The change from Li Shang is concerning, and not only because it’s erasing a very distinctly bisexual character. Forget sexuality: even if you prefer a more platonic interpretation (which I don’t), Li Shang clearly respects, admires, and likes Mulan as Ping and as a person. He loves her as a friend long before he loves her as a woman, girlfriend, or wife. The entire point of the movie is that Li Shang loves Mulan as a person (platonically, romantically, either way), not just as a potential mate. The entire point of the entire ending is that people do not award women the same respect offered to men. (Mushu: “Huh? You’re a girl now, remember?”) The entire point of the finale is that Shang and Ping’s friends do give Mulan the same respect as a woman, because her gender doesn’t matter: she is still the same person with the same good strategic sense, and they’ll trust her whether she’s wearing armor or a dress.
If this “Chen Honghui” hates Mulan/Ping until he finds out that she is a woman, that isn’t just erasing Shang’s bisexuality: it’s also sexualizing Mulan and stripping her of all her agency and accomplishment. In this version, Mulan isn’t worthy of respect as a person. She is only worth admiring as a woman. He can’t like her as a warrior, as a strategist, as a friend, as a person; he can only like her as a woman. Let me rephrase this: Instead of giving Mulan a chance to earn the same respect Chen offers to all his other warriors, he’s only going to appreciate her once he sees her as a woman. As an “approved” sexual object. ONLY THEN is it worth noticing her or granting her basic human decency and respect. “Something like love,” as the description tells us, clearly has nothing to do with any of her personality and everything to do with genitalia. Even if he was completely and entirely straight, we should see that he’s at least befriending Mulan/Ping before the Gender Reveal. Straight guys can still recognize another man’s good qualities and appreciate them for what they are. If Ping isn’t even a friend before “he” becomes Mulan, then this isn’t “something like love;” it’s just lust and objectification, pure and simple. The “rivalry” is also bullshit. The fact that “rivalry” can change so quickly into “something like love” means only that for Chen, a set of imaginary genitalia is all it takes to completely shift his perspective on someone from “worthy of competition” to “worthy of sex.” What, so he’s just going to abandon the rivalry now that she’s a woman? Oh – because she’s only a woman. He doesn’t have to compete with her anymore, because that’s not what you do with women. A rivalry would imply that she’s still a man, and at least he can view a rival as a decent warrior; but now, she can be comfortably reduced to Sex Appeal.
Also… what about that personality? “Cocky?” A “mean, bullying streak”? Thinks of Mulan as “his chief rival?” Are you going to strip the male lead of EVERY shred of decency? Li Shang isn’t a bully: he is a soldier who pushes his men (and woman) to excel, because this is wartime and that’s the only way to survive. He genuinely cares about them and shows real pride when they show signs of improvement. He doesn’t see them as rivals; he sees them as friends for whom he is responsible. Sure, he doesn’t like Ping at first, but that’s got nothing to do with gender and more to do with the fact that Ping’s initial behavior is so inflammatory. (Dodges commander’s questions; starts fights in the rice line; holds the other soldiers back in training; cheats on assignments, even if that’s the result of Mushu’s intervention). Once Ping proves himself as a person and as a warrior, Shang doesn’t hesitate to reward Ping with all the admiration Ping deserves.
Disney is so concerned about removing every hint of bisexuality from its movies, it’s also utterly destroyed any decency they could have in a heterosexual romance. In their attempts to make everything nice and straight and cisgendered, they’re bending their characters WAY out of whack.
They’re taking Mulan – originally a woman who denies gender boundaries to prove that gender doesn’t matter to personal worth – and they’re turning her into a person who can’t earn respect,honor, or even the admiration of her fellow soldiers until she puts on a dress and can be seen, not as a warrior or as a person but as an object of desire.
And they’re taking Shang – originally a man who cares about his fellow soldiers and who respects Mulan regardless of her gender presentation – and turned him into a cocky asshole who only cares about himself and is only able to appreciate Mulan when she is female, and even then, only because he’d like to have some sex.
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