Has The Mandarin ever have potential to be a good villain?

Has The Mandarin ever have potential to be a good villain?

Can he be fixed?

He could've but Shane black didn't wanna put forth the effort

Exactly. A great movie version could have revitalized the character like it literally did with Iron Man himself. But nope, Shane Black is a fucking hack and we can't get good super villains from Marvel.

Nice digits.

>Has The Mandarin ever have potential to be a good villain?

Yes. Any villain does with an imaginative writer. The Mandarin is an idea a lot of writers don't seem intellectual enough to grasp, as in he is the opposite of Stark. That's the original idea, where Stark represented Western civilization, capitalism, industry and science, the Mandarin represented the Eastern civilization of communism and mysticism. He made sense at a time when most Asian countries were suffering under these types of regimes.

But too many writers and readers have their head up social justice's ass and automatically see him as a "fun manchu" stereotype character. Not realizing he's representative of an ideology, not a race. Of a time period; not a culture.

So that IDEA is still valid. You just have to tweak him into something more relevant with the same idea. Which is where the movies looked they were going with making him a leader of an Islamic terrorist group or just a terrorist group in general.

But NOPE Black is a hack and thinking this broadly on the issue is too much for him and everyone else involved.

>the Mandarin represented the Eastern civilization of communism and mysticism

But the Mandarin was an explicitly anti-communist technocratic imperialist. He wanted to kick out the communists and make China great again. Mostly with death rays.

That said, he IS the opposite of Iron Man. In wanting to restore Imperial China he shows that he's actually socially and politically regressive in comparison to Tony. And unlike Tony, whose greatest technological achievement was a total game changer born of desperate ingenuity and pure creativity, the Mandarin's great scientific triumph is stealing and adapting alien technology for his own self-aggrandizement. And he's tried to do the same to the Iron Man armor more than once.

Of course, they're both autocratic egomaniacs, but where Tony's creative and progressive, the Mandarin is regressive and non-creative. For all his genius, the Mandarin can't make anything of his own. At best he's the world's greatest reverse-engineer.

>At best he's the world's greatest reverse-engineer.

Exactly. And given China's current penchant for doing this, I think a modern Mandarin who symbolize China's problem with stealing technology.

Sinestro and Black Hand used to be third rate shit tier silver age (literal) mustache twirling villains that were more well known to be bumbling schemer types similar to the Smurfs villain.

Now they are some of the top villains of DC because one writer made them something.

A decent writer can make Mandarin into one scary mutherfucker. He has ten different superpowers. Plus a crashed alien ship and all the technology that comes with it, a giant dragon pet, and a legion of supervillain mooks.

The only time he was ever quickly defeated was when Loki had enough of his shit. Other than that he is usually a really hard fight for Iron Man.

>I think a modern Mandarin who symbolize China's problem with stealing technology.

It's a not a "problem", it's a talent. Why would you work if you can steal the fruits of other people's work and never have to fear retribution?

>Black Hand
>top villain

C'mon, user.

Guy who happens across crashed alien ship and steals the technology inside to be a superpowered man-god can be done without making him into come caricature villain.

So don't give him flowing robes and a fu manchu mustache. Have him wear modern clothes and act like he came from the 21st century.

It would be easy to have some of the other Iron Man villains and link them to Mandarin too. Just make them Mandarin mooks that are using one of his rings.
>Whirlwind-vortex ring
>Blizzard-ice ring
>Heatwave-fire ring
>Living Laser-light ring
>Unicorn-electric ring
>Ghost- disintegration ring
>Gery Gargoyle-transform ring
>Controller-mental ring

A story where Mandarin dies and 10 quirky mooks inherit his rings? Jolly good idea.

He has been at the top of a couple events in the last few years. And is the conduit for the avatar of Death to enter that universe.

And really, compared to the pathetic shit he was in the silver age, it was just sad even for that era. The guy who just wore a lot of yellow was ten times more threatening than him.

Because we can just feed you bad information and watch it destroy your society from the inside out.

Did you really think your escalators are dangerous because of cheaping out on safety equipment?

There is nothing wrong with the Mandarin's robes so long as you remember he's evoking Chinese nobility and not dressing like a wizard. It's on exactly the same level as Baron Zemo wearing purple, ermine, and a golden crown.

>So don't give him flowing robes and a fu manchu mustache. Have him wear modern clothes and act like he came from the 21st century.

So take away everything that makes him cool?

I say keep the mustache, but update his outfit to be something more accurately Chinese, honestly I'm surprised no one's tried to make him into an Iron Fist villain, he'd be a good fit with some minor tweaking

>Why would you work if you can steal the fruits of other people's work and never have to fear retribution?

Because most all of man's ethics and morals centering around this being a bad concept that hurts other people? Stealing things is wrong.

Why not both? Iron Fist; Iron Man, both fight the Mandarin like Iron Man and Spider-Man both fight the Green Goblin.

I like villain crossing overs. I think they all live in a too small a world for them not to bump into each other. If one super hero is busy why can't another go and take care of their super villain? Do they call each other up and say "NO THATS MY BAD GUY YOU CANT DEAL WITH MY PROBLEMS FOR ME!!!" or just say "Hey thanks for getting my back on that, I owe you one?'

Plus this is how a lot of great stories get their start. Like Wolverine being a villain for Hulk at first and then he was used later in X-Men.

Hey look, it's a faggot on Sup Forums that never read any comics at all and only goes by what they read on a wiki

We never get those around here

Honestly I think making him look like a wizard might be a better way to go.

Makes the whole viewing technology thing work out when he is using it and pretending to be magic.

Isn't he a little better than Iron Fist even without the rings?

He is perfectly capable of fighting Iron Man without the rings in hand to hand and beating him. That sounds a bit outside IF's ability to do.

Honestly he and his crew should be one of the Avenger's most feared opponents. And S.H.I.E.L.D. should be flat out shitless whenever they show up.

>Huh....I didn't expect to meet my soul mate today.

This is so true. I wish modern writers would read Mandy's original first appearances & you'd see that he is a real dick, not because he's Asian or even an extreme traditionalist..he is just a DICK. The commies thought he was a dick, the peasants thought he was a dick. He is all about the divine rights of nobility & castes...meanwhile he's HALF BRITISH on his Mom's side which it seems like everyone has forgotten about. So despite his pretense for 'restoring China' he's really full of shit and just has a huge sense of dickish entitlement. He is "the Old World" of monarchies & empires and Silver Age Stark was all Howard Hughes post war "Can do!" capitalism.

Granted Stark isn't like THAT anymore since the inception of the RDJ films but mandy still is a great villain if modern writers just stopped thinking of him as a Yellow Peril character.

So, if Mandarin made a comeback in the movie universe, again as a leader of a terro group or something, it could still turn out good? I mean, embracing the whole "Mandarin is an idea" thing. It could sell the whole "actor playing" shtick from earlier.
They gave up on him, innit.

Mandarin should be the big bad of Central Asia

Sort of like Doom being the scary guy of Eastern Europe, Nefaria of South Europe, Graviton is the scary one of North America..

Exactly I was actually about to make a follow up post about how he was anti-Chinese per say because the Chinese were ALWAYS shown to hate him too. He's no more a racist caricature than having the Triad's as bad guys. He's just a bad mother fucker who happens to be Chinese. He likes that culture.

It could be done. I got this image in my head.

>Teaser trailer opens...

>Mandarin played by some actual Asian actor,
>Looks like Gin from the Iron Man teenager show.
>Iron Man flying at full speed, first first at Mandarin
>ZZZOOOOOOMMMM
>*THUNK*
>Mandarin catches his fist, bare-handed as one of this rings is glowing.
>Tony tries the other fist.
>He catches both of them
>Won't let him go.
>Bends Tony down to his knees..
>Mandarin leans down, face-to-face
>"Tell me, Mr. Stark, how do you justify calling yourself the Iron Man.... when you're obviously... barely A MAN!"
>Mandarin lets go of his fists
>Immediately roundhouse kicks Iron Man so hard his face plate flies off
>Mandarin stands above a bewildered, frightened looking Tony..

>"You are nothing more than a knight in shiny, decidant armor, where as I?

>I AM A KING!"

>Electric ring lights up
>Punches down on the arc reactor
>Iron Man shuts off.

>IRON MAN 4: ENTER THE MANDARIN.

Plus giving Mandarin his rings gives him the ability of ten different super powers basically. That could be a theme in the movie, Stark referring to him as like having ten different powered baddies rolled into one.

So he has to out think and out smart him. Find a way to counter the effects of each ring. You know, character growth. Instead of automatically winning.

I was more thinking about him being like James Bond - still the same "James Bond 007" but played by different actors, under different styles and different aesthetics throughout the years. Whatever.

the setup in Iron Man 3 could have been great, too, if they didn't turn him into a cheap gag.

It was kind of meta. As you said, classic Mandarin was deliberately constructed to represent everything that is the enemy of western nationalism in the era he was made, not unlike the Red Skull was for the '40s. The film kind of deconstructed that, and had the Mandarin be a /persona/ that was constructed with that same goal in mind; a villain that encompasses everything that America is afraid of. That, by itself, is a pretty interesting idea, and they executed it well right up until they revealed it was all a joke.

If they played it straight, kept Ben Kingsley Mandarin as the mastermind and the guy behind or in charge of the Ten Rings, expanded on them to be a multinational cabal of terrorists, pirates, arms dealers, etc, with Killian (and possibly Stane and Hammer before him) as their American supplier... That could have been a great movie.

Hell, if they wanted to go all out, instead of the Vice President being blackmailed, reveal that the Mandarin was someone he helped create. A dirty politician getting in bed with the bad guys to create a brown boogeyman that scares Americans into voting for more government power is topical as fuck.

>Graviton
???

Most powerful fucker on 616 Earth when Molecule Man is not around. Avengers actually try to avoid him when they go up to Canada.

If we agree on the theory that at best, all he could do is reverse engineer stuff, that still leaves open a barn door sized avenue of things Mandarin could be doing.
It's the peanut butter and jelly sandwich deal. He can't invent either one, but he could have the insight of seeing what the pair combined could be. Innovation of the use of existing technology is darned hard to rule out for anyone with a brain.

Yea this guy makes superteams his bitch, warps through dimensions, builds planets with atmospheres, and is immune to Vision and Thor.

He and Count Nefaria are supposed to be the top two guys the Avengers can barely beat.

I think that is good enough considering the technology makes him essentially a wizard.

>communism and mysticism
But communism is explicitly materialist and thus opposed to mysticism. And representing "Eastern civilization" as a cackling 2 dimensional supervillain is pretty stupid, even if you ignore the racist implications.

You know Mandarin routinely loans out his rings to minions all the time?

Copying isn't stealing though. And you can't actually own anything non-physical like an idea.

Exactly. They shoot themselves in the foot, they had some good ideas going but apparently were too retarded or thought the audience was too dumb to pull it off (the whole movie is constantly making fun of the audience so it's the latter). But the backlash against the movie proves how that gamble backfired and a serious Mandarin plot would of been better.

Plus they could of connected it to HYDRA too since it looks like they wanted to do that with everything in the Avengers anyways. But I'd prefer it to be it's own thing, like HYDRA started the Ten Rings but it branched off into it's own organization with it's own goals, being lead by Mandarin.

... I knew I get this response. It's the part of communism where hippies like it and those same hippies like "spiritual" things too. Not a matter of stated doctrines or actual historical relevancy, but where the ideas meet and have things in common.

It's the execution of communism that ends up in feudalism too. That ends up in dictators. Think how communism in the middle east created these religious regimes. It's the same bone structure with a different skin.

>And representing "Eastern civilization" as a cackling 2 dimensional supervillain is pretty stupid, even if you ignore the racist implications.

People like you are the reason people can't look past those implications -- it's all you fucking see. Projecting racism is for the intellectually weak.

That doesn't mean he's not a bad character still. Black Hand is just as bland and boring as he was before. Now he's just got an important job.

yes, but asian people are desperate to cash in on this racism thing so you can't portray chinese people as evil any more.

Not even ones who are giant eggs.

But Mandarin HATES communism. What the fuck
Do you ever read any Mandarin story? And there's nothing mystical about him. His rings are alien tech.

they're mystical alien tech though.

Make Shang-Chi his son.

I know "on /co no one really reads comics", but the Mandarin has been a great villain.

The best version of all was during the "Iron Man: Director of SHIELD / Haunted" saga by the Knaufs, a criminally underrated run that is often forgotten because not only is sandwiched between Ellis' Extremis and Fraction's Downeyfication of the character, but stuck in the middle of the whole Civil War shit that made Tony the most hateable man in the MU.

Despite all that, it was fucking epic, and the Mandarin was formidable and threatening throught it.

Dunno, I loved Director of SHIELD to pieces, but I don't think Mandarin really stood out there. He didn't challenge Tony in an interesting or special way, he was just a huge bad guy.

To be honest, I don't find the ideas laid out here all that compelling. Western Can-Do-ism vs Eastern ideologies is kind of shit and discredited and would take a writer of considerable finesse not to turn into a political wankfest or worse. Progress vs regress is just sort of superficial. Futurism is Tony's aesthetic, it's not the core of his story.

To my mind, Iron man is about responsibility and legacy. Responsibility for yourself, for others, for your past mistakes, for your your inventions and both the good and the bad they do. That's Iron Man to me, and I think most of Tony's best stories (including all of the movies) tap into that and explore what the limits of his responsibility are and how he copes with it. Most of his villains should then challenge him somewhere on that level, and I can't really figure out how to plug the Mandarin into that. Sure, you can have him running around stealing and perverting Tony's tech, but you could probably do that even better with guys like Obadiah Stane, AIM, or any of the other bizzaro Iron Men.

I just don't think the Mandarin works anymore.

He could basically be Dr. Doom with more magic and terrorist tactics, but that's all I can think of.

That's sort of how he was portrayed in Avengers Alliance. Which I think was a good take on the character. I think the best way is to play him as an anti-villain in a sort of "your terrorist is my freedom fighter way". Emphasize his anti-colonial aspects, maybe tone down his pan-Asian ones, and really stress that he thinks he is working towards the greater good.

Avengers Alliance had the best writing of the last 30 years for pretty much every character featured in it.

Rember when comicbookcast said that Mandarin was a bad villain because he was racist

>tfw they'll never bring Mandarin back in the MCU in order to change this debacle that IronMan3 created

You should learn how American industry started.

Spoiler: Some guys stole blueprints for weeving machines from France and Britain. China is just doing the same shit.

>Has The Mandarin ever have potential to be a good villain?

Oh, there's plenty of stuff to work with with the Mandarin.
The pre-Communist loyalties.
The magic rings.
The ties to Fin Fang Foom.
That alone gives you TONS to work with.

It's just that he started out as a pretty forthright Yellow Panic stereotype, and they've had a lot of trouble getting past that.

Well, yeah. That is what he does. His rings are the result of him weaponizing a starship drive.

The silk trade was started by stealing moths from china and smuggling them back to europe.

Not really. They stole the worms because they were already trading silk.

It's just the Byzantines wanted MORE silk, and less Chinese monopoly on it.

bump

>Iron Man should just be Tony moaning over his mistakes over & over again
>Western Can-Do-ism vs Eastern ideologies is kind of shit and discredited

Go back to Sup Forums

How in the everloving fuck is anything I said Sup Forums?

Everything is Sup Forums here on Sup Forums, especially if it upsets or offends us.

Wasn't there a move tie in comic that explained there was a real Mandarin and he was extremely pissed off with the Ironman 2 version?

I feel like it had Rhodey in it and was during the events of the Avengers. Maybe I'm mixing things up...

>Ironman 3 version*

I remember back before Iron Man 3 came out and they were releasing the first images of Ben Kingsley Mandarin, he has those brass rings on every finger. And a few people working on the film in interviews said that the rings did something, just not what fans would expect.

As far as I can tell they never did a damn thing.

There was a one shot where Trevor (Ben Kingsley) gets abducted when 10 Rings attacks the prison. One of the goons says that he is going to take him to see the true Mandarin and then nothing came of that. Could have atleast used them in AoS. For that matter SHIELD should be fighting the Hand as well.

I think another part of the problem is that since the late 80's Marvel has not had any fucking clue what to do with the guy either.

>In the early 90's he was some Chinese wizard type with dragon hands and was anti technology. Then he died
>Then they had his son who did not have rings and was a martial artist that could take on Iron Man hand to hand.
>The guy became an evil businessman rival to Tony who owned most of Hong Kong
>Then he was replaced by a guy claiming to be the old Mandarin who had the rings fused into his spine
>Then another guy claiming to be the old Mandarin came back, killed Temugen and has rings again only they are now other cosmic beings trapped in each ring.

No two writers have the same idea for the guy so I can see a director with zero prior knowledge assuming they can do whatever they want with the character since it is such a clusterfuck in comics.

I mean, there are no bad characters, only bad writers, but yes Mandarin is horrible and yet to have good stories.

Mandarin and Ra's Al Ghul are both transparent Fu Manchu knockoffs and Ra's is GOAT so there's really no excuse.

I'm pretty sure the real issue is that Iron Man on the whole is pretty shit.

>The best version of all was during the "Iron Man: Director of SHIELD / Haunted" saga by the Knaufs, a criminally underrated run that is often forgotten because not only is sandwiched between Ellis' Extremis and Fraction's Downeyfication of the character, but stuck in the middle of the whole Civil War shit that made Tony the most hateable man in the MU.
>Despite all that, it was fucking epic, and the Mandarin was formidable and threatening throught it.
This fucking phenomenal arc.

Thing is, even with all of Mandarin's potential, he suffers for the fact that he's Asian. Comic writers rarely depict an Asian well and Disney doesn't want to piss off the ChiCom market.

Except nobody remembers Ra's originally being Chinese. Having him be some pseudo-Arab dude is slightly more acceptable because he looks foreign enough like Omar Shariff playing white characters.

i'm a long time mandarian hate but i've heard a lot that's his only good stuff

I thought Ra's was always vaguely middle eastern bc cradle of civilization history and shit.

I'm not too into Batman, but from what I've seen of him he seems more Near/Mid-East.

Ra's was a Chinese dude who ended up in Arabia according to his backstory; something which modern writers have forgotten.

Just have a villain that is not another guy in power armor.