The Co-Creator of IRON FIST Gets Brutally Honest with the Whitewashing Controversy
Yesterday we learned that Marvel almost cast the Chinese-American actor Lewis Tan in the role of Danny Rand in Marvel's Iron Fist series. As I said then, I don't care who's cast in the role as long as it's the right choice for the character. A lot of other fans obviously feel differently and believe that Iron Fist should've been Asian, which I wouldn't have had a problem with had Marvel decided to change up the character like that, but that's not how it went down, and people are complaining about it.
This has been a big controversy, which is interesting because Danny Rand was always white. I'm sure there would've been a controversy had an Asian actor been cast as the character because we live in a world where you can't make everyone happy. People make choices and then we have to live with it, welcome to life.
Now the co-creator of Iron Fist, Roy Thomas, has some brutally honest words for those people who are complaining about the casting of Danny Rand. He doesn't hold back on his thoughts and I can't help but think that some people will be offended by what he had to say in this interview with Inverse:
"Yeah, someone made me vaguely aware of that. I try not to think about it too much. I have so little patience for some of the feelings that some people have. I mean, I understand where it’s coming from. You know, cultural appropriation, my god. It’s just an adventure story. Don’t these people have something better to do than to worry about the fact that Iron Fist isn’t Oriental, or whatever word? I know Oriental isn’t the right word now, either."
Thomas went on to admit that Iron Fist is a character from a different time, but explained that he's not ashamed of the character he created:
"He was a character for a comic book at a different time. It’s very easy to second-guess anything. You can argue about Tarzan, you can argue about almost any character who came up then is bound to be not quite PC by some later standard or other. Okay, so you can make some adjustments. If they wanted to kill off white Iron Fist and come up with one who wasn’t Caucasian, that wouldn’t have bothered me, but neither am I ashamed for having made up one who was. He wasn’t intended to stand for any race. He was just a man who was indoctrinated into a certain thing."
The co-creator went on to suggest that if people don't like the way his stories and character are being handled, they should go out and create their own characters instead of changing someone else's.
“I just think some people have too much time on their hands, I guess. They have an infinite capacity for righteous indignation. By and large, that tends to be misplaced quite often because if you’re becoming all upset over things that are just stories, and if you don’t like it, instead of trying to change somebody else’s story, go out and make up your own character and do a good job of it. That’s just fine, but why waste time trying to run down other people’s characters simply because they weren’t created with your standards in mind?”
He went on to defend the creation of his character:
“Now if something is really racist or degrading to a sex or race, an ethnic group or something like that, that’s something else, but Iron Fist isn’t that and never has been. It’s all about a fictitious race, a fictitious place like a Shangri-La, and one person who happens to be its emissary. There’s no reason why he can’t be Caucasian.”
Thomas explained that if Marvel had decided to make Iron Fist Asian, he would have been fine with it:
"On the other hand, if they had decided to make Iron Fist an Asian, that would have been fine with me, too. I wouldn’t have cared. I didn’t consider myself the safeguard of some kind of Caucasian literary standard or anything like that. But I would have found it easier to write about a Caucasian, so that’s one reason I probably did it. If somebody had suggested, 'You want to make it so he’s Asian?' Well, we could have done that too."
Whether you agreed with what he had to say here or not, you've gotta admit, he made some good points about the character he helped create and how he was simply just a man who was indoctrinated into a certain thing. There was never any intention for people to get upset over the fact that he's caucasian.