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?”

Yelling at (Doctor) Strange(rs): An long unbridled reaction to Marvel’s Doctor Strange

The complaints about Doctor Strange are probably much more eloquently put somewhere else but after waiting so long to watch a Marvel movie, which admittedly I really wanted to see, all of my critiques come back to one thing: Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One. Overall, the movie had a strangely large amount of white women in the background, set things in Asia with only one speaking part for a person of Asian descent, and overall attempted to avoid orientalism and instead fell into a mire of first-world problems, colonialism, and whitewashing.

Having all the main plot moving characters (you could have cut Mordo and Wong no problem) be white (Doctor Strange, The Ancient One, and Mads Mikkelson’s character whose name honestly does not matter) came off as super “white people problems”-y. OH NO BUT I WANT TO LIVE FOREVER, why? BECAUSE THE WHITE LADY DID……mk. Therefore the who situation comes off as super paternalistic for the many sorcery students who are not involved with this. One white man wants to save them this way, a white lady wants to save them this way, and in the end the white man saves them. Mads had minimal motivation, the Ancient One came off as super paternalistic (I’M OLD I MADE A LOT OF TOUGH DECISIONS FOR ALL THE LITTLE PEOPLE), and Doctor Strange was honestly fine. He comes across as that guy in high school who you always want to punch in the face, but he has a great dog-cape and most of his annoyance could be overlooked if it wasn’t for the Bald-For-No-Reason-We-Say-We-Are-Celtic-Without-Using-Celtic-Imagery Ancient One.

The plot is the typical Doctor Strange origin story, which can be found in any number of various comics reboots, many are good, and Benedict is the best white-male fit for the character that exists. Enough Sherlock without it being Sherlock and with a sense of humor. Downside is the fact that Marvel could do with a couple fewer Arrogant-Smart-White-Dudes-Who-Love-Showing-They-Know-More-Than-Others, he’s sort of rogue-ish, you sort of like him, but you sort of also just want to punch his smug-ass face over and over until he shuts up. Lots of white-people problems happen (expensive car crash, followed by smug comments about expensive surgery, there are only white doctors, followed by entitled yelling), then he goes to Kathmandu which of course he can still afford to do. Though honestly, it could have been Chinatown in Kansas considering how much it as a setting and the people from there mattered.

This is the crux of many critiques of the character. It was first conceived of in the 1960s when generic “Eastern” mysticism was all the rage. They wanted to incorporate that into the Marvel Universe, so they create a mystical superhero. I get it, it was a product of its time. Now? Not so much. But at least then they claimed ignorance though they actually used some semblance of internal pseudo-Asian logic to move things along. That aside from that we get to Kathmandu, Strange acts like he has no idea how to Google places before he has to travel and wanders around like a stereotypical tourist asking random people where they mystical temple is. No Asian People Are Heard Speaking To Him Until Wong Shows Up Half Way Through The Training Montage.

Seriously, Marvel, what in the actual fuck. We meet the Ancient One, there is a non-speaking older Asian man in the room who then leaves. We get no explanation as to why she is bald (there are no hair length/style requirements at her temple), we are told outright by Baron Mordo that she is Celtic (HEY GUYS SHE’S CELTIC ITS FINE) which is just awful storytelling, and a good portion of the background “help” are white women even in Kathmandu (why?). Also the evil women with Mads are also white but with heavy make-up to show they are bad! We have some training scenes with Paternalistic white woman showing the Asian people how to do body movements that are derived from martial arts started in their own cultures, none of them speak and most of them are light-skinned Asians so no locals from Kathmandu train there. Though, for a good five minutes they are better than the white dude who just arrived. But you know after about a month he’s surpassed everyone who has lived and trained there for years because he’s just that kind of guy. Also you see him read more than you see him practice movement and for the amount of mind-body-united talk there is not much demonstration of that.

We’re introduced to Wong. When the director said they were going to make Wong a “master” this was like 99% talk, we never see him fight or show mastery of anything really. He’s either being outsmarted by the white-guy who’s already better at the thing Wong has trained for his whole life/his librarian job or dead. He is a one-dimensional sidekick but they call him a master and he likes Beyonce so it’s fine guys. He leads a group of students, many in this shot are Asian-descent, into an epic battle where apparently they are all useless and just die because we see none of their skills or anything more of them than a group shot. So is Tilda even that good of a teacher guys? I think not.

Mk. Where are we…Ah Yes Tilda as metaphor. So, they tried to avoid 1960s orientalism and came off as colonialist. Basic rule of drama: you put a gun on the wall, it’s fired by the last act. You set a story in Asia and it kind of has to matter. Instead, at one, point you LITERALLY FREEZE ALL THE ASIAN PEOPLE AND THEY ARE LITERAL SET PIECES. Antarctica would have also been an OK place for this movie. Also would have looked cool, mirrored glaciers, penguins, the whole shebang. Plus their design team, for the costumes primarily and some of the sets, did lots of looking cool and very little thinking about where styles come from. Have you ever played a JRPG and they use European Armor and you’re like, no guys, that’s not how that armor works. That’s what the design in this came off as. Shape, form, and zero substance. Each martial art has it’s own uniform for a specific purpose that comes from somewhere. At Ms. Tilda’s school for the mystical arts, nah brah, that don’t mean a thing. If even in the design they didn’t draw more than aesthetics for their Asian influences (or heaven forbid hire an Asian designer to think about this shit) why even keep the setting in Asia. Marvel if you are so worried about the Chinese market, higher some Chinese actors and designers to design your shit and at least have it make sense. They basically cafeteria’d it up with generic mystical Asian symbolism and styles and didn’t even do a great job at that. Mine the continent for its mystical substance then distill it into emptiness.

OH best part. The Ancient One telling Doctor Strange the secret is that that he’s not important, demonstrating that he can’t be that smart if he didn’t figure out that blatantly obvious point that most meditation arts cover on day one

THEN

PROCEEDS TO TELL HIM THAT WITH OUT HIM THE WORLD IS ALL DYING

Ok Tilda, think about it, if it’s not all about him why does the fate of the ENTIRE UNIVERSE REST ON HIM? Please think about this Tilda, think long and hard about the mix-signals you are telling the arrogant white man. Honestly, he also doesn’t do that much to curb his arrogance and his saving the world came off as sort of “I’ma do this because I’m THE hero guys, mk”. Ok he hands Nick a scalpel but there was no progression toward that symbol of sacrifice. Also rather than concerned, Tilda comes off about as sincerely caring as when she played Gabriel in Constantine. Ethereal and unattached and basically “Oh but you can’t argue with me, I’m being polite, and I did what was right, and it’s hard to be a white woman”.

Other minor gripes:

- Why are all the sanctuaries in the Northern Hemisphere?

     o If Agamotto built them thousands of years ago why would he have picked the areas that are now New York or London? Why not put them in places that had large populations back in the day?

    o Also if the Ancient one is Celtic why is it in London and not Dublin, Glasgow, Bilbao, or another ACTUALLY CELTIC CITY? Did you pick these at random for the architecture Marvel? BECAUSE IT FEELS LIKE YOU DID

    o Also lots of African-descent students at the Temple (cool diversity!) but no sanctuary in Africa…that’s super ummm…colonialist of you….thanks guys because only whites/Asians have large cities as symbols for spiritual knowledge, A+

    o Also Mexico City wasn’t an option for you? Just checking that there are zero latino Mystics…because that’s you know….cool too, except maybe the “selfish” guy

- There should have been more Rachel McAdams, Christine was great and I want more of her awesome ACTUAL GOOD DOCTOR SKILLS to come through

- Fuck photographic memory, people sometimes just WORK HARD AND READ ALL THE THINGS TO GAIN INTELLIGENCE

- They could have milked the time-loop thing for some better landed jokes but not bad

Things I loved:

- The mystical world dimensions where just as crazy amaze balls absurd as in the comics. I love them, I would live in a weird perpendicular clock cathedral thing 100%

- The CGI was amazing, all green screen but felt like a real expanding world for the most part

- Dog-cape

- There was a good amount of snark

- Rachel McAdams

- Wong’s dead pan reaction to Strange’s humor was greatly appreciate, because honestly in a movie filled with extraneous white people how else would you respond

Honestly, I liked good chunks and there were parts that I could forgive if they hadn’t so blatantly whitewashed everything about the core of the story. Part of Stephen’s development is the conflict between scientific methods and mysticism. He truly doesn’t believe but we don’t get that development. We get no real feeling that Strange is actually trying an Eastern/Generic mystical approach because we get no evidence that what he is doing is different from what he did in New York. He basically just quips, reads, and tries hard. There’s less yelling and one trip to Everest but one incident does not change behavior. Also a big part of many mystic approaches is meditation, which we see absolutely none of, and should be at the core of why an embodied mystical approach works.

On top of that, Tilda was just distracting and a reminder of how poorly they dealt with Asian culture. Their design felt like the “Asian” section at a Pier 1. She looked a step up from Marlon Brando as a Japanese guy. They did not do anything to demonstrate her “Celticness” or give her motivations for her being there. Why is she bald? Why Kathmandu? Why is she Celtic? How did she become a sorcerer? How the hell did she get to Kathmandu in the first place without dying HUNDREDS of years ago? Why does she speak like a modern English woman? Why are her mannerisms detached from the culture she’s spent hundreds of years surrounded by? Why is there only one generic sorcerer type that uniformly exoticizes Asian culture? Why are all your “masters” white dudes? Why do you have no imagery of the founder of your cult? WHY IS THERE NO MEDITATION?

Doctor Strange should have just dealt with its orientalist foundations and improved them instead of pretending that it didn’t exist. Own your source material and then do better.

I wrote my way out: An unnecessary reference for an unnecessary review of the year

I have a lot to write about and a backlog of blog-posts that should have written months ago but we’re at the end of the year and my once-a week, a month, a every few months blog has changed it’s rhythm but I happy with that as this was, and still is supposed to be, for me and for fun. I re-started this blog for a number of reasons, which I covered in the initial re-viving blog post, and foremost of those has been to write more. Being in academia writing for classes, my dissertation, or something for publication makes me forget that I do enjoy putting words down for fun. This blog has been there for me to write the things that do not fall into those categories and try to write what comes to mind and on things that are less data driven in relation to science fiction, community, and anthropology/archaeology.

One of the good things to come out of this year, this blog, and twitter was the forum I moderated at Geek Girl Con. That forum was a great learning experience, wrangling amazingly creative people that I had never met before. It was extremely gratifying to facilitate a conversation that involved critiquing things that I love and at the same time help others understand a serious issue. Overall, Geek Girl Con was great and introduced me to an amazing group of people who are fascinated by the same media and social issues that I am. To me it showed that as much as there are tropes in science fiction media, there are also people who want to consume and produced better, higher quality, and more thoughtful media than currently exists. Seeing that enthusiasm was amazing and I hope to continue attending such great events or to bring such ideas to events that lack them.

Another positive to come out of this year was submitting my first chapter for publication based on my dissertation research. It’s in an edited volume rather than a scientific journal, and it’s currently being reviewed so hopefully people are kind and constructive so it actually gets published, but it was great to see something that I worked on go out into the world. It also happened to fall on a strangely appropriate anniversary, the day I decided to start writing about children and landscape in archaeology. That hilarious happenstance made me feel better about the work I have done in the last year, and last few years, demonstrating how sometimes you randomly decide something, stick with it, and for some reason it keeps giving back to you enough to continue doing it for the rest of your life.

Both of these demonstrated to me how individual moments create awesome and enduring events. The split second choice to do, act, say, or write can define important things tomorrow, in a year, or in several years and while there are an infinite number of possible things that can and will happen in 2017 it’s impossible to know immediately which will be the most important.

We are not things,or wait, are we?: Cosplaying as objects

I love cosplay. It is one of the best parts of attending cons: seeing it, doing it, and thinking about what I might sew or adapt next. Cosplay has also been central to the increasing numbers of women attending conventions . It makes cons a more welcoming environment for women because it highlights the combination of geek culture with the creation of costumes, an activity associated with women.

However, there are certain types of cosplay that bother me. While many people find revealing costumes uncomfortable, the ones that give me pause are more subtle. Specifically, I get uncomfortable when women cosplay as objects. My discomfort with this stems from the fact that I haven’t seen any discussion of this, which suggests complacency with seeing women dressed as objects and the gendering of the non-humanoid as female, including robots, objects, and even ideas such as the Nation state. Most often, these cosplays are robots, which have personalities and agency, but for every 100 woman dressed in an awesome TARDIS dress or costume you have only one male doing the same.

This also bothers me because as a possible replacement for revealing costumes, some women have turned to dressing as objects and that seems awkward. Obviously, dressing as an object does not mean you will be objectified but it seems an odd choice when one could cosplay as a women character. Additionally, the lack of representation of such adapted attire for men and the fact that it is more common for them to be the human male counterpoint or owner of the robot or object in question adds another layer of discomfort.

It reminds me that as much as cosplay has allowed cons to be more inviting for women the type of cosplay one does matters just as much. It reminds me about how important it is to think about who/what you are signifying when you cosplay. It is true that robots and other semi-sentient things, like the TARDIS, are awesome but are you choosing to be an object over an active woman character? If so, why does that appeal to you over the female character? How does this inspire or make others more comfortable? Or does your cosplay accidentally play into an agenda that does not support women?