Since “Iron Fist” debuted Friday on Netflix, and received less-than-stellar reviews, conversations have been swirling once again about whether protagonist Danny Rand should’ve been cast as Asian-American.
Well according to Roy Thomas, who is credited as a co-creator of “Iron Fist,” discussions really don’t matter.
In an interview with Inverse, Thomas, who was the editor-in-chief of Marvel comics back when Iron Fist first appeared in 1974, said that people who complained about whitewashing had too much time on their hands.
“I have so little patience for some of the feelings that some people have. I mean, I understand where it’s coming from. You know, cultural appropriation, my god. It’s just an adventure story. Don’t these people have something better to do than to worry about the fact that Iron Fist isn’t Oriental, or whatever word? I know Oriental isn’t the right word now, either,” he said.
He goes on to say that Rand, who is white, was created as such because he was a part of a fictional city and culture and, therefore, wasn’t defined by his race.
Thomas points to other characters of color Marvel has created — such as Rand buddy Luke Cage — and how he’s spearheaded concepts that included people of color. If people didn’t like it, he said they were probably just “too damn sensitive.”
“But then I really don’t have much sympathy at all to trigger warnings or any of that crap,” he said. “I think it’s overdone and nobody but a baby needs it, an intellectual baby.”
Thomas doesn’t say that Iron Fist can’t be Asian-American. If Marvel had, for example, killed off Rand and replaced him with somebody of Asian descent, it wouldn’t have bothered him. In fact, Marvel has done this a lot recently. Characters such as Ms. Marvel, the Hulk, Wolverine, and others have either been killed off, incapacitated, or moved on, which left the space for Marvel to introduce new characters, which often includes people of color or women.
The emphasis here is on the idea of a new character. It’s not about fixing Danny Rand, since he was a character from a different time. Thomas states that if people want to see a new character, they have to create them themselves instead of criticizing what’s already there.
“You know, just make up a new character,” he said. “Don’t worry about trashing another one. Just make up a new one. There’s always room for one, and it’s always better to be creative than to be a critic. I’ve been both. It’s better to be creative.”
There are a lot of problems with what Thomas is saying. For one, not everybody has the time or the skill to write fanfiction, or to create a character that others can enjoy. Thomas had an entire comic publisher behind him when he co-created “Iron Fist” (although he says he mostly just added the dragon tattoo in regards to Rand’s physical appearance) and most people don’t have that.
There isn’t anything wrong with being a critic — as Thomas says — but it’s insensitive to state that people have better things to do. When a reader or viewer sees a character that looks like them, or comes from a similar background, it creates a sense of comfort and familiarity. There’s a relief that goes along with identifying with a character. Not everybody’s a white guy (and no, a white guy doesn’t reflect all races), and there’s nothing wrong with people wondering where the women, the people of color, or LGBTQ+ characters are.
40 'Iron Fist' Characters, Ranked Worst to Best (Photos)
(Some spoilers ahead.) The second season of "Marvel's Iron Fist" is the latest entry in the Netflix Marvel TVverse. Between those two seasons, it has a pretty wide gamut of character quality, covering the full spectrum from totally insufferable to totally delightful. We've got the definitive rankings of where all the major character place on that scale. Check it out.
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40. Young Ward (Ilan Eskenazi) Ward was a total jerkface when he was a kid. That might be interesting if he didn't also sound completely fake and full of it in the way he interacts with everyone. His jealousy of Danny for having parents who actually love him would inform his character, but Ward sounds like a kid copying what he heard on a badly written soap opera.
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39. Wendell Rand (David Furr) Do we really need a screed about how hard Danny's dad sucks? No, I think Wendell's suckiness speaks for itself.
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38. Lei Kung (Hoon Lee) Danny's master who appeared to him either as a spectre or a hallucination in order to disapprove of him not getting that innocent Russian girl killed, and then we never saw him again. Yeah, you're a great master.
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37. Radovan Bernivig (Olek Krupa) Hard to conjure up many compliments about a guy whose main characteristic is he got shot and spent several episodes in a row dying without actually contributing much to anyone.
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36. Darryl (Marquis Rodriguez) Won a scholarship to join a cult and then immediately got his leg broken in half for being a dork. Fitting for a character named "Darryl."
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35. Dr. Edmonds (Murray Bartlett) A fairly ineffective doctor who spends most of his time with Danny in the mental hospital trying to convince him he’s not Danny. Not the best psychiatrist of all time, for sure.
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34. Crank (Sky Lakota-Lynch)
BB's former friend doesn't really have a lot to do in "Iron Fist" Season 2, until he basically becomes Davos' murder bot and killed no fewer than two of his friends. Completely buying Davos' line made Crank pretty scary -- too bad he wasn't in more of Season 2.
33. Young Danny (Toby Nichols) The coolest thing Danny has going for him as a 10-year-old is his hip-hop playlist. His role is mostly to see watch his parents die and be a dopey rich white kid, though.Is better than adult Danny by virtue of actually being a child while acting like one.
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31-32. Vesnikov Brothers (Nikita Bogolyubov and Stan Demidoff) They make a crack about being one person instead of two before they get their butts kicked by a skinny guy with no muscles, so the joke's really on them.
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30. Heather Rand (Victoria Haynes) We don’t see a lot of Danny’s mom, but she has one incredibly intense moment in which she gets sucked out of a crashing plane. If you’re going to die on a superhero show to give the protagonist a tragic backstory, you could do a whole lot worse than that. At least she wasn’t murdered by some random mugger to help turn a billionaire kid into a vigilante.
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29. Hai-Qing Yang (Henry Yuk) There’s not much to this crime lord, except that he shows up a few times to fulfill some plot necessities. The story he tells about the undead warrior is a pretty cool one though.
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28. Big Al (Craig Walker) Danny's homeless friend had a refreshing lack of seriousness on an otherwise inappropriately serious show. At least until he was randomly murdered offscreen.
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27. Wilkins (Clifton Davis) Exists to be an indignant jerk until a much bigger jerk shoots him in the face. I can admire that sort of utilitarianism.
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26. Ryhno (Jason Lai)
This guy's fake tough act is so thoroughly transparent and childish that it's an incredible bummer when he finally wises up and tries to save his friends from Davos -- only to immediately get murdered for it.
25. Ringmaster (Craig Geraghty) This guy brings a panache to his job that’s admirable, even if he only has a couple of scenes in the first few episodes.
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24. Bride of Nine Spiders (Jane Kim) Nearly succeeds in seducing Danny the Virgin while they're supposed to be fighting. An A for effort, at least.
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23. Mary (Alice Eve)
The nice "alter" for Walker in Season 2, Mary seems like a lovely if somewhat scattered person, who'd be a good, normal friend for Danny and Colleen. Mary doesn't have much to contribute except to be a smokescreen for Walker, although she does get a solid moment when she chooses to let Walker take control in order to help Danny and the others.
22. Jeri Hogarth (Carrie-Anne Moss) The New York lawyer for superheroes shows up to help Danny get back into Rand Enterprises, dishing out some cool legal kung-fu of her own. She’s doesn’t have much to do in “Iron Fist,” but her friendship with the Rand family helps to further flesh out the character that “Daredevil” and “Jessica Jones” started building.
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19-21. Corporate Drug Ladies (Jeanna de Waal, Kati Sharp, Monette McKay) The heroin subplot was pretty boring aside from when we saw these cool corporate ladies hawking it to rich people like they were selling accounting software or something.
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18. Sherry Yang (Christine Toy Johnson)
A shrewd business woman, philanthropist, negotiator and diplomat, one wonders why her husband didn't get out of the way and let her run the Hatchet gang years earlier.
17. BB (Giullian Yao Gioiello)
Local street kid BB is the smart, cool member of the little bicycle gang that hopes to join the Triad. His wisecracks toward Colleen, even as he's convinced to join her side and help her out in Season 2, are a welcome change of pace whenever he's around.
16. Bethany (Natalie Smith)
Ward's sponsor-slash-girlfriend is a good foil for his self-destructive tendencies in Season 2, and she's an interesting replacement for Claire Temple when Danny needs some medical attention. It's good to see someone who doesn't want to get sucked into the superhero helper racket, who doesn't take Ward's shit, and who forces him to get his act together. Bethany could have used a bigger presence in Season 2.
15. Chen Wu (Fernando Chien)
Davos' criminal driver second-in-command is a great fighter, but it's his unrepentant, no-nonsense survivor attitude that makes him a great evil lieutenant in Season 2. We're constantly wondering if he's going to shoot his mouth off and get murdered for it, and that's a fun tension.
14. Misty Knight (Simone Missick)
Misty is inching ever closer to superhero status as she completely takes charge of the situation with Danny and Colleen as they get themselves embroiled in a gang war. She's also got that killer metal arm that's pretty good in a fight. Misty's still pretty by-the-book, though. Just go rogue and start the Daughters of the Dragon already.
13. Kyle (Alex Wyse) Harold’s assistant is entirely pathetic and extremely wimpy. One wonders how he even ended up in a job where he cares for a man who faked his own death and never goes home. Too bad he mentioned ice cream that one time.
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12. Danny "Iron Fist" Rand (Finn Jones) Danny stormed into Seaosn 1 as an altogether too-clueless giant manchild. He learned some serious lessons after his appearances on "The Defenders" and "Luke Cage," and now he's actually bearable to watch. After gaining a lot in self-awareness and lightening up a bit, Danny has become a pretty cool hero, and it's finally possible to see why so many people are loyal to him.
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11. Madame Gao (Wai Ching Ho) The spooky leader of The Hand (you might remember her from “Daredevil”) is good at showing up to give supervillain speeches. She’s also good at messing with Danny’s head, and her cool-headed, relaxed evil is a good foil for all the hothead murderers on the show. Danny isn't particularly smart, so Gao’s conniving nature makes her a formidable foe.
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10. Davos (Sacha Dhawan) Earnestly serious, but in a way that pays off real well when he gets to talk about how trash all the non-heaven food is in Season 1. His turn to full-on villain in Season 2 is fun as well, because the guy is just so serious that it's a wonder he didn't murder Danny years ago as a child for a crime like having too much fun.
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9. Ward Meachum (Tom Pelphrey) A bumbling villain with a painkiller addiction, daddy issues and a penchant for talking to dead people, Ward has a lot of problems for a rich CEO in Season 1 that make him fun to watch. All that makes the corner he tries to turn in Season 2 even better -- who knew we'd be rooting for Ward to get clean and become Danny's best friend forever.
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8. Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick) The baddest of asses in “Iron Fist,” Colleen was, for a while at least, the most well rounded character we met in Season 1. Her penchant for just rolling with Danny's stupid was troubling, however. Colleen's arc picks up significantly in Season 2, and watching her grapple with her personal baggage makes for a compelling parallel to Danny's glowy fist problems.
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7. Scythe (David Sakurai) Gets absolutely the best scene in the series, when he's seen singing to the corpses of a bunch of people he just murdered before strangling somebody with the microphone cord. At least it took Danny using the actual Iron Fist to beat him.
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6. Joy Meachum (Jessica Stroup) Joy’s unstoppable must-win attitude makes her become much more interesting as “Iron Fist” goes on. She’s got her own kind of ruthlessness, even if it’s not of the murdery sort like the rest of her family, and it makes her a great semi-reluctant villain in Season 2. Her disparagement of brown M&Ms is unnecessary, though.
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5. Zhou Cheng (Lewis Tan) The drunken master and protector of the Hand that Danny fights in China has a mouth to match his fighting skills. It’s unfortunate that Danny beats him to a pulp, because the dude would have made a good silly nemesis to have show up over and over, whenever the Hand comes after Danny.
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4. Bakuto (Ramon Rodriguez) We will always fondly remember Bakuto's inability to smile in a way that doesn't make him appear like an evil schemer.
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3. Walker (Alice Eve)
Legitimate bad-ass throughout the entirety of Season 2. Walker's muted performance is a perfect, creepy counterpoint to when she busts out training and fighting skills to wallop people, including the Immortal Iron Fist himself. If only we could have gotten more of her backstory to bring her to the forefront a bit more.
2. Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson) Unlike in the other Marvel Netflix series, at least Claire gets a chance to do things other than stitch wounds in "Iron Fist" Season 1. And she's constantly calling out Danny's dumb ideas and stupid plans, making her a great counter to the naive earnestness of the children she's constantly having to babysit.
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1. Harold Meachum (David Wenham) Meachum dad Harold is a delightfully ruthless, diabolical mustache-twirler in Season 1. He’s got his own reasons, but regardless of whether he’s a pawn or a player in the story, he’s worth having around for his hilarious abuse of his spineless assistant, Kyle.
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The definitive list
(Some spoilers ahead.) The second season of "Marvel's Iron Fist" is the latest entry in the Netflix Marvel TVverse. Between those two seasons, it has a pretty wide gamut of character quality, covering the full spectrum from totally insufferable to totally delightful. We've got the definitive rankings of where all the major character place on that scale. Check it out.
Netflix
Netflix
