Having is not the same as wanting (or: overthinking TV shows again)

[sholio]

Back at the end of April I rewatched the first season of Iron Fist with rachelmanija, scioscribe, and also inflicted introduced magistrate to it -- in Magi's case, I'm not entirely sure if they're happy about that or not, but they reciprocated by introducing me to Detroit: Become Human, which I now have feelings about and have watched most of a complete playthrough despite never having played the game, so it all balances out ...

ANYWAY. It was fun, and there were parts of the first season that I hadn’t actually seen before (because I was skipping scenes in early season 1, and while I tend to go back and rewatch favorite scenes a lot, there were still some episodes I’d never actually watched in full). I really enjoyed watching the whole season while also knowing where it was going, and discussing it with rachelmanija and scioscribe, we had a sort of epiphany about Danny. I don’t know whether any of this was intended or not, but it certainly fits with what we’ve seen in the show: the skills that it takes to win the Iron Fist are not the same skills that it takes to use or keep it. And Danny’s skill set is geared heavily towards the former and not the latter.

It's partly an innate thing due to temperament, because Danny is incredibly stubborn, hotheaded, good at fighting, and likes to fight, qualities which (at least most of them) predisposed him towards doing well at a competition that was mainly based around tournament fighting. Then once he gets it, the coolheadedness and patience that he needs to use it are not things that he’s particularly good at.

But it’s also that he just wasn’t taught, and that falls squarely on K’un Lun in some really interesting ways. First off, I think they didn’t expect him to do well, and they certainly didn’t expect him to win, and it’s possible that they were even subtly trying to sabotage him (I could see Davos’s mother, at least, doing that, from what we saw of her in season two). But basically they just didn’t see any point in teaching him most of what he was going to need to know if he got the Fist because, well, they didn’t think he actually would. And teaching Danny anything involving coolheaded patience was probably hellaciously difficult anyway. (I mean, imagine Danny as a kid/teenager. He would have been sweet as heck, but I also picture him as a hyperactive, dramatic bundle of complete failure to do what he’s told, with bonus anger issues.)

But there’s also the fact that he wouldn’t have come into it with the same background as Davos and the other kids in the city. His entire upbringing is different. There’s a lot he was never taught, that every other kid would know by the time they were his age. And consequently, there’s a lot he doesn’t even know that he doesn’t know, in the same way that a 10-year-old dropped into a contemporary city would have a major learning curve on things everyone else knows, like how traffic signals work or not putting metal objects in a microwave – stuff that everyone around you knows to the point where they don’t realize it needs to be explained.

So basically, they didn’t think he’d need to know it, he didn’t know he didn’t know it, and he doesn’t really have a temperament that’s well suited to it anyway. It might simply have never occurred to anyone in K’un Lun that someone who was really good at fighting but not that good at patience/meditation/etc would win, because nobody who came up through the same monastery training that Davos got would’ve gotten that far without having a more balanced skill set. 

Either way, once he did win it, they probably thought they had plenty of time to actually teach him how to use it, and then OOPS, off he goes to New York. I mean, let’s face it, giving Danny the incredibly boring job of guarding the pass as a reward for winning the tournament is like, WHAT DID YOU THINK WAS GOING TO HAPPEN, but at the same time it makes perfect sense that they wouldn’t have realized how he’d react, because he’s just not really like anyone else at the monastery – his skills are different, his values are different, he applied himself to his training in different ways. He mostly just wanted to get out. So he gets what anyone at the monastery would consider a high honor, but Danny doesn’t, even if on a surface level he recognizes that it’s supposed to be, and he actually does try. But for most of his life, he’s had the goal of winning the Iron Fist to drive him forward, and then he got it, and now, suddenly he’s lost the goal that was keeping him going. All he has is a “reward” that literally could not be less suited to Danny’s basic temperament and skill set, and he’s still in a place he hates, and, well …

… basically that’s how you end up with Danny in New York being unable to summon the Fist half the time, only able to use it with one hand, and completely unaware of anything else it can do until Bakuto teaches him some basic techniques for healing and recharging. He just didn’t know, no one tried to teach him because they didn’t believe him when he said he was going to win, and then he did win, but being Danny (impulsive as hell, not that good at listening to people, and really unhappy in K’un Lun), he jetted off around the world before anyone could teach him the rest of what he needed to know.

Which is why Davos is better at it from the get-go, because Davos actually paid attention during any parts of their shared training that were not based around punching things, and also Davos probably got extra training that Danny didn't. At the same time, Davos is ALSO a giant ball of unresolved anger issues, which is why the Iron Fist also goes off the rails for him (in a sense), but in a completely different way than it does for Danny. With Danny it's more than he just can't get in tune with it; he's too hotheaded, not controlled enough, and he has trouble inducing the right state of meditative calm. Davos has worked hard at that part -- he can introduce an artificial state of meditative calm, while being basically a simmering cauldron of rage underneath, and he clearly failed to realize the extent to which getting the Iron Fist was not going to help with that.

Comments

[sheron]

I think that was one of my favourite things about S1, that Danny clearly has no clue and is sort of muddling along. One of my favourite tropes is when a character is thrown into the deep end and kind of is actually doing amazingly well for their circumstances, but at the same time it's always by the skin of their teeth.

In short, I *like* that Danny doesn't have the teachings to be IF, because I think he has the inner goodness/character to be IF which is more important, imho, and he can learn the rest. I like to imagine a future some 5 seasons from now when he's completely mastered his craft and then he looks back (travels back?) in time to those early days and just face palms a lot.

[sholio]

Yesss, I love that too. I think the epiphany that he can be really good at one part of it (the fighting part) but not at all good at most of what it takes to actually use it once he got it (which is almost all non-fighting stuff of the "meditate and get in tune with your inner chill" variety) was really helpful to figure out; it's going to be useful for writing him. For one thing, I'm not sure if he realizes it in the beginning either. I don't really think he really thought beyond "get the Iron Fist" at all. It was the focus of his life for most of his formative years, and then he got it, and now he's basically having to figure out not just how to use it but also how to be a ... well, a person, basically. Definitely how to be an adult. That was another thing we talked about on the rewatch, that because of what he went through and the life he's been living, he seems to have kind of just stopped in some ways at age 10 and part of what he's going through in the early part of the series is that he's not just having to re-acclimatize to being in the US, but he's also having to go through a sort of highly accelerated emotional growing-up process.

But yeah, I like that he's very much a work in progress, and in fact is really bad at using the IF early on; he's working his way through a much steeper learning curve than I think he was expecting, on just about every level.

[sovay]

That was another thing we talked about on the rewatch, that because of what he went through and the life he's been living, he seems to have kind of just stopped in some ways at age 10 and part of what he's going through in the early part of the series is that he's not just having to re-acclimatize to being in the US, but he's also having to go through a sort of highly accelerated emotional growing-up process.

Absolutely. (Along with the rest of the cast.) Isn't there even a scene in the first-season finale where the ghosts of his trauma go more or less literally screaming across the present action? I associate it with the sound of the crashing plane.

[sholio]

Oh yeah, it does do that! On my first watch I found the PTSD/flashback effect slightly jarring, but I was a lot more okay with it the second time around; it gets the subjective experience across, I think.

Along with the rest of the cast.

Ahhhh, yeah. Excellent point. I know we've talked about this before, but I really love the way the show reflects and refracts different characters' experiences of childhood trauma, as they search for their various paths through it.

[dirty_diana]

Nothing to add, but yes! this totally makes sense. What's sad is Danny thought getting the Iron Fist would help with his fish out of water feelings, but in fact it only made it more of a thing.

[sholio]

Oh yeah, that's a good point! Awwww. :(

[magistrate]

In my case, at least, I did ask to be introduced to it, so there is that. :P

I still intend to try out S2 at some point and see if it's more up my alley, particularly in the Danny department. I just left the retreat and then fell immediately into SEQUENTIAL DEADLINE HELL, which will resolve... er... sometime around the end of this month. >_>

And then I will possibly write wild AU fic about Bakuto not going from "interestingly morally complex" to "balls-out reckless evil" in 0.00 seconds flat. And also maybe about Joy ending up commiserating with Claire about everything and everyone.

[sholio]

... I feel as if you may want to wait and learn more of Joy's S2 life choices before deciding whether she should be complaining about anyone else's. >_o

(Claire: still the best.)

But yes, in general, I completely understand the deadline issue; I, er, fell headlong into writing for HurtComfortEx and am only now poking my head out and figuring out what else I should technically have going on. I seem to recall a novel I was supposed to be writing around here somewhere.

[magistrate]

I did note the moment in the finale where Davos is like WELP TIME TO KILL MY BEST FRIEND, HELP ME, RANDOM FRIEND-OF-FRIEND, and kinda side-eyed that a little. Does it become worse than that? Are poor life choices contagious?

(I mean, really, Joy. Straight to murder?)

Maybe I'll just write something completely bonkers AU wherein Joy, Claire, and Colleen get fed up with all this bullshit and take over the Hand because if it's under Joy's iron thumb at least they can control and limit it.

[sholio]

I will say this: I actually like S2 Joy a lot better than S1 Joy. In S1 she's just kind of there, being acted upon, and kind of all over the place character-wise, and in S2 she's got a lot more agency and drive. Her choices are sometimes terrible, but they're terrible in the way Ward's often are (it's not so much WHY DID YOUR WRITER DO THAT as AAAA, CAN YOU STOP BEING YOU FOR FIVE MINUTES AND THINK ABOUT THIS PLZ).

ETA: That being said, taking over the Hand (and reshaping it into something on the "ruthless but controlled and useful" end of things) is absolutely something I can see Joy being on board with. It is precisely her kind of bonkers. Claire maybe not so much. Now that I think about it, though, the idea of Joy as a new Hand boss and Claire as the person running after her being like "NOOOOO" works rather well ...

[sholio]

ETA2: And then she finally gets Claire on board as Claire becomes convinced that Joy has the fire but not the level-headedness; all she needs is a partner with some common sense and they can actually do some good.

I'M ACTUALLY CONSIDERING WRITING THIS, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE

[magistrate]

Listen: say what you will, but my AU game is on point.



(Colleen needs to come too. She needs to have her moment of re-creation-based reckoning with the Hand, and she needs to get to reclaim what the Hand means and the potential she experienced and had robbed from her. ...also, she has a built-in base of support within the Hand, in the form of all her students who saw her getting ousted and didn't just blindly fall in on the COLLEEN IS A TRAITOR wagon.)

[sholio]

Yeah, Colleen trying to reconnect with and reorganize her former students is a plausible direction for her, and it works especially well for me post-S2, I think - that's probably the corner of canon that I would set something like this in, if I were going to write it. It wouldn't even have to be AU, because I could see both Colleen and Joy's future character arcs bending in that direction - in fact there's a relationship Colleen has with someone in S2 that would tie into this in really interesting ways ... hMMMM.

(Your AU game is indeed on point.)