@bobbiamorse’s Parting Shot Appreciation Week Day 4 ⁕ Team

(insp.)

@bobbiamorse‘s Parting Shot Appreciation Week Day 5 ⁕ Parting Shot

Happy sixth anniversary!

❀ every daisy johnson scene (6/?) episode 1x01 - pilot

I am so happy to have the shield team back in my life despite them only being gone for 15 days 😍

Theres something really beautiful about the way that Daisy, whose survivors guilt has been a major part of her storyline since season 1, that her story ends with her dying and being brought back. It’s easy to think of all of the times she must have thought, ‘Why am I alive? Why me and not them?’ And she struggles with this a lot. With trying to make her life worth theirs. And contemplating her purpose. But in the end, she dies to save the entire world, and then her family brings her back. And basically the show is saying, why are you alive Daisy? Because your family loves you.

And then for Coulson to say, this is what we were fighting for, we were fighting for family, we were fighting for us and for you. And for Daisy to say ‘family’ with seven seasons of emotion behind that one word, where she sees her family and understands and lets some of her burden go and accepts yes, I get to have this. Family is something that is for me, not just for other people. That’s really beautiful.

x

Happy Lunar New Year Everyone! I made tiger shaped mantou to celebrate!

Ratitas 🐁✨

Thank you so much for the tags @stilltryingtowrite and @mtab2260​ !! These are so sweet, and I always love a good snail :) Here is mine! I’ve decided her name is Herb and she likes to collect pretty moss :)

I think a lot of people have already been tagged, but I’ll tag @herosofmarvelanddc​ @karasmoak01​ and @minierva141​ if any of you all would like to make a snail :)

I found.. some perfectly good food!!! On twitter of all places!! Sometimes my tl can be a blessing and sometimes it’s a curse. today is a game changer. You get to customize your own snail.

Here’s my snail!!! I tag 

@galactic-mermaid @gaynidopunk

MEET ALAQUA COX: Becoming Maya in Marvel’s Hawkeye (2021)

TOP 10 AGENTS OF SHIELD EPISODES AS VOTED BY MY FOLLOWERS                ↳#9: MELINDA

It’s happened before. There was a woman once… she didn’t trust my judgment, so she stole a batch of Terrigen crystals and fled. She got caught up with some criminals in Bahrain.

DAISY JOHNSON APPRECIATION WEEK 2021 ❀ ❀ ❀

day one - why you love daisy ❤

okay but dont ever think about the fact that Coulson and Simmons are probably the only TWO people who had ever told Daisy that they are proud of her. or else you’ll bawl like me.

May would too, but because she is so taciturn, these two lines “she’s (simmons) good, but she’s not the only one” and “i believe in you” are probably the closest to her saying how proud May is of Daisy.

( i cant find gifs for May saying these lines so if you can reblog this with the gifs i’d be really grateful 🥺)

The series finale sets the stage for one last mission that puts their family front and center, as they realize what they’re fighting for: a future for everyone they love. It’s a beautiful moment that brings everyone together and fully on board. No matter where they are, whether it’s the new Academy, some other galaxy, or a helicarrier, they will always find the time and a way to head back to that room in the new framework, to reminisce, catch up, celebrate wins, and sit in the same space with these people that have become so integral to their lives.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013-2020)

#queen of grammar

Fun fact about me: I hadn’t seen Winter Soldier before I saw this episode of Agents of Shield (Turn, Turn, Turn). I hadn’t seen it, hadn’t come across any spoilers, had no idea what I was in store for, and it was amazing. When I say this episode shook young, 2014 me to my core, I’m not kidding. I still get goosebumps when I rewatch Turn, Turn, Turn. As you might imagine, by the time I actually got to see Winter Soldier, it didn’t have nearly as much of an impact on me, and while I liked it and there are still parts of it that I think are really good, I find myself with an urge to rewatch Winter Soldier far less often than I find myself wanting to rewatch Turn, Turn, Turn. Obviously some of the reasons why I think AoS did it better are born from the fact that the twist was unspoiled in that experience for me and it wasn’t unspoiled with WS, but I still objectively think AoS did the Hydra reveal better. My reasons for this are as follows (this got long and a little rambly, so reasons are under the cut):

1. Investment. Obviously with both AoS and with WS, we have an investment in the main characters. Why else would we be watching? With AoS, we care about the team. We’ve watched them from their first mission, watched them grow in their skills and their relationships with one another. With WS, we care about Steve. We watched his origin story, we watched him find his footing with the Avengers after waking up in the ice, and now in WS we get to see a little more detail about how he’s struggling to adjust to a world decades beyond what he knows. We care about Natasha, too, have seen her at Fury’s right hand in Iron Man 2, have seen her hold her own with the Avengers, and we’re very quickly endeared to Sam at the start of WS as well. Of course there are personal preferences here regarding which characters a given person is more invested in, but from a checkbox standpoint, I’d consider both stories on relatively equal footing here.

The difference in investment, in my opinion, comes from the fact that one of the stories also gives us an investment in SHIELD, and one does not. In AoS, SHIELD the entity is almost as much a character as the rest of the team. We’ve spent episodes at various SHIELD facilities (the Hub, the Sandbox, the Academy, etc.), we’ve had multiple episodes getting to know various SHIELD agents (Hand, Garrett, Trip, Weaver, Blake, even Sitwell, etc.), and we’ve spent 16 episodes with people who are working within the agency on the day-to-day, who care about SHIELD, have given their life to SHIELD, who, even when they buck protocol or play fast and loose with orders, do it because they believe in the mission of SHIELD. I’d argue that in s1, we essentially have two POV characters that we’re working with as an audience. We have Skye, of course, she’s the audience surrogate, new to the world of SHIELD, fascinated by powers and with uncovering all of the secrets the ‘scary guys in suits’ have been keeping from us. (Note – I’m only referring to her as Skye here since we didn’t know she was Daisy at this point!) But we also have Coulson. Coulson, who we know from the MCU at large, who we loved enough to campaign for a resurrection, who is a SHIELD-lifer. He’s the guy in the suit, but he’s also our everyman, and his passion for SHIELD, for its history, for its purpose, is shared with us. SHIELD means everything to him, and so, because we share his POV, it means everything to us. So when we learn that SHIELD has been harboring a rotten core, that it’s mission and purpose has been secretly twisted and misused for decades, it hurts. It hurts Coulson, who’s had his entire identity shaken, and it hurts Skye, who had finally shed some of her suspicion and started trusting the guys in suits, only for it to blow up in her face and prove that her suspicious nature, her life of keeping everyone at arm’s length, wasn’t so wrong after all. And because it hurts Coulson and Skye, our POV characters, it hurts us.

Compare this to WS. Our POV character is Steve, a guy who has always been mistrustful of SHIELD and who has never quite felt like he fit in with the organization. Sure, they pulled him out of the ice, and sure he helped them with the Avengers Initiative and subsequently joined up, but he was never all in with them. Steve’s a military guy, a duty guy. SHIELD was born of the SSR, which he knew and trusted, and it functions for him as a powered individual the way the army did in the 40s. He wants to help, and the organization in place is, in his mind, the only way to accomplish that goal, whether he’s fully on-board or not. Even early in the movie itself we see Steve questioning SHIELD – he’s suspicious of Natasha when she goes rogue on the Lemurian Star mission with her own side mission given by Fury, he’s suspicious of Fury first for giving Natasha a secret side mission, then for Project Insight (‘this isn’t freedom, this is fear’). Part of why he connects with Sam early on is not only because of their shared experiences, but because he feels he can trust Sam in a way that he can’t trust his colleagues. When it’s revealed that Hydra has been inside SHIELD the whole time, it doesn’t hurt us because it doesn’t hurt Steve – it only confirms what he’s been feeling this whole time: SHIELD isn’t on his side. The things that hurt Steve the most in WS are the things centered around (as the title suggests) the Winter Soldier, around Bucky. That’s where Steve’s investment is, and since he’s our POV, that’s where our investment is guided, too. It’s worth noting: I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It makes sense for Steve’s investment to be in Bucky, and Steve’s suspicion of SHIELD isn’t unwarranted. The movie’s called Winter Soldier because that’s the focus of the movie. The fall of SHIELD and rise of Hydra is honestly set dressing for the smaller, more interpersonal plot about a long-lost friend who’s come back but this time as an enemy. And I get why they would pair those stories together. Friend-turned-enemy plot on the small scale with Steve and Bucky gets mirrored on the large scale with friend-turned-enemy plot involving SHIELD and Hydra. SHIELD’s corruption provides higher stakes for Steve and friends to grapple with as Steve also tries to save Bucky, gives us a big third act with explosions and face-swap reveals and fights on a helicarrier. But what it doesn’t do is give us more than a ‘whoa, didn’t see that coming’ moment upon first reveal. The betrayal isn’t as deep, because the investment wasn’t as strong.

Side note to this point – obviously in WS we do have characters who are deeply invested in SHIELD, the way Coulson is in AoS, like, Fury, Hill, and Natasha (and I guess Sharon, to a certain extent, although I’d argue she’s a better illustrator of Steve’s rightful distrust – she was spying on him, but it’s okay because she’s a friend! A mirror to Project Insight, in a certain sense, if you think about it from that angle – than the personal betrayal of SHIELD’s fall). We’ve known Fury and Natasha in some capacity since IM1 and IM2 respectively, and we know that they’re all in on SHIELD. Fury basically is SHIELD as the man in charge, and we’ve been shown that SHIELD was integral to Natasha’s turn from ‘villain’ (using the term loosely, since obviously there was a tremendous lack of agency during her time in the Red Room/as a Widow, but from SHIELD’s perspective, a villain) to a hero. Fury’s ‘death’ shocks us, but it gets undone quickly (which, in my opinion, further underscores Steve’s distrust). We don’t spend much more than a few passing moments or brief conversations on how Fury’s death, SHIELD’s fall, Hydra’s existence impacts Natasha or Maria. We don’t cycle through the confusion, the disbelief, the pain that Coulson and the AoS team do – we just jump pretty quickly into the taking a stand stage. Granted, part of that is the nature of the characters and their situations, plus the fact that TV as a medium gives us more time to slow down for emotions than movies do, but still… I guess my point here is that even the characters in WS who could give us  a window into the investment into SHIELD and the personal impact of the betrayal (like what we have in AoS) are characters who are not the focus, therefore the SHIELD/Hydra twist is not truly the focus, either.

Also on the subject of investment, we have the interpersonal element. Because it’s not just the betrayal of big SHIELD that hurts us when we learn about Hydra in AoS (or confirms our suspicions when we learn about it in WS), it’s the betrayal of individuals. With AoS, because we know and care about so many members of SHIELD at this point (the team, of course, but also the other SHIELD agents we’ve met along the way), there is a greater sense of urgency with the Hydra reveal. Who’s still on our side, who can we trust? Which friends were wolves in the herd the whole time, right under our noses? We have to (get to) go almost character by character at this point and parse out who’s still with us and who’s stabbed us in the back. With WS, Steve’s been grappling with who to trust, sure, but he quickly finds Natasha and Sam (and Maria and Sharon, too, to a smaller extent) and assembles his team – a team of people who he probably would have picked regardless of the Hydra situation, in my opinion. We don’t have to follow him as he goes through all his friends looking for traitors, because Steve doesn’t really have many friends at that point, and from the movie’s perspective, basically everybody at SHIELD can be written off whole-sale as a traitor (or a nameless agent who gets rounded up by Hydra, I guess…), because outside of Steve’s handpicked team, everybody’s out to get him, which is halfway to what he thought to begin with. Again, this makes sense given the medium and the kind of story being told in each case. AoS is more about the team and about SHIELD. WS is about Steve. I’m not saying either way is wrong, or a problem, but I do think that’s why the AoS Hydra reveal works better from an investment standpoint.

2. Foreshadowing and Red Herrings. This connects somewhat to investment, but I think it’s also its own separate thing. I’m of the opinion that the first season of AoS handled its foreshadowing very well (other seasons as well, but that’s not the focus here!), and that in the midst of their serialized, monster-of-the-week format, they did a very good job of planting the seeds for the larger, season-long arc, which resulted in strong emotional payoff by the end of the season. So that’s where a lot of this section will be coming from, just to be transparent. Leading up to Turn, Turn, Turn, the connective thru-line of the season had all been about Centipede and its leader, the Clairvoyant. Even seemingly-innocuous missions would sometimes be revealed as having some kind of mysterious connection to Centipede (Akela Amador, Ian Quinn, etc.), and eventually it became clear that there was a connection between Centipede and SHIELD that had been festering under our team’s nose – a mole. The Clairvoyant didn’t have abilities, he had clearance and all that. So the idea of rooting out a mole was already building up to a head by the time we get to Turn, Turn, Turn. The show throws us the red herring of Victoria Hand, an agent who the show has framed as a minor adversary, even before she was the suspected Clairvoyant, because of her harsh adherence to protocol, even in situations where Coulson and our team would prefer to go off-book. We also get the red herring of May’s betrayal, with her encrypted line, and the secret’s she’s been keeping from Coulson regarding Tahiti. So rather than come out of the blue, when Hydra is revealed in T,T,T, it becomes not so much a matter of ‘whoa, I didn’t see that coming,’ and more a matter of ‘my god, how deep does this go?’ with an added bonus of realizing that Hydra has been the missing piece of the puzzle, the thing that links it all together that we’ve been without as we try to solve the puzzle. And because we’ve got this deep investment in the team and in SHIELD, we’re scrambling along with our POV characters to figure out the answers, to figure out how deep it truly goes, to discern who’s a friend and who’s an enemy. Simmons and Trip are on their own – we trust Simmons, because we’ve known her since day one, and we share her momentary distrust of Trip, who we like but have known for less time, until we realize that it’s them against the rest of the base. We trust Coulson and Skye, and share their distrust of May and Hand, until we realize that they’re on our side, too, even if they were keeping things from us, even if there were red herrings. We trust Garrett, because Coulson and Ward vouched for him, and because he helped save Skye, until we get to the blood-chilling realization that we can’t trust him, because he’s been the Clairvoyant this whole time. Coulson lays out the puzzle pieces for us as he puts it together, and we can see the cracks in retrospect, which makes for a satisfying reveal and helps us feel the gut-punch of betrayal along with Coulson.

Compare this to WS. The movie starts us off being suspicious of SHIELD and Fury, because Steve is. But the suspicion isn’t that there’s a mole, or that there’s something wrong inside SHIELD, the suspicion is that SHIELD has too much power and is misusing it, that it’s an organization built upon deception and obfuscation of the truth, which isn’t entirely incorrect (after all, ‘we’re spies, we lie for a living’). So when the pivot in the SHIELD half of the plot occurs and we learn that SHIELD has been Hydra the whole time, the foreshadowing doesn’t quite line up. We’ve been foreshadowed that SHIELD is misusing its power, that it might be more nefarious than we’ve been led to believe, but then the reveal is that there’s something rotten inside SHIELD. Granted, the rotten thing is more nefarious than we’ve been led to believe of course, but that doesn’t directly address Steve’s concerns, even if it simultaneously refutes and reinforces his initial suspicion. Because SHIELD is bad, like Steve thought, but at the same time, if Hydra’s inside SHIELD, then all the bad things SHIELD has done are really Hydra’s fault, and the real SHIELD (i.e. Fury, Hill, and Romanoff’s SHIELD, not to be confused with s2 of AoS lol) wasn’t misusing its power the way Steve thought (even though they totally were… Project Insight is a bad idea, Fury…). There’s a slight disconnect in that to me.

The other place where I feel foreshadowing hurts WS is in its ‘villain reveal.’ While in AoS we get the reveal that Garrett, who we were led to trust earlier by his coming to the team’s aid, has been the Clairvoyant (again, a villain who has been teased repeatedly leading up to this point), in WS we learn that… Pierce… is the real evil mastermind. Which, in my opinion, means very little to the audience. With Garrett, there were a few breadcrumbs to be picked up in retrospect, but his identity as the villain was, at least to my recollection, played very close to the vest. It wasn’t obvious upon first viewing, but made perfect sense upon looking back. I consider that to be a satisfying use of foreshadowing and clue-dropping, leading up to the villain reveal. In WS, we’re introduced to Pierce specifically in this movie and specifically in the context of Steve questioning SHIELD’s motives. We have no attachment to him, no real reason to assume he’s anything but the eventual antagonist, since the movie doesn’t let us wonder if someone like Fury or Natasha is Hydra for more than a moment. Even though it telegraphs Pierce as the bad guy hard, I wouldn’t call that foreshadowing, or at least, I wouldn’t call that an effective use of foreshadowing. There’s a lack of potent red herrings like we got in AoS, there’s no narrative movement to allow us to put the pieces together, the way Coulson does when he realizes Garrett’s the Clairvoyant. Steve already thinks SHIELD is in the wrong, so it’s not satisfying when we learn that Pierce is, in fact, very in the wrong. We don’t trust Pierce the way we might have trusted Garrett, so we don’t care when it turns out he’s Hydra. If somebody like Fury or Hill, who we trusted and saw as emblematic of SHIELD’s principles, turned out to be Hydra, then that might be a different conversation, but as it stands, Pierce was created to be a bad guy, was always framed as such, and was never in doubt as such, even though the movie wants to pretend like it’s a big reveal when he does his ‘heel turn’ in his dark house. This leads me to…

3. Shock and Betrayal. This one is more like a half-reason, because it ties so closely in with points one and two, but I wanted to make sure I mentioned a few things specifically with regards to shock and betrayal. It’s no question that the Hydra reveal was a shock, regardless of which version of the story you see first. I was stunned when I saw T, T, T for the first time, and my brother, who saw WS first, has recounted for me his surprise at learning that SHIELD has been Hydra the whole time. Most people didn’t see it coming, I’d imagine. I certainly didn’t. But there’s something that AoS does, an additional moment of shock value, that I find lacking with WS, and that’s Ward. Ward was one of the team, was one of the good guys who we’d come to care about over the course of 17 episodes. He played into the stereotype of the closed off mentor with the good heart, he had a tragic backstory, he was conventionally handsome and was always at the front and center of their operations. He trained Skye, boosted Fitz’s self-confidence, and jumped out of a plane for Simmons. We saw him demonstrate respect for Coulson, saw him share an intimacy with May over their shared experiences (and… y’know… share a physical intimacy as well… :/ ). As far as we knew, he was one of us. He was incorruptible. We thought we shared his pain when we learned Garrett was Hydra. We thought that was where the betrayal stopped, that that was the big reveal and we didn’t have anything else to worry about. We were wrong. That moment on the plane, where we expect Ward to kill Garrett, and instead he turns and does the unimaginable, the unforgivable… Even now, years later, after who knows how many rewatches, my jaw still goes slack and my breath stops for a second. The precision and mercilessness with which Ward murders Victoria Hand, a character who we’ve come to like and respect, who’s proven herself to be one of the good ones, is chilling. There’s a reason this moment is still regarded as one of the show’s most memorable. Ward’s was a betrayal no one saw coming, one with true, unadulterated shock and horror.

To me, there is no moment in WS that can go toe-to-toe with Ward’s turn. There is no one in WS who we trust deeply who does not still have that trust by the end of the movie. While the Hydra reveal is still a shock, while maybe even to those who weren’t familiar with the Winter Soldier in the comics found Bucky’s reveal to be a shock, there is no moment, in my opinion, in WS that leaves your jaw on the ground the way Ward’s murder of Victoria Hand does. Fury faked his death, but he’s still one of the good guys. Maria Hill and Natasha never wavered in their loyalty to non-Hydra SHIELD and to Steve. Sam was trustworthy and honorable from start to finish. We know now that Sharon is the Power Broker and has become something of a villain, but in WS, she was a good SHIELD agent, who stood up to Hydra and spoke up for Steve. Obviously I don’t want Natasha or Fury or anyone else to have been Hydra. I love those characters and I’m not looking for them to be villains. Heck, I didn’t want Ward to be Hydra the first time we found out. But Ward being evil made for great storytelling, because it was personal, because the betrayal was such a shock, and because AoS had the benefit of follow-up episodes rife with dramatic irony and tension as we saw Ward play his role as a double agent to near perfection (until Skye figured him out, of course). WS didn’t have anything like that, as far as I’m concerned. No one who turned out to be bad was anyone who we lamented the loss of, who we felt the painful sting of betrayal from. Again, I think this stems mainly from the fact that the focus of the movie is on Steve and Bucky, on the surprise that an old friend was back from the dead, but wasn’t like how you remembered him, and not on the fact that SHIELD was crumbling all around them. Again, I like both and think both are good, but by design, SHIELD is an afterthought in WS, and by design, SHIELD is very much front and center in AoS, and that’s why I’ll always choose Turn, Turn, Turn over The Winter Soldier.