User blog comment:LoveWaffle/We Didn't See It Coming - Iron Man 3 and the Future of the MCU/@comment-5977347-20130513205536/@comment-3317214-20130514000526

You don't think Killian and his Extremis soldiers were a bigger threat than Iron Monger and Whiplash combined? I'm pretty sure there was a bit of disappointment about both of those fight scenes not lasting very long.

But Killian is the Mandarin. He was the one behind the whole thing. He created the Mandarin. He was the mastermind using decoys, etc. He was the guy with dragon tattoos on his chest. And, yeah, when Killian says he's the Mandarin, he does kind of mean it metaphorically, but the Mandarin was a metaphor. So, he was actually the Mandarin. I think you might have a vastly different opinion on this, if you expected the whole time that Killian was the Mandarin. I'm guessing that you possibly would've been okay with it, but it sounds like you're just angry because you were lied to. So anyway, we got our fight with the Mandarin, and it was awesome.

About the Ten Rings, I have a feeling that they had nothing to do with Iron Man 3, and Killian was just using their name as a disguise for what he was doing. We already had the actual ten rings terrorist group, and they weren't shown to be involved in this at all. Also, didn't their leader, Raza, get killed?