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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
Mind you there are still characters (few though they may be) that are genuinely unsalvageable. Mandrill
being one such example:
Mandrill also has the power of pheromones that control women. So he's like the Purple Man except he can only control women, which is somehow even creepier.
Edited by alliterator on Jul 24th 2019 at 8:56:14 AM
He also routinelly hangs out with a similarly (but not as egregiously) awful blatant "voodoo witch doctor" stereotype, iirc.
Edit: Said witch doctor stereotype is black, but she was born white in a mirrored origin. It's like someone wanted to do a Salt and Pepper-twist, but had no idea what they were doing.
And the weirdest thing is, Mandrill was created by a woman.
More fun:
Hoo boy.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Jul 24th 2019 at 10:21:07 AM
The much more cynical answer is actually that they didn't want the Mandarin to be the villain in the for fear of it being Banned in China. That a major Chinese media corporation was a significant production partner and financial backer for the movie also leads me to believe this is the case.
Like I said previously, I don't think it's a coincidence that they're using him in something like Shang-Chi, a movie that will likely have multiple positive depictions of Chinese characters to offset any problems the censors might have with the Mandarin.
Edited by comicwriter on Jul 24th 2019 at 11:02:43 AM
Back then, I used to have this idea that, each of Mandarin's rings would be a different suit of Power Armor with a different ability.
The Iron Man: Armored Adventures version of Mandarin was able to make Instant Armor with his rings.
The Mandarin twist and Ra's al Ghul from Batman Begins are about the only instances where I can actually say I've defended whitewashing and in that case it was only because they were explicit commentaries on the type of characters their original versions are. But I do agree the context of the MCU and DC movies having few to none Asian protagonists made those twists have bad optics.
Yeah, I actually based my idea on the Amored Adventure version. Only this time, each of his rings makes one set of Instant Armor.
Edited by Nightwire on Jul 25th 2019 at 1:04:43 AM
To say nothing of the fact that the main dialect of Chinese is called Mandarin Chinese.
"Mandarin" honestly sounds a lot less intimidating to people who actually know Chinese. It'd be like a supervillain whose codename is "Lawyer" or "Actuary".
"Beware the Actuary and his Ten Calculators of Power!"
Though tbf, being a bureaucrat was a very big deal in those times. China was and still is pretty big on bureaucracy.
Edited by M84 on Jul 25th 2019 at 6:11:35 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedGiven the disdain for lawyers in pop culture, a supervillain with the name "lawyer" might not be too surprising.
Edited by windleopard on Jul 25th 2019 at 4:11:05 AM

It's worth noting that until recently Marvel's go to response to any racially or nationally problematic character was to - instead of fixing them - to either remove them or simply make them white (because that fixes everything, obviously).
Literally the only reason we got Wong was because they realized in whitewashing the Ancient One they now had a faux-Asian environment with no actual Asians in it. They were just going to cut him because of his problematic comics portrayal. But instead they fixed him, and now he's a minor fan favorite.
Black Panther was the first time they really, genuinely sat down and said "hey, why don't we just fix this instead?" and I'll always love Ryan Coogler for that (among many other things). Now when a studio tries to use that as an excuse not to diversify, there's something to point to.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Jul 24th 2019 at 8:42:40 AM