‘Iron Fist’ Creator Fires Back At The Show’s Critics

There are a lot of iconic team-ups in the Marvel universe, but few are as iconic as Danny Rand and Luke Cage. Even then it had an actual Asian man, Ben Kingsley, play the fake Mandarin. The Marvel shows on Netflix have been extremely solid up till this point. Despite the show sticking to the comic roots of making the Iron Fist a blonde haired, blue-eyed white male, fans and editors alike thought it was a missed opportunity for Marvel to diverge from the text and update the character for the 21st century.

Still, the Netflix series debuted on Sunday, March 19, to mixed reviews – on Rotten Tomatoes it has a 18 percent “Tomatometer” rating and an 84 percent audience score. “I can’t even complain about negative representation because there’s no representation”. But in the Netflix series, he’s become more than that, and Danny Rand could have been too. You’ve got to give your hero an enemy who is either equal to or stronger than they are (at least mentally, if not physically) so that it’s all the more impressive when they defeat them anyway and save the day.

The mysterious Bakuto (Ramon Rodriguez) is introduced as Colleen Wing’s (Jessica Henwick) martial arts sensei. If they wanted to kill off white Iron Fist and come up with one who wasn’t Caucasian, that wouldn’t have bothered me, but neither am I ashamed for having made up one who was. Netflix has announced that it will premiere only two Marvel’s shows each year.

It may be true that the concept of Iron Fist was more acceptable in 1974. The problem is that they don’t have almost the budget to make that happen.

The superhero series has attracted controversy for its white savior premise, with many fans decrying the show’s cultural appropriation and arguing that an Asian or Asian-American actor should have been cast in the lead role. So it certainly looks like Danny should be meeting Jessica, Daredevil and Luke Cage pretty soon.

Again, the Iron Fist isn’t just a title, but a job given to K’un-L’un’s greatest fighter to protect the magical city – a job Danny leaves in the show’s first episode. While the series never quite devolves into the “lifestyle of the rich and famous” melodrama that Arrow frequently fell into, it comes damn close to it, forcing the plot to trudge through the uninteresting in-fighting of trust-fund babies and painfull tiresome corporate politics. In addition to that, Danny might be reunited with family in “The Defenders”. But instead of leaving it there, they decide to wrap the entire dangling plot thread up in episode 13. The next step is the most exciting one yet: The Defenders, which will see all four heroes unite to face a common threat. You know who else is a brunette? She’s a symbol of hope, and isn’t that what superheroes are supposed to be?

In other news, Jessica Jones’ fans can see the Marvel superhero in The Defenders this year. The most talked-about reason? In the TV show, this very awesome moment is somehow embarrassing to both Danny – who only sheepishly, reluctantly admits it late in the series – and to the makers of the show itself, because they don’t bother to show us the fight. But will he also discover that his mother is still alive and well in “The Defenders”?