YMMV / Avengers: The Initiative

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Some of the Skrull replacing Hank Pym's actions are odd, even for an infiltrator, raising the question of just how dedicated he is to staying in character, or if it's part of taking on Hank's mental illness, something Mighty Avengers showed was a serious problem for the Skrulls.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Taskmaster.
• Harsher in Hindsight: It can be pretty jarring to go back and read this book featuring people mocking Hydra and dismissing them as a minor threat after reading Secret Empire, especially when considering the heroes that were killed by Hydra during the event.
• He's Just Hiding: When the dying Reality Warper Crusader vanishes after he mutters, "it could have ended differently," many fans are convinced he changed the past by uttering those words, saving himself.
• Moral Event Horizon: Gyrich soars over the damn thing after MVP's death. Having a teenage boy who was killed in an accident dissected, then cloned to create super-soldiers, lying to the man's father about this, having the girl who did this locked up in an institution, and then refusing to admit he ever did anything wrong. And yet all that happens to him is that he gets fired.
• Nightmare Fuel: MVP getting his brains blown out, right on panel too.
• The Scrappy: 3-D Man got a lot of flack for arbitrarily killing The Crusader simply on the basis of him being a Skrull, never mind that Crusader was helping the Avengers. This act also made him something of an in-universe example, as the Crusader's friends and teammates all visibly hate the 3-D Man.
• Tear Jerker: Several.
  • The most notable is in #26. We're introduced to a couple of D-list villains, Johnny Guitar and Doctor Sax, whose only claim to fame is that they'd once fought Dazzler. After being recruited into the Shadow Initiative, Johnny learns that they're nothing more than cannon fodder, and their superiors are going to be intentionally sending them on suicide missions without the knowledge of the recruits. Going to visit Trauma, he learns that because of the way benefits and pensions are written, his family that he's estranged from will be well taken care of in the event of his dying in the line of duty. He decides to go through with it, but not before intentionally injuring Doc (doing so in a cruel way to prevent anyone from being suspicious) so he'll be sent home, and thus spared. Johnny's killed in the fight to reclaim Prison 42, and his and other deaths, as well as the sudden arrival of the 'big names' of the Initiative right at the end of the battle, suddenly make the rest of his unit aware of exactly what they are to their bosses.
  • MVP's accidental death in the first issue is a Gut Punch, and its effect on his horrified killer Armory (who's Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life) is equally disheartening.
  • The separation of Star-Crossed Lovers Diamondback and Constrictor in the final issue is depressing, even if it is resolved later on.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • While MVP is an effective Decoy Protagonist whose death in the first issue is pretty plot-relevant, plenty of fans wish that he'd lived and remained a main character due to his being a Badass Normal Nice Guy descended from the creator of the Captain America serum.
  • Conceptually, Armory's a pretty interesting character — she's a depressed teenager who was saved from a suicide attempt when a mysterious piece of alien weaponry attached itself to her, after which she found a new lease on life and decided to become a hero. Unfortunately, she didn't last past the first issue either; while not dead, she was stripped of her weapon and thrown into a mental institution for accidentally killing the above-mentioned MVP, and outside of an appearance in an annual detailing her backstory, she hasn't been seen since. The fact that her weapon was ultimately destroyed in Fantastic Four (2018) only makes any chance of her returning even slimmer.
• The Woobie:
  • Cloud 9 goes from a sweet, innocent little girl into a sniper who is broken down from all the horrible things that happened at Camp Hammond. Simply because she wanted to fly...
  • Armory. She lived in a foster home that left her with lasting trauma in the form of severe arachnophobia and suffered from depression that eventually led to her being Driven to Suicide. Things seemed to be looking up for her after the Tactigon bonded to her (saving her life in the process), but Trauma ended up triggering her arachnophobia, leading to her accidentally killing MVP, the Tactigon getting forcibly removed from her body, and her getting locked in a mental institute and monitored by a doctor on Gyrich's payroll so she won't tell anyone what happened to her. Poor girl really needs a hug.

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