With my comment re: Russia and China, I was kind of talking about the comics-verse actually, where Ivan Vanko became close enough to Tony to sacrifice his life saving him and Dimitri Bukharin is apparently a really close personal friend, and then the mutual respect with Temugin plus the fact that Tony seems to work with the Chinese Government a lot (I think SI has/had quite a bit of business there?).
Well, I can't really think of any superhero movie except IM1 where that happens actually. And I'm not sure if you actually mean to say that non-white villains can apparently only be fought by non-white heroes in Hollywood movies, because that seems kind of full of very different unfortunate implications in itself.
Personally, I found Yinsen the Magical South Asian, a much better prospect than Yinsen the Inexplicably White or Yinsen the Secretly Also Evil or Yinsen the Non-Existent. Also if I really wanted to be offended by the portrayal of Brown Guys in IM1, the fact that the Bad Brown Guys were actually working for A Bad White Guy and also got totally made by him, would probably be what'd offend me. (Hey! At least let us be marginally competent at being evil if we have to Bad Guys, yeah?)
Again it is just me, but I feels that the onus of a good Super-hero franchisee is forst and foremost to adapt existing characters and worlds and storylines for a new (as well as the old) audience. As such an Iron Man franchisee which does not have the Mandarin would definitely be a bit of a personal disappointment. I'm hoping we'll see a sympathetic Temugin (the US is much more concerned about being friendly with China than with the middle-east, tbh, so the probability is at least not non-existent) but I won't really be disappointed either way. (As long as the Mandarin is a competent villain that is, but that's more to do with the fact that I like competent villains than anything else)
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Well, I can't really think of any superhero movie except IM1 where that happens actually. And I'm not sure if you actually mean to say that non-white villains can apparently only be fought by non-white heroes in Hollywood movies, because that seems kind of full of very different unfortunate implications in itself.
Personally, I found Yinsen the Magical South Asian, a much better prospect than Yinsen the Inexplicably White or Yinsen the Secretly Also Evil or Yinsen the Non-Existent. Also if I really wanted to be offended by the portrayal of Brown Guys in IM1, the fact that the Bad Brown Guys were actually working for A Bad White Guy and also got totally made by him, would probably be what'd offend me. (Hey! At least let us be marginally competent at being evil if we have to Bad Guys, yeah?)
Again it is just me, but I feels that the onus of a good Super-hero franchisee is forst and foremost to adapt existing characters and worlds and storylines for a new (as well as the old) audience. As such an Iron Man franchisee which does not have the Mandarin would definitely be a bit of a personal disappointment. I'm hoping we'll see a sympathetic Temugin (the US is much more concerned about being friendly with China than with the middle-east, tbh, so the probability is at least not non-existent) but I won't really be disappointed either way. (As long as the Mandarin is a competent villain that is, but that's more to do with the fact that I like competent villains than anything else)