The Defenders-only Discussion Post!

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The Defenders Prompt Post

Talk about the Defenders! Speculate, discuss, squee and debate. There's a thread for each episode so you can discuss what you've watched so far without being spoiled for future episodes - click on top level view to see only the first comment in each thread and stay spoiler-free.

Anon commenting is not mandatory for this post. Playing nice is always mandatory.

Comments

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

[(Anonymous)]

Sure! I don't think it's necessarily better to teach it informally or formally (to be honest, I am biased because I got an unusually good education in it), but counterpoint: if a toddler never saw people walking or was ever helped to, would it necessarily learn to walk? (I don't actually know, but it's worth thinking about.)

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

[(Anonymous)]

Interesting question :)

I think they would, because toddlers stand up and try to walk on their own, it seems like instinct. And also, in the womb the development of a tiny human repeats evolution. It kinda makes sense that some of the last stages of that would carry over onto after birth, and there is an evolutional point in which we start to walk on only two :)

Back in the 50s USA, which was actually way worse than HYDRA in terms of human experimentation, did this experiment with babies being denied touch. Problems with learning to walk aren't among the famous findings, I guess you can dig that up and check.

I'm not sure if anyone thought of an experiment where babies wouldn't see adults walking around, but there some where human interaction was severely restricted if not completely banned.

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

[(Anonymous)]

Huh, that will be pretty interesting once I dig it up! But I do know of 'experiments' regarding mostly feral children, all of whom seemed to be permanently impaired with at least some aspects of language as a result, if only because language is so social.

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

[(Anonymous)]

Language, sure. And general social stuff. But to my knowledge, not walking.

To be fair, a lot of how we use our bodies is actually trained into us socially. Some peoples, for example, have a habit of *crouching* to a meal. Make an experiment: try to crouch for a while with both of your hands busy and manouvering food into your mouth. You'll gain a new appreciation of how closely your body is tied to your particular culture.

But walking is very, very basic. Our bodies aren't really suited to move them around in any different way.

And if we're tying it back to our poor Danny Rand (man, I wouldn't like to read a discussion like this one on myself!), bear in mind that he's not actually "feral". He was talked to, and allowed to speak himself. So language as a concept, sound comprehension, and articulate sound forming would all be known to him, and he'd have more than enough practice in it.

With that, even if he doesn't retain English, he would have all of the cognitive equipment to relearn it. His mother tongue would be whatever they speak in Kun Lun, though.

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

[(Anonymous)]

No, I totally agree! I just think it's interesting to note that social isolation often can have effects mimicking physical isolation enough that you can sometimes see similar results. And since Tibet has more of an oral storytelling tradition than rich white people NYC, it might be that his own sense of social isolation/alienation (to the degree that it exists) means that he ends up not being good at either literary traditions.

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think there's much room for social isolation in a monastery :)

He might not be as immersed in the oral tradition as his peers who were born into it, though, and he obviously didn't do all of his obligatory reading US. students do at school. (You do have obligatory readings, right? I'm a European, we sort of tell horror stories about how your education is organised around here.)

so he wouldn't be exceptionally knowledgeable in either, I guess. But I think people around this thread overestimate how important literary knowledge is in Western societies nowadays. Plenty of people never read a book in their life, and function with the rest of us without much problem.

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe not--I admit, I don't really know much about the day-to-day workings of Tibetan monasteries or Buddhist monasteries in general. But I can imagine it might still permit a deep sense of social loneliness/alienation and have him be very withdrawn, especially emotionally.

We do have obligatory readings! It depends on which school, class, and grade level, and in college it's often a lot more, but we do have books/essays/short stories/poetry/texts that we have to read for various classes.

I mean, maybe, but I...I'm not saying that totally illiterate people can't function, but I do think it would be sharply noticeable to people who know them closely (unless they loved TV and were up on pop culture in that sense, or were huge jocks/sports fanatics and had jobs that didn't require any reading), and at least in the particular area where I live there aren't any people who 'never read a book in their life'. (Which is not representative of the whole US or of NYC either.) And especially with somebody like Danny who doesn't have the requisite socialcultural competence or people-skills to hide any gaps or otherwise make up for them, I really do think that in many areas he just wouldn't function either, or only would because of his money.