Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1971498-20140219002039/@comment-1971498-20140219115032

New Captain wrote: The Mandarin is a mantle passed down through the ages, and that the ten rings existed throughout the first and second Iron Man movies (the people who give Mickey Rourke his tickets to America are the Ten Rings, as well). - source. Exactly this. I think the confusion being made here seems to be that people are thinking I'm insisting that Killian was a "Mandarin", just because of how back then I insisted that was the true alter ego of the Mandarin. With the One-Shot out and Drew Pearce debunking a lot of speculation, I felt like I should re-word Killian's description to suit the new information without removing his actual involvement with the whole Mandarin plot. By saying that he adopted the mantle, it doesn't mean he's the alter ego, far from it. It just shows how he manipulated people around him by masquerading his actions as if it was made by the "Mandarin", literally adopting the mantle as if he created the character on his own (even if its not true).

Even Drew Pearce said that he doesn't even know what a "legitimate" Mandarin means on twitter, and that Killian was only taking credit of his adoption of the "Mandarin" mantle through his Extremis plot. It makes sense too, since Drew Pearce admitted that Killian was a combination of Mallen and Matt Fraction's Mandarin, the latter of which was noted as literally kidnapping a director to film the idealized life and "origin" of the Mandarin as he saw fit (similar to how Killian got Trevor to act out an idealized "Mandarin" for him).

Saying that he "adopted" the mantle literally shows the nature of the "Mandarin" title-naming, and how Killian purposely took it as an outside source and treated it as if it was his creation for his own purposes. This means that it's not the he was designating himself as THE "Mandarin", but rather he took the title/mantle as if it were his own, to create an idealized terrorist persona based on what he deems fit to be the ultimate terrorist.

Killian's speech solidifies this notion, when he declares that he is the "Mandarin". Not because he's the leader of the Ten Rings. Not because he's claiming to be the true alter ego of the "Mandarin". But because he devised the scheme surrounding Extremis and the "terrorist bombings", as well as the adoption of the "Mandarin" mantle in light of his creation of Trevor's outward terrorist persona.