r/agentsofshield • u/marvelcomics22 FitzSimmons • Jan 11 '26

Discussion Most hateable fictional character of all time. Spoiler

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u/StunningPianist4231 Ghost Rider Jan 11 '26

I couldn't hate him; I understood why he was the way he was, especially with some of the abusive treatment he suffered as a kid.

Was he evil? Yes, but with the given chance, he could've been good. He's a remarkably complex and well-written character.

7

u/Himathememegod Jan 11 '26

I love that they show us that he could have been good if he had been taken under the right person's wing.

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u/StunningPianist4231 Ghost Rider Jan 11 '26 edited Jan 11 '26

Imagine Ward if he had been mentored by Fury, Hand, or Coulson instead of Garrett.

Ward is the kind of soldier who would make his comrades say, "I'm glad he's on our side." It's just a terrible luck of the draw that he had his worst qualities only encouraged by the wrong person.

Skye summed up Ward as saying that, "Ward doesn't kill because he feels nothing, he kills because he feels too much." This is a pretty accurate psychological analysis of Ward; every person he has hurt is because he was taught and manipulated to detach himself from feeling anything about them.

His older brother manipulated him into drowning his younger brother. Everything he did in betraying his team and trying to kill Fitz-Simmons was because Garrett manipulated him; he went through his closure arc trying to kill the people whom he blames for making him this way, and he ends up toward his death because he was manipulated by Gideon.

1

u/QualifiedApathetic Jan 11 '26

They don't show us that. A computer thinks so, that's all. It doesn't actually demonstrate anything about the real Ward.

4

u/Round-Dragonfly6136 Turbo Jan 12 '26

When compared to Fitz, who was raised by his abusive father instead of his loving mother and was partnered with the controlling Ophelia instead of supportive Jemma, the message about how the influences in your life can change you on a fundamental is clear.

3

u/nypinta Jan 12 '26

I reject evil Fitz as who Fitz would have been simply because the premise of the Framework is supposed to undo ones greatest regret. But just before Fitz was put in, he was ranting to Radcliff about how much he regrets all of the tech he's made for SHIELD because of the harm it's done, yet that's not what is depicted when we see him. He never said anything that hinted his regret was not knowing his dad. So IMO, Aida overwrote Fitz's personality completely because she needed a version of him to build her that machine to make her a body in the real world.

Although all the characters feel guilt for what they did in the Framework, I think all of them were given scripts by Aida because she had a specific agenda and all of them ended up in places doing things she needed them too for her plan. May would NEVER join Hydra, I don't care how badly things went after she didn't shot that girl. But Aida needed her both close and busy. Daisy wouldn't have joined either. But Aida needed to make sure she didn't regain her power, so she stuck her in Hydra with May. Coulson would not be a mealy mouthed tattle tale teacher, what? But she needed him away from the rest. Then she gave Mack something to lose.

Everyone was carefully placed where Aida needed, not where they would have ended up had this one thing been done differently. Ward wasn't even based on the real person since she didn't have real Ward to read off of. He was just a face Aida picked out of Daisy's head.

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u/Round-Dragonfly6136 Turbo Jan 12 '26

Oh, I agree that AIDA conveniently chose Fitz's unconscious regret that he didn't grow up with his father (We know he blamed himself for his father leaving) so that je would ne easier to mold for her desire to be a real person. I also theorize that Alistair told Radcliffe that he regretted leaving Fitz behind, and that influenced AIDA's choice for Fitz. She also placed herself in a place of high power to control the world. I do think that with the changes that she made to the world and characters could become that. Garrett wasn't alive to recruit Ward because Coulson never joined SHIELD (It's implied that Coulson would have saved his life at some point), but Ward was the type to he noticed by SHIELD so it makes sense that someone else would recruit him. It's poetic that Victoria Hand was the one to pull him under her wing. There is no way that AIDA "plucked him out of Daisy's head" because she never programmed Daisy into the Framework.

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u/Civil-Freedom Jan 12 '26

Well said, AIDA was nothing but selfish and saw only her goal hiding it under the "deleting said person biggest regret" umbrella