First of all, Stark would totally have a secret bunker. He would just hide right under the obvious one. Re: where the suits were stored in Iron Man 3.
I think all of the MCU main players are secret keepers, with the except of, maybe, Captain America.
Season two will give you more perspective on Ward. It's toward the middle of the season that you actually start to see who he really is.
It is unknown at this time what the deal with Skye is - the series was hinting that she was one of the Inhumans, but I can't seem to tell. If she is an Inhuman, she's a different race than the one that produces the GH-x, I am beginning to believe that theory less, as the Inhuman movie doesn't come out for so many years, so it's hard to believe that they would string that plotline out for so long.
There is a slim chance that she is the same kind of alien as the blue alien - if the fans are correct, and that alien was a Kree, then some of the Kree are pink skinned and look human.
Season two will give you more perspective on Ward. It's toward the middle of the season that you actually start to see who he really is.
I mean, I've seen enough of S2 to know the major plot developments, so I get what's going on with him. But yeah, I agree that you can't really gauge him based on S1, even after the reveal. But going mostly on S1, I think it's really interesting, the way you're forced to assess Ward as almost entirely a cipher? Because that is how the other characters have to make sense of him after the reveal (and to a large extent before it), but it's also reflective of the way his life is very much about being a weapon, a replaceable object to HYDRA. He is what you make of him; he becomes what he needs to be.
If she is an Inhuman, she's a different race than the one that produces the GH-xThat makes sense! I personally wouldn't be bothered if her search for identity went on for a long time, because it usually does, you know? And there are enough types of aliens in the 'verse that I think it would probably work.
( ... )
Yeah I'm better now! oof! I'm a few eps behind on season two (I started the Raina one but got sidetracked) so focusing on s1 only, with a few things from the first couple of s2
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I hear that sometimes fandom reacts to a character doing bad things with a kind of essentialist IT IS BECAUSE THEY WERE BORN EVIL, THEY WERE TRYING TO KICK WHAT THEY THOUGHT WERE PUPPIES IN THE WOMB
lol, FROM TIME TO TIME
partly because Coulson and May and, actually, Ward (!) gave her more leniency and more room to do her own thing than Garret did with Ward,
There's also a big developmental difference, though, between Skye being 25 and Ward having been, what, 16 when Garrett sucked him in? And between having been left to her own devices before that, rather than actively undermined. Like, I do agree with you that Skye is probably worried about that on some level and that's influencing her reaction to Ward, but I'm a little reluctant to compare the characters in that way in understanding them.
both that she can't entirely pin down her values and that she is capable of swapping in different values based on the people she is close to and who seem to offer her lifelines.
I haven't been watching S2, but my personal head-canon is that Coulson and May were never lovers but that after his death she started thinking that she had had feelings for him, and that's why she agreed to spy on him and is so protective of him. I wouldn't want them together, because I don't like Coulson and because his only canonical girlfriend is so different from May that I'm not sure he'd know what to do in a relationship with her, but I think she makes sense as someone who has decided that she's in love and is not going to act on it, even if the truth might be more muddled. (Other head-canon: Coulson's father killed himself. It seems like the only way to explain his loyalty to Fury, his intolerance of weakness, and his inability to process betrayal
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Without going into specifics, I think both of those headcanons have remained plausible up to the moment.
Coulson is intolerant of weakness and impurity, prone to treating people who have been affected or changed by the alien and magical as problems to be handled or villains to be dealt with, not humans with the regular mix of good and bad (which is of course ironic since he is now one of those people).
Agreed. And there's an interesting question of how people making these kind of decisions can continue to prioritize the humanity of those who have become superhumanly dangerous. But Coulson doesn't seem to be a person who is actually capable of rational detachment. When he distances from people, it's this big emotional, normative judgment, which doesn't necessarily lead to better decision-making, particularly now that he's personally invested in proving to himself that he remains able to distance.
It feels to me as if the show follows his lead in this regard - see its handling of Mike Peterson, someone else who was corrupted by
( ... )
there's an interesting question of how people making these kind of decisions can continue to prioritize the humanity of those who have become superhumanly dangerous
To me this is the essence of what makes a character heroic (and SHIELD is plainly more interested in being a show about heroism and heroic figures than it is in continuing the themes of series like Dollhouse and BSG). Buffy and Angel were both singled out for their willingness to reach out to people whom the narrative signposts as irredeemable or monstrous. Oliver Queen on Arrow (a show that is basically SHIELD's main competition, and which is much more successful on pretty much every level but probably not as interesting to you) becomes a hero when he allows his fundamental desire to trust and make allies to overcome the habits of isolation and violence that he learned during his own traumatic past. I'd like to believe that the bunker mentality that was prevalent among the SHIELD characters in S1 (and which, from what I've read about S2, seems only to have intensified
( ... )
Buffy and Angel were both singled out for their willingness to reach out to people whom the narrative signposts as irredeemable or monstrous.I'd agree that SHIELD is a complication of those themes, though I'm not as sure that Buffy and Angel come off unequivocally better. A single individual who is already elevated as a super can afford to show mercy in however unpredictable and idiosyncratic a way as they want; they can rely on others to do the dirty work without really being able to make a critique with teeth if the super is wrong. And an individual decision-maker means that there's a level of subjectivity which means that there's no checks when they talk themselves into believing that, say, laying waste to Los Angeles is the heroic thing to do. A few mere mortals who have to be accountable, even if only to each other, are probably less likely to step out of line and offer a personal connection, but they are also better suited to avert catastrophes. Better a super-secret group than a single special snowflake whose super-secret power
( ... )
I love this meta like WHOAH. Your thoughts are so thinky and so accurate. The thing that I find really fascinating is the lack of understanding that SHIELD and HYDRA are, at their core, suffering from the same problem. They're huge impersonal organisations making unilateral decisions about how society should be managed. And, ultimately, that doesn't really leave a lot of free will for anyone. I think you're correct in all the ways about Ward. He really is the perfect soldier, and that isn't down to him being 'evil'. It's down to him being systematically undermined by Garrett and trained to be a weapon, and that's something that is undoubtedly perpetuated by his SHIELD training. The fact that it's implied that he's second only to Romanoff in the espionage stakes whilst actually turning out to be 'Hydra' all along is mindblowing. It was such a great twist in showing how ultimately your own beliefs don't come into it when you're trained to be a good loyal soldier. I don't believe that Ward actually gives a shit about ideology; he's loyal
( ... )
he's second only to Romanoff in the espionage stakes whilst actually turning out to be 'Hydra' all along is mindblowing.
Right. Ward (and Romanoff and everyone like them) are not just any weapons, they are double-edged swords. How in the world do you not suspect someone who you have around specifically to be a lying liar who lies? But how do you function with that level of suspicion? Paranoia is what drives organizations to the kind of secrecy that renders sabotage more likely and more consequential. And so it ends up exploiting people who have already been deprived of their sense of self
( ... )
wasn't Garrett still acting as a SHIELD agent when he went to get Ward out of the detention center?I think that's probably the question I'm most interested in (which I guess reflects the fact that I'm more interested in Ward for what he reveals about SHIELD than for who he is himself). What did SHIELD (which is to say Coulson) know about Ward and when did they know it? Coulson repeatedly references Ward's troubled family history, and though I didn't believe at first that he could have known the full extent of the story, the more I think about it the more likely it seems. Coulson himself was recruited into SHIELD as a teenager recently traumatized by his father's death, so I can easily believe that he would have considered kidnapping an abused and abandoned child as a legitimate act, maybe even doing him a favor (children of abuse growing up to normalize and perpetuate abuse and all that
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I'm thinking so more and more too. I think my first response was that Garrett had successfully hidden his Hydra affiliation and to some extent his...biological upgrades, and so I assumed that Coulson and the other higher-ups were ignorant as to his other unsavory activities. But that seems less tenable with a little bit less distance. Ward wasn't some nameless infant who could be kept out of the public record like Skye. He had a social security number and a large and public family that knew he existed, and was in government custody and had court proceedings being brought against him as a matter of public record. There's no way he could have worked the receptionist's desk at SHIELD without red flags going up, let alone being fast-tracked into the Academy without even a high school diploma. And his relationship with Garrett was well-known. If this violent kid shows up at your doorstep and has become happy to comply, there's only one reason not to ask questions, and it's that you already know the answers
( ... )
When they were undercover as ex-SHIELD techs and the people interviewing them were like, "They're usually younger," and Coulson asked May if her sweater itched, too! ♥
THEY TOTALLY VIBE. I think they also bring out the best in each other in very believable ways? I think May grounds Coulson from his big flights of Imma Hero Watch Me Go! psychodrama and he pulls her out of suppressing the past and into living in the present.
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I think all of the MCU main players are secret keepers, with the except of, maybe, Captain America.
Season two will give you more perspective on Ward. It's toward the middle of the season that you actually start to see who he really is.
It is unknown at this time what the deal with Skye is - the series was hinting that she was one of the Inhumans, but I can't seem to tell. If she is an Inhuman, she's a different race than the one that produces the GH-x, I am beginning to believe that theory less, as the Inhuman movie doesn't come out for so many years, so it's hard to believe that they would string that plotline out for so long.
There is a slim chance that she is the same kind of alien as the blue alien - if the fans are correct, and that alien was a Kree, then some of the Kree are pink skinned and look human.
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I mean, I've seen enough of S2 to know the major plot developments, so I get what's going on with him. But yeah, I agree that you can't really gauge him based on S1, even after the reveal. But going mostly on S1, I think it's really interesting, the way you're forced to assess Ward as almost entirely a cipher? Because that is how the other characters have to make sense of him after the reveal (and to a large extent before it), but it's also reflective of the way his life is very much about being a weapon, a replaceable object to HYDRA. He is what you make of him; he becomes what he needs to be.
If she is an Inhuman, she's a different race than the one that produces the GH-xThat makes sense! I personally wouldn't be bothered if her search for identity went on for a long time, because it usually does, you know? And there are enough types of aliens in the 'verse that I think it would probably work. ( ... )
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lol, FROM TIME TO TIME
partly because Coulson and May and, actually, Ward (!) gave her more leniency and more room to do her own thing than Garret did with Ward,
There's also a big developmental difference, though, between Skye being 25 and Ward having been, what, 16 when Garrett sucked him in? And between having been left to her own devices before that, rather than actively undermined. Like, I do agree with you that Skye is probably worried about that on some level and that's influencing her reaction to Ward, but I'm a little reluctant to compare the characters in that way in understanding them.
both that she can't entirely pin down her values and that she is capable of swapping in different values based on the people she is close to and who seem to offer her lifelines.
She really is as adaptable as Ward.
yes, ACCURATE, Ward has ( ... )
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Coulson is intolerant of weakness and impurity, prone to treating people who have been affected or changed by the alien and magical as problems to be handled or villains to be dealt with, not humans with the regular mix of good and bad (which is of course ironic since he is now one of those people).
Agreed. And there's an interesting question of how people making these kind of decisions can continue to prioritize the humanity of those who have become superhumanly dangerous. But Coulson doesn't seem to be a person who is actually capable of rational detachment. When he distances from people, it's this big emotional, normative judgment, which doesn't necessarily lead to better decision-making, particularly now that he's personally invested in proving to himself that he remains able to distance.
It feels to me as if the show follows his lead in this regard - see its handling of Mike Peterson, someone else who was corrupted by ( ... )
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To me this is the essence of what makes a character heroic (and SHIELD is plainly more interested in being a show about heroism and heroic figures than it is in continuing the themes of series like Dollhouse and BSG). Buffy and Angel were both singled out for their willingness to reach out to people whom the narrative signposts as irredeemable or monstrous. Oliver Queen on Arrow (a show that is basically SHIELD's main competition, and which is much more successful on pretty much every level but probably not as interesting to you) becomes a hero when he allows his fundamental desire to trust and make allies to overcome the habits of isolation and violence that he learned during his own traumatic past. I'd like to believe that the bunker mentality that was prevalent among the SHIELD characters in S1 (and which, from what I've read about S2, seems only to have intensified ( ... )
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Right. Ward (and Romanoff and everyone like them) are not just any weapons, they are double-edged swords. How in the world do you not suspect someone who you have around specifically to be a lying liar who lies? But how do you function with that level of suspicion? Paranoia is what drives organizations to the kind of secrecy that renders sabotage more likely and more consequential. And so it ends up exploiting people who have already been deprived of their sense of self ( ... )
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THEY TOTALLY VIBE. I think they also bring out the best in each other in very believable ways? I think May grounds Coulson from his big flights of Imma Hero Watch Me Go! psychodrama and he pulls her out of suppressing the past and into living in the present.
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