We get to meet Dominique Thorne’s Ironheart, Riri Williams, in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and it is perfection. Our Princess Weekes gave the movie a 5/5 and rightfully so. It’s a brilliant followup to the 2018 movie Black Panther, and with it comes a new sea of amazing characters to love—one of them being Riri.
The young prodigy who gets into MIT as a fifteen-year-old is famous for building her own Iron Man-esque suit, called Ironheart. And while we got glimpses of her work in the trailers, actually getting to see Riri Williams in action in the movie is a different story, but let’s talk a bit about Ironheart and how her suit plays into the movie.
**Spoilers for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever lie ahead.**
When Riri gets kidnapped with Shuri and taken to Tlālōcān with Namor, the suit she built in Cambridge doesn’t get to leave Tlālōcān when they escape with Nakia.
That means that in the fight for Wakanda against Namor, Riri needs a new suit. Shuri tells her that she is needed and gives Riri her own space in her lab, and we get an iconic look at Riri at work. She does the Tony Stark thing and is making her own suit using hammers and wearing a tank top, and it is fantastic.
But this suit also doesn’t get to come back to the United States with her—mainly because it is most likely created using vibranium, and in a world that is trying to find vibranium by any means necessary, letting Riri go back to M.I.T. with a fully Vibranium suit wouldn’t be the best of moves, so Shuri is right to tell her that she cannot.
This does mean, though, that in Ironheart as a series on Disney+, we’re probably going to see Riri rebuilding a new suit since, she didn’t have one by the end of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. But until we get to see her in her own show, the reason she had to leave her new suit behind is because it was made with vibranium and since the United States government has already stolen from Riri Williams, maybe this is for the better.
(featured image: Marvel Entertainment)
