Last time in Mulan: Masking and the Myth of Honor, we pulled back the curtain on Disney’s so-called “girl power” story. Instead of empowerment, we saw how Mulan’s journey is built on masking, code-switching, and conditional belonging.
We talked about:
How awkwardness isn’t immaturity, but a clash between self-discovery and rigid roles.
How Mulan’s brilliance goes unseen until it’s useful to the empire—echoing the invisibility so many of us live with.
How desirability itself becomes conditional—recognition and love offered only after sacrifice and exhaustion.
Mulan isn’t just a fairytale. It’s a training manual in what society demands from those of us who don’t fit the mold.
Awkwardness ≠ Immaturity: Misreading the Self
Mulan’s so-called “awkwardness” isn’t immaturity—it’s the collision between self-discovery and a world determined to police difference. But the movie frames her stumbling as a personal flaw, when the real flaw is the rigid system demanding conformity.
And isn’t that the most primitive thing? To take people at their most vulnerable, most formative moments of becoming—and force them into boxes so small they can’t breathe? We call it tradition. We call it honor. But really, it’s fear. Fear of change. Fear of difference. Fear of what happens when someone decides to grow outside the lines.
That’s what these “old ways” are. Not wisdom, not protection—just rituals of control dressed up as sacred duty.
I know what it’s like to be read as immature, when really I was just becoming.
As a queer, Black, neurospicy person, my journey has been less about “growing up” and more about unlearning the shame others tried to wrap me in. The awkwardness wasn’t failure—it was self-preservation. It was me holding on to my rhythm in a world determined to remix me into silence.
For years, I was told I was too much, too loud, too different. And then, in the same breath, not enough—never graceful enough, never delicate enough, never simple enough to fit their definition of worthy. That’s what happens when society forces you into outdated roles: your reflection always comes back distorted.
Mulan’s fumbles aren’t immaturity. They’re a refusal to disappear into an antiquated mold.
And maybe that’s the truest kind of maturity—choosing yourself even when the world doesn’t.
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