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[Marvel MCU] Age of Assembling at the new thread cause this one retired!
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No. But it's silly to pretend that's not what you are doing.
There is a problem with reinforcing racist stereotypes though. Which is what we are talking about.
What if the stereotype being used is specifically a mythical or literary character?
The problem is when you try to suggest that the baggage associated with the "mythical" characters and places doesn't apply because it's not, technically, EXACTLY the same thing. Like, if I wrote a character named Electric Homeboy, and he looked of African origin, and talked in American street slang, but was technically an alien from the planet Colt 45 (the 45th planet in the Colt system, you see...), could I get away with using him as a minstrel-type comedy relief character while all the white (and caucasian-appearing alien) characters did the real work, or would Hooper X shoot me in the goddamn nuts?
No. Hooper X would shoot me in the nuts, and I'd pretty much deserve it.
Now, I have faith that Marvel will be able to navigate the Iron Fist minefield gracefully, but to suggest that they don't have to be aware of cultural tropes and stereotypes when creating the Netflix series because "Marvel's Kun Lun is not actually asian, it's an alien place settled by Danny Rand's ancestors" is kinda goosey.
But yeah, it's a thin line between celebrating cultural aspects and icons and ridiculing them because they are different. As an Asian-American, the thin line interests me, and I really don't trust anyone to do it right until they've actually done it, and I realize that not every person will have the same viewpoint as I do, even if they are Asian.
I imagine that the same conversation was happening with Tropic Thunder and RDJ's character back then.
Look. The problem with the "Kung-fu monk" or "asian guy who know's martial arts" isn't that it exists, it's that it's regularly the only representation of asian characters in a particular movie, novel or other media and their martial arts ability is regularly the only defining characteristic of the character. The problem is that the assumption is that someone who looks asian is also skilled in martial arts. That isn't the situation in K'un-Lun where it's more than just a place where martial arts is learned, and the people there are not all martial artists.
Oh, totally. That's not what I was trying to say at all. What I was trying to say is that if you use a place (such as Kunlun Mountain) or a character (such as Thor) within a story, I do expect some kind of tie to what traditional depictions of said place or character was in said myth.
That's not to say Thor must speak like the Swedish Chef and gobble down lutefisk drowned with mead in between sentences, because that could be crass and horrible (even if a small part of me would laugh at the overwrought depiction). It's to say that Thor is a god of Nordic myth with a temper and a hammer known for hitting people with said hammer when they piss him off, and I think Marvel hit the notes, even if they didn't sing the verse word for word.
In similar style, I think one can use traditionally held Asiatic appearance and flavor from paintings and manuscripts (and even from Wuxai if you really want) without going full-on racist. I'm not saying it's easy; when done right it can be like any other cultural genre piece, interesting and inspiring (and maybe just a bit cheesy). When done wrong it can be horribly offensive.
I don't think the wise man on the mountain is inherently offensive, any more than I think that the romanticized knight or lone gunslinger or Viking berserker is inherently offensive. It can be made offensive (knights killing pagans to "show virtue", gunslingers killing Native Americans "because", etc), and it's not hard to do so, but I think it still holds capital, provided you know where you're coming from and do it with the intent to honor rather than simply use the stereotype.
Honestly, I wouldn't want to see a whole movie (though I assume you're joking), but I'd love to see an SNL-length skit like this.
Actually it kinda is kinda racist by it's very existence. The entire ancient asian mystic who exists i the narrative to instruct his white student in the ways of strange foreign mysteries thing is a racist stereotype. That's the whole point.
It's EXACTLY like the Magic Negro. They are the same stereotype just tweaked for the appropriate racial stereotypes.
The example with Thor doesn't really work very well. In Marvel's take on the mythos the names are the same, but pretty much everything else is quite different. It isn't even the ingrained minutia stuff so much as it is some of the over-arching themes and inter-personal details. It's what Marvel does with myth. They use some of the themes and then carve out the details to mesh them into their shared universe. I don't think an accurate depiction of the myth would make it better.
Rather, focusing on making the characters fleshed out in order to prevent stereotyping is the better option. You can have an asian character with a solid grasp on martial arts as long as that isn't the entirety of their character. In a way Danny Rand is a fairly solid way of doing this, and why I think it'd be okay if they cast an asian, or asian descendant actor for his role. Because only the very surface details are about his abilities with martial arts, and he's a really well fleshed out character outside of those abilities. It's the same way that Thor isn't just his hammer, or Cap isn't just his costume, or Tony isn't just his armor, actually having fleshed out personalities for the characters stops them from being just being shallow characters or stereotypes.
I'd say they took beats from myth Thor, and then yes, mixed them together with other ideas to create an interesting character. It's not just his name and his hammer, per se, but they didn't just lift it wholesale either. It's . . . homage is the best word I can think of.
Have you read Iron Fist? You're picking and choosing some stuff that doesn't mesh well with how the narrative actually presents characters.
1) Danny Rand's father was raised in K'un-Lun, and he went back there to bring his son and wife to where he grew up. It isn't "asian mentor teaches white kid".
2) Lei-Kung The Thunderer exists as more than a person who teaches Danny Rand how to fight
3) Danny Rand gets his abilities from killing a dragon, not from learning how to fight from Lei-Kung
4) This is Lei-Kung:
Now put that on a movie poster.
You keep talking about the comic like it means the movie would be fine. The problem is that the movie is an entirely different thing than the comic. The format that the comic worked with was wildly different with regard to abilities to lay out complicated backgrounds as well as the general level of credulity people are willing to extend.
Danny fits it to a T. You can argue all you want about his dad (even though Wendell Rand is also a white guy who muscled his way into a foreign culture and tried to prove he was better than everyone there), but Danny Rand is a white guy who grew up in New York who travels to a mystic kingdom based on Asiatic cultures that he knows nothing about, then proves he is way better at martial arts than the locals, besting their champions and becoming the person responsible from protecting their kingdom from harm.
This is not to say Marvel can't navigate around these issues, but they are absolutely there.
The "movie" in question is a Netflix show, and it will probably do just fine with making the characters out to have actual depth.
Danny Rand isn't treated as a "white savior", and he certainly isn't the best at using the teachings of K'un-Lun. He's good, and he completes a number of trials of skill, but is never treated as being the only one who could do that, nor the first one to do so. There have been other Iron Fists before him, just as there are more capable people from K'un-Lun and the other heavenly cities who are more adept than him. At all times Lei-Kung is still treated as being Danny Rand's better, and at no point is he treated as saving the people of K'un-Lun alone or being a major source of protection for them. When Lei-Kung leads a rebellion in K'un-Lun, Danny is subservient to him, not the savior of the narrative.
The trials he goes through aren't even treated as being restricted to people of K'un-Lun. Anybody who could get to K'un-Lun and show skill can go through them. He isn't Thor lifting Mjolnir, or some test of worthiness. It's an open society.
Of all things, read Immortal Iron Fist and learn about it rather than picking out surface details and trying to extract some false meaning from that.
To be fair, I'm an Asian, and I fulfill, like, 90% of the stereotype. I was really good at math, played violin for many years, etc.
The problem here is that, on the surface, all of this stuff appears entirely stereotypical. If you're an asian kid walking down the street and all you see are posters of people who share your general appearance, and all they look like are wise old kung fu masters, then that's something you will internalize regardless of the specific material in question. When stuff like this permeates popular culture, you really have to take a long, hard look at the use of such stereotypes and justify whether or not it is appropriate or meaningful for you to do so. It is legitimate criticism to say that using a stereotype in any small way will continue to perpetuate it, so you need to tread cautiously.
The argument is not that you can't have an old wise asian mentor, especially if that character is well fleshed-out and does not conform to stereotypes except in the most superficial ways. The argument here is, why would you perpetuate that appearance in the first place?
There is definitely an aspect of "can't win" going on here, too. Comic book character origins, coming from past eras, are almost entirely racist caricatures when it comes to minorities and women. So every time Marvel dips into its library, it is having to walk this line between re-using stereotypes and reinventing those characters for a modern audience (whether they should just bypass this issue and create new characters is yet another question). Like, I can appreciate that me saying, "Don't take away roles from asians, even racist ones" and then turning around and saying, "Fuck you and your racist characterizations" feels like a lose-lose scenario.
But the basic point on the former is, nearly every single prominent role is cast on the basis of race (that race being white), so if you actually do have a role that is tapped for a minority, you aren't allowed to just give it to a white person and expect it to be cool. This is doubly true if you then turn around and put that person in the equivalent of blackface, because it says that you actually wanted someone of X appearance but didn't want to give it to someone who actually looks that way, which is 100% unequivocally racist, period. If you're going to take a minority role and give it to a white person, then frankly you need to perform some kind of trade-in-kind to, at a bare minimum, maintain the already-low levels of representation that exist. In all honesty though, this is all playing around in the margins.
The larger point is this: Knock it off with the racist casting and the racist characters. There is absolutely no reason that Captain America couldn't be black, asian, latino, etc. given the long history the United States has with veterans who have served proudly and honorably for their country during that era. If you're going to make the business decision that a main character has to be white, then have the courage to at least to make the ethical decision not to typecast all the other characters (which I would consider the bare minimum of compensation for the fact that you literally just performed a racist act). Similarly, there is absolutely no reason that Marvel (or any media company) should feel the need to re-hash old content just because it's in the library to be used. I'm sorry, but I don't give two shits about what happened in the comic books, especially if those comics are more than 20 years old, and even moreso if those comics reflect an unethical standard. I don't see people clamoring for remakes of the good ol' Hitler Youth videos, so you shouldn't be asking these companies to remake their old bullshit, either, unless you fully expect them to tackle, head-on, those racist origins and do the additional legwork of getting out from under them, if not pushing back forcefully.
What I really don't care to hear are arguments that X isn't racist because if you LOOK REAL HARD then it's not. I'm sorry, but that's not how it works. If I look at it, and it's a caricature of someone's appearance or culture, then it I can confidently call that thing racist in effect, even if it's not racist in intent (or detailed backstory).
If we are going to nerdrage about the precise details of imaginary kinda-alien-but-sorta-Chinese cities and the surrounding cultural issues, we are going to nerdrage politely. If certain persons in this thread, whose names rhyme with bike and whose avatars may or may not contain feline DNA, cannot discuss the issue civilly, they are invited to find a new thread in which to chat.
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/198558/marvel-mcu-is-it-too-late-to-change-the-thread-title?new=1
There actually is a black Captain America, but I doubt the Marvel movies would touch him with a ten-foot pole. Essentially, he's the product of the story strongly informed by the Tuskeegee experiments about how the U.S. government tested the super soldier serum on a group of black soldiers, killing most of them. When one actually developed powers, the government abused him and suppressed his existence.
The Blue Marvel is another character in the same vein. He's Superman from the 50s. Went around wearing a mask and protecting truth, justice and the American way, until he was unmasked, and the public freaked out because Superman was black.
The thing that ties these two characters together is - much like the Muslim Ms. Marvel - they were created in the last twenty years. They pretty much embody the idea that the best approach is to create new characters without the historical baggage.
The thing is, there are no wisened old asian mentors in Iron Fist. The K'un-Lun people who teach martial arts, and specifically the people who teach Danny Rand, are more powerful than him, youthful, and absolutely well fleshed out characters. There is nothing about The Thunderer that matches the "old wise asian" stereotype.
EVERYONE OUT OF THE POOL AND INTO THE OTHER POOL