#due to time-travel everyone thinks Danny is an Ancient God

[thelastmanipulation]

Here are some books/tv shows/movies that Black Friday is reminds me of for you to check out! Please feel free to reblog and add to the list! 

Books

1. Desperation - Stephen King/ Regulators - Stephen King

Much like TGWDLM and Black Friday, Desperation/Regulators are two books that take place in alternative universes, featuring similar characters but different plots.

Desperation is about a place where the seams between worlds are thin. A horrific creature known as Tak is released and takes human form by hijacking some of the town's residents. The forces of good orchestrate a confrontation between this ancient evil and a group of unsuspecting travelers led by David Carter, a young boy who speaks to God. 

The conflict between Webby/Hannah and Wiggly/Linda reminds me of the conflict between God/ David and Tak/town’s residents.

Regulators is about four vans containing shotgun-wielding "regulators" who terrorize a suburban street, cold-bloodedly killing anyone foolish enough to venture outdoors. Houses mysteriously transform into log cabins and the street now ends in what looks like a child's hand-drawn western landscape. Masterminding this sudden onslaught is the evil creature Tak, who has taken over the body of an autistic boy whose parents were killed in a drive-by shooting several months earlier. 

2. The Shining - Stephen King

Jack Torrance, an aspiring writer and recovering alcoholic accepts a position as the off-season caretaker of the historic Overlook Hotel. His wife and young son accompany him on this job. His on Danny Torrance, possesses "the shining", an array of psychic abilities that allow Danny to see the hotel's horrific past. After a winter storm leaves them snowbound, the supernatural forces inhabiting the hotel influence Jack's sanity, leaving his wife and son in incredible danger. 

Hannah’s powers remind me of Danny’s shining ability. Her “two doors, not one” is akin to Danny’s “Redrum.”

3. Needful Things - Stephen King

A little curio shop opens for business in the town of Castle Rock. Its mysterious proprietor, Leland Gaunt, seems to have something for everyone. The heart’s desire can easily be found among the curiosities in exchange for a little money and—at the specific request of Leland Gaunt—a whole lot of menace against their fellow neighbors. No one takes heed of the little sign hanging on the wall: Caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. 

Much like how in Black Friday, people are desperately seeking a Wiggly due to a void in their lives, Needful Things explores the how far people would go to keep the material things that fill a void in their life 

4. Station Eleven -  Emily St. John Mandel

One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies on-stage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve due to the spread of a disease. Moving back and forth in time, this novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Travelling Symphony, caught in the cross-hairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet. 

Station Eleven focuses on people trying to survive but in hopeful way. The whole book feels like What if Tomorrow Comes, with everyone coming around to comfort each other and thinking about how to move on. It’s a beautiful exploration of humanity. 

TV Shows

1. Stranger Things (specifically season 3)

In a small town where everyone knows everyone, Will Byers disappears near a top-secret government laboratory. On the same night, a strange young girl with telekinetic powers appears at a diner in the town. Dark government agencies and seemingly malevolent supernatural forces converge on the town.

Much like Black Friday, the third season features a girl with powers, creatures from other dimensions, Russians and lots of running around a mall.

Movies

1. Silence of the Lambs 

Young F.B.I. trainee Clarice Starling is assigned to help find a missing woman to save her from an elusive serial killer nicknamed "Buffalo Bill." Hoping to attain a clearer perception of the killer's modus operandi, Clarice reluctantly accepts the help of the brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic mass murderer, Dr Hannibal Lecter. 

The movie features the famous line “It puts the lotion on its skin or it gets the hose again.” Feast and Famine seems to reference this line through “It puts the toy into the plastic / It bags it up with gift receipt.” 

[ndx94]

My pro-choice Democrat anti-Trump pro-CCP parents are furious with me that my college girlfriend and I twice procured emergency contraception in 2007 and my brother will not talk to me as it turns out I’m not a virgin retard, but had sexual intercourse within a committed thought-we’d-get-married love-relationship in my senior year of college and lived with her in the year following that and twice in my life I committed seminal ejaculation within the context of a female anatomy belonging to someone who badly wanted to get pregnant and be “settled” with me at the age of 21, after our parents had very carefully trained us not to have sex before marriage, warned us about attending Rutgers University, and also demanded us to “take responsibility” in the case of conception.

I am not happy about being an abortionist, babykiller, or anything like that but the idea that I wasn’t put up to it in the least or that you can vote for Bill Clinton and love porneia and still hold your son 100% accountable for his morals at the age of 21 when he was traumatized by the Iraq War and sleep-deprived for 3 years due to stress and emotional abuse by his racist Pakistani anti-white roommate in college and naturally he would then not want to come inside girl to cope or work out and be a nice person in hope of getting love in general rather than gun for Law School.  TW-1 and I thought we would get married; we were both virgins in the autumn of 2006 and I at least have not so much as copped a feel of a breast-outline or buttock since TW-1 and I broke up in summer ‘07 let alone ‘played the lottery’ (pregnancy is winning). 

I don’t like talking about this but it’s one thing people want to know about and I feel the right to say a few words in my defense on Planet Roe America and as a person who I’m pretty sure was conceived both outside of wedlock and in cis-rape or rape by deception, and if my little “Jaehee’s helper-bird” friend is correct, son of a guy who got so mad I didn’t myself rape the American Korean Presbyterian Pastor’s daughter (a.k.a. my sister) in the summer of 2002 that he fond some girl to drug and rape as symbolic coping.

I still remember well the autumn afternoon I met Taiwan-1, whose name is Rebecca or in Mandarin means “pure literature” or as I like to say “pellucid and literary” or “limpid and well-lettered.”  As with the pastor’s daughter I in retrospect devoutly if not ardently regret not being closer to her father, who cared about me far more than my biological begetter; a Confucian gentleman and natural scholar / lover of moral philosophy who happened to become a banker just b/c he had to help his family (and all of Taiwan as a national-level financier), rather than a scholar of history and poetry as I apparently myself have become.

The evening Taiwan-1 and I met was the first day in my life I drank a full glass of wine.  It was at a Rutgers English Department function related to the Honors Thesis I wrote, also on Taiwan and the director Hou Hsiao Hsien.  I had originally wanted to write my thesis on a videogame called Final Fantasy VIII which in retrospect was an augury of how E. Asian media would summon people to Love not just through Squaresoft but later SM Entertainment, about which I also hoped to write an academic thesis before breaking hard toward political scholarship and military or what I call the sort of “hard science ofo Korean Studies’ like statistics, economics, history, primary source documents, constitutional and legal analysis, reading the daily papers, esp. 38North which is an amazing labor of love from generals who just think all day every day about saving their boys. 

The emotion that I felt as I drank that my first wine - I had just come from dropping off my desktop / tower PC to be repaired at the Livingston Campus Rutgers PC shop, and was looking forward to working on my writing on my father’s Windows 98 laptop (I didn’t like laptops at the time but felt comfortable / nostalgic using Win98 in 2006, the apparent end of the universe) - was like, “Wahh [soft but real cry], does David Johnston really deserve nothing and no one?”  I’m not trying to say I am selfish or unselfish but I had no friends, the only person I really liked was Big Bad Boris a.k.a. Aleksey “Alex” Kasavin who worked Google later on then Microsoft via Yale MBA program, but he doesn’t like / has never opened up to me or wanted to be close or committed or “eternal roommates” as I used to feel about him.  I recently wrote Aleksey a last letter just expressing frankly “sorry to you + sorry to me too” that I always wanted to be close with him and this was not reciprocated; it might’ve been a little cross but after 18 years of this person grinning at me without hugging me (platonically but I have always wanted a close male friendship like a I briefly had with Danny Shin in KR), what am I supposed to do but say something?

When Rebecca looked up at me at the RU English Honors Program welcoming gala at Zimmerli Museum I heard what was either glass breaking - like a Jewish wedding where the couple stomp a glass before kissing, a ritual I love / adore somehow - or at least someone toasting.  I had talked to this Korean grad-student.  Because of Rebecca I came out of my shell a bit and decided instead of pulling ice cream or delivering pizzas I would try to be slightly more social and get a job as a writing-tutor instead, since I was working on my creative writing daily since 2005, and had started my “bioweapons Taiwanese- and Korean-America families + abortion + China and America assassinating indigenous peoples” novel in 2003 (the “soft sci fi of Sci-Rom / Futurist Romantic Realism) novel that my parents hate me not publishing since it predicted Covid in a way), and had a good “ear” as a reader (I loved imitating esp. Haruki Murakami and a little Gao Xingjian).

TW-1 and I courted between September and November.  One of the formative drives in our relationship was her parents’ moving back to Taiwan for her dad’s job and mine moving to WI leaving us all alone together in New Jersey.  Another, we were both studying Taiwan.  My uncle’s wife is also Taiwanese.  I don’t want to give the details of our sexual relationship since this person is an important working professional, a scholar, but we lost our virginities in a hotel suite in Washington, which is why I posted this pic of drapes.  I’ll never forget how the day afterward I felt an insane, idiopathic “atheist-thought-bullet-packet” in my head then spent the day working on my creative writing at the “business lounge corner” of the Embassy Suite while TW-1 watched anime in her t-shirt.  For some reason that day when I went on my PC to check e-mail I got a communication from my online DAI Forum friend who hadn’t reached out to me in more than a year, as if psychically he just knew that there had been a disturbance in the force or, as I like to say, the great “gayakeum” that binds some people had been detuned or returned.

This is “American Korean Millennial Lit; the story of some semen / sperm” but it seems meaningful somehow that on the night I actually punctured her virginal membrance neither of us completed orgasm / ejaculation.  She started crying and then I stopped and we both went to sleep and left each other alone.  Then all day we just nursed ourselves in our way, she with Japanese stuff and I with my creative writing or “journals.”  We went out to dinner and it was a very “Maison Ikkoku” moment in the November weather in her metallic dress and my military jacket and polo shirt and taped glasses.  That night I also discovered my incredible intuitive capacity for what you might call “air-braking” or being able to stay inside really really really close to the moment of potential impregnation.  I don’t like talking about porneia and had wished I left it all behind but like in JAV when they have to j--- themselves before doing something obscene that men of my gen. were influenced by the millions to do to insult their GF’s and wives t’s pathetic to me that they can’t “air-burst the A-Bomb at 100 feet.”  It was 15 years ago and today I think like why did God create sexual organs to look that way and be that way, stuff like frankly what’s the relationship between male circumcision and conscience (removing the ”foreskin of the heart”). 

I am not without tremendous fault in my relationship with TW-1 esp. due to the fact that all the while we were together I was haunted by the presence or memory or eventual wish to be together again with S’hai-1.  I could never fully convince myself that TW was better and yet by the same token if I’m being honest my attitude in 2006 was, “If Kate doesn’t want me / is never coming back I am still gonna live life and try to be married with children and a profession because I am not trash just because she gets mad and fires me whenever she feels like it.”  Our relationship was also marked by meddling from both her family and friends and mine.

I don’t know why I’m saying this now as it is the ancient past and I am writing almost something that I fear the Holy Ghost does not want me to as everyone has to work out their salvation for themselves with fear and trembling and their seed and eggs are their own or the Lord’s.

TW-1 and I had a good relationship in all honesty except for money.  The MD at Aurora Psychiatric and my brother and parents are mad.  The MD was like “get a car maybe blahblah then do some Bulgarian deadlifts, Axe body spray” ahhaha alright just the car and I LOVE and thank Hananim for this man but he is Indian-American anwyay I was like “Dude we traveled around half the world, we shared so many meals in so many places.”  MD didn’t realize relationships are like that; you don’t just arrive but share the whole journey of two lives as one, and it’s infinitely sad when you share that way with one person then another rather than one all the way through.  It was really liek a marriage in the sense that pace Ecclesiastes I was “seeing the world with my wife.”

My very favorite day together with TW-1 was in Princeton, NJ at Panera or Au bon Pain drinking espresso.  I later wrote a scene in Hot Pursuit in Princeton and also K-pop fanfic in which I was married to I-know-not-whom but we were dropping off our daughter Krystal for classes.  It was common for Millennials at Rutgers at least in the honors program to visit Princeton as a vacation or “different oxygen” since P is only about 1 hour down the road from this mad disheartening to some soul-breaking suicide-inducing state school, nestled in woods.  Educational Testing Service / the makers of the SAT and TOEIC and TOEFL also have their headquarters around there adn I nearly got a job there in 2007, my first dream job as I believed that the SAT protected gifted young people from arbitrary often intellectually envious subjective teachers; a view on standardized testing shared by all rational governments but especially Korea and Asia in general, and also by the serious and caring moral, now basically religious scholar / sociologist Charles Murray, who believed he was saved from racists, as were many Jews in the days the Ivy League was hyper-anti-Semitic (word to the wise: they’re now anti-Korean mutatis mutandis).

The Lord is high and lifted up

The Lord is lifted up

[daresplaining]

Iron Fist Countdown: 4 Days

K’un-Lun, the Immortal Weapons, and the Capital Cities of Heaven

    Heart of the dragon! With only a few short days left before the show, we’re doing a deep dive into the details of the Iron Fist mythos and the eternal city of K’un-Lun! 

K’un-Lun, the Shining City

    Occasionally, early Iron Fist comics will refer to K’un-Lun as a city hidden deep in the Himalayas-- but that doesn’t come close to describing its remoteness. Technically, it only exists in the same physical space as the Himalayas for a single day, once every ten years. The rest of the time, K’un-Lun is located in an alternate dimension, on an alien planet called H’ylthri. Not much is known about the actual rest of the planet (the citizens of K’un-Lun don’t tend to venture far from the city), but we do know that it is inhabited by a race of maneating sentient plants, also called H’ylthri, and that the valley surrounding the city is infested with extremely aggressive, possibly crazed wolves. 

[Power Man and Iron Fist vol. 1 #75 by Mary Jo Duffy, Kerry Gammill, and Christie Scheele]

    The ten years rule is really more of a guideline than anything, and since practically the moment it was introduced, writers have been scrambling to find ways around it. The city is only accessible in the normal way once every ten years, yes-- but any number of portals and magical forms of travel can get you there. Lei Kung the Thunderer (who we’ll talk about in a moment) once ripped through the fabric of spacetime(!) to make a temporary entrance into the city. Inventor Phineas Randall, the father of former Iron Fist Orson Randall, built a steampunk-style gateway that allowed for passage between the worlds. And Danny once linked the city to his heartbeat to pull it onto the earthly plane permanently-- which worked out about as well as you might expect. 

[Iron Fist/Wolverine #1 by Jay Faerber and Jamal Igle]

    Referred to as paradise by its inhabitants (and the “City of the Damned” by the H’ylthri, who are kind of bitter about its presence on their planet), K’un-Lun is an ancient civilization, laced in magic and long-held traditions. The people who live there are functionally immortal-- that is, they can be killed in combat, but will otherwise live forever. Those not born in the city can be gifted with immortality, if they are deemed worthy of it, and those who break serious enough laws can have their immortality revoked. 

[Iron Fist vol. 4 #4 by James Mullaney, Kevin Lau, and Omar Dogan]

    K’un-Lun is ruled by a hereditary monarch called the August Personage in Jade (or Yu-Ti, if you’re nasty). He is advised by a council of Dragon Kings, who occasionally turn into actual dragons. While functionally immortal like the rest of the citizenry, there is a reasonably regular turnover of the line of succession, because kings always have short lifespans-- particularly in militaristic societies like K’un-Lun’s. Nu-An, the most recent long-serving Yu-Ti, is a particularly bad egg, engaging in everything from corrupt business dealings on Earth to alliances with malevolent gods. He also indirectly killed Wendell (his adopted brother) and Heather Rand, so Danny isn’t a huge fan. 

    The city faces many threats-- from the H’ylthri (who can get pretty violent, for plants), from the other Capital Cities (we’ll get to those in a minute), from internal unrest, and even occasionally from Earth-based forces. The responsibility of maintaining K’un-Lun’s national security falls partly on the city’s war-master, the Thunderer. This position has been held for the past few hundred years by a super cool guy named Lei Kung. 

[Immortal Iron Fist #8 by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, and Roy Allan Martinez]

    Lei Kung is a fascinating character, and someone who we’re hoping will get his live action due in the Netflix show. He is often the voice of reason in the midst of K’un-Lun’s internal conflicts. He is respectful of tradition, yet able to see when and where laws need to be broken for the betterment of the city. And he is a strict-yet-caring teacher, responsible for training all of the young fighters in both physical combat and moral fortitude. Plus, as those for whom he has played father figure over the years would probably attest, he has a soft spot for misfits. (He’s not a great father to his biological son, but that’s another story...)  

[Iron Fist: The Living Weapon #3 by Kaare Andrews]

    When we talk about formal martial arts training in K’un-Lun, of course, we’re talking about men. The city upholds a strict occupational gender divide: Boys are trained in the martial arts, women are taught academics, and the two life paths are kept rigidly separate. (So yes, for anyone who may have been wondering-- Danny probably still has a fourth grade education level when he returns to Earth). Teaching a woman martial arts results in very serious punishment for everyone involved, and hitting a woman can get a man kicked out of the city.       

[Marvel Premiere #24 by Chris Claremont, Pat Broderick, and Phil Rache]

    For this reason, Danny is initially thrown off-balance by the fact that the first two friends he makes upon returning to New York, Colleen Wing and Misty Knight, both kick serious butt-- in public!-- on a daily basis.    

    However, this is one rule that has been undermined for probably centuries. There is a long history of women illegally learning martial arts, and most of the K’un-Lun women who show up in the comics know how to fight. This recently became an organized movement, with Lei Kung helping to train an entire army of women in secret. 

[Immortal Iron Fist #14 by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, and Tonci Zonjic] 

    K’un-Lun is currently in a bit of a mess, but it’s very likely that when it is restored to its former glory, this rule is one that will be consigned to the garbage heap of history.

    No word on whether men will get to study academics, though.   

K’un-Lun Slang

    Listen. If they can make “Sweet Christmas” work in the context of the MCU, they can give us some of this hip K’un-Lun slang too, right? 

The Iron Fist Legacy and the Ch’i-Lin

Bei Ming-Tian: “I am the Iron Fist. I stand before the unstoppable hordes... and I hold them back. That’s what I do. What I’ve always done.”

[Immortal Iron Fist #1 by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, and Travel Foreman]

    The rest of the responsibility for defending K’un-Lun falls, of course, on the Immortal Iron Fist. Sixty-six of these dragon-powered warriors have protected the city over the span of nearly a thousand years, and more will continue to do so far, far into the future. The Iron Fist legacy began partly by chance, born out of a period of great darkness in K’un-Lun’s history. According to the most recent version of continuity, a creature called Changming summoned a horde of monsters to terrorize the city. One of them was a dragon with the snappy name of Shou-Lao the Undying. 

Immortal Iron Fist #23 by Duane Swierczynski, Tonci Zonjic, et al.] 

    Shou-Lao found a home in a cave just outside the city and settled in for a long stay. It was thought to be unkillable (note the “Undying” epithet) because its heart was outside of its body, hidden deep inside the cave. To kill the dragon you had to get to the heart-- and obviously, Shou-Lao felt pretty strongly about not letting that happen. The dragon continued to terrorize the citizens of K’un-Lun, until a young man named either Bei Ming-Tian or Quan Yaozu (depending on which writer you ask) had an idea. He ventured out to the cave and fought the dragon. When the opportunity presented itself, he grabbed Shou-Lao around the middle and used his body to block the hole in the dragon’s chest through which its heart had been removed. This cut off the flow of chi between Shou-Lao and the heart, causing the body to die. Having survived this, the young man went over to Shou-Lao’s still-beating heart and plunged his hands into it (because why not?), absorbing the dragon’s chi and becoming the very first Iron Fist. And that’s how it’s been done ever since.   

[Immortal Iron Fist #7 by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, Leandro Fernandez, et al.]    

    Thus began a sustainable source of magical warriors for the city-- because Shou-Lao always comes back. A certain period of time after dying, an egg appears in the cave, which eventually hatches and grows into another Shou-Lao, ready to be killed by another future Iron Fist. While the procedure for winning the dragon chi has remained the same since the beginning, a certain amount of ritual has been added since. Having acquired the chi of Shou-Lao, Iron Fists are now forced to test their new powers in the Challenge of the Many and the One, in front of the entire population of K’un-Lun.        

[Iron Fist: The Living Weapon #5 by Kaare Andrews]

    During the periods of time between the death of one Iron Fist and the rise of another, the graduating classes from Lei Kung’s school will annually fight to win the right to face the reborn dragon. It’s not an easy feat, and most of those who try to kill Shou-Lao end up dead, so there can be long periods between one Iron Fist and the next. When there is an Iron Fist, anyone else who thinks they have what it takes can, seemingly, challenge the current champion to a formal duel and try to take their chi. 

[Iron Fist vol. 2 #2 by James Felder, Robert Brown, and Mike Thomas]    

    But as it stands, most Iron Fists don’t last long. As warriors and adventurers, they lead dangerous lives anyway, and nearly all them have died at the age of thirty-three at the hands of a creature called the Ch’i-Lin. 

[Immortal Iron Fist #18 by Duane Swierczynski, Russ Heath, and Matt Milla]   

    This creature eats Shou-Lao’s eggs-- and to do so, it hunts down Iron Fists by tracking their chi. It travels around in a human host who uses the name Zhou Cheng (remember that name.) This chi awareness makes the Ch’i-Lin almost impossible to fight. It can predict any move that the Iron Fist it is hunting might make, and the chi of Shou-Lao has no effect on it. Having beaten the Iron Fist into submission, the Ch’i-Lin will rip out their heart and use it as a gateway to K’un-Lun. Once there, the K’un-Lun army will try and prevent it from getting to Shou-Lao’s egg. If the egg is eaten, the city will lose its chance of having any future Iron Fists-- so this is kind of a big deal. Only two Iron Fists have managed to survive their encounters with the Ch’i-Lin: Orson Randall, who drugged himself up on opium to the degree that the creature could no longer detect his chi; and Danny Rand, who had the advantage of teaming up with the other Immortal Weapons.     

The Immortal Weapons 

    K’un-Lun is not alone in the cosmology of magical, dimension-shifting cities. It is part of a collective referred to as the Capital Cities of Heaven. Officially, there are seven cities, each cycling through spacetime at a different rate, and all intersecting with Earth at various points. Each city has its own champion, with their own chi-based powers, who operates along the same lines as the Iron Fist. These superpowered badasses are collectively known as the Immortal Weapons:       

[Immortal Iron Fist #8 by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, David Aja, and Matt Hollingsworth]

    The traditions surrounding each of these champions vary, as do their powers and methods of acquiring them. As Weapons, they are intended to be “wielded” to best serve their city’s interests. All interactions between Weapons can thus be seen as diplomatic in nature. The capital cities maintain a delicate power balance, and past aggressions between Weapons have been enough to create long-held animosity between their corresponding homelands. One of the most important job requirements for the Immortal Weapons is to battle each other every 88 years, during the rare period when all seven cities intersect. The outcome of this pan-dimensional tournament determines the celestial cycling for the next 88 years, and how frequently each city will have access to Earth. 

[Immortal Iron Fist #9 by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, David Aja, and Matt Hollingsworth]

    Because as far as the Iron Fist mythos is concerned, when you get past the complex worldbuilding and endless minutiae, it all comes down to cool kung fu fights. And we wouldn’t want it any other way. 

    We are extremely eager (and just a little bit nervous) to see how all of this will be adapted into the relatively grounded world of the Netflix shows. We really hope they go all out with it. After all, this is Iron Fist. They knew what they were getting into when they picked the character. 

    Certain minor details in the trailers have suggested to us that K’un-Lun may exist in an alternate dimension in the MCU. We really hope this is the case, because that’s a detail they could have easily not used. If so, they may at least have changed the interval at which it intersects with Earth from ten years to fifteen, since that’s how long Danny is gone in this universe. Unless it takes him five years to find his way back to New York-- which isn’t out of the question. 

    There have been only a few suggestions of what form K’un-Lun will take in the show. While ideally, we’d love to see the ancient, complex, drama-filled city of immortals fully explored in live action, it seems likely that it will be downsized for the sake of storytelling convenience. Since so much of this season will be taking place in New York (as it should-- this is Danny’s origin story, after all) it probably won’t have the time to delve deeply into all of the details of K’un-Lun, or to develop it on the scale at which it exists in the comics. The biggest piece of information we have so far on the subject is from the recent Empire Magazine article, in which it is referred to as an “all-male monastery”. We’re not sold on this idea, but of course, we’re going to reserve judgement until we see how it is handled. Danny has also been referred to as a monk in some of the promotional material, which suggests a level of spirituality in his training that is absent in the comics. No one would ever call 616 Danny a monk-- even in DnD terms. He is a warrior all the way. 

    The actual role of the Iron Fist will be pretty much the same: serve and protect K’un-Lun. Since the Hand have been tied into all of this in this universe, the Iron Fist’s tasks will also include directly battling them. We know that-- like in the comics-- MCU Danny will have to juggle his duties and identity as the Iron Fist with his responsibilities on Earth, which will be a lot of fun to watch. Furthermore, we know that the Ch’i-Lin (or at least, Zhou Cheng) will be making an appearance-- but it’s anyone’s guess what form he might take. 

    We also know that the concept of the Immortal Weapons is alive and well in the MCU. Apart from Danny, the only other Weapon that’s definitely been confirmed so far is Bride of Nine Spiders.  

    But if there are two, there have got to be more, right?

    Only four more days (well... three days and a few hours) until we find out!