Chantal Thuy Cast as Grace Choi

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As we continue the slow crawl toward Black Lightning, we’ve started to get a trickle of information about the additional superheroes that will pepper the show.  That’s basically just par for the course of CW superhero shows at this point- single hero shows are out the window and everything now will have a rotating cast of supporting heroes.  Now I'm in favor of this practice, it helps keep things interesting and at an appreciably grand level now that single hero stories have become the bread and butter of the Hollywood hit machine.  

In an age of The Avenger and Justice League selling a whole superhero show on 1 masked crime fighter has become kind of passe.   In the case of Black Lightning, the show already had 2 additional superheroes at the starting track in the form of Black Lightning’s daughters Thunder and Lightning.  Now, the show has reached out to add its first additional hero outside of that immediate family unit with Grace Choi, who will be played by Chantal Thuy. 

Let’s start with the good news before working our way into the explanations and complaints: Grace Choi is one of the most underrated DC characters ever so I’m glad she’s finally getting her due.  As one of less than ten Asian-American superheroes across DC and Marvel, she’s actually one of the only queer characters of color in the superhero genre.  

That’s a big part of why I like her character though I’m also painfully aware it’s probably a big part of why she didn’t break into the mainstream before now- which is disappointing but unsurprising.  Still, Grace is finally getting her time in the spotlight for big, butch, Asian-American lesbians everywhere so there’s at least some reason to celebrate. 

Grace’s main orbit in the world of superheroes has been with the Outsiders, a globetrotting superhero team put together by the Batman in the ‘70s.  The Outsiders has had a long and weird history of being revived whenever DC needs an easy team name to thrust a bunch of characters onto.  Grace joined the team during the time it functioned as a holding cell for the older versions of former Teen Titans like Nightwing, Arsenal, and Donna Troy.  That version of the team was never exceptionally popular, mainly because it hit the stands during that era in the early 2000s when Marvel was re-asserting its dominance and DC was beginning to spiral.  

However, this was the era that established Grace as a lesbian character and put her in a relationship with Black Lightning’s eldest daughter Thunder, who has density control powers.  I suspect it’s that relationship that will lead Grace into whatever role she holds on the upcoming show. 

As to who Grace is and where her super strength, stamina, and durability come from, that was answered a little later on in the mid-to-late 2000s.  This was the era DC was working to sort of rehabilitate a lot of their big name titles and one of them was Wonder Woman, specifically DC wanted to turn Wonder Woman into an event-driven mega-franchise like Superman, Batman, and Green Lantern had managed.  

A big part of that was the event Amazons Attack, which featured an Amazonian invasion of the US and Washington DC in particular.  The event re-introduced the idea of the Bana Amazons, an offshoot of the Paradise Island group who embraced technology as well as magic as well as being overall more diverse as a group.  It was revealed that Grace was one of the Bana Amazons who had become lot from their city sometime after her birth. 

I’m not really sure how much of the Amazons back-story is going to make it into Black Lightning’s vision of Grace.  Personally, I’d be onboard with the Black Lightning universe being the CW Earth to feature the Amazons but I also don’t know what the actual rights issues are on that front.  It seems more likely Grace will just be a latent metahuman, especially given how much CW has just embraced Metahumans as a thing that exists in all universes now.  

I suspect the core reason Grace is coming along really is just the romantic ties to Thunder, especially with how each of the CW superhero shows has committed themselves to featuring a queer character (though The Flash could certainly re-commit itself to that particular goal these days.) 

The other major connection is that team the Outsiders.  Black Lightning has been on the Outsider’s roster multiple times and is one of the founding members.  If CW wanted an easy shopping list of heroes it could just bring in to Black Lightning as supporting characters or even just as in-name-only adaptations to act as villains of the week the Outsiders would work well in that regard.  There are a few characters that are off-limits for having appeared elsewhere like Katana and Captain Boomerang, both of whom appeared briefly on Arrow, but for the most part, the Outsiders roster is pretty worth diving into. 

My one major concern, and I’m going to try and be as tactful about this as possible, is that Chantal Thuy isn’t exactly the right…body type for Grace Choi.  I know I’m treading on eggshells here so let me couch this in saying that this is less about Thuy herself and more about an overall trend in women superheroes overall.  There’s kind of a trend of favoring more slender and conventionally beautiful women for characters that tend to leave taller, more visibly muscular women out in the cold.  

Like I said, I don’t really feel comfortable telling a woman “you have the wrong body” for this, it’s just that a character like Grace Choi’s physicality represents a very specific group of people who rarely see themselves represented and it seems a shame to forego that in favor of more of the same body standards.  It’d be like trying to adapt Valiant Comic’s Faith with a rail-thin actress. 

Overall I’d say this addition to Black Lightning is a pretty solid win, even accepting the overall concerns about body type representation in the superhero genre.  It’d be great to have two major queer relationships on the CW superhero set and the fact they’re adding yet another superwoman of color (in addition to Vixen and Isis on Legends of Tomorrow) can only be viewed as a good.  I am at least hopeful that Thuy’s version of the character will get the short-hair, lipstick punk aesthetic that defined Grace in the comics though I’m also fine with that being something they build up to over time- CW’s earned the benefit of the doubt at this point.   

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