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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
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That's sort of what I meant when I said that Danny was the kind of character your screenwriting professor is trying to get you not to write.
The thing is that most of the complaints about Danny only really come down to the fact that he's bland (and his interactions with Colleen, which in the beginning particularly make him look like an absolute shithead). On an overall level, Tony Stark has probably caused more harm to the world than Danny and he's similarly an immature, privileged billionaire.
But that doesn't matter because he's interesting and charismatic. Hell, I think you'll find people are often more sympathetic towards the Punisher than Danny in spite of the former being a much worse person, because Frank Castle is a well-realized and fascinating character to the point where people sometimes forget how horrible his actions are. Finn Jones is just straight up wrong when he said that Donald Trump's election means people are sour on stories about billionaires. If the writing is good enough, it's completely irrelevant.
The truth is that there a bunch of films and tv shows with main characters like Danny - it's a telltale sign of an amateur script. Creating well-realized and interesting characters isn't something you learn how to do overnight. He feels like he's the main character because the writers said he was, not because he's a well-crafted character that deserves to have his story told.
edited 6th Nov '17 7:39:41 PM by Draghinazzo
YO, I just got back from watching... Spider-Man Homecoming. Not Thor.
Vulture's great, Peter is great, the twist is great, Tony's great, and I had a big dumb grin on my face for the entirety of the first two sequences of the movie (Peter video blogging Civil War and him running around being a Friendly Incompetent Neighborhood Spider-Man). Best Spider-Man movie and best Spider-Man actor.
But that doesn't matter because he's interesting and charismatic.
On a fundamental level this is really all most audiences are concerned with, characters that are at least intentionally likable. Unintentionally Unsympathetic characters, however they get there, simply aren't given any leeway from audiences and will be far more scrutinized.
On the one hand, that was part of the point. He's bouncing around because he's trying to find his purpose. But he's not good at articulating that, so instead it just turns into him changing his mind on what The Most Important Thing is every other episode. Again, if he was less bland, people wouldn't care as much. Many interesting stories have been written about people trying to find their purpose. This wasn't one of them.
I still think they should have made it so that K'un L'un intentionally sent Danny out because they found out about the Hand infiltrating Rand. It would solidify his motivations, explain why he's not paying enough attention to the company after fighting so hard to get it, and overall make his actions less hypocritical.
Writing a post-post apocalypse LitRPG on RR. Also fanfic stuff.It's much like Buck's work on Inhumans. He could've easily just rewrote it to where, say, Black Bolt and Medusa want to actually end the caste system but Maximus attempts to stop them by holding a coup. Make them struggle with the moral dilemma of propagating a caste system that they didn't create while trying to get rid of it through essentially a civil war or revolution. Or something. It took me five seconds to think of this and I feel like I put more effort into this than Scott Buck has ever put into anything he's ever made.
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?I have a suspicion that Scott Buck's part of that movement that doesn't like straight-up heroes and considers them flat and boring, to the point where he goes out of his way to make them flat and boring. I also think there's an element of snide protest in making superheroes into fascist jerks. I get where that criticism comes from, but it's a very old argument at this point, dating back to '80s, meaning it completely disregards the way the medium has evolved since then and the ways that the MCU is already its own argument against that kind of tyranny of the supers.
Like BVS, it's adapting material largely unchanged which isn't really current or relevant anymore.
edited 6th Nov '17 9:33:20 PM by Unsung
Well I can understand that view to a point. I think it's easier to get a really interesting multifaceted character if you allow them to have really deep flaws, because it makes for a bigger contrast with their positive qualities and allows for a more complex psychology.
But there's no real point to making a straight up heroic character boring in protest. I don't really think any of the Defenders are ambiguous enough to not count as heroes in the end, with maybe the exception of Matt but I don't think so. And none of them are as boring as Danny is.
Danny Rand felt a lot like Scott Buck took a lot of the archetypical 70's / 80's hot shot action hero tropes and just plastered them on the screen, without any of the nuance that (arguably) covered the worse bits back in the day - a lot of the way he interfaces with the other characters, and the way we're supposed to assume they relate to him, smells a lot like he was taking it for granted that we would receive these characters in a standard way because they're doing cool things no matter how poor and outdated their characterizations actually were.
edited 6th Nov '17 9:26:31 PM by KnownUnknown
Well we hopefully won't have to worry too much about it because Buck isn't on IF S2.
Although the person they're replacing him with, Raven Metzner, apparently was showrunner for Sleepy Hollow which I heard was a mess, so maybe still not the absolute best choice but I'm hoping for an improvement at least.
The theme of Iron Fist is NOT Family. It is legacy and identity.
See, Daredevil is about moral, about the area between the law and actual justice (we all know that the law doesn't always provide the latter, especially not in the US). Jessica Jones is about psychology, to be specific about the power dynamic within relationships and how easily they can become abusive. And about abuse survivors. Luke Cage is about culture, how the individual is the product of his environment and how it impacts said environment through its decisions. And Iron Fist is about philosophy, but interestingly now about comparing eastern and western philosophy (at least not mode of them time), but about expectations vs personal fulfilment (though in a way this is comparing eastern cultures, which tend to put the society above the individual to western cultures, which tend to put the individual in the centre). Danny, Ward, Joy, they all struggle with the expectations which were put on their shoulders, and they all and Colleen are forced to redefine their position in life.
Concerning Scott Buck: I hesitate to blame him for Inhumans. Scott Buck is a show runner who is called in when people want something on a budget. He is a hired hand. We all know that the Inhumans is Perlmutter's pet project and the show has his stink all over it.
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You've said that about Iron Fist before, and it might be about mentors and broken pedestals and questionable parenting, but I don't especially find it has much to say about any of those things. Daredevil had Stick and Bill Fisk, Jessica Jones had Dorothy Walker and Kilgrave's extremely skewed view of his parents, Luke Cage had Mama Mabel, Pistol Pete, and the Reverend Lucas's treatment of Willis Stryker. All the shows deal with parental expectations. The Harold-Ward relationship is solid, but Danny and Colleen's parent/mentor issues are pretty bland, too much so to really hold up as a theme. I certainly don't think it makes up for the missed opportunity to say something real about homelessness and mental illness.
And you can draw a pretty straight line between Inhumans' problems, Iron Fist's, and latter-day Dexter's, too. Rush job or not, the pattern of odd, out-of-place filler material and dropping plots the moment they start heating up is too similar to ignore.
edited 7th Nov '17 5:24:43 AM by Unsung
They have more flexibility on account of the fact that they're predominately antagonistic characters, so when they're behaving like assholes, it's a feature, not a bug. In general, villains have an easier time being likable than heroes do because heroes are expected to generally make if not good than at least decent choices and do generally decent things. The hero might make mistakes here or there, and that's what gives them their interesting flaws, but most of their decisions are supposed to seem like right decisions because they represent the moral rightness of the story.
Villains don't need to do that. A villain can kick a puppy in the face while singing a jaunty showtune and it will do nothing to damage his likability because villains are supposed to be assholes so it doesn't undermine his role in the story to do so. The villain's role in the story is to be wrong. He can condone slavery, give speeches about how everyone but him is stupid, order a mass genocide, and it won't harm his likability one bit because we all understand that he's meant to be wrong. He's a bad guy doing bad guy things and we can rest easy in the knowledge that he will get his comeuppance in the end.
This is what makes it so infuriating when a hero transgresses "flawed" and starts doing bad guy things: because whether or not he'll get his comeuppance is determined entirely by how much the writer realizes that he's doing wrong here. He's ultimately supposed to be right, and that colors his actions.
It's painful to watch things like Danny undermining Colleen's authority in front of her students in her own dojo, because we know that the payoff scene where Colleen tells him to go f*ck himself, slams the door in his face, and never sees him again, won't ever come. She's going to fall in love with him anyway, because he's the guy that's supposed to be right and that makes it okay for him to harass and stalk her. Ward and Harold will be - and are - inevitably punished for their transgressions, but Danny is rewarded for his, and this makes it much easier to sympathize with Ward and Harold over him.
edited 7th Nov '17 5:17:11 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.@Tobias but also in terms of the discussion generally-
Trying to think how to put this, and with the caveat that I haven't watched Iron Fist as of yet nor have I read the comics:
So, I've found it kind of strange how much you hate Danny, especially for that aspect of unpunished dickishness which the story validates, since you are like the biggest Tony Stark fan on the site, seemingly for those same reasons. I'm not saying this as an accusation of hypocrisy though, because while not really being a Tony fan myself, I can see the differences. Most obviously, although I still think the movies go out of their way to validate Tony's choices, there's definitely consequences for his actions and "personality" and perhaps more importantly, a big part of the character is that he is this egotistical jerk, balanced by things like his wit, his kindness toward those he cares about, and his extensive charitable endeavors. Whereas my understanding is that Dany is supposed to be this "woke" and all around nice and selfless guy. So, the problem with trying to make him "interestingly flawed" is that he's not really that kind of character, and you get further problems when he's flawed but the story still functions as if he isn't.
And another reason I like the Tony Stark comparison, is that apparently Stan Lee created him as being a character that audiences would love despite embodying qualities they hated (rich, conservative hawk), and while Dany is currently controversial because of being a classic Mighty Whitey character coupled with out-of-universe criticisms of whitewashing, he wasn't envisioned as deliberately controversial in the same way as Tony. Which plays into the fact that while from an out-of-universe standpoint, Danny is very privileged and needs to be made lovable in the same way as Tony, from an in-universe perspective, he really isn't at all privileged (i.e. grew up under Training from Hell for most of his childhood and is legitimately a superior martial artist to Colleen), so "dunking on Danny" doesn't really work from an in-universe perspective.
So, while I'm not totally sure it would work in the Netflix shows, especially because Luke Cage is already framed as The Cape, I think to make Danny work, you need a very different approach in which you play up how he's a Sheep in Sheep's Clothing and the story is about his desire to use his company and wealth for good, something made difficult both by his enemies and because he's a Stranger in a Familiar Land. Think Mr. Smith Goes to Washington with ninja-punching.
That's a pretty good point.
For me, the distinction is that Tony's flaws are meant to have repercussions, and most of them are also meant to serve a purpose. When Tony's in the wrong, it's a deliberate choice that often winds up being the crux of his character arc. His flaws come with a promise of consequences, a lesson to be learned, etc. Like any other hero, his role is to ultimately be right, but his rightness is a journey. At the start of the film, he might not be right, but we know he'll become right by story's end.
And the mistakes he makes along that way are more forgivable because they ultimately come from a good place. When Tony says, "I want to make weapons that will blow up America's enemies and keep our boys abroad safe from harm," he's somewhat misguided, but his motives still come from a genuine place of wanting to help people. From the start, he set out to provide a net positive to the world; he's just had to re-examine how he's doing that over the years to make sure that a positive is actually what he's providing.
Conversely, when Danny marches into Joy and Ward's dinner and tells them, "You know what? I didn't care about getting my company back before, but now I'm going to do it just so I can rub my sweaty balls in your face," his motives are coming from a self-centered desire to lash out at someone for scorning him, personally.
Tony has moments of self-reflection where he recognizes, "Huh. I think I f*cked up. Time to try something different." He's capable of this because his character is ultimately flawed but outward-facing. His ego is actually a benefit in this regard; while it does blind him to a bad idea he's having in the moment, it also makes him self-conscious about how he presents himself to people and what impact his choices are ultimately having.
Danny doesn't have ego. Instead, he has conviction; an iron-clad and unyielding absolute faith in the unquestionable rightness of everything he ever does. He's a lot more like Captain America in that regard. And because of that conviction, Danny never admits fault. He never realizes where he went wrong. He's incapable of saying the words, "I screwed up. I'm sorry. This was a bad thing that I did."
Instead, Danny's righteousness makes him an incredibly self-centered character. Where Tony looks at the world through the lens of, "What can I do to make this better?" Danny views it through the lens of, "How has this thing affected me, personally?" Tony has a mission; Danny has a crusade, one with no actual discernible goal other than screwing whoever recently slighted him.
This is why I've compared Danny to Kratos from God Of War in the past. His motivation to act is typically that he's angry and someone's going to pay for it. He got back into Rand because he was angry at Joy and Ward for snubbing him. He opposed Gao and Bakuto because he was angry about his parents, even though Bakuto wasn't even tangentially related to that. He went after Harold in the end because he was angry about his parents still and also Harold sent people to kill him. Now in Defenders, he's after Alexandra because he's angry about K'un Lun.
Danny's entire life is a long sequence of someone doing something to him that's fairly reasonable to be upset about, and Danny screaming at the top of his lungs, charging through the door, and punching people until his rage is satisfied. Very little of what he does actually seems like it's meant to help anyone but Danny Rand. Danny does things that primarily benefit Danny and sometimes other people benefit from them as well, while Tony does things that are meant to benefit other people while also benefiting Tony by letting him slap his name on the gesture.
That said, Danny does talk about how his actions are ostensibly to help other people, but it's hard to take him seriously when he does this because he also likes to talk about how he's a sworn champion meant to defeat The Hand, even though he abandoned that lifestyle at the first opportunity. Zhou Cheng hit the nail on the head when he said, "You wear your oath like a mask." This makes it hard to buy Danny's bluster when he tries to sound heroic, because it just feels like he's traded the oath mask for a cape mask instead; he's still just using it to justify what he already wanted to do, which is beat some f*ckers for sleighting him.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I actually made this exact comparison in my review earlier because it really demonstrates the exact problem with Danny's character.
Chiefly, it's that Danny, before anything else, is boring. He has no charisma, no stage presence, nothing that gives his character any weight to it. He just ping-pongs about with vaguely defined ideas about what to do, usually relating to whatever's pissing him off at that exact moment. The show's writing is sloppy so you don't really generate a strong connection with him. Because of this, and the iffy and dated writing that colors his interactions with Colleen and other people, it creates a strong negative reaction. You can have a likable character, an unlikable character, and an interesting character that that is either of those two things, but a character who's both unlikable and uninteresting is usually a sign that you've failed, because why would I want to see a story about someone who's both cardboard AND not likable? Since he isn't interesting, people aren't going to give Danny the benefit of the doubt.
Contrast this with Tony Stark; there are criticisms to be made about him, but whatever you could say, you can't say he's an amateurishly written, bland character like Danny is. Robert Down Jr. is way more fun and charismatic than Finn Jones, and the writing in the Iron Man films in general is way better at defining Tony's character and making you empathize with him. Because of this, it's easier for the audience to be more forgiving of Tony's mistakes or various flaws.

Without spoiling things, Ragnarok also has a kind of recap of the previous Thor movie anyway.
edited 6th Nov '17 7:18:59 PM by comicwriter