aww yeah it's question meme time

[hackitude]

Time to bring back one of my old faves...

the QUESTION meme

Simple and easy! Here's how it goes:

1. POST a top-level with your character name

2. REPLY to other people's top-level with a question for that character

3. ANSWER the question you were asked

4. ASK a question of that person's characters in return!

We go back and forth like this asking questions in a thread until one or both of us runs out of questions!

QUESTIONS CAN BE ANYTHING. Serious or silly as you want! What does Jane think of (x)? What does Sarah have for breakfast? How many times a day does Alex masturbate? What's Tom's dream job? The only limit for questions is your imagination.

Replies can be as monosyllabic or as tl;dr are you want; it's up to you. Go wild kids!

Comments

Ward | Agents of SHIELD.

[hydraated]

..

[immuno]

does he feel guilty at all?

TEAL DEER AHOY SO SORRY.

[hydraated]

I think if he does he's processed it or dismissed it as a sign of weakness. It's impossible for him not to feel it - when he drops Fitz and Simmons in the ocean he genuinely looks upset about having to do it. However he's in a box now, in a basement, and he'd rather try and own up to the bad things he's done or at least shove them under the rug and compartmentalize them. I doubt the guy's getting any psychiatric help and so he has to fall back on his same coping mechanisms that got him through the majority of his life. When he says to Fitz "I'd imagine you have a lot of things to say to me." he sounds accepting. He's not the sort of person that would wallow in guilt or grief. Does he feel responsible? Yes. Is he sorry? Yes, I really do believe that he's sorry and I think that Chloe and Brett at least do too, but his ability to feel regular emotion is compromised and it continues to be compromised by his choices.

Ward's an interesting character because we see his coping mechanisms deconstructed. We don't see May and how she deals with doing terrible things (well, I mean on a one on one basis) or Coulson but Ward as a spy represents the worst of what spies can do and will do. I was having a discussion about this last night ironically with someone hoping that Bobbi Morse's appearance would be just a pure straight heroine. She's not, she's working for HYDRA and even if she's undercover or brainwashed eventually if the writers give her the credit she deserves as a character we're going to get to see how she copes with what she's done.

The thing is, we see how Ward copes and the choices that have been made for him and his reaction to the choices that have been made and the choices he's made himself and you realize just how screwed up Ward really is and just how potentially messed up every single character could become. Does he feel guilt? Yes but if he does he doesn't know what it is and dismisses it as a sign of weakness. Remorse is something that he was taught to bury, Guilt is something that he doesn't believe he can feel, or even that he has a right to feel. When he's put in the vault he has the time to seemingly address his choices. He's a realist.

If you want to go the woobie fandom route then he's never really shown a secondary way to feel about it because everybody and their brother hates him fifty ways to Sunday, but honestly I feel like Ward's reaction is probably really typical of what would happen in reality to captured spies and people who are traitors and do terrible things. Ward - no matter who he worked for - was trained to be the final solution and make the really bad decisions so that nobody else would have to bear that burden. He still feels human things, but he has distanced himself from them. "I did this, I am a bad person, well there need to be bad people in the world."

Ward is a lot like Cato from District 2, and a lot of the other district 2 tributes if you read the Hunger Games. Cato in the movie has this great line at the end

Cato: [holding Peeta in a rear-arm choke] Go on! Shoot, then we both go down and you win. Go on. I'm dead anyway. I always was, right? I didn't know that till now. How's that? Is that what they want? Huh?

It's a Tragedy because people like this are made every single day and nobody really acknowledges it since survival means living as an individual and thinking in very black and white terms. "Doing such and such is bad" "but why? Why is it bad? what if doing this will get us as a group what I want? What if we send someone to do that?" "I volunteer as tribute." "AWESOME NOW I CAN LIVE AND HAVE FREEDOM AND STUFF" "and my ability to cope as a human being is compromised BUT AS LONG AS YOU'RE OKAY WE'RE GOOD." but he was very specifically chosen.

Garrett was in the market for people with broken homes who had a degree of power (I mean really, Trip's an ex-howling commando, Ward's a member of a political family) and he took them and made them into soldiers. The most guilt at this point, at least in MoM is about Garrett and what happened to him. That perhaps this is something that could have been prevented. The difference between Ward and say, people like Natasha Romanoff - is that instead of being loyal to a country he was loyal to a person. Which I think is inherently sort of reprehensible? Most people look at that kind of relationship and they're like, "Hey, you...are 30 why are you clinging to your parental figure what the hell why are you stabbing us in the back for your dad what the hell what happened to you know being a productive member of society" which makes it twice as hard for people to offer him that secondary route of "It's not your fault you need to learn how to see things differently." because we're such inherently group creatures. That's why he transfers that onto Skye.

TEAL DEER: Yes, but not very well at all and barring some serious psych intervention or possibly magic sexual healing because this is marvel, this is comics, and that's how that works It'll probably only get worse.