“Oh, I ain’t requesting nothing. Ask who I am.” – Erik Killmonger
Erik Killmonger cosplay 🙂 I was able to pull this look together without spending too much money. I got the vest from Aliexpress, the chest piece is separate and is made from 2mm and 6mm Eva Foam (Amazon) and cobra buckles (you can find those on Ebay or Aliexpress), the blue shirt I had at home, and I bought the pants and green military belt from Amazon.
Cosplay is always the best when you don’t have to spend much. Well I hope you all like it. This cosplay isn’t completely finished, but I liked the way I did my makeup and hair for this costest.
I feel the need to touch briefly on Erik’s mother before we start because it ties into my head cannon of his early life. I noticed they say nothing about Erik’s mother other than she was an American woman. So I was thinking what happened to her? Is she dead or alive? If she’s alive, where is she? Even Erik during his confrontation with T’Challa says “the world took from him everything he ever loved.” That does not strike me as a person that either A. Grew up with his mother after his father’s death or B. Grew up or was raised by his mother’s extended family.
So my personal headcannon is that she died in childbirth and that N’Jobu raised him alone. I have reasons for why I settled on this. I don’t like the idea that she could be alive and his parents aren’t together. It’s just so cliche.
But if she is dead, that raises the question why wasn’t she shown when Erik went to see his father on the “ancestral plane”? Couldn’t she have been there? My theory is that since Erik didn’t know her, he had no ties to her enough to see her. So even if she didn’t die in childbirth, she died before Erik was old enough to remember her. Unlike T’Challa who could see the other past rulers because he still had the connection of his father. Or the fact that Erik was so far gone he could only see what was right in front of him, ie only his father. I know there is a bit of loophole in this and to be honest there is probably going to be a loophole in all theories involving his mother but I’m sticking with this.
Now without further ado Erik Early Life headcannons:
A lot of people are saying that Killmonger functions more as an antagonist than a villain and I disagree with them mostly because I feel like they’re forgetting the moment when Killmonger had zero qualms about killing his own sixteen-year-old cousin (a direct contrast to Nakia defending the rebel soldier in the beginning btw). Killmonger is very much a villain.
However, he’s a villain in the way that every good villain is the hero in a Greek tragedy. I was actually shocked that Marvel let Ryan Coogler get away with this, but it is absolutely not a mistake that Killmonger is an American invention in every possible way.
Erik is graduated from MIT at what – 19? He probably had access to *some* scholarships but since Erik went into the military right after graduation, it’s heavily implied that he went to school on the military’s dime. Non-U.S. people might not know this, but the U.S. military has a *heavy air quotes* mandate to have the demographics of their forces to match the demographics of the country. So let’s say if the U.S. demographics say that the nation is 70% white, 30% nonwhite, 70% of the military should be white, 30% of the military should be nonwhite. However, this is very much not the case because the U.S. doesn’t have mandated military service for all citizens, and as a result, the military heavily recruits from under-served communities. More nonwhite soldiers sacrifice everything for U.S. interests than white ones every day, and usually because there’s no other way they can get a job with no training that’ll provide access to steady pay, housing, and education.
But I was talking about Black Panther, so let’s get back to that. Erik got inundated into this way of thinking where the only solution is violence and manipulation in order to further one’s own interest, and for most of his career, Erik was furthering American interests.
There’s a couple of little lines that almost got past me, but Ross says something about how Erik’s work as a black ops soldier was “toppling governments” and the way he says it grammatically kind of distances Erik’s actions from the U.S., but I’m pretty sure that in the script that he was still working for the U.S. at that time. Like when Ross says that I’m like “he toppled governments because he either did it explicitly for the U.S. or because the U.S. taught him how.”
Add on top of that the fact that Erik’s dad was killed the state (granted it was the state of Wakanda instead of the U.S. but still), the American military-industrial complex and then his own personal cocktail of rage, despair, and compassion for the suffering of others and Killmonger was born.
His tragedy, then, is that Erik wasn’t destined to be Killmonger. If he had been taken back to Wakanda, if he had found really any kind of community – Erik could have been an amazing leader in anything he chose to do, whether he stayed in Wakanda or not. But T’Chaka and the United States created Killmonger instead.
TLDR: Killmonger is the best MCU villain and Ryan Coogler is a genius.
Honestly, I feel like Marvel passed up a good opportunity by killing Killmonger. Like, I understand why they did it narratively, but even Loki has gotten a sort of soft redemption arc, and I feel like Killmonger could’ve had an actual substantive redemption arc.
Except, we never do see Erik dead do we?
We hear him say that he’d rather die than spend his life in jail after T’Challa offers to heal him and then he pulls the knife out of his chest and we see him topple over, but from a very long distance.
And like Wakanda has the tech to stabilize a dying Agent Ross and transport him I don’t know how many hundreds of miles and heal him perfectly in a few hours. Not to mention they’ve been keeping Bucky on ice for how long and Shuri freed him from the Winter Soldier programming.
Finally, we not only do not see Erik dead, there’s not funeral, no memorial service, not even a private one. Do you intend to tell me that after everything T’Challa wouldn’t give him a Wakandan funeral, or any kind of funeral?
Nah, I don’t believe Erik is dead.
Besides, it’s Marvel. Characters only stay “dead” until the franchise needs them for another story. So I’m not so sure we’ve seen the last of Erik Killmonger.
L.J.'s Obsessions 