…Saw the latest trailer/clip from ‘Iron Fist’ – this one is
focusing on the show’s second season’s fight scenes. Apparently, they are going
to be quite different from what happened in S1. Well, cannot blame a show for
trying to improve itself – whether it will succeed is another question. Given
all the excitement that is coming down lately, it has to, because-
Because it already had flak before the series’ premiere that
the titular character is not an Asian-American actor, but Ser Loras Tyrell, the
Flower Knight, who decisively is not. An Asian-American anyone, that is. That
said, it really wasn’t the problem for S1 ‘Iron Fist’ – other issues were, but
the whitewashing of the titular character didn’t help either, so here we are,
at a moment in time when the USA media is doing its’ best to cash in on the
Asian-American factor of its’ international sector. There’s ‘Crazy Rich Asians’
– did wonderfully back home, less wonderfully abroad, but they still made
money, as Huffington Post pointed out, (or a similar website did), so they are
in the gravy, at least in the short term. In the end, it all comes down to the
money, so the titular characters of the novel trilogy and movie, (and the movie
is likely to have a sequel), are/were onto something, after all.
The same goes for the LJ Netflix movie – proportionally, it
has as much restructuring as KK’s movie – i.e. ‘Asians’ – did. As it was said
before, the titular heroine is not biracial
as she was in the novels, (and let us be fair, this is a big deal), she is
wholly Asian, her father is not her father, but is her stepfather, and etc. As
far as novels-to-movies adaptations go, this is mild staff; when Rick Riordan’s
novels began to be turned into movies they suffered a much worse treatment, to
the point where the author himself publicly denounced them, apparently starting
some sort of a chain reaction: to this day, only the first two novels of his,
(and he had written over a dozen about Percy and Annabeth, the Kane twins,
Magnus Chase and his friends and so on), became movies and no talk has been
raised about any repeat experience. Some of the novels were adapted into
comics, but so far only the Kane chronicles were adapted completely; clearly,
Riordan’s works have a reputation of some sort by now, so there is that. What
next?
FH and its’ new heroes, that is what. It was discussed
earlier that it was somewhat weird that the new heroes of the game also came
from the Far East/Orient, just as the Samurai did, making it something of a
repetition, but it is still very – convenient for FH that their new heroes are
Oriental, thus giving team Ubisoft an extra edge to cashing-in on their fans –
and team Ubisoft is firing on all cylinders here. They are fixing the technical
issues and they are improving their story-telling aspect too: now FH has an
arcade mode, which is something of a Choose Your Own Adventure sort of thing,
complete with varying quests and levels of difficulty, something new and
exciting. Go them! They are playing their cards close now, their level of
cooperation with such YouTube channels as GameSpot, IGN and AWE Me has vanished,
but maybe this is justified: in the past such alliances didn’t give Ubisoft
much of an advantage, so they went in a different direction, and it seems to be
working better, so good luck to Ubisoft, one guesses.
And now we are back at ‘Iron Fist’, who, as a show with – at
least partially – Asian-American cast should be in a right place for some extra
PR and benefits, as Ubisoft’s FH game is. Only it has not aired yet, (and it already
has a weird reputation), so its situation is more ambiguous. Bugger. Still, it
could be worse; it could have been like the ‘Dragonballs: Evolution’ movie or
the 2017’s Power Rangers’ movie reboot. Both failed so miserably, that they are
largely gone by now, so there is that.
…Well, I guess this is it for now; see you all soon!
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