Yes, I'm definitely reading a lot into a little. There isn't much to go on. It's also hard because the rebooted Spiderman won't be integrated into Avenger movieverse because it's being made by a different studio. I can hypothesize all I want about Spiderman-Avengers crossovers, but they'll never happen except in fanfiction.
I'm well aware of 616 SHIELD's history, but lots of little details about movieverse's presentation suggest a much newer origin for movieverse SHIELD. It has every indication of being a post-9/11 pop-up security agency, from the use of 'homeland' in its new name to its mish-mash of agents with very different training experiences. If SHIELD did exist before 9/11, it looked very different than it did after.
The X-Men/Fantastic Four tonal tension has been a thing that Marvel writers have had to struggle with since the beginning. They've done so in a number of ways, but by and large the methodology begins with a theory that humans adapt much easier to people transformed by technology than people who were born different, which is funny and problematic but at this point it's a core assumption of the Marvelverse. Ultimate Marvel has characters who are mutants but pretend to have developed their powers through lab accidents, notably the Wasp.
The idea that SHIELD has been some sort of CIA/Interpol backstop for a long time is plausible to a certain extent, but it sort of raises the question of why have a CIA if you think it can't handle global threats. If the CIA can't handle threats, the solution isn't to backstop it with a more competent agency, it's to fix the CIA. The idea you suggested when you called SHIELD "an MIB-style covert ops organization " to me points us a little differently. MIB, after all, wasn't chartered to do covert ops that CIA couldn't hack. It was chartered to deal with aliens. I think the most likely scenario is that SHIELD was chartered to deal with superheroic/weird threats. And I think our canon mostly suggests that until Hulk and Iron Man, that kind of thing didn't really happen all that often.
If SHIELD has been around for decades, it's been developing amazing technologies that are mostly pretty showy. The helicarrier is pretty awesome, but stealth or no stealth, if they had actually deployed it in a combat setting before this people would start asking questions. One possibility that bears consideration is that the reason SHIELD's purview includes superheroes is because they've commonly been using 'superheroes' as the cover story for their implausible covert ops actions.
As to who runs SHIELD, Fury in the movies answers to the 'World Security Council', clearly something ambiguously modeled on the UN Security Council, but with more teeth. This is very strange, and the geopolitics of it don't really bear careful thought.
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I'm well aware of 616 SHIELD's history, but lots of little details about movieverse's presentation suggest a much newer origin for movieverse SHIELD. It has every indication of being a post-9/11 pop-up security agency, from the use of 'homeland' in its new name to its mish-mash of agents with very different training experiences. If SHIELD did exist before 9/11, it looked very different than it did after.
The X-Men/Fantastic Four tonal tension has been a thing that Marvel writers have had to struggle with since the beginning. They've done so in a number of ways, but by and large the methodology begins with a theory that humans adapt much easier to people transformed by technology than people who were born different, which is funny and problematic but at this point it's a core assumption of the Marvelverse. Ultimate Marvel has characters who are mutants but pretend to have developed their powers through lab accidents, notably the Wasp.
The idea that SHIELD has been some sort of CIA/Interpol backstop for a long time is plausible to a certain extent, but it sort of raises the question of why have a CIA if you think it can't handle global threats. If the CIA can't handle threats, the solution isn't to backstop it with a more competent agency, it's to fix the CIA. The idea you suggested when you called SHIELD "an MIB-style covert ops organization " to me points us a little differently. MIB, after all, wasn't chartered to do covert ops that CIA couldn't hack. It was chartered to deal with aliens. I think the most likely scenario is that SHIELD was chartered to deal with superheroic/weird threats. And I think our canon mostly suggests that until Hulk and Iron Man, that kind of thing didn't really happen all that often.
If SHIELD has been around for decades, it's been developing amazing technologies that are mostly pretty showy. The helicarrier is pretty awesome, but stealth or no stealth, if they had actually deployed it in a combat setting before this people would start asking questions. One possibility that bears consideration is that the reason SHIELD's purview includes superheroes is because they've commonly been using 'superheroes' as the cover story for their implausible covert ops actions.
As to who runs SHIELD, Fury in the movies answers to the 'World Security Council', clearly something ambiguously modeled on the UN Security Council, but with more teeth. This is very strange, and the geopolitics of it don't really bear careful thought.