Discussion Series / AgentsOfSHIELD

If your continuing this conversation you need to state what it's about # context. To anyone confused this is a discussion regarding Designated Villian. There was already a member thread for that as in the ATT. Proceed there if you wish to continue.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/remarks.php?trope=DesignatedVillain.LiveActionTV

However I remind you as per ATT and that thread the consensus was the definition did not match for Grant Ward. I'm not the one standing in it's way. Consensus and the fact his example did not fit the criteria. Also Frameward an NPC didn't end up on the right path because Frameward never made choices and Fitz unlike Real Ward was mindwiped. But again your missing the point. Frameward does not make Real Ward a Designated Villian. The things Ward chose to do him a Villain. Context defines trope.

For example the literal example itself A villainous antagonist is a common driving force behind conflict in stories, so it makes natural sense to write one in. But villainy requires performing villainous acts; a villain who doesn't really act on those is difficult to root against. The result is a character who is treated as a bad guy by the principal characters, despite never actually doing anything to justify that amount of hate. They might even be sympathetic by virtue of their social position. Any astute arguments and observations by this character are to be dismissed by the audience, because they are Evil™. Villainous acts required. Betraying the team, trying to kill the team, kidnapping members of the team, torturing members of the team, trying to use one team members ( Daisy) curiosity about her father to get her to help him escape etc. That is why DesignatedVillain does not apply to him. Hes not the bad guy by designation and no reason, hes the bad guy for doing awful things. But I recommend you go the the original thread to continue this. Its already there and has been for a couple of years. Consensus both there and ATT have mark him as NOT a DesignatedVillain, as well as examples shown.

@Tuvok Yeah I'm off that now. See my edit on the previous post. I want to talk that the showrunners realized trying to make a Ward a straight villain after making him so flawed and complex was a choice they ended up going back on (for the better).

Unless you have links directly from the showrunners stating that intent. Then like a lot of your reasoning its opinion . You state they went back on making him a straight villain but state no example from the show ( Did he try to make up for it? Was he given a heroic death? ) no he stayed the same as he was and did worse things until he was killed for it. I would give more weight to your argument except your marking opinion as fact with nothing in show to back that up or actual backing from the creators themselves. You can carry on in the other thread but the fact remains consensus is against you due to examples in show and your main argument is just that your trying to convince one person on what the writers were doing, with nothing in show or the writers indicating that.

Well it is my interpretation, but I believe it's supported by how they wrote Fitz's arc as a foil to it as well as Daisy pretty much saying what Garrett did to Ward was Not So Different compared to Hive swaying her. Yeah, the wound was still fresh at the time, but it's not like it was ever followed up and reneged on though.

Once again, Daisy was speaking as a literally going into drug withdrawal. Fitz is not a foil to Ward as Fitz mind was literally mind wiped with no choice versus Ward who actually had a choice and has said himself not brainwashed. The main problem is your statements are followed by "I believe" with no backing of intent from the writers. Its okay to be passionate about a character, but opinion does not override what was written in the show itself, and guessing what you think the writers were trying to say does not override what they actually wrote or said. With all due respect I think I will stop interacting with you on this matter. The original point was about discussing DesignatedVillain and why it does not apply to Ward. For some reason you seem to want to make it a discussion in general about what you think the writers wanted etc. I think there may be some forums you could go to, to discuss your thoughts on the writing for AOS . That might be the best place to carry on your discussion on.

Another arc is that while it was mostly a program, everything in the Framework still had a life and personality to it that it did become real. Also by being created by the Darkhold, my view is that it all WAS real no matter how contained in the Framework it was. Framework Ward is in a way a resurrection of Ward and gave him the chance to be different and be better. Without knowing he's a version of another person, he showed under different circumstances that who he was was based on what happened to him and not simply his own choices. Not everyone will agree and it could be that I think this way because I see Framework Ward as an extension of Ward rather than a completely different person. Yes, Fitz's original personality wasn't intact, but again, circumstances ruled. The writers could have thought all this or maybe they didn't, but it doesn't mean that it's wrong for me to view it this way. There was truth in Daisy saying "So was Ward" even if she said it in a daze and it's backed up by her also admitting: "There was some good in him after all." I agree that unless the writers say this was their intention, it's not concrete, but it's an analysis that's a more than acceptable interpretation.

At a guess, it's the Fitzsimmons that breaks it. I agree with you, but this is one particular trope that is resistant to tweeking.

Nope. Doesn't count. The Lancer can never be female.

Sadly, I'm not just being a jerk. Five-Man Band is stupidly strict. It must be four males and a female, with the female being The Chick, or it doesn't count.

The reason it's like this is that at one time this was a hugely common trope seen everywhere and always in this exact formation, but it's become less common recently and has become something of a Dead Horse Trope, in part because it's so strict... since that formula's fallen out of vogue it's next to impossible now to find straight examples unless the author was intentionally going for that trope.

Check out The Team for a possible replacement.

Well, since there are no responses, I've started slashing and burning. If anyone disagrees with some of the stuff I'm untagging, feel free to post it here. The current page is a Signal To Noise Trainwreck.

I got to the letter "D" before deciding it was getting too exhausting to continue for the time being. I'll come back later but it would be nice if someone else wanted to help make the page minimally legible.

There's a glitch that discussion pages don't always show up on watchlists. That's why no one replied.

Anyway, you are allowed to spoiler-tag entire entries (minus the trope name, which should never be tagged). You're supposed to try to avoid it, but it's not flat-out against the rules. That being said, most of your edits look fine, though I'm still looking over them. A good number of them were indeed unnecessary tags. I just want to make sure you're not un-tagging things like HYDRA's existence under the logic "everyone already knows."

I actually did un-tag that particular development, but for a different reason; it is literally impossible to talk about current episodes without talking about it, so spoiler-tagging that particular development means being essentially unable to talk about recent episodes at all. There comes a point where you're spoiler-tagging so much that there's nothing left for the people who don't highlight the spoilers, and I think trying to keep the existence of HYDRA a secret crosses that line.

Oh, and FWIW, I definitely erred on the side of un-tagging too much. Intentionally. The pendulum was so far in the other direction that I figured it was better to untag the borderline cases and let other people argue with me about the ones that turn out to be mistakes than to leave the status quo.

Actually, it's better to err on the side of not untagging too much, so people don't have to waste their time cleaning up after your mistakes.

If you're deliberately going to not even try to not make mistakes everyone else will have to fix, do everyone a favor and don't edit.

People who don't care about spoilers can just deactivate them. People who do care would rather err on the side of caution.

Not un-tagging stuff that should be un-tagged is also a mistake. It's better to make a mistake someone else will be motivated to fix, than to make a mistake that hardly anyone will care to fix and will just accumulate with the other similar mistakes that have made the page the mess it is right now. And I'm by definition only un-tagging the things that I believe are at least close to the line, so the "damage" I'm "risking" is both minimal and a matter of opinion.

Ironically, I care about keeping the use of spoiler tags reasonable because I don't want to deactivate spoiler tagging completely. Having 70%+ of the examples spoiler-tagged means the only reasonable way to read the page is to highlight everything, so the spoiler tags become useless. Keeping them limited to actual spoilers allows them to do their job.

All of that said, I'm glad other people are paying attention to this because I really didn't intend to just unilaterally decide how this stuff is going to work. In that vein, I'm going to start posting general principles I'm using when making these edits so other people can offer their opinions.

• One convention I've adopted to help make things less spoilery (and therefore allowing me to delete tags) is to refer to Garrett and Ward as "The Clairvoyant" and "The Mole" when talking about their activities under HYDRA, as long it keeps the substance of the example the same. That way people who know about that particular plot development will know what's going on but it won't spoil anyone who doesn't.

• In a similar vein, I've started un-spoiling mentions of the existence of Deathlok, but it might be possible to keep his identity under spoilers without ruining the page. So, my current convention is to just call him "Deathlok" if referring to him after "T.R.A.C.K.S.", and "Peterson" otherwise. He was showing up in the promotional materials anyway so it might just be a Late-Arrival Spoiler at this point.

• Things that are revealed the next scene after they become relevant are not spoilers. I consider Thomas Nash to be on the borderline of this principle because while he was revealed as a fake right after he was killed, he also spent the entire episode being a Red Herring.

• I'm inclined to say that Victoria's fake villainy can't be kept under spoilers, because even though it could be considered a spoiler in a vacuum, it's only for like half an episode and requires hiding almost everything that comes after it, right down to avoiding pronouns when referring to The Clairvoyant.

Agree with everything but the last one. We've made it clear that we're using male pronouns for the Clairvoyant out of convenience's sake; the fact that he actually is male isn't really relevant. Furthermore, it's not too difficult to hide stuff about the fake reveal of Victoria Hand being the Clairvoyant, since she dies the episode after.

Another addition:

• "Character gets the exact same superpowers he has in the comics" is not a spoiler.

So I'm 99% done with my rampage now, though I may come back and do something about Wham Line; quotes are offically Spoilers Off material, though I'll probably show a little more finesse than cutting the quotes or removing the spoiler tags.

That's quotes at the top of a page.

That's not what it says.

The character page says "WARNING. These pages assume that you are up to date with the films up to The Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Relevant spoilers will be unmarked." Should we announce the same here?

I don't think anything left in The Avengers is a spoiler (I mean the biggest one is Coulson getting killed by Loki and that's necessary backstory for this show), but I think the biggest stuff from Captain America should be tagged. I think it's bad form to spoil movies that came out after the show started.

To be clear, I don't mind it on the character pages. I think that the more detailed a page gets, the less should be tagged, with the extreme case being the Recap pages which are 100% tag free. But I don't think it's fair to say "you shouldn't read the main page about this series unless you've watched movies that are chronologically after parts of it"

What about Fury being Not Quite Dead? It makes sense in the movie, as he dies and is revealed later to be alive. But here, you either saw the movie (the full movie) or you didn't; if you saw it, you know that he staged his death, if you didn't, you didn't even know it. In the series, he is mentioned to have been killed. Off screen, somewhere else, very far away from the action, and without influencing the plot other for increasing the Diabolus ex Machina. And he's mentioned to be alive but hiding at the next episode. Again, without influencing the plot. Nick Fury eventually makes a second appearence, but at this point it was a surprise only for the characters who were not up to the secret, not to the audience.

I don't have a strong opinion either way since it's revealed in the very next episode (by Eric Koenig). I was actually kind of pissed that people spoiled it for me on the "Turn, Turn, Turn," recap page, but it's kind of old news now.

I'd say so. It's leader is a member of HYDRA, after all.

Well yeah, I mean Garrett is Hydra. He created the project, so yeah.

Shout-Out, I'd say. A mythology gag is about the Meta-text of the story. AGENTS is clearly in The 'Verse.

Wouldn't it be Continuity Nod? Shout-Out is usually a Shout-Out to something completely unrelated to the work.

I agree with you completely. I'm actually not sure any episodes other than "Turn, Turn, Turn," count, personally. Maybe "End of the Beginning". A Wham Episode should vary from the baseline, and the baseline has been raised.

"Only Light in the Darkness" definitely isn't, but I can't recall most of the others by name, so I'm not sure.

Listing "Yes Men," which is almost entirely disconnected from the rest of the series except a ten-second stinger, is also pretty ridiculous.

I agree with "Turn, Turn, Turn," being the only Wham Episode in the show.

I cut most of them:

• "The Bridge": With this episode, the series enters an unbroken string of Wham Episodes. Skye's faith in Coulson is damaged by May admitting they're not looking for her parents, Centipede kidnaps Coulson, Mike is seemingly killed in an explosion covering Centipede's escape, and Ward gets shot in the process.
• "The Magical Place" finally addresses the mystery of Coulson's apparent death and resurrection: he was dead for days, and S.H.I.E.L.D. had his memories rewritten to stop him being a Death Seeker. And if that wasn't whamy enough, the last scene reveals that Mike is still alive, but minus a leg and prisoner to Centipede.
• "Seeds": Skye is an 0-8-4, and Ian Quinn is working for the Clairvoyant.
• "T.R.A.C.K.S.": Mike is turned into the Clairvoyant's new enforcer, Deathlok, and Skye is left comatose after being shot by Quinn.
• ''T.A.H.I.T.I.": Coulson finally learns exactly how Fury brought him back: through the transplant of alien tissues turned into potent drugs. What's more, Skye is given a similar treatment.
• "Yes Men" is for the most part an ordinary episode, until the very end reveals that May is spying on the team for (presumably) the S.H.I.E.L.D. conspiracy that resurrected Coulson.

I think "End of the Beginning" is borderline and wouldn't mind if someone else wants to cut it (it's almost like a two-part episode with "Turn, Turn, Turn", given the massive cliffhanger it ends on). "String of Wham Episodes" is not possible by definition. Given the new Arc-centric direction of the show, I think it's safe to say that even one or two major reveals can't qualify an episode; it has to seriously change the trajectory of the arc somehow, like HYDRA's reemergence did.

What Coulson says is entirely Due to the Dead, but it's the exact opposite of what he would have wanted. It might just be Idiot Ball. I think when Graviton finally shows up and Coulson has to defend his decision, we'll learn more about what his reasons were. Maybe.

Coulson might not be able to destroy it. Given what happened in the episode, I got the impression that destroying it could only entail massive collateral damage. So instead he does the next best thing he can and has it locked away as completely as he can.

I got the impression that Coulson doesn't want it destroyed because he thinks at some point in the future they might be able to extract Professor Hall.

I agree with Mr Death. Unlike many other objects that can be flung into the sun, a big chuck of gravity altering stuff might not be the wisest move. Potentially altering the gravity of the sun should be one of those things that you don't do. And given that their one expert on the substance is dead as far as they know, they've likely got no one else they can consult about destroying it. If you can't safely destroy something, then it's better to hide it away without documentation and hope that's the end of it.

Yeah, I was wondering about that, too - especially since the aft engines don't seem to be running in regular flight. (They didn't ingest any debris in the second episode, either.)

They remain strangely placed, though.

How do they remain strangely placed?

Also, wouldn't the hot exhaust damage the rear engines even if they weren't running?

That's what I meant by 'strangely placed'. (According to the official bluebrints, they are not directly in line, though.) It doesn't make much sense and can't be good for the engines, but it does make a little bit more sense if they are only used for VTOL.

For the same reason it didn't count as a shout out to the fish tank in mass effect.

Fish tanks are fairly common decorations, so there's no reason to take the idea of one being used as such as a reference to any of the billions of fish tanks in fiction (you might as well argue that it was a reference to A Fish Called Wanda or a certain Monty Python sketch.

How many of those fish tanks were aboard the main vehicles of the characters, as in Star Trek or (I suppose, I don't know the game) Mass Effect? Putting the fish tank on the ship is what does it for me. Plus, the element of the British Dividual being the one that wanted it, also mirroring Picard's character (yes, we know he was supposed to be French, but aside from the name, what about Jean-Luc Picard was not British?).

"Billions" of fish tanks? You've just named the only 2 I can bring to mind and added 1 I have only read about. :grinning:

... huh? You totally lost me.

A fish tanks in an executive's quarters is a common trope. Both Picard and the Mass Effect are just examples of this. Ditto Coulson. It just so happens that their quarters are all mobile. I mean, it's not like Coulson has the opportunity to have a non-mobile fish tank.

It's Chekhov's Gag.

As the OP on the entry I would agree that it is inverted rather than averted, but probably belongs under the Gag category also. Sice my entry has been deleted twice I am gunshy about trying a third time however.

Behold.

...well now I feel silly.

Part of the issue is that Arc Words is a horribly, horribly defined trope. There's a reason it's in TRS. I'd say just leave it for the moment, and once TRS figures out what it means, we'll deal with it then.

Acceptable, thanks!

I believe so considering the episode's villain had a personal history with Coulson and used it to their advantage.

I don't think it was. After all, if there wasn't a rebel attack, the villains could have just killed the team as soon as they had the drop on them, blamed the rebels as they were going to and drove straight home. Being stuck on the Bus added another complication to their plan (since they needed to keep Coulson alive to redirect the plane, and the team alive to extort Coulson).

Well, the placement at the end of the film (including how it was suddenly revealed to surprise someone) and the way it takes off look very similar....

Put it on YMMV and problem solved, yes?

That's not how YMMV works. Specific tropes go there.

Anyway, it's pretty clearly an homage. It's done in such a similar way to the Back To The Future scene that it would have to be a pretty huge coincidence. And it's not like Joss Whedon is averse to pop culture references. There's certainly no way that the similarities would have slipped by him unnoticed.

The Centipede bracelet may incorporate extremis, but it doesn't work exactly the same way.

You can make it yourself, just manually edit the url in your address bar and start the page.

They did find the third option - which is what they shot Mike with at the end. Fitz and Simmons were there too.

At least I think they did..

Yes, they found a third option. They loaded it into the "Night Night" gun which was what Ward shot Mike with.

Yeah, there was some technobabble earlier that stated it was tied directly to his metabolism or something and the only way to stop it was to kill him... or tranq him.