Agents of SHIELD: Do our protagonists need to be good people?

Joss Whedon and Marvel have made a brave move in making SHIELD the protagonists of their new series. So far in Marvel's new movie and tv franchises they have been involved in, and okay with, stealing research from independent scientists (from Jane Foster and Erik Selvig in Thor), and lying about secretly developing massively destructive weapons (in the Avengers).

In the first episode of the new SHIELD series, we have now seen black-bag-over-the-head kidnappings and secret motives, and in the second episode we have seen an idealistic new recruit immediately asked to do things against her ideals. It is a brave move to make these dangerous, deceptive, and complicated people the protagonists.

Flawed protagonists are nothing new though. Shakespeare liked to offer his viewers complex characters, tragic heroes mired by fatal flaws. We have seen violent anti-heroes like Wolverine, serial killers like Dexter, the unstable drug kingpin Walter White, and the vain, delusional, psychopath Patrick Bateman.

Agents of SHIELD presents you with the eponymous agency in the role of heroes - heroes prepared to do whatever is necessary - and openly asks you to cheer for them. When it comes to such problematic characters, that is not an easy thing to ask. But, it is important that somebody does.

Trying to understand complicated people, even those with ideas antithetical to our own, is at the core of how we learn empathy. By expecting us, the audience, to make the leap, imperfect protagonists challenge us to imagine other perspectives from which we might perceive the world.

But there are dangers here that should not be ignored. By presenting characters in contexts and roles normally reserved for the heroic, or at least generally good, their methods and their values can be normalised to an audience watching uncritically.

As has been said before, that is not a responsibility of the artist. It is however something to always be kept in mind when considering the context in which people are presented. Narrative, story, context - these things matter. When facts are set within narratives, the details of those stories can subtly alter how facts are interpreted by observers. We, the audience, need to be vigilant; we need to be alert to the possibility that those people presented to us as heroes, who we think of as heroes, may very well not be.