#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.

Me and 1 Million BC (AKA Marvel, that's not how this works)

It might not be super clear in this blog but I’m an archaeologist. This means that at the most basic level I’m interested in what people did in the past and I try to access that by looking at the things that they left behind. (My specific research toes that line but that's another story). If you can stand some strange hours and a lot of learning, it’s a really cool gig. Special note: WE DO NOT INTENTIONALLY LOOK FOR DINOSAURS. If that’s your gig, look into paleontology. Archaeology digs people stuff.

So here’s my beef with Marvel’s 1,000,000 BC, it is on the very edge of making sense but is just one order of magnitude off. You say 100,000 and I’m there. But at 1 million you are in the territory of "do we call what we evolved from people” or "are they still not quite similar enough to us for that".

Yes. I. know. it. is. fiction.

The problem is that in many other ways comics do things that undercut what we know about the human past (Kree involvement to make the inhumans etc.) that this extremely close but not quite right event becomes the last straw and I can't suspend my disbelief. Besides the Inhuman influence, the implications of the 1 million BC arc are so far reaching that in some ways I seriously question if the “regular” humans in the Marvel Universe would even be recognizable to us as regular earth people. On top of that I hate that this timeline actually undercuts human achievement because we came up with the cool shit they are doing/wearing much more recently than 1 million years ago. AKA in less time we came up with the same complex stuff. For me errors like 1 million BC are closer to Ancient Aliens than something I would want people being inspired to do archaeology from because it takes all the cool shit away from people and makes them supernatural. If they had just removed a couple of zeros, let say 10,000 BC, I would have been fine but 1 million (so exactly 1,002,017 years ago), nope cool story Marvel, you're drunk please go home.

What is going with the Earth and our ancestors at 1 million years ago? Well we’re chilling as Homo Erectus, with some possible variation into maybe a few other species maybe just some cousins who are from a distant relative, and making some of the first stone tools, not the first but more advanced stuff. We probably make fire and it’s an ice age. There is nothing like Homo Sapiens for like another 800,000 years give or take. There is no such thing as symbolic culture at least that we have evidence for. Being white doesn’t exist yet and actually is a phenomenon that outside of Neanderthals may not have been common in Homo Sapien Sapien until the last 12,000-8,000 years. Related to this, there probably were not the ethnic separations that would produce the type of “avengers” Marvel is selling as of 1 million BC and also red hair didn't exist yet. So who were these "Avengers"?

Starbrand – The concept of a “Brand” doesn’t exist in the sense of signifying similarity or ownership

Agamotto – Fine basically except for there not being Ethnically Asian people yet

Iron Fist – We have not developed metallurgy enough to smelt iron

Black Panther – Possible except the human evolution hang up explained above

Ghost Rider – Not clear that we had the symbolic capacity to understand an afterlife and hence “ghosts” or if the concept of “riding” something had been invented

Phoenix – We just got around to fire and Phoenixes are associated with Ancient Greece which does not exist yet

Odin – Not human, so of all the Avengers he is actually the only that makes sense in this context because he did not evolve on Earth so doesn’t fall under my critique. The irony abounds.

My annoyance with settings like this are that we know a lot about what happened in the past. We spend a lot of time excavating sites and reconstructing climate and behavior by examining material culture. So to not take those as facts or even consider that as an avenue for consideration is really frustrating. While this is probably something that other scientists regularly get annoyed with, many of those technologies and sciences exist to some degree in the “future” of humanity. They are things that we are moving toward, in some cases, going from science fiction to science fact on the back of scientists interested in creating what was envisioned as part of our future. Unfortunately, that is not the case with historical sciences like archaeology. By remaking the history of the earth, and of human evolution, you are going from science fact to science fiction.

We can’t increase the pace of human evolution just because we wanted to have extra zeros to make our event look more existing. On top of the pace needed to sustain that, there’s also the problem that all of the characters come from what would essentially be complex civilizations that would need to have come about extremely quickly to support the symbolic behaviors, particularly with the mantle-like traditions of Iron Fist and Black Panther. We didn't even farm until 10,000 years ago during something called the Neolithic Revolution.

I also have to address the possible existence of people with the x-gene in 1 million BC. We would all have the x-gene by now, most likely, if people with it started popping up a million years ago. Especially if those were children of, or they were, the people who were smartest, most powerful, and had good reproductive power (all helpful for making sure your descendants continue to live). Most likely, in the absence of too many supervillains, such new “powers” would be highly adaptive and fitting for the unpredictability of the early Pleistocene so those with the X-gene would have definitely taken over the world by now. No Doubt. Also I’m very confused by the weird Starbrand/Hulk thing that is going on. Is It supposed to be Gigantopithecus (which is what Sasquatch might be based off of)?

So why do I even care so much as to write this? Well right now, as the March for Science demonstrated, science is being regularly attacked and under funded. Particularly, anthropological sciences, such as archaeology and paleoanthropology, that teach things like evolution are under attack and are presented as “one of many possible explanations”. And because of that it matters a fucking lot that comics espouse an evolutionary agenda more akin to creationism than evolution, especially when people like to think of comics as science fiction rather than just fiction or fantasy. From a storytelling point of view, it is a disservice to feed the public a thinner fictional world when we have a wealth of knowledge about the realities of prehistory. Particularly when prehistoric life rarely gets the sort of publicity that a Marvel event brings. This could have been a great chance to collaborate and use archaeological knowledge to color a fictional world using the comics art to illustrate a complex prehistory. A chance to do something fun but also use what we have learned about the past to give it a depth that goes beyond prehistoric “cavemen” stereotypes. In the same way I think that comics should be doing better with culture, they should be doing better with science. We know more about science and culture than we did in the 1960s, it's time we did something about it.

My thoughts on two-bit Marvel Batman or wait…I mean Iron Fist

There are many ways to start this blog. I could relate it to my experiences growing up mixed race, I could start it talking about the tweet storm that descended every time I watched a minute of Iron Fist, and a million other ways that begin academically/professionally but end up a mire of foaming-at-the-mouth rage. But honestly, Danny’s not worth that sort of time or energy.

Those of you who read this (all four!) will probably recognize these ideas from previous tweets, Facebook posts, and angry/exasperated text messages but I’ve probably spent more time thinking about Danny Rand than the writers did so I thought I should have all of those ideas organized in one place. I will also try to refer to much smarter minds than myself for some of these issues because I am only one person and can’t think of all the ways this was entirely mediocre.

You may be thinking “Paulina, if you hated it so much, why did you finish it?” Well, person who questions my life choices, it started with a podcast I did with the awesome Daniel Kwan at the SAAs in Vancouver. We chatted about everything under the sun regarding diversity and being of Asian heritage, and at one point we started ripping into Iron Fist, which had just come out. Between the two of us, we had seen maybe an episode or two, but we had seen enough to joke about forcing ourselves to watch the whole thing then do another Podcast. I thought, hey sure, I’ll give it a chance even though there are tons of articles coming out about how boring it was etc. [All the hyperlinks]. I also had a morbid interest in actually seeing what was going on because I enjoy the Marvel cinematic/Netflix Universe and Colleen Wing seemed like such a boss.

So, post SAA, but before returning to school the BF and I put the first two episodes on and realized very quickly that there was no way in hell we could get ourselves to finish this on its own. So we decided, let’s pair this with Into the Badlands which we had both heard great things about. I put the first five minutes on and was like “This dude riding on this motorcycle is more interesting than that whole episode of Iron Fist”. From then on, we had a formula, two episodes of Iron Fist to one episode of Into the Badlands.

I love the Defenders pic.twitter.com/wPepneDCgq

— s. (@jakepreaIta) May 3, 2017

(NOTE: I would instead recommend just watching Into the Badlands and, if you really need to know, Googling a synopsis of Iron Fist and watching the fight with Lewis Tan. Then maybe re-watch the Defenders trailer to see how many times Jessica Jones sasses Danny because he deserves it.)

So what was so bad about it? Well, almost everything. The casting was unimpressive, the acting was bad, the fight scenes were boring, the overall plot was unclear, the writing was atrocious, and the show did nothing to improve the problematic origins of the character. I’ll try to address my critiques in that order, otherwise I’ll die of an aneurysm. However, honestly, they bleed and crisscross one another so it’s hard to say where one of these critiques ends and the next begins.

Casting: Danny Rand is white in the comics but he’s also supposed to be interesting and capable. For training so much as a monk, he is not that physically impressive and isn’t that good at martial arts. Marvel cannot tell me they could not find a decent-looking blonde, white actor who knew at least some Kung-Fu. There are tons of Caucasian dudes who do Kung-Fu, so, it’s absurd that they went with someone who so minimally fit the visual profile of Danny Rand.

The acting: So the writing is atrocious, which I’ll get to in a second, but Finn Jones doesn’t do much to convince me of anything. He looks like a petulant child when he’s angry, which is about 75% of the time. And his uncontrollable anger/anxiety does not do justice to those who experience such emotions. I’ve seen people go through such episodes and Finn acts them so badly they are borderline comedic, which is not what we want when right now we do so little to support people with mental health problems. Especially coming after Jessica Jones, which did such a great job with that, the poor acting surrounding such issues is truly infuriating.

The fight scenes: So there were a couple good ones, I will give them that. HOWEVER, THE WHOLE POINT OF THE IRON FIST IS MARTIAL ARTS MASTERY. Literally, he was created alongside characters like Shang-Chi, Colleen Wing, and Misty Knight as part of a growing line of martial arts heroes. So, his martial arts should be impeccable. Instead, there is a stiffness whenever Finn Jones executes moves that makes the divide when he fights professionals, like the fight with Lewis Tan, even larger. This makes his entire purpose (master of kung fu) unbelievable and his whole character come off as mediocre. Also, as he’s told us, like five million times, he has been training for 15 years doing Kung-Fu in a place surrounded by Kung-Fu masters who only doing Kung-Fu. Did I mention Kung Fu? (Or that you’d get more students if you taught Kung-Fu even though it’s clearly a Japanese constellation martial arts studio?) HE ALSO DEFEATED A REAL DRAGON TO GET HIS POWERS WITH HIS KUNG FU. Overall, the scenes feel slow when you can actually see people move or they’re cutting between shots so quickly you have no time to actually admire the fighting that’s going on. They also do “cool” but tricksy cinematic shots like stage fights at night or in dimly light areas, meaning they can hide what’s not going well in the fight. This became even more obnoxious when pairing the show with Into the Badlands, whose bread and butter is epic long-cut fight scenes. And to top it off, multiple times in the show he is on the precipice of LOSING, badly, to people who should not be close to his equal.

The overall plot: How did Danny get to New York without a passport or identification? How does he know how to drive an actual car? Why does he still speak American English? Why does he still act white in his physicality? Why was David Wenham’s character even there? What was the point of Davos coming back? What was the point of this season? What did we learn about who Danny is? What did we actually learn about his origin? WHAT IS HE EVEN FIGHTING FOR? Because honestly, I’m not sure and the overall plot seemed to want to be half introduce the Hand, while actually giving us no real information about the Hand except maybe hinting at Bad Davos, and half “PLEASE LIKE DANNY”. But what does Danny fight for? So far as I could tell, he felt like Marvel’s mediocre Batman. His parents are killed, he gets trained in the ways of an Eastern martial arts, comes back and then RETAKES THE COMPANY and gets vengeance?! It’s Batman Begins but boring and, sidenote, Finn Jones is not as hot as Christian Bale. ANYWAYS what is he fighting for? He has no real ties to New York beyond the five people he’s met and honestly being away from 15 years and growing up with monks would probably make places like New York and the whole American system feel extremely cruel. So why stay? And honestly, the way he interacts with his company in New York feels like the most white-people-problems shit I’ve ever seen, it’s like he’s still a child even though clearly Davos, who also is from K’un L’un, can act like an adult and still have a little bit of fish-out-of-water too. Also Thor was a fish-out-of-water and didn’t come across as an annoyingly naïve child.

The writing: “Worst Iron Fist ever.” “This means I have to kill him for you” “But I’m Danny Rand” “I’m Danny Rand” “I’M DANNY RAND” These are the lines I remember from this show. Particularly, because I laughed at all of them. The plot, as mentioned above, was confusing but so often the individual lines were just absurd. They were written stiff, acted stiffly, and did not convey anything that they should have. It’s like, did no one edit the scripts for these episodes? Because they were trash and it’s like, we really know you are Danny Rand, seriously, you can stop saying your name. It’s like he was some sort of Pokemon that got stuck only saying their own name for 13 episodes.

And lastly, but not leastly, the Problematic Origins of the Iron Fist:

Like most superheroes, beyond ye olde white-straight-cis-het-male-American heroes, the origins of Danny Rand and his whole schtick are problematic. Why? Well like Luke Cage and Shang-Chi, he was created at a point in time where comics were written by white-cis-het-male-Americans who had no idea about cultural appropriation and had yet to take the time to examine how their culture was inherently racist. So, these characters, while great for bringing “diversity” into comics, contain horrible stereotypes that modern writers have spent a lot of time fixing. Essentially, if you pick up any Luke Cage comics before 2000, though some may also take issue with the Max CAGE series, you will see a horribly stereotyped essentially racist portrayal of an African American man. The Netflix series dispels most of that, and created a well-rounded solid representation of an African American man, and modern African American culture, and engaged with how his power was a symbol for the ongoing conflict we have in this country between structural violence and the African American body.

Iron Fist? Yeah…No. Full disclosure, I haven’t read much Iron Fist. However, there are tons of articles out there by people who have but I’m going to give my two cents on some of the excuses I have heard about Iron Fist:

“But Danny is white in the comics!”

Yes and so were Elektra and Psylocke originally and they were be played by Asian heritage actors.

“His race doesn’t really matter!”

If his race doesn’t really matter why did you pick a white person? White is not the global average for generic! It’s white and has just as much racial baggage as any other choice. Especially when he had no martial arts background anyways!

“He was supposed to feel like the other”

Where? We don’t see his training in K’un L’un where he is supposedly an “outsider” (like being picked on by all the mean Asian boys) and clearly he was less of an outsider than he claimed if he had the same rights as everyone else at the monastery. Is he an outsider in New York? He sort of is, but that could be done with anyone because that’s personality and not physical perception. Also if it’s about feeling like the "other" any Asian American will tell you that no matter how similar you might look to others in Asia, they know when you aren’t a local. Also we’ve had the white-guy in Asia outsider story told like a Kajillion times before, this isn’t unique (See the Last Samurai).

“There are other Asian superheroes that Marvel can use”

Yes all five of them. There actually is a paucity of well-developed Asian-American heroes in the Marvel universe and they get whitewashed anyways (see: The Ancient One)! Seriously, if you read Totally Awesome Hulk #15 you’ll see almost all of the Asian American superheroes Marvel has on offer (sans X-men). Also, the three most well-known ones were created in the last five years and are ALL spin-offs/new mantel takers (Ms. Marvel, Totally Awesome Hulk, and Silk) so doing this to Iron Fist would not have been out of step with what Marvel is doing already. Additionally, the Iron Fist is a mantel, not a person, and they change all the time. There have been many Iron Fists, the series The Immortal Iron Fist talks about them, and Marvel is not married to its cannon (Psylocke literally spontaneously changes ethnicities in the comics at one point). There is no reason to preserve his ethnicity when it serves no purpose to the story, it embodies a type of cultural appropriation, and forwards the stereotype that Caucasians are better at being Asians than Asian people. Even better, they could have done a swap, like they did with Patsy Walker for Carol Danvers in Jessica Jones! Shang-Chi could have been originally named Danny Rand but given a new name by the monks or become the Iron Fist and blam, you make a fine swap/merge and the world keeps turning.

There are probably lots of other “but actuallys” or “what ifs” but overall Iron Fist wasn’t good and while it wouldn’t have fixed the other problems casting an Asian-heritage actor as Danny would have lessened a lot of the sting. By choosing to cast a Caucasian actor, they don’t acknowledge the orientalist origin of his character or adapt his story to fit modern relationships with Asian nations, heritage, and culture and they didn't use his own backstory to make up for the those problems. For example, they don't take the idea of being raised in another culture to their logical end. He didn't act like a monk in his physicality, he speaks English like they only spoke English in K'un L'un, and overall nothing about his character besides his fighting skills and him telling us he's been to K'un L'un point him being brought up in a completely different culture.

They didn't follow any of their own plot points to their logical conclusion and while they may still have not done that with an Asian American actor like Lewis Tan they would have at least helped rectify the appropriative origins of the character. Assuming they had actually cast Lewis Tan this blog would be like “At least the fight scenes were awesome and they followed through with a commitment to diversity” instead of “Why didn’t we burn this before it began?”