daredevilkink | The Defenders-only Discussion Post!

*He's clearly literate, and, again, there are plenty of people who get by at a fifth grade reading level...

Let me clarify here: even if Danny is not actually past a fifth grade reading level in the English language, which wouldn't be unreasonable, there are plenty of people who get by at that level. But if he is past that level, I would kind of wonder how considering the fact that he'd had no chance to practice and develop his skills (unless there were books in English and someone specifically teaching him English, which seems so unlikely), and pretty much just arrive at the conclusion that he was a really advanced reader from the beginning. (And, presumably, an advanced mathematician as well.) Some people just have that gift.

I'm just spending a lot of time pondering the logistics of this whole thing.

Can we also if we're gonna have thos conversation all remember that even though he didn't speak a word of it presumably as a ten year old, Danny is shown onscreen a few times speaking fluent Chinese?

So assuming the monks ONLY taught him fighting would be wrong. He likely didn't receive NO education. He just received a culturally different one. If the monks are taking in many kids, presumably they have an interest in them being trained into an adult army. Like... if you join the U.S. Forces, you aren't just trained with weapons and they assume that's all you need.

I am assuming Danny was at minimum trained and guided to read ancient texts in Kun Lun related to his studies, maybe even in more than just the second language, in addition to probably a handful of other skills besides fighting. Not anything that would be as useful in a business setting. But not nothing either.

OP

I thought I did mention that I figure he had some kind of education with a different curriculum? Looking back, I don't think I did, but also I figured he learned by immersion if it wasn't formally taught.

As someone who grew up in a family where nobody read with no additional support outside of a classroom, can I just say:

The way to get better and improve your reading level outside of a classroom setting is just... to read and like reading?

Shockingly a great many people throughout history self-taught themselves to be some of the greatest writers and philosophers of all time. And as far as comprehension goes, if he stopped speaking English at ten but still learned a second language (Chinese) and was trained to comprehend, interpret and utilize texts in that language? Guess what... English specifically doesn't matter so much at that point. His vocabulary might not be the best when he returns to it but his actual comprehension level should be just fine.

Also, he has no accent. And he and his friend from Kun Lun Davos spoke English to each other in Iron Fist. So the monks clearly had some English fluency.

Educationally, I feel like there are much bigger gaps he would have in his learning that are more cultural than around knowledge that are more interesting to consider than literacy. To me, reading is the easy one. Besides the fact that historically and even still in some parts of the world, literacy does not equal intelligence anyway.

SA hoping that didn't come off rude. I just find it strange and a little sort of... Western-focused? To be so hung up on grade-based English reading levels as a way of understanding how capable or educated Danny is or isn't.

And I just would hate for fanon to coalesce around this idea that Danny receiving a culturally different non-traditional education = lesser than vs. just less useful specifically as a business person in New York.

Op of the "wtf are the grades" post: YES. I don't understand the grade-based levels thing, or levels AT ALL. ??? When I was 10 - so as old as Danny when he crashed - I was reading "Master and Margarita" and "Lolita" two years later. I knew how to read so why not, what was the problem? I honestly don't understand these levels.

Not OP, the criticism of advance reading at that age isn't that a child is incapable of reading and understanding the words. Most criticism is that they'll miss the salient and subtler points due to the ignorance of more complex themes.

In essence the child will see the forest but not the trees.

This is OP, and...yes. That is what I meant. It was pretty much comprehension, and I really thought that maybe there wouldn't be books in English in K'un Lun. He may not have an accent, but he was ten when he got taken, so why would he get an accent? And sorry I was Western focused, but I'm American (I mean, my parents aren't U.S. born but reading is still taught pretty much the same way where they're from lol, same with the 'liking reading' thing) so I was thinking of it that way. One of the things I was wondering was access to English language books. And that there'd be a different curriculum if there was organized school, which we'll say there was.

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.

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.

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...

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?

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.

Thanks for standing to my defense :)

It's entirely possible that we're thinking about 'comprehension' differently. I don't think that's the issue right now, though.

Nah. Right now, anon is insulted because anon's friends are apparently disabled (which they decided I'm denying), but anon forgot to mention that. Just out of curiosity, was that part clear to you? Is it just me who hasn't jumped to the right conclusion?

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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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OP

You're right. Literally everything about the comment before and this comment is correct. This comment is elucidating my points better than my comment. The stuff that you mentioned is actually what I'm most interested in too, and when I talked about reading level I was thinking English, which, you're right, wouldn't matter in the situation he was growing up in, just like how literacy isn't actually an indicator of intelligence. I didn't bring it up as that, I only brought it up as an example of how God different education could affect day to day New York Businessman life. But, like you said, that's really not even secondary as an issue. It's really the knowledge gaps in things like history (I mean, Danny's missed a LOT there) and culture that would affect day to day life most.

And I would be so so so unhappy if fanon did figure that whatever Danny's education was was lesser just because it was non-traditional. That's not what I meant at all. Like a later commenter said, my whole issue here isn't that he had a different education, it's that he was allowed into the company with no formal education and no one even really brought it up. I really did not mean for this to come off as that?

Again, I don't think culturally different education is somehow not valuable, I like to think that I'm not that much of a dick lol. Being a businessperson in New York is just one thing you can do, and Danny definitely has other marketable skills from his education, I'm just still baffled as to why he ended up marketing one he didn't have and why everyone was like 'sure, makes sense'. And the thing is that in the Western world he's living in by the events of the Defenders, a lot of people would think his education was lesser, and it would be kind of a stumbling block for him if, say, a news outlet came out with the news that he didn't have a high school diploma or something. There's a lot of practical issues there and I think that when I was saying those it might've sounded like I thought a non traditional education was worse? I really didn't mean it that way. I mean, for day to day life he doesn't need a NYC businessman education.

And honestly, the actual comment wasn't really focused on reading level, or at least I really didn't mean it to be. It's just that then there was a question about the reading thing, so it became a lot more present in this conversation than I thought it would be. I'm definitely not using reading level as some arbitrary point of how educated or capable he is. Like. English grade-based reading levels were never supposed to be the point of this post. If I had not included a single comment about reading in the post, it would've boiled down to the same thing, which was really 'what kind of education did Danny get in K'un Lun and why was he somehow allowed into a company with little fuss without people even realizing he didn't have any formal education that would generally be required to do so, and how might his different education affect him in day to day NYC life, if it would at all'. Mostly the reason I mentioned reading was because I was wondering, if he'd been not reading or reading another language for over a decade, how well he'd comprehend leasing and medical documents and mundane shit like that when it's in English. But that would really have more to do with the 'when would he have learned to do a bunch of the mundane grown up Westerner things in the past fifteen years' more than reading anyway.

I've done a lot of reading tutoring, so maybe that's why I immediately went to levels and so on, but tbh at this point it's starting to give me a headache.

Though I still kind of want to know what K'un Lun curriculum might look like.

(Uh. Hopefully this clears something up? Sorry, I'm not very coherent.)

NA

I suspect he might have a lot of trouble understanding some 'higher' Western literature--I don't know what K'un Lun's literature and storytelling traditions are, but I doubt they'd contain all the same structures, tropes, symbols and suchlike that Western canon tends to, and he might have some serious vocabulary gaps when it comes to, say, Faulker or even stuff like Pride and Prejudice. He might struggle to grasp the foreshadowing in some movies or come away from stuff like The Princess Bride or House of Cards, for example, with a really different understanding or feelings about it. On the other hand, non-mystical Tibetan and Chinese literature might be intuitively easy for him to understand because he's so used to them (eg The Plum and the Golden Vase) or even stuff like old Japanese literature (eg The Pillow Book, The Tale of Genji). Heaven help him if he wants to understand James Joyce, lol.

(Of course, this depends on headcanons for Danny's early life education and interest in books and reading. If he wasn't interested in them at all vs if he was an avid science fiction fan, and so on.)

I also think he'd have a lot of vocabulary and educational gaps when it comes to economics and business. K'un Lun seems to not be particularly capitalistic at all, and he clearly doesn't understand concepts like how it might be acceptable to have a rather small profit margin on selling pharmaceutical drugs to further fund research and manufacturing, for example. He might have heard a bunch of these words growing up as the heir of Wendell Rand, but as a child he didn't seem interested at all in the business and isn't educated in these sorts of things. We also see him not have any sense of scale for money and interpersonal stuff, and he might be the kind of guy who is genuinely clueless about anything having to do with economic prospects and privilege--see how astonished he is when Luke points out that he's had opportunities and power Luke will never have simply because he was born rich. Stuff like that honestly would fly over his head unless he made a serious effort to research and understand it.

I also don't know what his math education might be like--I'm not familiar with Tibetan mathematical traditions or if they're an integral part of Tibetan Buddhism or not. He may be very educated in some math and science fields (astronomy and astronomical navigation, for example) and extremely ignorant in others (calculus, basic physics, cell biology). He may not have a good grasp on the scientific method or on how science actually works in the real world, and his understanding of zoology might have some very big gaps (maybe he knows how to catch and eat, I dunno, wild boars, but doesn't know anything about animal behaviourism).

As to why they 'let' him...honestly because they didn't have a choice. As Hogarth says early on, for most of the people there it's basically a hostile takeover, and I think it is for Ward Meechum as well. I imagine many of the Rand employees first dismiss his educational gaps as idealism or eccentricism, but when they realize just how little of the business he actually fundamentally *understands* it would probably freak them out and make them furious. Definitely be a source of company gossip and shit-talking for sure.

OP again

And I do know a lot of brilliant people were self-taught/started out as self-taught, but idk if that's relevant if Danny wasn't self-taught anyway, though I figure you were just using that as an example for why Western education isn't the be all end all of education, which, again, I agree on.