![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethstill :-)
still bored with Skye
still feeling like they can let us in on the others any time now. really, there's whole numbers of minutes. they could show us some reason to care.
... still <3 Coulson but it would take a lot to make that wear off.
I was thinking earlier this week, I'm not sure we know what the stakes are. In general, each week, the SHIELD business stakes, yeah, but specifically why the characters are involved, what they individually have to gain or lose, not so much. I'm still having trouble caring, and I'd quite like to care.
Also this week I've been thinking, I'm going to have to give up on tumblr between tuesday and friday. there is no culture of spoiler cuts, there's not even consistent tagging, and between gifsets and people having what would on other platforms be comment threads out in the open I saw and read about every beat of this story while actively trying to skip SHIELD posts. It's frustrating and wearying and means every first watch feels like a rewatch and I think i've had it with tumblr just on that basis. Why, why has fandom activity moved so heavily to the platform that lends itself to this kind of mass fail? *giant shrug*
But, this week:
I've read a lot of complaints, and the vast majority of them seem to be complaints that it does exactly what it says on the tin. The Agents of SHIELD are the heroes. Even when they do ethically terrible stuff, the bad guys do much worse stuff, the people calling them out on it turn out to be greedy liars, and it all works out in their favour in the end. Which, you know, I know why that's a problem, but the thing is it's a genre feature. Batman is basically a fantasy of how much a rich white guy could get done if that whole rules against police brutality thing wasn't holding him back. Arrow is a series about a vigilante who seems to have taken the entire first season to notice it's still murder if he does it. These are the stories being told a lot at the moment, about how it's okay if the good guys are doing it, and that's considered a selling point.
But they have also consistently shown it blowing up in SHIELD's face, so, you know, I'm willing to give them some rope and see where they're going with it. They'll still end up saying that SHIELD is where the ethical line should be drawn, but it might move a bit over the course of the season. You never know.
That's the other thing the majority of the rest of the complaints are about, stuff that I feel we can wait and see about. It's a TV show with a 22 episode order; for better or worse, that means the story will be doled out in enough pieces to stretch. UK TV with it's six episode seasons and rapid actor turnover is seeming appealing in all the same ways it has been frustrating, in that if the characters burn through that fast we get to know them fast and get their whole story fast too. US TV is aiming for 100 episodes with these same guys. Patience is required.
But still, I don't feel they've given us sufficient hooks yet. I would like to care, yet do not.
Also it's increasingly evident Skye is the Gwen, the way in, the one we're supposed to care about. And I actively don't. The more we see and the less likely she is to be being deceptive the less interesting she gets. She's just there looking for her parents? Maybe they're trying to put a human face on the politics and make it personal but to me it just feels cheap. Like, she could have principles, but instead she has emotional issues. Boredy bored bored now.
Suspect this is what Skye and Ward will have in common though, family tangled in SHIELD in a bad way.
Still don't know if FitzSimmons are actually human people. If they are, they're very young in the ways of humans. Odd.
Still don't know much more about Melinda May, and want to.
Phil is worried about how he went with his gut and was all surprised to be wrong. I though he was giving her enough rope, because really, we didn't need viewer cam to know he was wrong already. Ways this bit could be interesting: He's an android and no longer technically has a gut. I was thinking today about how the gut has its own brain and SF about uploading humans never seems to take that into account. You'd change your whole biochemistry too. Put the same programming in a new vessel and you get a new person, like Dax, but to different degrees. Is interesting.
Of course it's also interesting how it all maps to mid life crisis and the whole wondering if he's lost it crisis of confidence and overcompensation.
But every episode drops a hint that there's definitely something up with him. Today's was the sleep thing.
Also it seems Coulson/May might have been a thing? Or was I imagining the flirty while offering to go a few rounds? Because that would be fun.
... well, assuming my OTP won't be any more canonical in this fandom than it ever tends to be, if I have to get het couples, that would be fun.
Not as fun as May/Skye, which has the added bonus of not dividing them all up predictably by age.
Things that actually bugged me:
Phil, where is your discipline? If you have a whole magazine, why the hell use it all up while he has that fire wings thing going on? That's terrible fire discipline. I only play tabletop RPGs and I know this. Why just bang away when you know you're not getting anywhere? Try another angle!
... okay, I read too much fanfic, that's... *blinks*
ANYway, the competence rating all round wasn't high. That hacker guy, he was being kind of a moron about the Centipede thing. I'm going to have to adjust my clue filter down a bunch of notches if this is what they think is good enough to hack SHIELD.
Blah.
Also of some note, the thing where there's no black people in the main cast leaves them to be evil almost every week so far. This needs fixing. It's nice they've got asian characters, but we need a human rainbow going on with the good guy team or things go nasty.
I don't know if we should expect Scorch to be back. I know this series is using comic book logic, but I don't know how comic book. I mean, that could be an explosion ala Extremis in IM3, or it could be a body of fire or Scorch pushing all the fire out of himself. It depends if they think he's cool enough to bring back I guess.
I did like the whole giving him a name thing. Names have power.
The thing is, if SHIELD is expecting everyone with powers to live in the closet, well, my word choice demonstrates where my brain goes straight away. And if the law says certain aspects of certain people should not exist, those people have a lot of incentive to say screw the law and make their own rules. It's unhelpful and counterproductive for the law to be set that way, where there's no way to work within the rules.
Also, X-Men, mutant rights, they're cracking down on him for using fire in his magic act now? He's not breaking any laws by what he's doing, just making people uncomfortable by what he's being. That leaves no room for cooperation with authority, because authority has left no room for them.
It is however exactly how SHIELD tried to treat Tony Stark, so there's already an alternate model, for people rich enough to call senators assclowns with impunity.
It's also global registration, without the inconvenience of getting votes for it. I've seen movies and comics on that theme. I'd be vastly surprised if the TV series drew on Marvel comics and yet ended up in a comfortable happy let nice big brother watch you and keep you on a leash kind of place.
So themes are developing, and conflicts, and they're familiar and from a different angle and likely to go interesting places. I'm fine with that. Even though they could easily go worrying places too, that's the thing this genre does, positing that enough power with little enough restraint could make it All Better.
I'll happily watch again next week.
but while I remain a Coulson fan I'm not actually a fan of this show yet.
still bored with Skye
still feeling like they can let us in on the others any time now. really, there's whole numbers of minutes. they could show us some reason to care.
... still <3 Coulson but it would take a lot to make that wear off.
I was thinking earlier this week, I'm not sure we know what the stakes are. In general, each week, the SHIELD business stakes, yeah, but specifically why the characters are involved, what they individually have to gain or lose, not so much. I'm still having trouble caring, and I'd quite like to care.
Also this week I've been thinking, I'm going to have to give up on tumblr between tuesday and friday. there is no culture of spoiler cuts, there's not even consistent tagging, and between gifsets and people having what would on other platforms be comment threads out in the open I saw and read about every beat of this story while actively trying to skip SHIELD posts. It's frustrating and wearying and means every first watch feels like a rewatch and I think i've had it with tumblr just on that basis. Why, why has fandom activity moved so heavily to the platform that lends itself to this kind of mass fail? *giant shrug*
But, this week:
I've read a lot of complaints, and the vast majority of them seem to be complaints that it does exactly what it says on the tin. The Agents of SHIELD are the heroes. Even when they do ethically terrible stuff, the bad guys do much worse stuff, the people calling them out on it turn out to be greedy liars, and it all works out in their favour in the end. Which, you know, I know why that's a problem, but the thing is it's a genre feature. Batman is basically a fantasy of how much a rich white guy could get done if that whole rules against police brutality thing wasn't holding him back. Arrow is a series about a vigilante who seems to have taken the entire first season to notice it's still murder if he does it. These are the stories being told a lot at the moment, about how it's okay if the good guys are doing it, and that's considered a selling point.
But they have also consistently shown it blowing up in SHIELD's face, so, you know, I'm willing to give them some rope and see where they're going with it. They'll still end up saying that SHIELD is where the ethical line should be drawn, but it might move a bit over the course of the season. You never know.
That's the other thing the majority of the rest of the complaints are about, stuff that I feel we can wait and see about. It's a TV show with a 22 episode order; for better or worse, that means the story will be doled out in enough pieces to stretch. UK TV with it's six episode seasons and rapid actor turnover is seeming appealing in all the same ways it has been frustrating, in that if the characters burn through that fast we get to know them fast and get their whole story fast too. US TV is aiming for 100 episodes with these same guys. Patience is required.
But still, I don't feel they've given us sufficient hooks yet. I would like to care, yet do not.
Also it's increasingly evident Skye is the Gwen, the way in, the one we're supposed to care about. And I actively don't. The more we see and the less likely she is to be being deceptive the less interesting she gets. She's just there looking for her parents? Maybe they're trying to put a human face on the politics and make it personal but to me it just feels cheap. Like, she could have principles, but instead she has emotional issues. Boredy bored bored now.
Suspect this is what Skye and Ward will have in common though, family tangled in SHIELD in a bad way.
Still don't know if FitzSimmons are actually human people. If they are, they're very young in the ways of humans. Odd.
Still don't know much more about Melinda May, and want to.
Phil is worried about how he went with his gut and was all surprised to be wrong. I though he was giving her enough rope, because really, we didn't need viewer cam to know he was wrong already. Ways this bit could be interesting: He's an android and no longer technically has a gut. I was thinking today about how the gut has its own brain and SF about uploading humans never seems to take that into account. You'd change your whole biochemistry too. Put the same programming in a new vessel and you get a new person, like Dax, but to different degrees. Is interesting.
Of course it's also interesting how it all maps to mid life crisis and the whole wondering if he's lost it crisis of confidence and overcompensation.
But every episode drops a hint that there's definitely something up with him. Today's was the sleep thing.
Also it seems Coulson/May might have been a thing? Or was I imagining the flirty while offering to go a few rounds? Because that would be fun.
... well, assuming my OTP won't be any more canonical in this fandom than it ever tends to be, if I have to get het couples, that would be fun.
Not as fun as May/Skye, which has the added bonus of not dividing them all up predictably by age.
Things that actually bugged me:
Phil, where is your discipline? If you have a whole magazine, why the hell use it all up while he has that fire wings thing going on? That's terrible fire discipline. I only play tabletop RPGs and I know this. Why just bang away when you know you're not getting anywhere? Try another angle!
... okay, I read too much fanfic, that's... *blinks*
ANYway, the competence rating all round wasn't high. That hacker guy, he was being kind of a moron about the Centipede thing. I'm going to have to adjust my clue filter down a bunch of notches if this is what they think is good enough to hack SHIELD.
Blah.
Also of some note, the thing where there's no black people in the main cast leaves them to be evil almost every week so far. This needs fixing. It's nice they've got asian characters, but we need a human rainbow going on with the good guy team or things go nasty.
I don't know if we should expect Scorch to be back. I know this series is using comic book logic, but I don't know how comic book. I mean, that could be an explosion ala Extremis in IM3, or it could be a body of fire or Scorch pushing all the fire out of himself. It depends if they think he's cool enough to bring back I guess.
I did like the whole giving him a name thing. Names have power.
The thing is, if SHIELD is expecting everyone with powers to live in the closet, well, my word choice demonstrates where my brain goes straight away. And if the law says certain aspects of certain people should not exist, those people have a lot of incentive to say screw the law and make their own rules. It's unhelpful and counterproductive for the law to be set that way, where there's no way to work within the rules.
Also, X-Men, mutant rights, they're cracking down on him for using fire in his magic act now? He's not breaking any laws by what he's doing, just making people uncomfortable by what he's being. That leaves no room for cooperation with authority, because authority has left no room for them.
It is however exactly how SHIELD tried to treat Tony Stark, so there's already an alternate model, for people rich enough to call senators assclowns with impunity.
It's also global registration, without the inconvenience of getting votes for it. I've seen movies and comics on that theme. I'd be vastly surprised if the TV series drew on Marvel comics and yet ended up in a comfortable happy let nice big brother watch you and keep you on a leash kind of place.
So themes are developing, and conflicts, and they're familiar and from a different angle and likely to go interesting places. I'm fine with that. Even though they could easily go worrying places too, that's the thing this genre does, positing that enough power with little enough restraint could make it All Better.
I'll happily watch again next week.
but while I remain a Coulson fan I'm not actually a fan of this show yet.