…after Nora [of True Blood met a bad end], I pretty adamantly swore off of falling in love with another character that hard, at least for a while. (There’s some kind of correlation between this vehemence and the fact that I wasn’t yet romantically with drift partner, but I’m not sure exactly how to explain it.) This was a fool’s promise, however.
I was excited about Agents of SHIELD because, yeah, it was 2013 and I liked Whedon properties, but also because Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen were responsible specifically for Dollhouse, and I love Dollhouse in a very deeply personal way. (Dollhouse also killed off my favorite characters, all three of them, one episode after the next: Bennett [Summer Glau] in 2.11, Mellie [Miracle Laurie] in 2.12, Topher [Fran Kranz] in 2.13. I didn’t hold this against it too much, though, because at least those deaths weren’t complete fridge jobs.) I was also excited because if it was about SHIELD agents that weren’t, like, Avengers-level badasses, maybe there would be someone I could dibs. I loved Natasha (Scarlett Johansson) in The Avengers but I wasn’t Natasha. I loved Darcy (Kat Dennings) in Thor and I kind of related to her but she wasn’t, like, cosplay-level iconic (that didn’t stop me from cosplaying her eventually, of course) and she was just a little too much the funny girl to feel like mine entirely. I loved Peggy (Hayley Atwell) in Captain America: The First Avenger but Peggy was aspirational, Peggy was a beautiful badass I felt like I could only dream of being as cool as (which also didn’t stop me from cosplaying her eventually, but after the first season of Agent Carter, which by virtue of being centered around her made her more someone I could see myself in as I was). No, I needed a Sailor Mercury/Mary Anne type. I needed the kind of girl that was more brains than brawn, more compassion than confrontation.
When SHIELD‘s first episode introduced Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge), I knew any chance I had of staying emotionally reserved enough not to get my heart broken was gone. British? Check. Absolutely the brains? Check. Big-hearted? Check. Funny, but in that awkward referential sometimes-accidental (autistic) way? Check. Absolutely adorable and easily shippable with Skye (Chloe Bennet), another awesome female character (that drift partner happened to have latched onto)? Well, that was just a bonus…
…I have to tell myself that the abrupt detour into compulsive heterosexuality that Fitz’s confession triggered was partially studio or network meddling, because otherwise it makes me really sad. This is the part of the essay where, if you couldn’t tell, I’m about to get really salty about Fitz and his behavior and also the way their romance is written. FitzSimmons shippers, backbutton now. I don’t want to argue with you, you can feel how you feel, but this is how I feel and I just need to say it. This isn’t even just because I read Jemma as super queer. That’s its own whole essay. It’s just because this relationship really doesn’t do it for me and, in my opinion, actively harms Jemma as a character.
Full story here.