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 over life and death is unknown to the vast majority of people. It's Gen X individualism versus Millennial collectivism. The beats of our narrative expectations are built around the first, which makes the second one harder to execute well but also quite interesting in its own right.
That's a really important point about the racial implications of Mike's story. I'm still a bit resistant to categorizing him as being narratively marked as a villain? Because watching it without any knowledge of the comics and therefore only having cues from the show, the signposts read to me like his is still an origin story, albeit one that is more protracted and grimdark than he thought it would be.
Better a super-secret group than a single special snowflake whose super-secret power over life and death is unknown to the vast majority of people.
It's interesting, because while you're obviously right about this (though I think your "better" is the choice between two evils), in the MCU this is clearly not the case. It's supers like Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff who have the moral standing to make complex and compassionate choices, while organizations like SHIELD are amoral machines that inevitably trend towards the most authoritarian, dogmatic solutions to problems that are often of their own making. (I think this is also true in Buffy, by the way - in theory you should definitely prefer a council of experienced people making decisions about the fate of the world rather than a teenage girl and her sidekicks, but in practice the Watchers' Council are cruelly utilitarian, uncaring, and often just wrong.)
I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that characters like Buffy and Steve Rogers clearly see themselves as servants, whereas even the SHIELD characters who crow the loudest about their devotion to "true" SHIELD ideals obviously enjoy being the secret masters of the universe a little too much. There's also, in Winter Soldier, a strong sense that no one involved with SHIELD has truly grasped the true extent of their power - Nick Fury talks about needing protection while surrounded by an arsenal that could kill millions of people in minutes. It's not just that they're secret masters of the universe, but that they're secret masters of the universe who think that they are the underdogs, a very dangerous combination.
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 over life and death is unknown to the vast majority of people. It's Gen X individualism versus Millennial collectivism. The beats of our narrative expectations are built around the first, which makes the second one harder to execute well but also quite interesting in its own right.
That's a really important point about the racial implications of Mike's story. I'm still a bit resistant to categorizing him as being narratively marked as a villain? Because watching it without any knowledge of the comics and therefore only having cues from the show, the signposts read to me like his is still an origin story, albeit one that is more protracted and grimdark than he thought it would be.
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It's interesting, because while you're obviously right about this (though I think your "better" is the choice between two evils), in the MCU this is clearly not the case. It's supers like Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff who have the moral standing to make complex and compassionate choices, while organizations like SHIELD are amoral machines that inevitably trend towards the most authoritarian, dogmatic solutions to problems that are often of their own making. (I think this is also true in Buffy, by the way - in theory you should definitely prefer a council of experienced people making decisions about the fate of the world rather than a teenage girl and her sidekicks, but in practice the Watchers' Council are cruelly utilitarian, uncaring, and often just wrong.)
I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that characters like Buffy and Steve Rogers clearly see themselves as servants, whereas even the SHIELD characters who crow the loudest about their devotion to "true" SHIELD ideals obviously enjoy being the secret masters of the universe a little too much. There's also, in Winter Soldier, a strong sense that no one involved with SHIELD has truly grasped the true extent of their power - Nick Fury talks about needing protection while surrounded by an arsenal that could kill millions of people in minutes. It's not just that they're secret masters of the universe, but that they're secret masters of the universe who think that they are the underdogs, a very dangerous combination.
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This is a FASCINATING point.
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