insight into any cultural ethos.

Gripe No. 2: Wakandan Faith

This is the most consistent thing about Wakandan culture, We have the Iconic Bast goddess which I'm fine with, I guess, but adding the orishas and other random African deities gets a little too much. Like the fucking Orisha?? their whole thing is that they're spiritually rooted to the Yoruba people. Again, cultural influence and just putting elements of a culture in there with no context. But actually, this was a really fun chance to make up gods or at least use the bantu mythological figures as a basis instead of just copy pasting shit.

Why it matters?

So why the fuck am I this passionate about a series of comics made for 13 year olds? I think the reason I'm so tough on Black Panther's worldbuilding is that Black Panther is tied to Wakanda in a way that other Marvel heroes aren't. Places Like Asgard and Atlantis have existed in the Western Imagination for centuries before their debut in Marvel Comics and thus the amount of legwork needed to make those worlds believable has already been done from the get-go. Wakanda, however, has none of that and has the additional burden of having to fight against the cultural narrative of African peoples and cultures being "less civilized" or intellectually barren. By extension, the Black Panther more or less is Wakanda, he is it's protector and leader and the narrative glue that gives the setting its identity, and as a result, fleshing out Wakanda is fleshing out Black Panther and vice versa.

If we dive into the meta-text, Black Panther is a stand-in for black identity in a time where there werent really that many black superheroes. So for all the shit I gave it I understand why modern writers see him and by an extension wakanda as an extension of that identity but times have changed, wakanda can grow and eveolve and I hope it does, for it's potential as a world and or a now 22 year old me.