#he’s living in an episode of Jackass and hating/loving every second. isn’t he literally fighting vampires with the saber rn?

[milimeters-morales]

ATSV Miles: i only recently learned to use my palms to amplify my venom-

Comic Miles about to summon a venom-saber, send out concentrated energy beams, throw lightning balls, and just generally fuck around: hola mi nombre es Spider-Man y esto es Jackass 💯⚡️💥💥🔥🔥

[oodlyenough]

kali watches iron fist so you don’t have to: 1.01-1.03

i’m watching iron fist for two main reasons, the first being that i’m going to watch the defenders and i have a compulsive need to Know Everything, and the second combined reason being that i wanna see colleen and claire. that’s ... pretty much it. for the record, though, as much as i may have gone into this anticipating that i would not like it based on the reviews, it’s not like i actively want to hate it -- i would very much like to not be bored by all of danny’s stuff in defenders, i would much prefer to be invested in all 4 of the leads and to feel like this dude is worthy of hanging around jessica, matt and luke, all of whom i adore. 

but here we are. so. if you wanted to know the basics but don’t want to watch, episodes 1-3:

my first overall impression of this show is that the reviews were more or less correct: the characters aren’t that compelling, the pacing is boring, the fight scenes (there’s been... like...... 3 so far) are nothing special.

the cast of characters:

danny is probably supposed to be perceived as sweetly naive, but is mainly infuriatingly oblivious. he frequently ignores the requests of women and laughs at them when they express that they feel threatened by them. “i’m not dangerous!” he insists quite often for a guy who, when angry, lashes out violently.

when he first meets colleen, he speaks mandarin to her unprompted. yeah.

marvel is no stranger to the “white guy you hate to love” trope, so it’s weird how much they missed the mark with danny. like, on the face of it, he shouldn’t be that much less likable than someone like tony stark, and yet. And Yet. there’s just not a lot going on here: humour or charm or warmth or ...anything, really.

colleen wing runs a dojo and at this point really just wants to live her life but fucking danny won’t leave her alone. i like colleen, but so far she hasn’t been given a lot to do besides be shown up by danny, who explains dojo custom to her, shows her how to fight better (yes, really) and flagrantly ignores her wishes at every turn. she is at this point just about danny’s only ally. free her.

colleen also participates in a fight club where she wins money... because she uses the trick danny taught her. where would we be without him?

brother and sister dynamic duo ward & joy meachum used to be danny’s childhood “friends”, and i use air quotes because in the early flashbacks we see, “friend” is probably the wrong word. more accurately they were danny’s babysitters slash bullies.

ward is a moustache-twirling bully maybe 5 years danny’s senior who obviously gave danny swirlies. canonically we are told he used to lock danny in the freezer. we see a flashback of him playing monopoly with danny, where he angrily tells danny that his dad says “rules are for PUSSIES” and knocks the tokens off the board and then tattles to the parents that danny is misbehaving five seconds later.

joy is supposed to be the nice one, i guess. joy is actually pretty horrible in these 3 episodes, like everyone else on the show, but ostensibly she is “the nice meachum”, whereby nice means “doesn’t lock children in freezers, probably”. i suspect her arc will be learning her family secrets and defecting to some kind of redemption arc, but she literally auctions off a human being’s liver for political gain, so, that redemption is gonna be a tough sell.

henry or harry or something meachum is the patriarch puppetmaster of this horrible clan, and he is “dead”. except he isn’t dead, he lives in a secret penthouse that he can’t leave for fear of reprisal from the Hand, and only his son and his manservant know he’s alive. joy believes he is dead. why all of this is true is part of the mystery of the show, i think, but i also zone out every time henry and ward have scenes because they are both boring people, so it’s hard to say for sure.

jeri hogarth from jessica jones fame is a long-lost family friend of danny, and the first person to easily believe he is danny rand because he tells her some anecdotes from the start of her career as a law intern at rand enterprises. (rand... corp? rand co? whatever.) she puts danny up in a BEAUTIFUL apartment she just happens to have lying around. danny takes his high-threadcount sheet and sleeps on the floor.  

the basic plot of these episodes is this:

danny rand arrives in new york looking like he is homeless, walks into the giant building that bears his family name, and announces to everyone that this is his building and he is danny rand. no one believes him, because danny rand is supposed to have died 15 years ago, and also he seemingly hasn’t showered in, like, a decade. 

he decides the way to convince people of his real identity is to beat up a bunch of security guards and force his way into the building. at this point you see that it is a plot necessity for danny to be white, because if he was not white and, as a seemingly homeless person, attacked a bunch of rich people, he would probably already have been killed by police like 15 minutes into the pilot

he also breaks into someone’s house. 

nobody believes danny is danny. that is essentially the plot of the first 2 episodes in their entirety.

danny also spends the first two episodes living on the streets, by which i mean meditating under a tree in the in-between scenes. the local other homeless people reach out to him, and he has these weird moments of “haha oh i’m not actually one of you!!” and the other homeless people sort of pityingly tell him where he can get shoes.

he doesn’t wear shoes for like two episodes. everyone asks him to put on shoes: the meachums, colleen, fellow homeless people 

one of his homeless pals has an iphone (stolen) and explains that it will have data briefly before the original owner cancels the contract. danny’s first act confronted with the internet is to vanity google “danny rand”

through this he learns that everyone believes he died in the plane crash that killed his parents, and that his parents’ company, “Rand”, is now run by family friends the meachum siblings.

claiming to not believe him, the meachum siblings conspire to drug danny and send him to some kind of psych ward which seems to just kidnap homeless people, diagnose and drug them. what follows is about an episode’s worth of danny being strapped to a bed and drugged while we do the “i AM danny rand” “no you’re not” argument repeatedly.

this includes joy mailing him some M&Ms and danny mailing her back only the brown ones, which joy considers incontrovertible proof this is Really Danny, since apparently as children they both refused to eat brown M&Ms even though literally every colour of M&M tastes exactly the same. ward convinces her this is just a crazy coincidence~~~

i am assuming based on their treatment of danny, as well as the weird meachum-family livestream in the hospital rooms, that this hospital place isn’t legitimate, but its real raison d’etre has yet to be explained and may never be.

danny finally manages to balance his chi (really), which allows him to activtae his glow-y fist superpower and break out of the psych ward. he shows up at colleen’s house and somehow convinces her to let him stay the night, promising he’ll leave the next day.

some goons come looking for him, colleen kicks their asses, and the next day danny refuses to leave, because he needs to “protect” her. colleen says she doesn’t need protection, fuck you very much, and they have a friendly spar match to prove that Actually danny is better at martial arts than she is.

he promises to pay her a year’s worth of rent if she’ll just let him stay for one week. “you don’t have any money” says colleen to a man who hasn’t worn shoes in two episodes. “of course i have money i’m danny rand!!!” says danny, who i guess thinks he can just walk into any bank and demand a billion dollars on the honour system. colleen relents, because she wants money.

danny shows up at joy’s house to try and make nice with her, and what follows is kind of baffling. it was also obvious from the start that joy meachum thinks danny might actually be danny rand, and she feels sort of bad about how she and her brother conspire to kidnap, drug and gaslight him, yet her apology is... to offer him $40m to fuck off, change his name and never lay claim to his family’s corporation.

like, to be clear, danny is pretty uninteresting and not especially sympathetic on account of how he talks over all the women in his life and has no significant redeeming traits, but he’s still drugged and ends up held in a “psych ward” strapped to a bed and forcefed sedatives while everyone tells him he’s insane, and joy’s reaction to all of this is kind of a shrug, because she and her brother Worked Hard For The MoneyTM and don’t want to share it with some jackass who had the audacity to be in a plane crash as a child

danny steals a children’s craft he made for her when they were kids, lawyers up, and threatens to take them to court for his shares in the company. he then follows ward home, where he discovers that the meachum patriarch is actually still alive, right before being shoved out a window, Game of Thrones style.

RIP iron fist

it probably sounds like i’m kidding. that’s seriously what happens. if only the series just ended now.