I've seen this floating on the internet and wondered what you thought. What do you think of the headcanon where Lei Kung and/or Yu Ti needed a human shield/sacrifice to feed to Shou Lao. So they rigged it all so that way the outsider, Danny, would "win" and go be the dragon's dinner instead of one of the Kun Lun natives?
Ooh, interesting! That’s sort of a combination of two bits of continuity that actually do exist. One is from Power Man and Iron Fist vol. 1 #75, in which Danny returns to K’un-Lun and discovers that the people who’d been killed fighting Shou-Lao over the years were actually dying as sacrifices to appease the malevolent god/sorcerer Master Khan, with whom the city’s Yu-Tis have a long-held arrangement.
Danny: “How… could the people have gone along with this…?!”
Nu-An: “The people do not know. It has always been the leaders’ secret, our responsibility to choose sacrifices, and so protect the majority of our people. […] For generations, young warriors marched off, hoping to win the Iron Fist, and as we planned, all of them fell to Shou Lao the Undying… until you.”
Master Khan: “Shou Lao was the mightiest of my creatures until you, a mortal youth, did the unspeakable and slew him! The heart of the dragon was the focus of my power upon this world, until you ruined it. And now its stolen energies reside within your own heart!”
Power Man and Iron Fist vol. 1 #75 by Mary Jo Duffy, Kerry Gammill, and Christie Scheele
This was long before the Iron Fist legacy had been written into the worldbuilding, so at that point in continuity Danny was the only person to have ever killed Shou-Lao. Nu-An and Master Khan are pissed off about his survival, and so they try to kill him again during his visit (he survives, with help from Lei Kung and Luke). For a long time afterward, he struggles with a crisis of identity thanks to this horrifying discovery about his home. This plot point was essentially retconned away by the introduction of the legacy in Immortal Iron Fist.
And Living Weapon and Brisson’s run introduced and explored the fact that Shu-Hu, the robot that Iron Fist candidates have to fight in the Challenge of the Many and the One, was actually being controlled by the Yu-Ti so that he could rig the results. The Yu-Ti at the time made a business deal with Orson Randall’s father soon after he arrived in K’un-Lun– that he would build him tech (most notably, the Randall Gate) in exchange for Orson becoming the Iron Fist. The actual flesh-and-blood Shu-Hu who had been the One for centuries refused to throw the fight, and so the Yu-Ti had him replaced.
Shu-Hu: “Our Yu-Ti was seduced by their tales of the outside world. He wanted to experience it for himself. And so, a deal was struck. I was expected to intentionally lose to the outworlder’s son, Orson Randall, so that he could become the next Iron Fist. I could not take part in the corruption, so I left the city I loved. The Yu-Ti replaced me with a robot that would not question, that would only obey. And from then on, he chose Iron Fists to serve his own purpose. No longer leaving it to fate. The mantle of the Iron Fist was never meant for outworlders. It was meant for us. So we could protect ourselves against those who’d seek to bring us harm.”
Iron Fist vol. 5 #5 by Ed Brisson, Mike Perkins, and Andy Troy
Neither comic reveals whether Orson won because of this ruse or under his own power (I’m inclined to believe the latter, because… come on, it’s Orson), or what the Yu-Ti intended the results of Danny’s fight to be. But the first arc of Brisson’s run centered around Danny proving himself by besting the real Shu-Hu in combat.
That headcanon would make the most sense in pre-IIF (pre-legacy) continuity, because it implies that fighting Shou-Lao is a guaranteed death sentence. And since that version of continuity isn’t directly relevant anymore thanks to all of the retcons, and also because I’m less a fan of that continuity (both because of its white savior-y elements and because the legacy is just really cool), I personally wouldn’t adopt that headcanon for the main series. I don’t find the idea of the Iron Fist being used as trick as compelling as it’s being an actual, attainable position. However, that said… I would read the heck out of a dark What If? comic with that premise!
