So why did the MCU fumble the 10 rings stuff when it comes to iron man?
They wanted to do Avengers.
>>151699302Because the Mandarin (as he was) was a perceived racist caricature embodying "yellow peril". So they thought, we can just cleverly write him out of the mythos altogether. This didn't go over well with fans so they tried rewriting it and reintroducing him. But still fearful or concerned about the optics of an Asian villain they then watered him down. And the rings themselves I believe are one too powerful to justify in universe (same reason they nerf or write the Hulk out of big Avengers confrontations) and arm bands make for a better merchandising than than actual rings.
>>151699643>>151699302I find it hilarious MCU attempting to censor Islamic terrorism from the timeline accidentally implied Muslims are more violent.
>>151699643The Mandarin we saw in the trailers was nothing like his comic counterpart, but everyone still thought he was cool.It was really fucking stupid to throw him away and make the main villain a jealous nerd Tony didn't want to hang out with on New Years.
>>151699788Yeah it's kind of funny that if they just 100% played Ben Kingsley's Mandarin straight instead of the actor twist I don't think anyone would have been mad.
>>151699817One thing people really don't get is that the vast majority of modern audiences, even back in 2007, do not know or care about "yellow peril" shit. The fears of >>151699643 were wildly overblown, most people have no idea who Fu Manchu even is, and didn't 20 years ago either.They could have made the Mandarin straight-up East Asian and if they'd done it well nobody would have perceived it as racist. Disney was worried over nothing. I honestly think Paramount would have gone through with it, they were always more based about the MCU than Disney.
>>151700932>>151699643Well a few things to keep in mind: when Iron Man 1 came out Marvel was still in the very early stages of the MCU and weren't exactly planning very far ahead until after it was a giga success. They probably threw in the Ten Rings as an easter egg and didn't really worry about comic accuracy because "who cares we'll probably never get around to using them", so they made them middle eastern to be more socially relevant. By the time of 3 when they were actively plotting out stories ahead of time was in the early days of, for lack of a better term, the "wokeification" of Hollywood when sensitivity of cultural/racial/whatever stereotypes were getting more mainstream attention and becoming actively verboten, hence the need to change The Mandarin - that and the odd choice to focus more on a semi-recent comic story (Extremis) as the narrative than the Mandarin directly, they kind of just jumbled everything together and didn't really think about it. Hence why they quickly pivoted after it came out by revealing "actually, The Mandarin is real but he wasn't either of the guys in this movie".
>>151699302Pretty sure the leader of this 10 Rings group was originally meant to be an adaptation of the Mandarin
>>151700932Another thing to take into account is that IM3 came out at a time when Hollywood was trying HARD to appeal to Asian markets; the chinese version of the film even had a subplot starring a chinese actor, who is the doctor that give Tony his heart surgery at the end (and who's on screen for like 3 seconds in the western version), so they didn't want to create controversy there and diminish their profits.
More like The Caliph.
