EVERYTHING CULTURALLY RIGHT AND WRONG WITH MULAN II (2004)

by Panzer
Have you ever seen a sequel that destroyed so much of what you
loved about the original movie?
That even as a little kid, you vowed to erase it from your mind?
And then over a decade later, your YouTube channel accidentally
blows up because of how hard you roasted a remake of the original
movie, so people are determined to remind you of the existence of
that sequel until you roast it too?
That's me.
That's me with Mulan II.
And so…here we go.
If you guys didn't know, my tolerance for historical accuracy
is directly proportional to how much I enjoy a certain piece of media.
Therefore, I don't care that Mulan II is a cartoon kid's movie.
I'm about to tear it apart with the full force of my historical
and cultural nitpicking.
This Disney-forsaken movie starts with George Takei praising
Mushu for helping save China.
The Chinese characters here are clearly trying to say "hero"
except the second character is missing its entire right half.
The characters for hero are supposed to literally read as "valiant male."
This is just "valiant upper arm."
And by the way, George Takei's character is holding a ruyi, a kind
of Buddhist scepter that possibly originated as a backscratcher.
Its name literally means "as desired" possibly because it could scratch
places you normally could not.
But it involved into a symbol of power and general auspicious
item to gift to people.
You can see it a lot in Chinese buddhist art.
The head is supposed to look like a cloud or a lingzhi mushroom, which is
considered a really good ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine
and is associated with longevity.
I have so many questions about this scene though.
Why does helping Mulan Save China get Mushu upgraded to
the status of an emperor?
This makes no sense!
Mulan didn't get the ability to boss her parents around just because
she's a decorated war hero now.
If Mushu was considered a servant of the Fa family before, then
he would still be their servant now, or at most their equal.