daredevilkink | The Defenders-only Discussion Post!

Yeah, honestly, a bunch of Iron Fist is the writers not thinking about the implications of things to even come up with a quick handwave for them. Danny doesn't really behave like someone who genuinely immersed himself in the monastical culture--which *could* make sense, but he was also portrayed as if he were this perfect monk and lol he's just so much not it at all??

And it's very odd that he's so good at English still. I mean, he does have kind of childish speech patterns in it, but I doubt it'd be so easy or simple for him to speak it so fluently again. I wish there had been even a scene of him practicing and stumbling over it with strangers before he regained enough.

I don't think you can function *always* well with a 5th grade reading and math level, but you're right, Danny's so rich he can probably easily hire anyone to do anything he needs--reinterpret memos, do his domestic work that he's unfamiliar with, handle his finances and taxes, etc.

OP.
You have a point but remember she fought a guy on her house and she was pretty damn good so it does not make sense that she didn't even try to help

I mean, she could also have just been too startled and out of place? I have self-defense training and do a martial art but I don't know how I'd react to a dude suddenly trying to hurt me in the middle of a party, lol.

NA

Okay, I got this far in your conversation, and I feel compelled to add: the comprehension thing isn't something we get taught in schools. We, partially it is, but to a large point it's just personal development, and also brain development. Meaning: part of being an adult. And Danny is, despite everything, an adult.

He's not going to think like an adult just because he didn't go to school long enough.

Regarding the no-English-books thing: if you know the language well enough, you can comprehend a text written in it at the same 'level' as the language that you normally read. This is just a question of how well Danny knows English, which seems unaffected by his 15 years away (which is really stupid, but another matter altogether).

So yeah, he would read (and comprehend) in English about as well as he reads in Chinese, or whatever language they speak and read in Kun Lun monasteries.

Does this answer your question?

Regarding the no-English-books thing: if you know the language well enough, you can comprehend a text written in it at the same 'level' as the language that you normally read. This is just a question of how well Danny knows English, which seems unaffected by his 15 years away (which is really stupid, but another matter altogether).

NA disagreeing here--first of all, there's the problem with verbal vs written speech, and how they can be asymmetrical, but also, it's possible that he would comprehend texts in terms of what the surface-say but not get the greater literary allusions, symbolism, emotional messaging, etc.

It's an interesting premise actually - a failed monk. A Western child that even after 15 years, couldn't let go of the culture and ideals it was born to. A man who sometimes chooses the Buddhist wisdom, and sometimes chooses the Western ambition. It would be almost the s.1 of DD - a moral drama, except with all the cultural issues at the center of it. You could hardly find two more different worldviews - which attitude is the right one? Where does a culture end, and a person start? Where do people between worlds have a home? Where should you look for answers?

Eeehh. the more I think about it, the more I like the idea. And then I remember - "The immortal iron fist". Right. So that's that.

Well, we could still at least see him learn about our world, get a fresh, outsider perspective on what we accept as normal... but we didn't. Right.

The explanation I came up with about the language was that he looks like he had walked half the world to finally get to Rand building (though I guess he conveniently landed on the right side of the ocean when that portal opened), so he probably had weeks or even months to practice. If he retained enough language from his childhood, it could be enough time to get fluent in everyday conversations.

Still, if your audience needs to come up with excuses for your characters, you're not doing a good enough job as a writer.

Well, *I* certainly couldn't function without at least some math. I need to calculate my taxes. But Danny mostly functions well outside the normal circumstances of our world. He runs around with a sword; he doesn't get memos, doesn't seem to have a home to do domestic work in, and Ward probably hired someone to manage his taxes and other finance stuff, just so Rand wouldn't get into some legal shit because of him, because Danny himself would never thought of it.

Let's be honest here, does he really need to get literally allusions, symbolism, emotional messaging etc. for what he does? Do we ever see him even read that kind of text? Do we ever see him read at all? He's not exactly a scholarly type.

(And this is also not something you learn by reading books in English; it's a matter of cultural competence. Which, admittedly, Danny doesn't have much, and he shouldn't.)

Well, when I said it's a matter of knowing the language, I meant both the spoken and written version. You don't actually *know the language* if you only get one of those.

To clarify, what I meant by 'knowing the language' is that people can understand written or verbally speech asymmetrically--a lot of people can understand spoken English that's more academic or complicated or whatnot but can't read at the same level that they can hear, and vice-versa, for various reasons.

And yeah, Danny's missing like all of the cultural competence necessary for a huge amount of his life in NYC. It astonishes me that he doesn't get constantly mugged, lol.

It did. There's a scene where after a punch, Matt is covering his ears and clearly struggling with the sound.

I don't remember which ep. that was, sorry. One of the later ones, I think. (I'm sure someone else will be happy to help you out with that, if you need it.)

Huh, that does sound like a pretty interesting premise. Difficult to do without being racist or unnecessarily biased (and we all know how good the writers of Iron Fist are at not being racist/Orientalist *eyeroll*) but could be really interesting and different! But we didn't get that and I doubt we will, lmao. Danny himself would need to be more interesting and self-reflective and intelligent for it to work at all.

That's a decent headcanon as far as that goes, but it would be nice to have seen it. And I do wish that he at least acted more bilingual or trilingual or whatever--moments where he knows only the Chinese word for something, using odd grammar, not understanding some English phrases or jargon, etc.

I would imagine he has a penthouse apartment somewhere? But Danny probably doesn't even hire his own maids, Ward arranges for it and also makes sure the drivers have good NDAs and that if Danny ever decides to stay in the apartment it's already tastefully decorated, furnished, stocked with food, etc. Being megarich and a cute white boy does come with a lot of leeway nobody else would get.

I honestly don't remember much of the scenes that you're referring to. But, yeah, I definitely expected her to offer to help/demand in - it's well within her character, kind of happened before and seemed to be the whole reason why she started taking lessons in the first place.

The way I envision it, Jessica would flat-out refuse (also well within the character), and then maybe the attack that you're referring to would happen, Trish would be startled and wouldn't know what to do - reminding us all that a few months martial art training doesn't make you into a superhero - and Jessica would have a particularly stron argument as to why Trish should shut up and let others handle this - which does actually finally shut Trish up.

so eah, maybe they did actually forget. Or they just resigned from addressing it, like many other issues, so that they can fit it all into eight episodes and tell each other that they focused on the main story.

Don't you know? NO HOSPITALS!

Beaten into unconsciousness? No hospitals.

Bullet to the head? No hospitals.

Suddenly going deaf? Thank God nobody saw, they might want to take you to a hospital.

You'd think they eat babies there or something.

DA
It's episode 6 but I think the ano means exactly that. Matt was affected when the first hit Luke yet not against the sword or the hand warriors

Well, to be fair, "the immortal iron fist" is probably technically not the guy you want to mug, and he doesn't need to worry too much about getting banged up by random criminals if they do pick him. (Boy, but that glowing fist idea is stupid.)

Well, sure, but like I said, it's a question of language competence. If you understand the written English well enough, you can read it with about the same level of comprehension as your mother tongue. You don't need to train for it the way OP suggests. You might be lacking some frame of reference, sure, but Danny did spend the first ten years of his life here - he has the basics, and that's actually quite a lot.

Maybe he doesn't get mugged but I bet he damn well gets fleeced for all sorts of shit every day. I mean, he's so clueless and thoughtlessly rich that *I* would be tempted to take advantage of it for cash, and I'm not even that ruthless, lol.

Ehh, I disagree. When it comes to certain *types* (not levels) of reading comprehension, you do need to train for it--super complicated literature, legal writing, business writing, medical writing, scientific articles, hyper-academic stuff, linguistics...

Ah. Okay, I see your point. Adrenaline thing? That sword was about to kill him, if I remember correctly. Not really a moment in which you think about one of your senses being uncomfortable.

Alternatively, we can just pile it onto that heap with all the other plot holes and inconsistences.

If you're trained for it in one language, it doesn't take much to get used to it in another language (unless the specific type of writing stems from a different tradition and is therefore substantially different, in which case it does take some self-training, but usually not much).

Provided you already know the specific sociolect you need (see what I did there?) in the language you're about to read - which is honestly more than 90% of the issue.

You can trust me on that, actually. Is English your mother tongue? Because it's not mine. And I read academic shit in it all the time, no training necessary.

English is, but then again I do have a disability that affects language, so I'm not using the same sampling that you are, I think. (And I read academic shit all the time, but I also know people who had to take literal decades to be able to understand it.)

Well, that's just an issue of personal talents, and maybe also educational background. Maybe your friends' brains just aren't wired that way. Maybe they had some gaps in the basics that stalled them. Maybe it was just the circumstances of their lives (sounds like they have been living far longer than I have). If you have a child to feed and a job to do, you don't exactly focus on reading and understanding academic papers.

Also, the topics matter. Your friends sound like they've been training themselves to understand papers in their mother tongue -which means they didn't really need to learn comprehending the text, they needed to learn whichever field it was that interested them. Now that is another matter entirely, and yes, I did get formal training for that. Some of it, at least.

I can see how learning that might take several decades without anyone's help. But it has nothing to do with the art of reading, per se.

Uh, I'm gonna be pretty blunt here, because I think perhaps I've been phrasing things wrong and that's why we're not fully understanding each other, but: I don't understand this reply at all. It sounds to me like you're skeptical that language disabilities exist? Or that they could prevent being able to do certain types of reading, or they could make it so difficult and unpleasant people with them would stop trying? Why do you think that?

I think the problem here is that we're both working off of things we know about reading but we know radically different things and different samples? I know plenty of people who can't read what they can hear, for example, or vice-versa. I mean, are you also skeptical about the existence of someone's expressive language being better than their receptive language? Or vice-versa?

I don't understand what you're saying. Can you rephrase?

Hey hey we're keeping that on the down-lo.

Not the anon you are responding to, but I don't think they were implying that reading disabilities don't exist or downplaying them.

I think we are all just maybe working off of varying definitions of "comprehension" maybe? Like... there are things that reading levels measure amd things they don't measure as well. The act of reading can encompass a lot of different processes - vocabulary, understanding grammar and syntax, cultural interpretations, specific formal training on types of documents (understanding poetry is different than academic papers vs. legal contracts), etc.

I think what we're all trying to understand here is when thinking about Danny's background, what is reasonable to assume he is or isn't capable of. Especially because the canon itself is too wildly inconsistent and sparing in his backstory for us to properly get a sense of it.

AYRT

Yeah, that's one of the reasons I was trying not to use 'reading levels' terminology, because I find that they don't really measure what they say they do and I don't actually understand the intuitive difference between them.

Yes, that's what I've been meaning. And the canon is so poorly written and thought out that I don't think any of our understandings are actually necessarily 'right' or 'wrong'--we just don't have enough information.

It doesn't seem terribly difficult to me, but then again, I have studied culture for something like seven years now. Give me six months and I'll have it prepared. Three if we hurry. What you need is knowledge, and insider perspective: people with migrant experience, Asians, Asian Americans, and finally, experts on various aspects of Asian cultures and any other topic you consider relevant. With the experts, you can just take their advice and opinion, but with others, you need to design a set of questions to ask.

Off the top of my head:

What do Asian immigrants/tourists find most surprising when coming to a place like USA? what do Asian Americans struggle with the most? What do they miss from home? What concepts don't translate into English? Do they talk the same way among themselves and with other people in USA? What do they think of those 'others', and how do they support that opinion?

Important: which traditions have they retained?

...okay, I'm getting excited now. Time to stop. Sorry.

Anyway, no, I don't think we'll see anything like that. Shame. Maybe there still is a way to mold Danny Rand's into something interesting, but not that. I'm not sure what it could be actually, between his attitude and the fact that he's supposedly the best monk of his generation. It just doesn't add up.

Yeah, we should have seen it. Or at the very least, we should have seen *something*. If Danny is just fluent in English, how and why should be dropped on screen for us.

I guess he might, if someone has suggested buying one to him. Otherwise I think he'd be happy sleeping on Coleen's gym floor.

AYRT

Hm. Okay, sorry.

This may also come out as blunt:

You said that *you* have a language disability, and then you said that *your friends* have spent decades before being able to comprehend academic papers. Since you didn't mention anything about disabilities in regard to your friends, I assumed that they don't have any. As far as I know cognitive disabilities of this kind are quite rare, at least in enough severity to visibly affect your life and skills.

"Normal" people, however - healthy, neurotypical, however you want to call them - can still take decades to get around to reading with understanding academic stuff, for many different reasons. Some of them I listed in comment.

What I was trying to say were two things:

1. It might not be, and most likely isn't, an issue of not having received a formal training in academic reading skills, which university students generally don't get (although they might in USA; it's a weird place).

That assessment would change with the knowledge that your friends have language/reading disability.

But if I remember correctly, we were talking about one Danny Rand, and what would your reading skills be like if you spent 15 years in a Buddhist monastery on the edge of the world and didn't go to an English school because of it.

Danny is not disabled. Nor is the hypothetical 'someone' in Danny's place, in my mind at least. I'm sorry, but if your friends are severely disabled (within the area of cognition), their experience is impossible to compare with this scenario.

2. There's nothing particularly wrong with your friends. Lots of people are like that, not everyone needs to be an academic. It doesn't make them stupid or anything.

I guess I failed at communicating that one, because you sound really indignant.

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