Over the weekend, Marvel announced David Jonsson as the next Black Panther.
The reactions didn’t surprise me.
Not because people disliked David Jonsson.
But because many had already cast Damson Idris in their minds months ago.
For months, social media had been telling us the same story. Fan pages posted it. Entertainment blogs repeated it. “Insiders” hinted at it. YouTubers analyzed it. Twitter debated it.
The more it was repeated, the less it sounded like a rumour.
It started sounding like a decision that had already been made.
So when Marvel announced David Jonsson instead, many people reacted as though Marvel had changed its mind.
But here’s the question I couldn’t stop thinking about:
Who actually promised us Damson Idris?
Not Marvel.
Not Ryan Coogler.
Not Kevin Feige.
We did.
Or perhaps, more accurately, the internet did.
Somewhere between speculation and repetition, possibility became certainty. We heard something often enough that we stopped treating it as a rumour. We started treating it as an expectation.
And I don’t think this is just about Marvel.
I think it is how many of us now consume information.
A rumour gets repeated enough times.
A screenshot gets reposted enough times.
A “source” gets quoted by enough blogs.
Eventually, we stop asking whether it’s true.
We simply assume it is.
And if we’re honest, we’ve seen this happen far too many times.
I think this is one of the biggest dangers of the social media age.
Not misinformation.
Not even fake news.
But our declining ability to distinguish between what has been confirmed and what has simply been repeated.
We’ve become so accustomed to riding on rumours that repetition now feels like evidence.
And when reality refuses to follow the version we’ve rehearsed in our minds, disappointment feels justified—even though no promise was ever made.
Sometimes, the truth is placed right in front of us, yet we struggle to accept it because we’ve spent so long believing a different version of the story.
Maybe that’s the real lesson from Marvel’s announcement.
Not every disappointment comes from a broken promise.
Sometimes, it comes from believing stories that were never ours to believe in the first place.
