Snowflake day 4

[obstinatecondolement]

If you got the opportunity to add one thing to the canon of any of your fandoms, what would that be? Maybe there’s a character who didn’t get much of a backstory/storyline and you’d like to do something with them, maybe a show was axed too soon and you had thoughts on what could happen in a subsequent season, maybe there’s a new episode you’d like to have added.

Challenge #4

In your own space, add something to your fandom’s canon.

— snowflake_challenge

This is said with all possible love in my heart for the character of Amanda LaRusso: Kumiko should have been Daniel's wife in Cobra Kai.

First of all, they were so cute together in TKK2! No criticism of Ali intended, but Daniel/Kumiko was peak teen Daniel romance! It was an enormous bummer when we found out they broke up offscreen before the start of TKK3 (although I 1000% agree with Kumiko's decision to go to school for dance in Tokyo instead of following Daniel to America) and I think it would have been really sweet to have them canonically reunited and married going into Cobra Kai.

Second of all, I think it would have been a pretty painless way to increase the diversity of the show in general and the representation of East Asian characters specifically (which I think is important given that the franchise is so strongly associated with a martial art that developed in the Ryukyu Kingdom) if Daniel's wife and children were Japanese and Japanese-Italian American respectively. Jen Ruggirello is probably too old to have played this version of Sam, but maybe they have family in the business! Or, indeed, maybe there are lots of mixed actors who could have been given this opportunity to get a break.

Third of all... can we please have some women over 50 with regular roles on this show besides Rose Bianco?? Idk if Amanda is supposed to be the same age, approximately, as Courtney Henggeler, who plays her, or closer in age to Daniel and just incredibly well preserved, but it's just kind of frustrating that both Daniel and Johnny's love interests are played by women so much younger than them. Not in a "problematic age difference" way, but in a "women in Hollywood are considered to have an expiration date and that blows" way. Like... Johnny is closer in age to Rosa than Carmen (granted, only just about, he's basically between them in age, but still!), but the show would have never in a thousand years have pursued that as a love story. Shannon, Robby's mother, is also played by a woman significantly younger than Johnny (or his actor William Zabka). Because Tamlyn Tomita played an age appropriate love interest opposite Ralph Macchio in 1986, there would be no getting around the fact that she was 51 when the first season of Cobra Kai was being shot. And I think that would have been great!