Iron Fist could have been the next epic Marvel show on Netflix, if they’d only been brave enough to do one thing …
By: The Help Machine
Tags: Movies, Marvel

Iron Fist could have been the next epic Marvel show on Netflix, if they’d only been brave enough to do one thing …

… just make Danny Rand Chinese-American. Lewis Tan, the actor who’s the villain in the new Netflix Iron Fist show, lobbied hard for this. But in the end, he didn’t get his way, and he kept his job, and there’s yet ANOTHER Marvel Netflix show with bad-guy Asians in it who are kung-fu masters.

Man, Iron Fist, it’s okay (to me at least) if the first/only/finally Marvel superhero with an Asian face is a kung-fu guy, especially if they made him Chinese. I mean, half of the Marvel heroes are kung-fu people now, why not a kung-fu artist who’s Chinese-American? It’s a cliche, but there’s literally ZERO heroes in the Marvel Universe that look like Bruce Lee, or Shannon Lee, or any of another hundred names I could type out right now.

It’s where Iron First is this missed opportunity.

I know there’s controversy in the Asian-American community about Doctor Strange. I’m alone on this one; I think it’s great that The Ancient One is a white woman, now, for that movie. Because in the comics, The Ancient One as written is this oriental nightmare; just a Fu-Manchu design on top of a bunch of land of the celestials orientalist nonsense. It took decades of writing to sort of fill in a backstory that at least makes the land of the celestials oriental nonsense kind of compelling, but it’s all in English, and only Tibetan in the same way that The Mikado is Japanese. The Ancient One in the Marvel comic books is a racist mess, no matter how much you rewrite it, so, yeah, go make that character into a white woman for the movie; it fits the weirdo space-magic that grounds Doctor Strange better, anyway.

And I know, I get it, it’s business. It’s probably done less because of the aforementioned racist mess, and more likely because a Tibetan mentor for Doctor Strange could’ve hurt box office in China. I get it.

But, if we can get a white woman as The Ancient One, why can’t we get a Chinese-American Danny Rand? That could have been something. A guy who doesn’t know kung-fu, with an Americanized name, who learns all about this ancient lineage, tracing his roots back to a land he’s never seen. That’s a Marvel show ABOUT something. That’s a Marvel TV show going into ‘American Born Chinese’ sort of territory.

There’s our Chinese-American hero, Danny Rand, set adrift in a far away land, learning the language, learning that Kung-Fu, and then learning some space magic fighting styles until he becomes the master, he’s now the 铁拳

(Tiěquán). And without skipping a beat, our Chinese-American Danny Rand, who’s learned all about his culture, translates 铁拳 into crystal clear English and says, “Iron Fist.”

And when he does, this music plays, as he shows off the power of the Iron Fist …

Daring General (于會詠、胡登跳)

https://www.youtube.com/watch…

… straight out of Cantonese opera, ‘Daring General (于會詠、胡登跳)’ the kind of music a big hero would get as the opening titles or, if they were really lucky, as fight choreography.

And I know what you may be thinking, “But Danny Rand, that’s an English language name, how could he be Chinese?” And I’ll say, “You do know my name is Fred Rutherford and I have a Korean mother, right?” And point out that people’s names change when they come to America, and there’s a story there all on its own, about the advantages the Chinese Rand family might’ve had by simply changing their name decades earlier, and surprising business contacts with their ethnicity when it was too late to back out.

And so to do that, you have to get someone to make the show who understands or thinks about these things, and thinks it matters. Who understands that yeah, it’s kind of lame to make the first Asian-American Marvel superhero into a kung-fu guy, but if you’re going to do it, you go DEEP, and you get it RIGHT, and you make a 13 part Chinese-American Kung-Fu OPERA out of it. You get the tropes right, you pull out every stop, you ask for White Tiger and Fat Cobra and you go ahead and read Journey to the West in English and crib from it and do it EPIC. You go DEEP into the aforementioned ‘American Born Chinese’ territory too, and you go DEEP into Marvel, and you decide, okay, it’s ALSO about cultural appropriation, and theft, and honor, and coming through, and about being forever foreign in America NO MATTER what your name is, how long your family has been here, all of these things.

But, Marvel doesn’t do that. The Asian faces in Marvel properties remain helpers at best, or outright villains. There was a moment, in Luke Cage, his at first stern Chinese landlord who turns out to have a sweet spot for him. That could have been Danny Rand’s ‘auntie’ from a side of the family that did NOT change their name. And then that was the in, the way to make Luke Cage and Danny Rand best friends, and start them off right.

They’ll figure out how to make Danny and Luke friends. And who knows, maybe the showrunner will make it about cultural appropriation anyway. Or, maybe it’ll just be the kind of thing you come to expect when you’re Asian-American and you see this stuff; where the love interest will be a sultry kung-fu goddess, and the villain will be a super-buff kung-fu master who could do his own stunts, unlike the lead white guy who has at least 2 stunt doubles.

But in my head, I’ve already seen the kung-fu epic opera version of “Way of The Iron Fist” in my sleep. I’ll stick with that one, and hope that one of these days, some little kid who kind of looks like me get a superhero who kind of looks like him among Iron Man and The Hulk and Black Widow and all the other supergods, and the same for a little girl with the same kind of face, too. Because it matters, seeing yourself in the heroes of popular culture. It’s a way you learn that you’re not a foreigner in your own country.