It looks like Riri Williams was a success in the Marvel Cinematic Universe fandom after her introduction in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
A popular tweet is praising the young “genius” for the way she made a vibranium detector just to prove a detractor wrong, which was actually the catalyst for the main conflict in the film.
Much like Shuri (Riri’s Wakanda Forever lab partner), Riri is a young tech wizard who has been building machines since she was three years old. She goes to MIT and creates the vibranium detector during a school assignment after a professor told her the metal was impossible to detect.
The character’s actions reminded one fan of that time Tony Stark confessed to hacking the Pentagon because his high school classmates dared him to. Although the two will most likely never meet in the MCU, Tony is Riri’s mentor in the comics and inspires her to build a suit of armor very similar to the Iron Man suit.
This has the same energy as Tony Stark hacking into pentagon on a dare
— LIGHT (@JanowskiKsawery) November 13, 2022
Despite the tweet’s nine thousand likes showing that a lot of MCU fans are in agreement with the Riri praise, for some skeptics, the fact that she didn’t consider the consequences of her invention proves that she still has a lot to learn.
If she was in fact a genius she would’ve simply thought and understood why she shouldn’t do that regardless… 😕
— Keith (@KeithJ801) November 13, 2022
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For the overwhelming majority of the MCU faithful, however, there is one quote by Riri from the Black Panther sequel that really says it all: “To be young, gifted and Black.” The quote, although a perfect match for both Riri and Shuri, was a callback to the late Chadwick Boseman, who quoted Lorraine Hansberry in his speech when the cast of the 2018 film became the first Marvel ensemble to win the SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.
Riri will continue spreading her genius in her solo Disney Plus series Ironheart, premiering in the fall of 2023. For now, fans can see the Marvel newbie kick ass both in the lab and in the field in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, currently in theaters.
