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Societies have relied on different cultural mechanisms to cultivate appropriate and timely models of heroic masculinity, which have included oral tradition, art, epic poetry, and theatre. In contemporary times, cinema has become one of the primary venues to disseminate masculine archetypes throughout a society’s collective conscious. In certain cases, heroic masculinity can be manifested when characters embrace their valor, courage, and physical prowess for the greater good while eschewing the potentially toxic elements of their personalities and powers. In Ryan Coogler’s 2018 film Black Panther, the dichotomy of toxic masculinity and heroic masculinity plays out through a series of ritual combats. Black Panther applies traditional and historically relevant motifs to show how its superhero addresses the question of toxic versus heroic masculinity; and, in the end the film condemns toxic masculinity by portraying a hero who embodies strength, wisdom, and inclusiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four years after the globally-lauded premiere of Black Panther , Marvel-Disney launched its sequel Wakanda Forever. The film centres on the new all-female leadership of the fictional African monarchy as it grapples with an emergent threat from Namor, the centuries-old ruler of an undersea Mesoamerican kingdom known as Talokan. Employing an assessment of the absent presence of the Anthropocene in the text, this article interrogates the popular, political, and planetary geographies of the expanding BP universe, focusing on what is screened in WF and what is left unscreened (obscene). In terms of the former, the article complicates the potential-if-unrealised geopolitical condominium between black and brown superpowers against the (neo)imperial white/surface world. Regarding the latter, it examines director Ryan Coogler's retro-active change in continuity which denudes Namor of his ecological activism and his burden of care for the oceans and the innumerable lifeforms contained therein. While anthropogenic climate change, rampant oceanic pollution, and humanity's geological agency stalk the filmic narrative, these hyperobjects are conspicuously missing from the diegesis, thus indicating the unwillingness and/or inability of Disney – qua the consummate American global conglomerate – to make a case for environmentalism in the face of cascading planetary crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]