Why People Should Suck It Up and Get Over the Iron Man 3 Thing (SPOILERS AHEAD).....

Seriously, there are SPOILERS in here. Last chance.

Well, Iron Man 3 has finally come and, as I predicted within 15 seconds of seeing the big Mandarin reveal, the entire internet fell on the floor kicking and screaming like children (Bell Biv Devoe calls that "the crybaby"). For those of you that don't care about seeing this movie, but want to know what I'm talking about, here's the breakdown.

The movie version of the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) is the (white) supposed head of a terrorist organization known as the Ten Rings, the same group that held Tony Stark captive in the first movie. Stark infiltrates the Mandarin's home only to discover that he is actually a drunken, drug addicted British actor named Trevor Slattery, who is just a front for Aldridge Killian (Guy Pearce) and A.I.M.'s war profiteering scam. At some point throughout Killian's final battle with Iron Man, he screams "I am the Mandarin!!!" Denzel Washington Training Day style.

As a result of this twist in the narrative, as I said before, the internet lost its collective mind because they didn't get a RDJ/Ben Kingsley superpowered slugfest even though the slugfest they got instead was FUCKING AWESOME. The thing about comic nerds is that they're very random about how and when they decide a movie's handling of the source material is careless. X-Men First Class was taken seriously, the Scarecrow got beaten up by Katie Holmes, Dr. Doom was basically portrayed as Donald Trump with superpowers and Ghost Rider got two movies. But somehow, THIS is just too much to handle. To understand why this is a silly grievance, you have to understand who the Mandarin is in the comics.

Depending on the writer, the details have changed slightly over the years, but basically the Mandarin was a Chinese man, oppressed by Chairman Mao, who stumbled upon alien technology in the form of ten powerful rings and used them to become an evil would-be conqueror. An evil Chinese would-be conqueror who looks, dresses and talks like a villain from a Shaw Brothers kung fu movie.

In other words....this guy.

Over the years, they've changed his clothes and motives for hating Iron Man, but as far as his goals and ideologies, long story short....this could be considered pretty fucking racist. In 2013, with the borderline xenophobic political climate, there is just no way in Hell you can market this to a worldwide audience with children in good conscience. None. Granted, I'm not saying that you HAVE to characterize the Mandarin this way to do it justice, but it IS racially problematic for Marvel and, ultimately, Disney. If they cast a Chinese guy, the Asian community would quite possibly maul the studio and rightfully so. If Ben Kingsley's version (dressed the way he was) had been a superpowered badass, the movie would have been accused of "whitewashing" a Chinese character and we saw how that worked out for M. Night Shaymalamadingdong with The Last Airbender. Or you can write the Mandarin out altogether, but then you have C-List Iron Man baddies like the Living Laser. Sorry, but outside of comic book, no studio exec in the universe thinks Living Laser is a good name for a movie villain.

My point here is that Shane Black handled the "Mandarin" issue in the most realistically feasible way possible. So suck it up.