Aqua-pessimism and Black-Brown Futurities in Wakanda Forever (2022)

Poster for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever that features Namor/Talokan

In a dazzling spectacle of CGI wizardry, kinetic fight choreography, futuristic tech, soaring musical score, and ideological clashes (we are truly spoiled in this era of the Marvel Cinematic Universe), Shuri, Riri Williams, and the Dora Milaje triumph over Namor and his Talokanil warriors, as well as their oceanic allies. The Black Panther returns. Wakanda’s immediate future is secured, its global cultural and military might reaffirmed. The brown, Indigenous, aquatic threat recedes into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean—a historically fraught site of colonial violence and shared trauma for Mesoamerican and African peoples, from the Middle Passage to the Yucatán Peninsula.

Without ambiguity, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) reassures audiences that despite the untimely death of Chadwick Boseman and the irreplaceable cultural footprint left by Black Panther (2018), the superhero’s legacy lives on—both literally and symbolically. It’s a message of resilience and hope, particularly for Black and African American fans, for whom leading, well-crafted superhero narratives offer powerful counternarratives to a long history of marginalization in U.S. popular culture. Yet, the specter of Namor, Talokan, and the deep, unpredictable vastness of the Atlantic continues to unsettle the MCU’s—and our own—comfort with visions of harmonious, cross-cultural futurities.

Director Ryan Coogler, known for his commitment to excavating historical “otherwise” possibilities, is at his most compelling during Talokan’s mid-film reveal. He interrupts the celebratory climax of M’Baku’s bid for Wakanda’s throne and the comedic punch of the “colonizer in chains” gag at Everett Ross’s expense in the back of a CIA van. Between the airborne bursts of Black joy and the warm, sunlit moments on the surface world, Coogler plunges us into one final, haunting tableau—this time from the vantage point of Talokan.

The climactic battle between Wakandan diplomacy and Talokanil isolationism. “The thought of you kneeling to the Wakandans…” Namora, Namor’s cousin and right-hand

“The thought of you kneeling to the Wakandans…” Namora, Namor’s cousin and right-hand woman, rebukes him. Ominous music swells and recedes in the background. Namor pauses, halting his brush mid-stroke. His mural—depicting a Talokanil warrior locked in battle with a jaguar—stands as a symbolic clash of civilizations, mythologies, and worldviews. Slowly, he turns to face her.

“The Black Panther is the most powerful person in the most powerful nation on the surface… But she has no allies,” he replies. Tenoch Huerta, magnetic and measured, channels the chilling pragmatism of a nearly 500-year-old demigod. As Namor speaks in Yucatec Maya, the language itself becomes a vessel of resistance—a declaration of anti-coloniality, anti-surface, anti-assimilation into modern systems of extraction and systemic oppression.

Scenes set in Talokan—or at its shadowy entry-point—are never as brightly lit as those above the waves. Shuri, and by extension the audience, must recalibrate terra-centric vision to navigate the preexisting conditions of this submerged world. The film refuses to translate Talokan’s epistemology into surface-world legibility. The underwater is not exoticized but asserted. It exists on its own terms.

The final shot of Namor in Talokan’s cavern throne room underscores this: dimly lit, bathed in somber blue tones, and entirely disinterested in the aesthetic sensibilities of the surface world. Namor appears to be persuading Namora, but much of the scene plays as a direct address. He moves toward the camera—as if speaking to us. As if calling us to witness a future visible only through an oceanic, decolonized, Indigenous lens—what Frederick Luis Aldama might describe as a “brown optic,” now immersed in the aquatic.

“Now she has empathy for the people of Talokan,” Namor says. “With this alliance… Talokan will be stronger than ever. The surface world will come for Wakanda. And Wakanda will turn to us. Trust me.”

Namor paints a new mural– perhaps his recent fight with Shuri, or another one in the future?

It’s a compelling complication of what allyship means in a world shaped by militarization and surveillance. In other words, the joining of Black and Brown forces isn’t just a gesture of solidarity—it’s a necessity for survival in the modern age. Much like Queen Ramonda’s unapologetic speech at the United Nations earlier in the film, Namor directly critiques the extractivist impulse of the Western world.

To borrow Catherine S. Ramirez’s germinal term—developed from and in conversation with Afrofuturism—Chicana Futurism “questions the promises of science, technology, and humanism for Chicanas, Chicanos, and other people of color.” Namor embodies this questioning. His philosophy resists the dominant futurities that center Western technoscientific progress, offering instead an oceanic insurgency against the ideologies of conquest, control, and capitalist expansion.

The intertwined futures of Wakanda and Talokan are fundamentally incompatible with a surface world still governed by predominantly Western, White powers hostile to the Global South. Namor’s vision could be described as aqua-pessimism—a fluid, insurgent worldview that interrogates whether the surface world, as it currently exists, is even worthy of inclusion in the inevitable, irrepressible unfolding of Black and Brown futures.