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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
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I could actually see Vision getting a decent sized role since he's got one of the Infinity Gems. And Hawkeye as well if those reports about him becoming Ronin in the second movie are accurate.
Nowhere near lead character status but the Russos did say they wanted some of the lower tier characters to take on a greater importance here.
Honestly Iron Fist kind of feels like a lesser version of Arrow overall really (completely with the showrunners of both clearly doing no research whatsoever into how stocks/corporate law work). Heck even it's fight scenes are weaker than Arrow's (even at that show's worst, it still has cool-enough action sequences).
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To be fair, in Arrows case there was no doubt about the identity of Oliver and his family really wanted him back. Danny is more an inconvenience. I actually enjoyed quite a lot about the early beats, especially how Joy moves from disbelieve to accepting the truth and how she actually is kind of glad that he is alive even if she also wants to protect the company she has worked for - which is kind of understandable, she worked her a... off and then Danny just turns up and reaps the benefits - to finally relenting. My issue is that the whole legal stuff just happens too fast, and that it feels as if there are chunks of the story missing. Like, how exactly did the board react to the news that there is a claim of a lost heir of Rand industries?
My problem with Joy is that, when it's all said and done, she feels really superfluous. Like the writers didn't really know what to do with her character most of the time. Harold and Ward at least have defined reasons to be there. With her, she just kind of bounces around randomly, and seemingly changes her personality randomly as well, to the point that not only is she superfluous, I cannot get a handle on what her character is supposed to really be.
And that ending with her, WOW did that feel tacked-on/contrived.
So can someone genuinely explain to me why Mighty Whitey is in play for a hero - i.e. Iron Fist, or Strange - when it comes to aping Asian culture like martial arts and that's bad but Yellow Peril is equally bad for villains? I mean, I get it on paper but in practice if I hypothetically have a White guy playing the head of an evil Ninja clan, is that better or worse than Yellow Peril by implying that a white man, or woman, even, managed to climb to the top of the ladder - because now the face of what would be a traditionally Asian group of villains is White? Or is it just as bad as a heroic White ninja? Or worse? Can Asians only play martial artists if they're heroic, like it's only racist if they're the bad guys?
I guess I feel like people are wanting to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to the racial controversy, at least in terms of Iron Fist and the Hand. Either you make the Hand/Iron Fist Asian and that's stereotypical (if historically accurate, the Hand originated in Japan, makes sense that a vast majority of their membership would be Japanese and of other Asian descent, and K'un L'un is somewhere in Asia, when it materializes on earth anyway) or you make the Hand/Iron Fist white or literally any other ethnicity and they're stealing the Asian culture that you don't want Asians to be the face of because it's stereotypical.
Am I making sense? Do you see the paradox, kinda? I just don't get it, because it seems likes no matter which route you take there's some dumb controversy and you guys won't be happy either way, and even if a medium is taken like in Defenders with the multi-ethnic Five Fingers of the Hand it's still not good enough. I just feel like when it comes to cultural representation/appropriation Reality Is Unrealistic and these issues seem blown out of proportion a bit. I don't like getting political, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around it all.
"A king has no friends. Only subjects and enemies."![]()
Still reserve judgement on that one, I have my own theory where they go with this. But in general, I don't think that Joy's various turns are that much out of the left field. Her ruthless streak is after all established early on (who the hell buys an organ for a business deal), and I like how it goes counter with her caring side, which still has a sense of fairness.
The way the hand - and pretty much every other villain group - is handled in Daredevil is kind of problematic because the heroes in the story are all white while the "foreign" is dangerous (and it doesn't help that Daredevil tends to delve deeply into stereotypes). It doesn't help that the white criminals all get more or less elaborate backstories and motivation to flesh them out, while the Asian ones are vaguely dangerous.
Iron Fist actually does a lot to even the scale, at least in my book, because there not all heroes are white and not everything Asian is automatically bad.
edited 16th Sep '17 1:42:52 PM by Swanpride
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Nobody said The Hand can't be Asian, the problem is they're so generically written that there's not much to them outside of being an evil Asian Yellow Peril stereotype. Like, diversifying them is a step but also making them actually interesting is something the shows have failed at doing. They're especially awful in Daredevil with how they exemplify so many stereotypes. Ninjas? Check. All Asian? Check. Do they have a clear motivation? No.
And of course, ya know, there's the whole thing with the Hand being enemies with the Chaste, whose leading member, Stick, is a white man, and the aforementioned issues with Iron Fist being a Mighty Whitey archetype. Most of the people going up against The Hand are white.
edited 16th Sep '17 1:42:31 PM by AdricDePsycho
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?The key to averting Yellow Peril is not "never have Asian bad guys". Marvel actually tried to do that with Iron Man 3 and you saw how that was received.
The key is that your Asian bad guys should be well-defined characters and not just Scary Asian People. If your conflict can be summarized as "The ASIANS are coming for you!" then that's Yellow Peril.
This was a huge issue in DareDevil not just because the bad guys were Japanese, but because they were a faceless army of ninja with no clear motive, no characterization, nothing that actually makes them a villainous force beyond being mindless spooky bad guys. All the other ethnic gangs had personality and characteristics, but for the Japanese, Marvel went with "Roving horde of Asian man-monsters".
Yellow Peril and Mighty Whitey are firmly divorced from each other. As a rule, Mighty Whitey is purely a protagonist trope. A villain can't be Mighty Whitey, because the purpose of the story is not to empower the villain. It's to disempower him. A story about a young Chinese kid training to overthrow a white man who came to his lands, appropriated his culture, and subjugated his people would actually be pretty sweet.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Well, they are considerably better in Iron Fist...they get actual motivations, and at least Gao is a fascinating character. It also helps a lot that Iron Fist lays down some ground rules. But naturally the Defenders more or less destroys all the good work which is done (and honestly, what the hell is the Black Sky?????)
The Defenders also suffers from the "there are hardly any heroic Asian characters outside of Colleen" as well. Also I wonder if the Iron Fist writers realized that trying to tie The Hand into the IF mythos is not really a natural fit? Like you have a Kung Fu-based hero, vs. an army of Ninjas. Excuse me writers, those are two different kinds of disciplines from two different countries.
It's not accurate to say that the Hand were completely impersonal generic Asian bad guys in Daredevil Season 2. There was that one white woman who was a member of the Hand who yelled at their hostages in the truck and Matt got angry at Elektra for killing a member of the Hand because he was just a kid.
Besides, the races of the generic Hand ninjas is left ambiguous for most of them because of their face being covered, and their constant mentions that the Hand was a worldwide threat led me to assume they were racially diverse. I didn't watch Season 2 of Daredevil and think "the Hand is an evil army of Asian ninjas", I thought "the Hand is an evil army of ninjas, some of whom are Asian".
Hell, we even saw several people getting kidnapped and being converted to be members of the Hand and most of those people weren't Asian!
One white woman out of how many Asians? And you can't just say "Hey some of them were masked, you can't tell if they're Asian!" and use that as evidence for the Hand being more diverse in Daredevil. We don't know their race, the people we see on-screen as active members are all Asian.
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?![]()
You're focusing on the wrong thing, here. It's not that they're Japanese. They could *all* be Japanese— they're ninjas, and Japanese gangsters who people in-universe assume are Yakuza. That's not an unfair assumption to make, and while based on race, ninjas being Japanese and Japanese gangsters being Yakuza is pretty justifiable prior to any evidence to the contrary.
The part that's problematic is that they have no characteristics— being mysterious, Asian, and villainous is seen as enough. They can just stand around being Eastern and sinister. That's the part Asian actors are sick of, being typecast as inherently inscrutable and unreadable, and too exotic for certain roles, ie. parts where they get actual lines.
edited 16th Sep '17 5:12:33 PM by Unsung
Elektra was a huge part of Daredevil Season 2 and she got more lines than some major characters in Season 1. And before you go all "but then they revealed that she was connected to the Hand which ruined her character" remember that Colleen had almost the exact same thing and no-one complained there. Elektra having a connection to the Hand doesn't suddenly invalidate her character any more than it did for Colleen.
I don't have a problem with Elektra, but she doesn't fix the Hand's portrayal in DD Season 2. She also doesn't make up for the Hand by her presence, but neither should she need to, or Colleen, or Madame Gao. Offering up one character as an apology or consolation prize becomes sort of patronizing when the alternative is actually fixing the underlying problem. And there's nothing keeping that from happening other than a lack of interest on the part of the creators.
edited 16th Sep '17 5:46:35 PM by Unsung

Danny getting his identity back was paradoxically too hard and too easy. Spending four episodes on an event that Arrow managed to cover in half an hour is annoying and feels like filler. On the other hand, spending so much time on it implies that it's going to be a major plotline running through the entire series, so having it get so wrapped up so quickly just feels like the writers wanted to get it over with once a few story beats were taken care of.
Writing a post-post apocalypse LitRPG on RR. Also fanfic stuff.