It's hard to find someone who gives a shit about Iron Fist. As far as Marvel superheroes go, he's a pretty deep cut—maybe not as deep as the Guardians of the Galaxy before they starred in an extremely popular movie, but still relatively obscure. The broad strokes of his character are simple: Danny Rand is the son of a wealthy corporate magnate who loses everything but finds a mythical city where he gains superpowers and martial arts training, returning to New York after 10 years away to both discover himself and reclaim his family's legacy.

This is, essentially, the narrative arc that the upcoming Netflix series Iron Fist will explore. It's pretty cut-and-dry, and also possibly the last thing Netflix's nigh-complete vision of street-level Marvel heroes banding together to form The Defenders needs.

Part of this might be due to the fact that Iron Fist is inherently the most problematic of the four heroes in the Defender's lineup. Created as a response to the '70s Kung Fu craze in America, the dual rationales that introduced Iron Fist to the Marvel Universe are arguably the same ones that notoriously turned down a Bruce Lee TV pitch and greenlit the David Carradine series Kung Fu instead: a fascination with Asian art and culture coupled with a great reluctance to actually put any Asian or Asian-American actors in lead roles. Over the last two years, a number of essays on publications like The Hollywood Reporter and Vulture have argued that the forthcoming Iron Fist series should correct for this and cast an Asian or Asian-American actor in its lead. Instead, Marvel and Netflix decided to cast Game of Thrones' Finn Jones in the lead, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white guy, a move that's faithful to the character's comic book look but also to the comic's problems. Iron Fist will now have to be twice as smart and tell a good story while dodging all of the troublesome Orientalist subtext inherent in the character's origin.

It also makes the show less interesting. While pushing for diversity is often attacked as a way to merely score political points (it's not), there's also a more pragmatic reason to advocate for it: It's an easy way to make a tired story idea immediately more interesting. We have seen superhero origin stories dozens of times now, and the three previous Netflix series have covered the origin of a street-level hero with relatively low-key superpowers pretty exhaustively. Iron Fist, then, desperately needs to stand out. An Asian actor in the lead role would have made for a different, underrepresented lens to explore this world with, offering new insights and cultural conflict. Instead, the only interesting and distinct thing Iron Fist seems to have going for it is extremely flashy action—something that isn't really confirmed as much as it is implied. So let's amend that a bit—Iron Fist desperately needs to have some freaking sweet martial arts sequences, and hopefully smart integration of the comic book mythology. And also, maybe, you know, be about something—kind of like Jessica Jones' exploration of trauma or Luke Cage's hip-hop Western about the need for a bulletproof black man.

The most interesting thing about Iron Fist isn't his origin story. One does not envy the writers who have to come up with thirteen hours of Iron Fist origin stories.

Speaking of comics—there's not a whole to go on when it comes to Iron Fist. While the character has been around since 1974, he's not made much of an impression by himself. The most notable Iron Fist stories often come when he's paired off with another character—like his buddy cop relationship with Luke Cage, which is arguably the most interesting thing about him until a run of Daredevil comics that saw Matt Murdock in prison and asking Danny Rand to wear the horns for him. The only real time Iron Fist shined in a solo story was in 2006, when writers Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction joined artist David Aja for The Immortal Iron Fist, which retroactively made Danny Rand the latest in a long line of Iron Fists throughout history. It was a great change to a then thirty-year-old character that immediately made him more interesting.