#DannyRants

I find myself starting Iron Fist again and I don't know why. Season one was awful and from the first few scenes of this season, it is not clear that Marvel learned their lesson. How do I know this? Well there's a yin/yang sign on a shipping truck and all I can think is, “this is what you thought of? This is what you want me to get from Iron Fist?” and then I started laughing because of course this is how Iron Fist would open, with a ham-fisted attempt to wallop us with attempts at “relevant” symbolism...

But why? Why am I still watching? Well, I can't quit Iron Fist because it leaves me with so many questions and the feeling that Marvel is in fact, trying to phone it in. There's just too much work going into making martial arts, dragons, and magic boring and I am obsessed with all the ways it could be better. My notes on the episodes are full of unanswered questions regarding design, imagery, acting, writing, casting, and basically every part of the show that it makes me wonder where they put the money to make it. It’s my Pepe Silvia.

Specifically, most of these phone-it-ins have to do with character motivation throughout the series. While Sacha Dhawan (Davos) and Jessica Stroup (Joy Meachum) do great jobs with what is written, I wonder about the directors asking them "what's your character's motivation" and them looking at each other with blank stares because the writing gives no cues. No matter how many times Joy says "You kept my father from me" or Davos says "There's a cancer in this city" I don't see how their actions follow. Why does Davos care about crime in New York? He has no tie to the city or any nation state, having grown up in K’un L’un, so why start there? If he really cared he should be punching senators in Washington, DC or going to the sources of crime not beating up or murdering petty criminals. Joy's motivation feels more warranted, the idea that her dead father was hidden from her by Ward. She and Ward have some great conversations about it (they're well acted in spite of the writing in most cases) but the actions feel disproportionate. Why would Joy have Danny kneecapped rather than go to therapy when she never had an inclination towards trademark villain behaviors? Therapy is cheaper (even Ward’s trying it) and would give her more resolution in the long run. The best I can say is at least they made Joy less forgettable than last season.

The one shining beacon in this season has been Misty Knight, riding in on a gallant steed of reasonable questions, solid acting, and good chemistry. Misty's great with all the characters, even having some chemistry with a more memorable Ward Meachum, and they teased us with a Daughters of the Dragon duo. While that possibility is fantastic, I’m not sure how I feel about Jessica Henwick’s Colleen. I can’t tell if its her acting or the writing but her character's actions feel haphazard and just...off. Nearing the end of the season Colleen acts resigned but with no preceding steps towards that feeling. This "off" feeling particularly comes through in the fight scenes where in one, Colleen seems to have forgotten all her empty hand techniques and in the next, she's creaming three enemies at once. These made it hard to feel that Misty and Colleen could actually be good partners. One is a well-written clearly compiled character with defined skills, the other is a mish-mash roller coaster of character choices and it’s unclear what she’s actually capable of and not in a good way.

Overall, Season 2 is better, but to say that is like saying it only forgot to add 4 of the ingredients instead of 5 for the dish that is Iron Fist. The bar was so low that yes, they raised it, but it's not a bar I'd be proud of getting over. There are a lot of ideas in the series but if we have a season three I hope they take a step back to think about what they've done. Marvel's delivered us a horribly bland white savior character, centered a bunch of white folks, and then doubled down on it. What sort of message does that send and is that what they want to send, especially now? In a year like this one, with Crazy Rich Asians killing it at the box office and Asian Marvel characters like Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) stealing the show in Ant-man and The Wasp, why continue a mediocre trajectory?

Whitewashing is not a solution to stereotype

In the last year, we’ve seen many whitewashing efforts by Hollywood and none of them have escaped major criticism. As more whitewashed products come out, *cough* Death Note *cough*, the more it seems that in an attempt to avoid stereotypes showrunners have chosen to whitewash characters.

What is whitewashing?

Well it’s a when a Caucasian actor is put in the role of a character that was initially written for a person of another race. Recently the focus has been on Asian and Asian American characters. See the t-shirt “Scarlett & Tilda & Emma & Matt” above on Lewis Tan who should have been Iron Fist. The irony is, that in attempting to resolve stereotypes they have created bigger problems by taking away opportunities for actors of color and then not doing enough to build a real character.

One example is, in an attempt to get away from “the only Asians in this are ninjas problem” (which, guess what, in Daredevil Season 2 DEFINITELY ALL THE NINJAS WERE ASIAN), Marvel (who I will pick on because I love them and want them to do better) has removed any trace of actual Asianness from the people from their products. In addition, they have actually reinforced those same stereotypes (and added new ones) by giving major roles for Asian people (the Ancient One) to white people and then only leaving the lackeys to actually be Asian (yay!). Additionally, in Privilege in Action (aka Iron Fist) they only reference the fictional K’un Lun and never the real Kunlun (a Tibetan Mountain Range where there are probably real Asian Monks). Yay! So even the idea of a real Asian philosophical tradition that belongs to Humans who live on earth, is actually magical and 100% does not exist on this plane. Yay. Literally real Asians, from real human cultures, that have meaning and history and inform the character’s choices do not exist in the Marvel universe. The closest Asian-Americans get to a character who is Asian and uses that in their character is Colleen Wing, who has to suffer in the hands of truly terrible writing and will drop things like the “bushido code” when in the show that has no real impact to her motivations.

Whitewashing is in many ways worse than stereotypes because you are taking the already marginal representation of those of Asian descent in American Media away from the people that was written for. It also demonstrates that you have not taken care to understand what was actually wrong with the stereotype that property was based on because you are actually removing the Asianness from it. “But we’re changing the context” In many cases, they don’t actually change the context enough for that to be true. For example, the Ancient One was initially old Tibetan man and the way that he’s portrayed in many comics is stereotyped. However, that does not erase the fact that many martial arts masters and founders, at least the ones that they are always referencing in these works, were Asian. Current masters are diverse, and many are white, but they respect the origins of these works by acknowledging the Asian heritage that they owe their existence to. They say that the Ancient one in Doctor Strange is Celtic. Ok Fine. Why is she in Nepal then? Why is there not a center of power in a Celtic Nation? If she’s going to be Celtic then she actually has to be Celtic and that has to have some sort of impact on the character you are creating. Instead of dispelling the stereotype of an old Asian man teaching a white guy mystic arts, it replaces him with someone who makes the story disjoined and doesn’t dispel any stereotypes it instead just relies on different ones.

Being so caught up in the idea of “fixing” the problems of source material, which in many cases is fundamentally and obviously flawed, has actually in some cases made the original incarnations look better than the modern ones because you know there were inherent problems with racism and sexism when they were written. While now, people claim that those don’t exist. In addition, it’s also clear that the stereotypes that those characters came from were based on actual things, at least in relation to Asian characters. Stereotypes in the least contextual sense are a way to essentalize cultures and people to be easily absorbed or understood by others that don't understand cultural complexities. However, forty years (more or less) later this no longer is an acceptable position to tell a story from. We have stereotypes already and since then we have had plenty of time to learn about other people and fill characters in with real details and actual knowledge that preserve the meat of the character and their stories without conforming them to one-dimensional token diversity heads.

And it’s clear that actually MARVEL KNOWS THIS. No seriously I’m 100% certain these companies know what they are doing Why? Because we have well adapted version of Luke Cage and Black Panther coming to consumers. These two characters have had immense changes that have transformed them from two extreme stereotypes of black men to authentic realizations of black identity.

The heart the whitewashing problem is that it demonstrates weakness, laziness, and poor construction on behalf of the script. As Clara Mae wrote in regards to Mantis, stereotypes aren’t bad if you use them to impact the character and if the development of those skills become specific to their context. Mantis is another Asian-descent character in the Marvel universe who relies on Martial Arts for some of her skills, except in the movie where she has become another Madame Butterfly rather than a Turandot. However, as Mae outlines, in the comics, her martial arts skills inform Mantis’ character. The training influences how she makes choices and impacts what she does.

This is important because as much as we can experience Asian cultures through Korean dramas, food, and video games, many people, myself included, grew up and helped to bring those Asian cultural products into the mainstream. I remember wanting to read more volumes of a Manga and finding out that the publisher decided not to translate the rest of a series so I was shit out of luck. While these are all things that anyone interested in Asian culture experienced it does not mean that we all experienced the hardship equally. Especially because many of the things I listed are products, and not cultural behaviors. Behavior is important, not something easy to "correct" by eliminating stereotype, because it ends up divorcing the real, though sometimes mythologized, experience of Asian Americans from the rest of the United States. While we have an abundance of Asian products available to us, even so accessible we are able to whitewash them, we don’t have the same number of real Asian and Asian American stories. While mainstream white culture is aware of many of those “stereotypes,” they are also stereotypes because it is what people experienced. Removing those and there by eliminating the unique experiences of the Asian and Asian American communities continues to alienate us within our own nations and should not be covered over but instead addressed.

It honestly should be obvious by now to people who make films like this that whitewashing is not acceptable but it continues to happen. Even as recently as this month, the movie reboot for the Hellboy Franchise had cast Ed Skrein (aka FRANCIS) as an Asian American character. Thankfully, Ed, NOT THE PRODUCTION COMPANY, decided that was a bad choice and to step down. Thanks for doing the right thing, now tell your friends. So rather than replace/rebrand, writers and showrunners need to engage with the stereotypes of their characters and understand them. Rather than see stereotypes as inherently negative (although some are) view them as seeds to grow from. We now know enough about cultures around the world or can hire writers that do (for fuck’s sake you can get one Asian writer on your goddamned staff) and leverage on their experiences where you can or, you know, research the lives of the people you are depicting, to inform the characters you are writing. Stereotype should not be ignored because in many cases that’s what drew early diverse comic book readers to those characters and to keep us as adults, we want the depth that those characters deserve.