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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
I guess it makes sense that she was the one giving those wold-is-ready-for-gay-superhero
comments a couple years ago. Optics and all.
Y'know, I wonder if part of the reason the Ten Rings weren't quite comic book accurate in Shang-Chi was because the Eternals kinda fill the role as "ten individually colored things with unique powers" idea, but are actual god-like beings instead of just objects to be harnessed.
"I'm Mr. Blue, woah-woah-ooh..."I think it’d be hard to effectively use ten whole ass different powers in one movie
The infinity gauntlet had six whole ass different powers and TWO movies and soul still hasn’t done anything except be part of the complete set
Forever liveblogging the AvengersThe closest was probably in the Iron Man cartoon from the '90s, where the Mandarin lost his rings at the beginning of the second season and had to recover them one-by-one.
Although that mostly amounted to an episode being not involving the Mandarin at all, until the final scene suddenlyy cuts away to show him collecting one of his rings.
Edited by chasemaddigan on Sep 20th 2021 at 10:28:39 AM
I also agree that comics-accurate Ten Rings would have been impossible for a single two-hour film to properly do justice to. It's just too many superpowers. Once you say, "This bad guy has ten powers," you are obligated to demonstrate and utilize all ten powers over the course of the story.
"Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" doesn't have hundreds of different stories spread out over sixty years to let the rings' powers breathe. Finding excuses to fit each individual ring's abilities into the plot would have overtaken the entire film.
Also, it would have been really hard for a character as low-power as Shang-Chi to defeat a comics-accurate Mandarin throwing all ten rings' powers (including shit like reality-warping, disintegration rays, and psychic assaults) at him in an epic final boss fight. Wenwu needed the nerf to make this hero/villain dynamic believable.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 20th 2021 at 8:35:00 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.There was a plotline where Mandarin's rings spread themselves among several guys after his death in Giellon's run, but that's the plotline in reverse (as Mandarin had them on-hand, but after he died they got spread out among ten different supervillains).
I do think it wouldn't have been impossible to show Mandarin in a movie series, but it'd have required more coherent world-building than the MCU had for either the IM trilogy or the Thor trilogy. Captain America trilogy and the Avengers franchise are the only ones I think really played out in a relatively airtight way to its completion.
The story of the Mandarin having 10 individual mooks with possessions of the rings wouldn't have been a bad idea, but you'd need to build this from the ground-up in a way the first IM movie really wasn't thought of.
Something like Raza in the first with the psionic ring (to control his mooks), Obadiah basing the Iron Monger energy core around the disintegration ring, Ivan Vanko having the fire ring to aid in his forging of his armor, Justin Hammer studying the ring that generates forms of energy to see if he can produce a arc reactor out of it, e.t.c. And every time an antagonist is defeated you see the ring vanish and return to its owner. You'd need to structure the films around the Ten Rings in a way they really aren't (and couldn't, given how much of the first IM movie was free-styled).
"All you Fascists bound to lose."The individual powers of the Ten Rings are also honestly just Techno Babble anyway. For the most part their powers are a literal case of Doing In the Wizard, as it doesn't thematically jive having an evil wizard be the main villain of a tech-centric hero like Iron Man. I think the Mandarins storyline in Kieron Gillen's run is the only one that really revolves around the Rings as individual baubles.
The MCU retool really does an incredible job refocusing a kinda unwieldly concept. They're simplified to a weaker but more cohesive power-set, reworking them as arm-rings both distinguishes them from the Infinity Gauntlet while also tying more into legitimate Chinese martial arts, and them being these powerful magic weapons fits the reworked Wenwu and continues to fit when Shang-Chi inherits them.
I've only ever seen Moviebob theorize the Ten Rings as relating to the ten known Eternals and it's always come off as a massive leap. Like Bob rightfully derides a lot of the toxic fanbase for expecting completely new things to just randomly show up to explain things (a la Mephisto) but then goes too far the other way in assuming everything is Connected All Along.
Edited by Watchtower on Sep 20th 2021 at 12:12:51 PM
I'm sure we would've gotten a comics accurate version of the rings had the MCU not just done a big story in which a villain has a collection of different kinds of jewelry each of which alters reality in some unique way.
I second the idea that the perfect way to do the ten rings would've been to do a thing where each of Wenwu's liutenants had one, leading up to him having them all at the same time. But that skews way too close to how the Infinity Saga went.
The best we can hope for is that as the MCU continues to explore the ten rings' still not-entirely-explained powerset and origins, we eventually get a reveal that the wielder can alter them while using them to do different kinds of magic in combat - imitating the comics rings' different powers.
As for Wenwu not fighting Tony in the MCU, it's a shame yeah, but ever since the thought came to me that since Wenwu is like a thousand years old they could totally make a prequel and having him return, I've really wanted them to make - like - a 60's or 70's pre-Avengers film in which Wenwu threatens Howard Stark (as well as Hank Pym, and any other superheroes they want to introduce for that time period).
Edited by KnownUnknown on Sep 20th 2021 at 10:58:13 AM
Or they can do a What If? scenario where Wenwu decides to hijack AIM and turn their fake Mandarin and Ten Rings scheme into the real Mandarin and Ten Rings scheme for Tony to fight.
Edited by Shadao on Sep 20th 2021 at 11:04:49 AM
I don't think they were any more fragile than before (42's glitchiness aside), I think the Extremis soldiers were just a lot more powerful than the previous threats he faced.
Killian chopping through the armor with his bare hands like a hot knife through butter is pretty cool to see.
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!

She was Selby, the mid-level dealer they go to when looking for the Power Broker.
You and I remember Budapest very differently