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Nightmare Fuel / Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

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"He hungers for your soul."

  • The flashback revealing that Shang-Chi, at age 7, witnessed the entirety of his mother's fight against the Iron Gang and her death. Even without everything that happened afterwards, just that one thing would be traumatizing to any young child. His father being devastated from losing his wife and reverting back to his old ways only made things worse.
  • While fighting Death Dealer, Shang-Chi gains the upper hand and pins the killer down. Shang-Chi holds one of Death Dealer's knives, there is a brief flashback showing a montage of all of the times that Death Dealer had abused Shang-Chi during his Training from Hell and then Shang-Chi rams the knife straight at his face. Fortunately Wenwu knocks the blade away at the last second. In retrospect this foreshadows the reveal that Shang-Chi had killed the man who ordered his mother to be murdered.
    • Ironically, dying to Shang-Chi may have been better in the long run because Death Dealer eventually has his soul absorbed and eaten by the Dweller-in-Darkness. With the aid of the soulsuckers, the Dweller-in-Darkness eats the souls of many of the villagers and Ten Ring soldiers, including the kind old man who was teaching Katy archery, causing them to drop dead on the spot. During the final fight the Dweller-In-Darkness almost manages to eat the dragon's own soul, though Katy saves her at the last second with an arrow shot at the Dweller-in-Darkness' weak point.
  • The Dweller-In-Darkness is a hideous hybrid of octopus and dragon that feeds on souls, planning on multiversal extermination to gain more souls. It tricked Xu Wenwu into thinking it was his wife, begging to be freed from its prison in order to wreck havoc on the Multiverse. It almost manages to suck the soul of the Great Protector and had previously commenced a genocide eons prior to its sealing. And unlike previous main villains, there is no levity to the situations or quips at the villain. It is a manipulative, soul-eating monster with omnicidal intentions played darkly straight.
  • The scene where Razor-Fist tries, unsuccessfully, to kill one of the Soul Eaters is partly played for laughs, with it instantly regenerating from his blows. However, the Soul Eaters' Nigh-Invulnerability has terrifying implications: were they to escape to the world at large, without dragonscale weapons nothing—not any world military, not any of the Avengers like Iron Man with all his technology, or Hulk with his strength, or maybe even Thor or Strange with their powers—would be able to hurt them permanently, let alone kill them. And these are the mooks, not even the main villain.

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