The Obligatory Iron Fist Post

So, in case you haven’t heard, Marvel’s long anticipated Netflix series Iron Fist….is garbage. Even by Arrow season 4 standards, it’s pretty rough. The worst part about wasn’t even that Iron Fist was a white guy. Matt Fraction’s version was pretty awesome and featured a white guy but also many Iron Fists of color that, Marvel seems to have completely overlooked for reasons unknown. It’s a bad thing but not the worst thing.

It was that it was painfully obvious that Marvel had been putting the development off because they had no idea what angle they wanted to approach the story from so they went with a paint by numbers origin story that, good or bad, just didn’t feel genuine at all. Granted, I realize that “heart” isn’t really quantifiable but you can definitely tell when a writer has something to say and the writers for Iron Fist didn’t.

No matter what you think of any given Spider-Man film, it’s very clear in each installment that the writers have a clear understanding of the fact that Spider Man’s most prevailing themes is “doing the right thing even when it sucks.” Hell, even Kung Fu Panda seems to run with the theme that “Being a hero isn’t about where you come from so much as who you choose to be.” Nothing about Iron Fist seems to convey an overall theme aside from “because kung fu” which is pretty rudimentary considering how far along we are in telling of the superhero myth.

Honestly, Marvel had a chance to beat DC to the punch of something they do well because they’ve been doing legacy stories forever (Reminder: There have been four Flashes, three Batmen and three Green Lanterns in one sector). They could have easily done a Book of the Iron Fist series about various wielders of the power throughout the years. Introduce a new Iron Fist, preferably an Asian one and have the show be about him returning to the world to fight the Hand when someone else emerges who controls the Iron Fist simultaneously, a white man named Danny Rand (because there is precedent in the comics of two people having the power at the same time), let them do an obligatory team up and have Danny go away and let Lewis Tan or Collin Chow or whoever be in the Defenders.

So yeah, I’m not as mad about Iron Fist being racially problematic and silly. There’s plenty of that. I’m salty because it’s structurally silly and full of missed opportunities. No matter WHO plays Iron Fist….the show would have still been bad. The only difference is that we’d be drowning in think pieces about how (Enter Much Better Actor Here) is way too good to be in it.

The Defenders seems promising, though. So, there’s that. Check out my review on the Green Lantern/Space Ghost crossover on Black Nerd Problems