Headscratchers / Marvel One-Shots

• At the end of Agent Carter, how come Howard Stark refers to SHIELD by its acronym, instead of its full name? Iron Man made me think that the shortened name wouldn't have existed in the 1940s.
  • The name was only fully said in Iron Man because it was the first movie to introduce the organization, and the general audience wouldn't know what the organization is and comic fans needed to know the acronym stood for something different. While the dialogue does make it sound like the acronym hadn't been invented until the end of the movie, it seems to be Early-Installment Weirdness: They hadn't fully fleshed out the MCU yet, and probably hadn't decided SHIELD would have been created right after WWII.
  • In the first movie, Coulson was also depicted as a kinda wimpy bureaucrat rather than the Badass Normal that he is now. Definitely Early-Installment Weirdness. Or maybe Coulson just didn't know the acronym yet.
  • Or he was deliberately playing up the "stuffy pedantic wonk" image, the better to make his agency seem less savvy and intrusive to Tony: an industrialist who, like so many other U.S. corporate bosses, might object to government oversight on principle.
  • According to a tie-in comic, Fury never noticed that the acronym was SHIELD, and the agents avoided using it because they thought he disliked it. My own theory is that they initially used the full name because they didn't know whether they could trust Pepper (if she can't remember the name of the organization, she can't repeat it, and people are less likely to trust her about the organization if she can't repeat the full name).
  • In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., it's noted that someone really wanted the initials to spell "SHIELD".
    • That there is what we refer to as a "joke."
  • It was basically a retcon, but I'm under the impression that Stark named it in honor of Steve. He couldn't exactly call it "STEVE", so maybe "SHIELD" was the closest he could get. Hell, according to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Bucky is an honorary member.
• I know Killian is stupid (really, really stupid), but did he seriously not consider the consequences of stealing the name from the Mandarin? I mean, he didn't think he'd be dead by that point.
  • He probably thought his army of super soldiers would help him out there.
    • Unlikely, if the Mandarin is anywhere near as powerful as the comics.
  • It's also very unlikely that he was aware that the Mandarin was an actual person and not just a legend.
    • This seems even more plausible in the wake of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, as we now know the MCU Mandarin had been around for centuries, and had retired from running the Ten Rings for some years. Kilian probably assumed "Mandarin" was at most a Legacy Character, not an individual, and one that was no longer consistently being passed on.
  • It's probably why he had Trevor play the role of the Mandarin to the masses and only let Stark in on it, figuring he would kill Stark and if the real Mandarin came around, he would go after Trevor (which he does).