Mulan is what happens when you have whitebread Asians who pretend to be in touch with their heritage and culture but end up viewing everything through a western lens so every single piece of symbolism in the movie has been whitewashed so badly it can be considered a hate crime.

Buckle the fuck up.

The original story was about devotion to family, the notion of “filial piety” (孝順) which meant honor, dignity, and love to your parents and mentors above all else. The movie tears that out and tries to make it about how Mulan is just some girl being pushed down by “the man.”

The movie tries to do this by making it about some Naruto witchcraft shit where women are banished and oppressed if they even think about using their “chi superpowers,” making it a clumsy metaphor for the Salem Witch Trials. Problem! China’s “sorcery” issues were never gendered.

Throughout the movie there’s the imagery of a Phoenix, clearly representing Mulan rising from the ashes after being oppressed by “the man” for so long. The issue is that phoenixes in China don’t have that symbolism.

The fenghuang (鳳凰) is only the closest Chinese analogue to a Phoenix, and it represents femininity. Far from being oppressed or “lesser,” it is believed to be the equal and opposite complementary to the long (龍), the Chinese dragon that represents masculinity.

It is meant to represent that just as the long needs the fenghuang to achieve balance, man needs woman, masculinity needs femininity, and light needs shadow. This is why fraternal opposite sex twins are called longfeng babies (龍鳳胎), they are one perfect being split in two.

All the imagery in Mulan are western themes transposed clumsily onto a Chinese wannabe Wuxia film, which makes it not only inconsistent & confusing, it makes it a cultural orphan that could only be created by idiots who think they’re “culturally connected” when they are retarded.

If anyone wonders why I hate whitebread Asians who play at being “connected to their culture and heritage” but are actually liars LARPing as culturally enlightened representatives of their heritage, this is why.