Connecting Imaginary Dots: Another Potential Addition to ‘SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS’

If you’ve never read an installment of Connecting Imaginary Dots, allow me to explain the idea. Connecting Imaginary Dots was the title I came up with for my speculation pieces when I was writing at MCU Exchange. These types of pieces basically allow me to unload a bunch of junk that’s circulating in my brain in a way that should never be confused for things I actually expect to happen. I basically take a bunch of facts that are almost always entirely unrelated and do my best to connect the dots with by stretching my imagination. In the past these types of pieces have resulted in me theorizing that the Spider-Man sequel which became Far From Home might end up being a team-up outing of Spidey and Hulk in the Savage Land;however, I also wrote one theorizing that Sterling K. Brown would be playing the father of Erik Killmonger in Black Panther LOOOOOONG before anyone else was considering it and one in which I theorized that Annette Bening was actually Mar-Vell when everyone else still thought Jude Law was playing the character. The bottom line is this: these are fun spec pieces that allow me to just be a fan. With that out of the way…

Last week I was able to get my hands on some Shang-Chi info. As you probably know by now, I was able to confirm that Leiko Wu, Clive Reston and Black Jack Tarr, allies of the Master of Kung Fu, were all in the script. For the last week, I’ve been doing some thinking about another character and I think I may have figured it out.



I’m writing this as sort of retelling of my thought process and I also want to be clear that the best I’ve been able to do here is connect some dots using my pre-existing knowledge of Shang-Chi comics and the info I was able to get last week.



Here we go…



In addition to the characters mentioned above, the studio was also casting for a character named “YAEKIO.” Now there is no Marvel Comics character of whom I am aware named Yaekio. There’s a Yukio and I’m sure a lot of people would have made the jump to this being that character, but there’s more to the story: they’re open to any ethnicity for this AMERICAN character and, as you know, Yukio’s Japanese origins are crucial to developing that character. None of that is really the important information here, but it is background info that will help fill out the rest of the story. The important information is that Yaekio is described as the partner of a character referred to as Su-Mi.

I spent a few days doing some thinking that kept taking me down the same path. Between Yaekio sounding like Yukio and Su-Mi being similarly constructed to Shang-Chi, I was sure that these were Asian characters who were just codenamed and I was just not thinking of the right ones. Then, I started to go down an different path, focusing more on the “American” and “partner” aspects of the casting and it was down that path that I found the character who I think makes the most sense. Rufus Carter, aka Super-Midnight!

Rufus Carter is a CIA agent who first appeared in Master of Kung Fu #96 who met Shang-Chi and Leiko Wu when their separate missions intersected on a mission in London. Shang-Chi and Wu were already left MI-6 at the time and were working for the private consulting firm known as Freelance Restorations (the name of this film’s production company). Carter left the CIA and continued to occasionally cross paths with the gang from Freelance Restorations and was an ally to Shang-Chi in the way the Felix Leiter often was to James Bond.

For those reasons alone, Carter makes a lot of sense for Su-Mi, but there’s one more thing about Carter that really helps push me closer to believing it’s him. Carter is an elite fighter, skilled in both kickboxing and martial arts. If this “tournament” leak is true and the Ten Rings are the prize, you can be sure that the CIA would do what they could to send an undercover agent in to fight for the prize. If we connect ALL THOSE DOTS, and to be sure that’s all this is, some really crazy guess work, Super-Midnight is the guy! 15 Likes