(no subject)

[seekingferret]

I've been thinking about movie SHIELD. Specifically, I've been thinking about the nature of the institution in the pre-Iron Man era. What was its charter? Things like "Nick Fury's Big Week" and tiny bits of Iron Man 2 and Avengers canon suggest that before the Avengers Initiative, SHIELD wasn't big in the superhero game. The implication I got is that the sudden confluence of Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, led a sleepy think tank-type agency focused on gameplanning unpredictable homeland threats and trying to prepare the government to respond to them suddenly reconfigure to respond to those homeland threats. On the other hand, there's Nick Fury's line at the end of Iron Man, when he suggests "Mr. Stark, you've become part of a bigger universe." The implication of that line is that SHIELD has long been involved in dealing with other superhero-related threats, etc...

But in Marvel movieverse, what are those threats? There's the Hulk, but that's clearly not under SHIELD purview initially, as "The Consultant" shows. I try to figure out what else SHIELD was doing and I come to Fantastic Four, X-Men, and maybe tangential involvement in Spiderman. Before ~2008, SHIELD must have basically been an agency that supported the Fantastic Four and surveilled mutants it considered potentially dangerous. With a major part of their resources dedicated to trying to dig up Captain America.

So this raises questions I think are interesting. As the Avengers Initiative starts to take up more and more of Nick Fury's focus, what does that do to the Fantastic Four's relationship with the agency? Does Reed's toy budget see cuts? How does Ben feel about the Hulk just being out there? Do Johnny and Tony get into superhero fights at clubs all the time, or only every other week? Ultimately, the overly cute crackfic writer in me is going to want to read Johnny meets Steve, but we already knew I'm a bad person.

But beyond these simple questions about fitting the FF movies into the Avenger movieverse, what I find interesting is SHIELD itself, and the reconfiguration it must have had to do to reorient itself for its new mission statement in the Post-Thor world. "Every Hero" hypothesizes that Coulson was recruited for SHIELD only a year or two before Iron Man, and I think given his quip about working on the name, that's likely true. Natasha obviously also, as someone relatively young and with the backstory she shared with Loki, joined SHIELD fairly recently, and while Hawkeye has been with SHIELD longer than her, his skill-set speaks of significant military special-ops experience. This is a group of agents that is incredibly competent, incredibly comfortable with each other, and yet they haven't been together for all that long.

My best explanation for this is Nick Fury, leave it at that. You have to figure SHIELD was some sort of internal exile for Nick Fury. He was too competent and held too many secrets to just get rid of, but they wanted him out of the way so they dumped him in a sleepy agency charged with dealing with problems most people thought of as jokes. "Ha ha, we put Nick Fury on the Roswell Project." But Nick Fury was so competent and so compelling that he figured out how to sell his agency to competent people who were frustrated with other government agencies. He told them that yes, all they'd be doing was dreaming up imaginary threats, or maybe they'd be babysitting the Fantastic Four for the inevitable cock-up, but they'd get to develop all their own tools, work the way they wanted to work alongside other smart, competent people, and somehow he got people like Coulson and Hawkeye and Sitwell and Maria Fucking Hill to work for him, and with people like that, when the shit hits the fan and suddenly you're leading a group of loose cannons with superpowers against an alien invasion, you're ready to figure out how to change everything on the fly. I think the way SHIELD responds to the rise of the Avengers is a story worth telling in more detail than the movies do. Maybe the rumored Nick Fury movie will deal with some of that.

Comments

[hatman]

I think you're drawing some pretty heavy conclusions from a few throwaway lines.

My understanding is that SHIELD has been around for decades. (In Marvel canon, it started somewhere after WWII.) They've got the helicarrier and all this advanced technology and some really highly trained agents. Clearly, they've been doing a lot more than trying to hunt down Captain America. FF, X-Men, and Spider-Man movies predate the shared Marvel continuity. (In fact, that was part of the point of the line at the end of Iron Man: It's not just Tony's introduction to the wider Marvel Universe, it's ours.)

Spider-Man is being rebooted. New origin story, which will likely be tied into the Marvel movieverse, or at least acknowledged as part of it. So Spider-Man hasn't been around before.

I don't know how they'll deal with FF or X-Men or any other additions going forward. But Stark lives in New York. If the FF were around, he should have heard of them. The X-Men have trouble fitting into the Marvel Universe. There's been no hint of mutant powers in the movieverse so far. The idea is that people love superheroes like Iron Man and the Avengers. But the idea of the X-Men is that people hate and fear people with super powers, even if they're fighting for good. It doesn't mesh right.

I could see a new FF movie series down the line, where we find that Reed Richards has been working for SHIELD. Maybe one of the eggheads working on the Cosmic Cube. And then he goes up into space to develop their new orbital platform, and takes his family along...

But I think up until now they've been dealing with covert ops. We see Widow "interrogating" a man (about international arms shipments, was it?) at the beginning of Avengers. A small piece of what's doubtless a much larger picture. Something too big for the CIA or Interpol. But still, it's a fairly routine mission for Widow. (Traditionally, Widow was trained by the KGB and then defected to SHIELD.)

Hydra was established in Captain America. They have super science and maybe some super powers. And Cap worked in semi-secret to stop their plans to destroy or take over the world. I think SHIELD grew from that. An MIB-style covert ops organization dealing with super-scale global threats under the public's nose. Hydra. Possibly AIM. Maybe even some supervillains. Stopping wars and terrorists and so on.

The question is who runs SHIELD. Fury answers to some mysterious board of directors. Are they part of the US military? Or is it some international coalition? Or something else?

(Also, will the recently revealed alien threat cause that mysterious board to create SWORD? Or does SWORD already exist?)