I’ve been thinking about this again in light of Nate Moore’s interview. Say T’Challa and Nakia did have a child in between BP and Endgame but he was just offscreen because Daddy had bigger fish to fry (Thanos). I came up with this rather convoluted fan theory on how they could make it work, especially if the kid is named T’Challa II. After BP2, there will be a team up film with Kang as the main villain and since he’s the master of time, Kang decides to target all the major heroes and teams in the MCU at that point. So Shuri, M’Baku, Okoye, Nakia, and possibly Ayo and Aneka are ambushed by Kang and pulled into a temporal limbo. Basically Kang is doing the opposite of what Thanos did, where as the mad titan targeted everyone, Kang targets a few specific individuals that will be key to foiling his plans. So not only does he pull the Wakandan Heroes into the void, he also gets Shang-Chi and his allies, The Fantastic Four, Namor, The Marvels, Captain America, Thor, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, Blade, the Hulks, the Young Avengers, and literally all the major heroes on earth that have been introduced at that point are pulled into the limbo. Ant-Man, having been through this song and dance before starts freaking out as he knows that literally every second counts as time passes by differently in the outside world. The other heroes brush him off thinking that he’s being extra but Doctor Strange tells them that Ant-Man has a point. Eventually they break out of the void, but the thing is they’ve been in there for about 18 hours, which translates to 18 years in the outside world. And Kang has taken over everywhere except Latveria, Atlantis and Wakanda. And then blah blah blah, shit happens, the heroes regroup to fight Kang but get their asses kicked. Kangs about to end it until a bunch of Wakandan battle ships and some impressive looking Panther mechs rain fire upon him.
Shuri and the rest of the Wakandans look to see who’s leading the charge and it turns out to be a new king of Wakanda that rose to power while they were in the void. The king shouts “YIBAMBE!” with the army behind him also shouting before screaming “Wakanda Forever!” and leading the charge against Kang, thus turning the tide in the heroes favor all while the theme song with the chorus shouting “T’Challa” blasting full volume. Then yadda yadda, they beat Kang and Shuri asks the new king his name to which he’ll say something like “Aunt Shuri, I am King T’Challa the second, son of King T’Challa” or some shit like that. Basically this would be a way to age up the kid (again assuming the rumor is true) without significantly aging the other characters in the process. He would also have T’Challas comic accurate traits such as his genius level intellect and prep time mastery.
Again this is assuming IF Coogler is going through with the whole T’Challa jr thing as a way to say “see guys? T’Challa is still in the MCU”. I personally think the idea is convoluted and stupid and I know this idea is needlessly complicated. Personally I think it would be a lot easier to just drop a variant of T’Challa in the main timeline and call it a day but all this could have been avoided had they just took time to grieve then recast. But here we are. Smh.