daredevilkink | The Defenders-only Discussion Post!

Well, to be fair, getting raised in a Buddhist monastery does involve a lot of education. It's just not the formal Western education. There's a lot of reading, trust me, though the choice of books is profoundly different to English canon. I have no idea how much math there is.

There's also a lot of self-discipline, mind and body exercises, spiritual teaching and molding your body to fit a particular ideal - all of which is education. None of which is Danny showing any signs of having received, although we're supposed to believe that he did.

For a best student of Kun Lun, he doesn't seem to have retained much of what must have been his lessons.

Yes, people call out Danny on his utter lack of competence for leading Rand several times. No one can really stop him from interfering in the company business, though, because, well, he OWNS it. Nothing much you can do about that, besides assassinations (which did happen).

The language thing isn't explained. I guess knowing more than one language is so foreign to US. writers that they don't realize you get rusty in a language (or forget it near-completely) if you don't use it for FIFTEEN YEARS. At the very least, he should have said something about Chinese being easier for him than English, but no. Nada.

I'm not sure if he's past a fifth grade. Does he make literally references? Calculate something? As long as you're not an idiot, you can function as an adult quite well with fifth grade math and reading. Especially if your finances are being managed by an army of corporate accountants and you spend most of your time "hunting the Hand" all over the world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've read stuff (everything from askreddit threads to books) on some of your questions--specifically 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?

The first one: an answer I've seen popping up a lot is that the US is friendlier and safer than a lot of Asian tourists think it will be. A lot of the things I've seen have had statements to the effect of "I didn't realize people were so nice and generous and giving in the US, I thought they were all thieves/individualistic". Also, the sheer size of the US seems shocking to people from very small Asian countries of Japan? And the variations in US cultures and places? Not sure how much of that is relevant to Danny Rand.

Asian-American struggles: a huge theme of p much everything about this that I've read is about double-alienation and the myth of the model minority: basically, a lot of especially 2nd and 3rd generation Asian-American immigrants feel alienated from their families and their home and immigrant cultures while also feeling alienated from American culture. Being 'perpetual foreigners' and having difficulty finding people who understand the duality and complexity of their experiences without judging them or viewing their lives through very polarized lenses. Then the model minority myth has its own effects--Asian-Americans feel like failures, are hyper-perfectionistic, feel overly feminized and devalued, have trouble if they're not STEM majors or supergeniuses, are alienated from other minorities, are questioned if they're a part of 'troubling' society, etc.

Also, possibly relevant wrt language--there's this great essay by Amy Tan, "Mother Tongue" (here: http://www.olypen.com/pnkdurr/as/mother_text.htm) that really explains the relationship between 2nd generation Asian-American immigrants and the English language as well.

I think that part of the thing is that it's entirely possibly Danny does have this stuff, because I can see Ward or Danny's secretary or *somebody* setting it up if only for appearances, or out of the hope that he'll lose the 'delusions' of being a monk and snap back into shape.

Thanks for the info. Asian cultures aren't my specialty (African are, kind of), it's always nice to learn something new.

To the first one: yeah, not much of it is applicable. This is surface stuff; you need to look deeper than that. You're looking for the times when in Asia it would be normal to act in one way, and in USA people turn out to do something entirely different, and it was very surprising.

So for example, I think it was an Asian man who was very surprised when his Canadian colleagues asked him what made him choose his career, because what young person would try to make such a burdening, responsible decision by themselves? His father decided his career. He was further surprised when the Canadians were suddenly outraged and sympathetic to him.

Or another one: in Asia, you're supposed to take care of your guests - give them something good, not parade an army of choices in front of them. So it's a bit of a shock to an Asan when they visit a Western home, and the host is suddenly like,

"What would you like to drink? I have tea, coffee, oh, jasmine tea, orange and apple juice, there's some water if you'd like, oh, how about some alcohol? I have..."

"Uh, water please."

"Sure! You want it sparkling or not?"

Your guest is already screaming inside, frantically calculating how long it will take them to reach nearest exit and if you can catch them before they get there.

The struggles: this is pretty much normal for a migrant experience. I'm sure Asians have their own quirks within it, but yeah, none of that is surprising. The whole "outsider everywhere" thing certainly needs to be included in Danny Rand's characterization, but you're again looking for something more. In what ways does the Asian immigrants' culture not fit into US. society? For which aspects of that are Asian Americans actively fighting?

I don't have enough knowledge to give real examples here, I can only speculate. One of the things that don't fit at all are names - in some of the Asian cultures, at least, the name is made out three words, there's no real distinction between a first name and a surname, and your "first name" actually comes *last*, while the first two indicate what family you're from. But immigrants seem to let go of all that pretty easily.

What people are maybe working hard on keeping might be their religions and spiritual convictions, but I have nothing to actually support this claim. It's a shot in the dark, based on how things work in general.

Why does the language thing need an explanation? They presented K'un Lun as a multicultural place, with people who have made 'pilgrimages' there from all over the world. None of the members of the Hand were born there, it is mentioned that they returned to their home countries when they were banished. Danny also spoke English with Davos, who was born there, so it is not unreasonable to assume that English is likely taught and spoken in K'un Lun, alongside many other languages.

Wasn't Kun Lun sealed off for fifteen years? That pretty much guarantees no pilgrimages.

Yeah, but it has been open on and off for MILLENIA. You can't tell me there aren't still people there from before, not to mention the descendants of pilgrims who never left.

I can't imagine a place that no one seems to have heard about has a lot of visitors, no. Maybe in the past, when the knowledge of Kun Lun's existence was more common. But languages change, and descendants stop speaking the original language of their family very quickly. So any languages actively used in Kun Lun would likely be very, very different to their earthly counterparts.

Also, I'm sorry, but I see no reason for off-world monks to teach English in particular. Maybe Chinese or Tibetan, since Kun Lun is generally portrayed as being closely tied to those cultures. But like you said, Kun Lun has been around for millenia. English, especially in its modern version, doesn't even blip on their radar.

So what's your explanation for Davos' perfect English? You think 10 year-old Danny taught him to speak like that?

And really??? K'un Lun is not general knowledge in modern New York so therefore "no one seems to have heard about" it??? What about Stick and the Chaste??? They have a drawing of K'un Lun on the wall of the weapons shop they were working out of! There has clearly been a history of communication between them! But sure, modern English "doesn't even blip on their radar." *rolls eyes*

SA

Also, the Mandarin Danny was taught in K'un Lun is obviously modern enough to be easily understood, so the argument that languages would have changed there that much also doesn't make sense. Being a place with limited accessibility is NOT the same as being completely cut off. There is reasonably frequent contact between the two worlds, as evidenced by the footage of a previous Iton Fist that Danny was shown.

SA

And by your logic I suppose we are to believe that there couldn't possibly be any sites in the modern world where significant (not necessarily large, but significant) numbers of people make spiritual and religious pilgrimages, simply because the average American has never heard of them.

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