Series-wide
open/close all folders
Po constantly underrated
- Why do people constantly underestimate Po due to his looks? He's a fucking bear!
- Because he's fat and out of shape, and pandas don't have the same reputation as other bears do, and for that matter are NOT bears. Pandas are more closely related to raccoons.
- Wrong pandas. Panda bears are bears but not really pandas as they can hardly digest bamboo. You're thinking of red pandas, what Shifu is.
- Giant Pandas are bears. Red Pandas are raccoons.
- You still don't mess with Pandas, though. Wild ones are well known to bite through leopard's necks in protection of their young, and there's also accounting of those maulings by the people at zoos who tried to hug one...
- And have you seen one sneeze?
- They're not raccoons, they're just related to them, about as closely related as we are to gibbons.
Animal ethnicity
- The characters all seem to be animals native to China (or East Asia in general), or livestock commonly found there. So why is there a gorilla in Secrets of the Furious Five? Gorillas are from Africa! If it has to be a great ape, why not an orangutan? They don't live in China either, but are at least Asian animals. What do you say? Not imposing enough to serve as the template for a mean badass warrior character? Well, grown up male orangutans certainly are! (And they make excellent librarians, but that's beside the point...) Or was the character I am talking about originally supposed to be a Gigantopithecus (a gigantic ape living in prehistoric China), but the authors feared that too few people would know what that is?
- That's not a gorilla, gorillas don't have tails.
- I am not talking about Monkey, one of the members of the kung fu team called the "Furious Five". I am talking about a character (explicitly referred to as a gorilla) in the (partly) 2D animated short film called Secrets of the Furious Five, where Po narrates the origin stories of the Furious Five. The gorilla is the villain in the segment about Viper's origin. As far as I can recall, he didn't have a visible tail.
- Well, if Po's narrating, maybe he just got his facts wrong?
- Well, it can be said that there's the possibility that people from other countries travel to China, that could explain a gorilla being there.
- What about the rhinos who guard the prison? Are they common in mountainous China?
- They're found in the foothills of the Himalayas in eastern India and Nepal, both of which have rhino sanctuaries not too far from their borders with China. It's not a stretch to imagine that their habitat could have extended into ancient southern China, pre-endangered status.
- There are also gorillas in the sequel, serving as Shen's soldiers. I either think they are actually Gigantopithecus (referred to as gorillas because Viewers Are Morons), or they have traveled from Africa to China (sort of like a Scary Black Man serving in the Chinese army).
- Just to add to the quandary, the fourth movie's villain is a lizard called "The Chameleon". If she's an actual chameleon, they don't belong in China either.
Names of the Masters
- What's with the names? Tigress, Mantis, Viper... Oogway, Tai Lung, Po? Shouldn't they be Turtle, Leopard, Panda?
- My guess is that the Furious Five had their names changed for some reason. They're the only ones that don't have their own names.
- I always figured Tigress, Mantis, Viper, etc. were their titles, rather than their names.
- This troper counts Fridge Brilliance here. All of the Furious Five are the representative animals of five infamous styles of Chinese martial arts, and pretty well follow the basics of those styles (Tigress focuses on footwork, Monkey integrates acrobatic maneuvers into his kung fu, Mantis has the focus on aggressiveness of Northern Praying Mantis, Viper strikes from unpredictable angles in Snake-style kung fu, and Crane has a combination of more graceful, targeted attacks). In this list, Tai Lung is actually a weird aversion of the naming trend, since he fights like he's using leopard kung fu.
- The reason Tai Lung breaks the tradition is to give him a Meaningful Name, courtesy of his father Shifu: Tai Lung means "great/ultimate dragon", so he is named for what it was believed he would be (the Dragon Warrior) rather than his kung fu style. It is also implied in Tai Lung's write-up in Art of Kung Fu Panda that being imprisoned in Chorh-Gom caused his kung fu to become "tainted", his moves becoming more brutal and less formal, like Ultimate Fighting Championship. Any appearance of Leopard Style moves should be considered only in the light of his brutality (one of the style's philosophies is "Why block when you can hit?"), with his coolness and his species thrown in. It could also be that unlike the Five, Tai Lung actually invented his style, which is why he isn't named for it the way the Five are.
- If you recall Po's initial gushing over them, they are a kind of superhero team. Their names are superhero code names.
- In Art of Kung Fu Panda the makers say they tried to experiment with using personalized character names but in the end kept returning to the 'simplicity' of the generic name. Whether this is an example of viewing the Five as archetypes who embody their kung fu styles, a cop-out motivated by being unable to come up with fitting given names, an attempt to avoid them all having a Meaningful Name in Mandarin (like being named for their styles is any less meaningful?), or because they believed the audience wouldn't remember Chinese names is up for debate. For what it's worth, most fanfic writers seem to assume the names we are given are titles and the characters actually have undisclosed given names. Which is realistic, as many kung fu masters do/did take a special title upon achieving mastery, albeit one a little more creative than merely the animal of their signature style.
- In The Secrets of the Furious Five, which is set in the characters' past, we learn that Viper, Crane, Tigress, and Monkey were called Viper, Crane, Tigress, and Monkey even before they started practicing martial arts, so it seems these really are their names and not just kung fu titles. (Mantis' chapter in The Secrets starts when he was already a kung fu fighter, but there's nothing to suggest he had any other name either before this.)
- Minor point: Oogway is a phonetic transliteration of the Mandarin word for "turtle", so his name actually is just the name of his species.
- Could overlap into Fridge Brilliance for Shifu's character and how he views his students. Remember, Tai Lung was Shifu's first student, and was always called by his name (rather then "Leopard"), while with the Five, they were known simply by their titles. He even called Po, "Panda", rather than his name. It's possible that with Tai Lung's betrayal, Shifu decided to refer to his students as anything other than their names as a way of distancing himself from them.
Mantis as a sexist
- Why is it that Mantis is refered to as a He-Man Woman Hater when he seems to work perfectly fine and respect both Viper and Tigress?
- Well, if any guy believed that most women want to bite his head off, I wouldn't blame him for being a He-Man Woman Hater. But... Mantis apparently sees that as the mark of a good family woman. By all accounts, it doesn't make sense.
- Viper and Tigress aren't female mantises. Female mantises eat the heads of the males after they mate.
- Well, if any guy believed that most women want to bite his head off, I wouldn't blame him for being a He-Man Woman Hater. But... Mantis apparently sees that as the mark of a good family woman. By all accounts, it doesn't make sense.
Inconsistent battle stats
- Okay, in part one Tai Lung curb-stomps the furious five all at once. Then Po curb-stomps Tai Lung in single combat. In part two when Po fights Tigress (meaning the legitimate fight in the prison, not the sparring they did on the boat), Tigress curb-stomps Po... Umm... What?
- Po didn't beat Tai Lung because he was simply stronger, but because Tai Lung's main technique didn't work on him. Which was the whole point of the film.
- See second answer to the headscratcher directly above.
- It wasn't an actual fight or anything, but Tigress didn't seem to want to hurt him and vice versa. She was just trying to protect him. Major Ship Tease moment here, if you read between the lines.
- Po, Tai Lung and Tigress are actually perfect counters to each other, like rock, paper scissors. TL outclasses Tigress in every aspect of Kung Fu, but is so offensively minded that Po can easily defeat him by turning moves against him. But Po is still fairly unskilled, so the more balanced and restrained Tigress can overpower him (also, Po likely holds back a lot more than Tigress does when they spar).
- Truth in Television-just because Person A beats Person B, and Person B beats Person C, does not mean that Person A will beat Person C. There's more to any fight than just skill-there's strength, speed, how seriously both are taking it, how well they know each other's fighting styles, and motivation.
Panda's rareness
- Okay, since the sequel establishes that Lord Shen killed most of the Giant Pandas and the rest are living in hiding, wouldn't that mean that seeing a Panda out and about would be a big deal? Yet the citizens of the Valley of Peace don't even give Po a second glance. Granted, Po is in his twenties/thirties when the films begin, but still.
- The Valley is some way away from Gongmen city. Maybe by the time the news had arrived people were already like, hey there's Ping's son Po and didn't put two and two together...or something...Anyway, even if he were to find out about Po, I doubt Shen would ever have tried anything with Oogway around. He didn't attack Thundering Rhino until he had the cannon(s) ready to go and Oogway was a master among masters.
- Maybe the Pandas never really had all that great of numbers to begin with. Maybe they didn't leave their villages all that often. Maybe Panda trade routes never really intersected with the Valley of Peace. All these reasons could explain how people of the village could simply write him off as an anomaly, and not equate him as the last survivor of his race. For all we know, the Valley of Peace's first experience with pandas could be through Po.
- There are so many different species of Talking Animal in these films that it's probably not unusual to have token members of a foreign species living in any given city. The Valley of Peace might have one panda cooking dumplings at the noodle shop, one wolf stoking the furnace at the blacksmith's, one peacock performing with a dance troupe, etc.
- It's also worth noting that, even if they were aware of Po's status as the last of his race, it wouldn't do them any good to constantly lampshade it
- Simple. He's been living in the Valley of Peace for nearly his entire life. It's made clear that the restaurant has been in the family for some generations. The people there, by the time the movie starts, are just used to him being there, regardless of how rare his race are.
