CLASSIFIED: LEVEL 10 (Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)

Fanart of Daisy Johnson/Quake (1)

The thing that makes this blog different from all of my other blogs is that I am fully outing myself as a nerd here. Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is the first fandom that I encountered and interacted with heavily from basically the moment of the show’s premiere way back in 2013 (when I was just entering eighth grade and didn’t know anything about anything). I created my Tumblr account after months of lurking so that I could interact with the fan content, and eventually, I began to produce my own fanworks. I can honestly say that with just a little bit of cultivation of the people that I follow on Tumblr, this fandom became a wonderfully positive place for me to figure myself out and experiment more with writing. That being said, my lens of this fandom is largely through the content that I like to consume and produce, which means that there is a lot of Daisy Johnson (like the fanart shown here).

The Show:

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. premiered on September 24, 2013, and ran for 7 seasons before finally concluding in 2020 (as if that year wasn’t bad enough). It brought in some already fairly big names like Ming Na Wen (Mulan, Street Fighter) and Clark Gregg (The Avengers, The New Adventures of Old Christine). Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. also gave rise to some up-and-coming stars, chief among them Chloe Bennet (Abominable, Valley Girl).

Fanart of the main characters (2)

The show is technically an ensemble cast, though most fans consider their favorite character to be a bit more important to the team dynamics. The long-running show dealt with everything from aliens (a lot) to Nazis (too much) as they struggled with trying to defeat HYDRA, the Nazi science division that the fans of Marvel found out was still alive and well during Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The impact of HYDRA shows better than most other examples that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. holds a very nebulous place within the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), as it was largely affected by the events of the MCU but did not hold a reciprocal sway over the other properties.

Fanart of Elena "Yo-Yo" Rodriguez,
one of the first Latinx superheroes
on the small screen (3)

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. features a fairly diverse cast, which only improved as the show went on. The show features some of the firsts, if not the absolute firsts, in the following categories: Asian-American superhero (Chloe Bennet's Daisy "Quake" Johnson), Latinx superheroes (Natalia Córdova-Buckley as Elena "Yo-Yo" Rodriguez and Juan Pablo Raba as Joey Gutierrez), and openly gay superhero (again Pablo Raba's Joey Gutierrez).

The Fandom:

The parts of the fandom that I actively participate in are hosted largely on Tumblr, a social media/blogging site that is home to just about every fandom possible. Tumblr is especially interesting with properties in the MCU because of the potential for crossover fanworks. This can be as simple as a parallel between two separate scenes in different movies/shows (such as a parallel between Daisy Johnson and Steve Rogers). It can also be as complicated as directly comparing characters from the different works or imagining how they would interact for the first time. There's also a lot of works and posts which take the assumption that characters from different media know one another and run with it.

There is some cross-platform content, like with the Tumblr blog agentsofchallenges, which serves as a host of fandom challenges on the gaming server host Discord. There are different servers on Discord that one can be invited to which deal with different things. I am not a part of the agentsofchallenges one, and therefore cannot say exactly what happens there, but I have seen the Tumblr side of things for them. Basically, agentsofchallenges runs a new challenge every month. This month was March Madness: The Fandom Version. It started with 8 common tropes of fanwork and 8 common Alternate Universes (AUs). Fans created works within those categories to earn points allowing their favorite tropes and AUs to survive, until there remained only one trop and one AU, which are currently battling it out for the top spot of being the ultimate fan favorite.

There are almost always fan challenges or appreciation weeks if one knows where to look (I often don't). But fans don't need challenges or appreciation weeks to create fanworks.

Fanart of Agent Melinda May that I
genuinely thought was a photograph (4)

The Fanworks:

Since Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was such a long-running show, there is a nearly infinite amount of fanwork (parts of which I have contributed). A quick search of Archive of Our Own shows that there are over 31,000 works under the "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)" fandom heading. And that's just the fanfiction. There are dozens of fanworks that pop up across my Tumblr dashboard every day, from photorealistic drawings (like the one seen to the right) to fan videos that knock my socks off. There are several fanvids that I really like, including one which is styled like a video game and another that shows Daisy at different points in the show with the song "Feel It Still" playing over it.

Fanfiction is a fascinating thing because of the potential range. There exist just within this fandom fics just about the same characters living different lives together. There are fanfics that are canon divergent, where one thing happens differently and things spin out of control from there. There are Coffeeshop AUs, Chinese Restaurant AUs (which I didn't know existed until like three nights ago), and Soulmate AUs. There are seriously so many soulmate AUs. I myself have probably published a few dozen works of fanfiction that fall into at least half a dozen different categories, from Detective AUs to Florist/Tattoo Artist AUs. It's really fun to just borrow some characters and play around with them for a bit before I send them off.

The thing about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is that I couldn't find any technically academic writing about it. It just doesn't seem to be out there. What I have found in my years in the fandom and on Tumblr is the in-depth psychological analyses of characters on the brink. I've found discussions of sexism, classism, racism, xenophobia. I've read analyses of the language used by politicians who are trying to turn people against one another. In the show, it's about turning humans against Inhumans, people who are just like them until they go through a life-changing event. And of course our world doesn't have Inhumans. But we have immigrants. We have queer people, people of color, people who politicians try to turn us against in order to secure our vote and actively deprive people of their rights. So while I didn't find any formal academic writing, I think there's a lot there just underneath the surface.

Works Cited:

1/ cloudy-paws. "Daisy Johnson + dawn meadow" we are goose-free, 15 January 2021, https://cloudy-paws.tumblr.com/post/640428777001861120/daisy-johnson-dawn-meadow-i-guess-this-is-what.

2/ agentreeb. "It's a spy's goodbye..." AoS Fan, 12 August 2020,  https://agentreeb.tumblr.com/post/626268110264156160/its-a-spys-goodbye-my-little-tribute-to-agents

3/ marleywtoons. "Continuing with my #agentsofshield character tribute drawings...." Marley Ward (MarleyW_Toons), https://marleywtoons.tumblr.com/post/627280841580675073/continuing-with-my-agentsofshield-character.

4/ larkistin. "These three were my first attempts at some Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. fanart...." Larkistin, 5 March 2021, https://larkistin.tumblr.com/post/644853236026785792/these-three-were-my-first-attempts-at-some-agents.