Yesterday might have been the best birthday Simu Liu ever had, with the actor celebrating turning 32 by seeing the first trailer for the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings explode online and draw hugely enthusiastic reactions from all corners of the internet, with both the movie and the man himself trending worldwide.
However, because this is social media we’re talking about, it wasn’t long before the star found himself being targeted by cancel culture. A tweet posted by a then 23 year-old Liu in 2012 where he described Nicki Minaj’s vocal stylings as comparable to watching a homeless man yell at a pigeon resurfaced and went viral, and somehow that made him a racist in the eyes of certain people.
There are no doubt a lot of folks who share the same sentiment when they hear Minaj’s music, and at no point did Liu ever bring race into it. That hasn’t stopped him from deleting the tweet in question, though, and he offered a roundabout apology as well, which you can see below.
https://twitter.com/SimuLiu/status/1384231631519576065
The fact that a subsection of Twitter users waited until the exact same day the first trailer for Shang-Chi dropped to try and dig Liu up for his old tweets, which comes almost two years after he was initially announced to be playing the comic book superhero in July 2019, is another story entirely and just sums up the nature of cancel culture in general.
This is why we can’t have nice things, because when they do happen and we get the star of the MCU’s next major origin story and potential franchise losing his mind at the maiden Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings promo arriving on his birthday, cancel culture waits in the wings to blow out his candles for him.