These Tashi Takes are Ass. Go watch the Film again.

When I first watched the trailer for Challengers, I only got about 5 minutes of happiness and glee in before I had two thoughts.

1. A film with a black girl being desired by two hot white guys? This kissing scene is probably the only scene where that happens. This cannot possibly be a film all about that. It simply wouldn’t happen
2. IF! IF it happens? Culture will not respond well.

I have never been happier to be mostly wrong in my life.

The positive reaction to Challengers has been glorious. The film itself was a masterpiece in all areas, and you can find a million takes on that from a million amazing voices.

I want to talk about the one way I was right.

Almost instantaneously, the majority (white) interpretation of Tashi as being “only ever in love with tennis” began to pervade and then overtake the conversation around this film - showing a fundamental lack of reading nuance in Zendaya’s performance.

Zendaya presents Tashi as an incredibly self-assured, hardened front. She is ambitious, in control, and confident in her choices - or so she would like everyone to think. This plays beautifully into people’s perceptions of black women as being comfortable in their independence.

This also plays into the ‘man-eater manipulator’ female power fantasy - but it is not the entirety of Tashi. Many of my friends, mutuals and I have all picked up on the subtle and gorgeous clues and intonations in Zendaya’s performance that clue you into the very vulnerable, scared, and tender woman underneath.

She yearns for camaraderie, while also striving to be so one-of-a-kind that no one is her equal. She is an adrenaline junkie, cut down in her prime, made to choose the lesser path of fulfillment, but able to stomach it, with pride, when Art is by her side, and passionate. She hates how much she loves Patrick. She hates how much of herself she sees in Patrick. She hates that Patrick would ever see himself as her equal. She hates that she wants an equal. She hates that he’ll never be her equal. Neither of them will. No-one will. Not even herself.

Tashi may be at war with the woman she was supposed to be, but she’s also at war with the yearning - wanting to be loved not just for what she represents (Unachievable Excellence), but for what she can actually do (Tennis, Winning). She doesn’t just want to be a trophy, she wants to be the tactical advantage. She wants to be useful, and adored, and obsessed over, and exalted, and all of it. ALL of it.

The world wants to make her choose, from a young age.

The audience, also, seems to have made the choice for her.

Shame on y’all.

She wants the hot, adoring husband, and the winning career, and everything that anyone else might feel entitled to, because she knows she earned it - with the hard work, with the observation, with the discipline. Fate robbed her of one route, so through the men she loved, she proved herself.

There are three moments that disprove the “Tashi Never Loved Them” Narrative.

1. During a party celebrating her, she finds herself drifting to the beach to talk to two players FAR less talented than her - and she knows it. She knows everything about them already. She’s researched them.
2. She goes to their hotel room. She promises to date one of them, which one to be decided by Tennis, her other lover. She ends up with Patrick. Pretty fucking happily, until Art intervenes.
3. She is genuinely offended by Patrick’s lack of adoration for her and her skill. Her ego is bruised when he says he’s her peer. Do you think she’d care if she didn’t want him to adore her?

To read every single one of these actions as manipulative starts to reveal more in the eyes of the beholder than in Tashi herself. To decide she must be a raging Sociopath instead of someone genuinely curious and interested is a leap you can only take without compassion.

She expressly says she doesn’t want to be a homewrecker. Her smile as Art and Patrick kiss seemed as much to me a confirmation of her suspicions as it was satisfaction. Quickly after this, she leaves.

There is a whole separate essay on why Art and Patrick find themselves unable to resist orbiting this woman, and it has only half to do with her being a proxy for their own desire for each other. Any take where she is merely the glue allowing them to like each other is simply a-factual. If this were true, Patrick would not have been sent into space, far away from them, to orbit from afar for so long. Watch the movie again, Zendaya’s orders.

To Art and Patrick, Tashi is Tennis. Tashi is excellence. Tashi is the pinnacle they’ll never reach. Just to be seen by her and to have her attention is to, for a brief moment, achieve excellence.

Tashi wants, needs, to connect and be connected to, and in this, these boys find some purpose, and in this, Tashi finds some purpose too. Just because she’s angry about it, stone-faced about it, unable to admit her dependency, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

In conclusion, I would implore all of you to analyze why it’s so easy for you to slip into a narrative where a strong and excellent black woman has no need for love, has no yearning for connection beyond manipulation - and why you feel these two men cannot see her as anything but a proxy for each other. In doing so, you strip her of her personhood, masculinize her, and, more than anything - play into every single trope black women have been trying to warn you about for decades.