Yet what IM3 established the Mandarin and by extent the 10 rings was incongruent with what had been shown in IM1.
No it wasn't. The Ten Rings was a terrorist organization in Iron Man 1. Either Aldrich Killian founded it, or he appropriated their iconography and took over the remnants of it after the organization was crippled as a result of Iron Man attacking them and Obidiah Stane murdering their leadership. What's incongruous about that?
Well to be fair the Mandarin himself wasn't mentioned in IM1 but the 10 rings organization was a direct allusion to him.
Yes. And? How is that incongruous with what we got in Iron Man 3?
Shane Black played fast and loose with the established continuity because obviously he didn't care much for anything else but what he was interested in doing, that's why he basically threw in a bunch of established characters unrelated in the least bit to their comic counterparts.
Are you talking about the established continuity of the films, or the established continuity of the comics? Because I really don't see how he played fast and loose with the established continuity of the films. Nothing in his film contradicts anything that was established in the previous films.
And what characters did he throw in that were unrelated to their comic book counterparts? I mean, yeah, the movie Aldrich Killian isn't anything like the comic Aldrich Killian, but that's because he was actually intended to be an adaptation of The Mandarin with misdirection thrown over the whole affair.
I see more the All Hail to the King as damage control rather than backpedalling because of the nonsensical shift the 10 rings took from IM1 to IM3, if Killian had anything to do with the first iteration then he'd of gotten involved before Tony even became Iron Man and we wouldn't have had much of a franchise.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. "if Killian had anything to do with the first iteration then he'd of gotten involved before Tony even became Iron Man and we wouldn't have had much of a franchise." What does that mean, exactly?
The movie was pretty clear about why Killian got personally involved and started making public spectacles when he did. The public bombings and the theatrical terrorist threat videos were a very intentional and somewhat necessary response to the heightened climate of panic after the battle of New York. He was happy to stay in the shadows until that happened and forced him to up his game, he said that explicitly. The film was also very clear that Killian had no interest in Tony Stark and only went after him when Stark challenged him publicly and now posed a potential threat to his operation. So, if you were to look at Iron Man 3 pre-AHTK and interpret Killian as having founded the Ten Rings in the first place, then he would have had no reason to do anything he did in Iron Man 3 until the events of those movies. If you were to interpret Killian as having co-opted and taken control of a pre-existing organization that was unrelated to him, as AHTK stipulates, then same thing.
As is it makes perfect sense that he simply appropriated the terrorist organization as a means to get Stark's undivided attention. The One-Shot doesn't feel like a cookie for entitled fans, it's just another step towards expanding their already rich universe.
It's pretty clearly a cookie intended for fans. It was something they admit to have made up pretty much on the fly during IM3's post production that wasn't even hinted at in the film, was introduced in a tucked away little corner of the MCU that likely only the hard core fans saw, and happened immediately after a controversial **** storm over how Shane Black chose to adapt The Mandarin in the MCU.
I'm no writer, but I doubt you're one of great renown either and I'm sure that if Marvel went ahead with an expansion of the Mandarin storyline it wouldn't be done in a lazy fashion and could even be something worthy of Avengers if not Iron Man uniquely.
Does it expand the MCU? Sure it does. But it does so in a convoluted, retcon-y way, and that's not good writing. IM3 established The Mandarin as a threat in the world and established that Killian invented the identity of The Mandarin in order to manipulate the fears of white middle class America. Saying that there was a "real" Mandarin this whole time reeks of a hasty retcon. The Mandarin we got in Iron Man 3 was, in my opinion, the best possible adaptation of the character we could ever hope for. Re-adapting the character
is lazy, it's needlessly convoluted, and it would come off as hella silly, especially since an Iron Man 4 with the "real" Mandarin would likely have trailers that would look almost identical to the IM3 trailers.
And, in my opinion, it could only be inferior to Iron Man 3. IM3 took what worked about The Mandarin while also taking what didn't work about the character and turning it into a strength. You don't get much better than that.
Honestly the MCU can't use many of Marvel's best villains because they are tied up in the Fantastic Four franchise and to everything else Fox and Sony own, they aren't closing things up on trilogies either if Feige is to be believed so a character like Mandarin would be a great asset and could be done much better than pseudo-Mandarin in IM3.
The Mandarin in Iron Man 3 was The Mandarin. Same MO, same personality, and he hit all of the key narrative beats. They changed a few surface details, but the character was intact. And he was absolutely a more faithful adaptation than the immortal sorcerer that the "real" Mandarin is implied to be. The Mandarin is not and has never been a centuries old sorcerer who has led a secret cabal of terrorists down through the ages. That's Ra's Al Ghul. The Mandarin, like Aldrich Killian, was a spoiled and resentful prodigy who stole power that did not belong to him and that he did nothing to earn in order to build and empire of wealth and crime and reinvent himself as an ubermensch. Those are the defining characteristics of who The Mandarin is as a person. Everything else is just fluff.
And there's nothing a more traditionally orientalist Mandarin could bring to the table that Aldrich Killian couldn't. International network of spies and terrorist? Check. The ability to kung fu fight a dude in powered armor with just his bare hands? Check. The grand vision necessary to bring entire nations to their knees? Check. I don't see how the character was lacking in any way in that film. All they did was take the more troubling aspects of the character and turn them around into some nice social commentary that added new layers to the character.
The only difference between Killian and a more traditional Mandarin is that the later would be more of a Chines stereotype. I'm not sure how that makes him a better villain.
Also, the only great Marvel villains tied up with the FF are Doom and Galactus, so I'm not sure what you're talking about there.