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Right. So I'm going to risk my Fury rant, because it's been bugging me lately.
This is basically in response to the whole 'Nick Fury is an evil manipulative bastard who will betray the Avengers' thing which I've seen in some places. Which ... confuses me mightily, in that I'm not sure what people are using as the basis for it. Um. At all. So. Just a quick run through of my impression of Fury (and SHIELD) in the MCU? (Spoilers for all movies so far. And I tell a lie, not quick at all. In fact, somewhat long -_-;)
This is basically in response to the whole 'Nick Fury is an evil manipulative bastard who will betray the Avengers' thing which I've seen in some places. Which ... confuses me mightily, in that I'm not sure what people are using as the basis for it. Um. At all. So. Just a quick run through of my impression of Fury (and SHIELD) in the MCU? (Spoilers for all movies so far. And I tell a lie, not quick at all. In fact, somewhat long -_-;)
Okay. So. Here is a list of Things Nick Fury Did In The MCU, either personally or as Director of the day to day operations of SHIELD:
- Sends Phil Coulson plus backup to investigate the circumstances of Tony Stark's escape from Afghanistan in IM1. Either he gave Coulson a fairly loose brief, or Coulson has the field authority to change mission parameters on the fly, because this went from 'debrief Stark' to 'find out what the hell technology Stark's invented' to 'help Pepper/Stark take Stane down' in fairly short order.
- Personally appears at the end of IM1 to extend what is essentially a job offer to Tony Stark, regarding the Avengers initiative. At this point in the verse, the initiative must be fairly tentative, because the potential candidates are Tony, possibly Bruce, and whoever else SHIELD's been watching that we haven't seen. Anyway. Things Fury does NOT do, at this point, include attempting to take either the reactor or Iron Man tech from Tony, despite the fact that Tony's already made clear via Gulmira that he absolutely intends to actively use the armour for whatever cause takes his fancy (up to and including interfering, as Rhodey says, in active war zones).
- Sends Natasha to infiltrate SI in IM2, after the Senate hearing where Tony refuses to surrender the Iron Man technology. I'm presuming this is mostly because Tony has now very clearly announced that he has privatised world peace and intends to keep going with that, as well as also become visibly more erratic in the intervening months. Natasha's brief seems to be mostly 'find out his intentions and also what the fuck is wrong with him', because the first time she takes action in any manner in IM2 is after she's reported to Fury and he's personally shown up to do something about it.
- Personally shows up to do something about what Natasha's revealed to him. This takes the form of a) having Natasha give Tony an injection to take the edge off the heavy metal poisoning, b) reading Tony the riot act regarding recent behaviour re things like getting drunk in tank-killing armour, having a knock-down, drag-out fight with a member of the US military, while drunk, while in armour, and flying around hungover in public in, again, tank-killing armour ("You are making yourself my problem"). And then c) giving Tony information that might help him with his problem of encroaching death, assigning Coulson to sit on him to make sure he stays mostly sober to do something with it, and leaving Natasha on Pepper and SI in case Vanko and/or the US military decide to be a problem. Which means for most of the events of IM2, Fury had left people assigned around Tony as dual support-structure and information-gathering infrastructure, while shit went down involving technologies that could comfortably take out small armies on their own.
- Pulls Coulson from Stark's detail to head instead to New Mexico, (forcibly) get any and all information on what the hell Jane and Selvig found, and quarantine the crater site. Sends Clint to back him up. Is also monitoring Bruce's situation as well, by this point. There is a series of clusterfucks involving Thor, the Destroyer, Bruce, the Abomination, the US military, and the destruction of most of a town in New Mexico, a large portion of Culver University, and Harlem, New York (... between the implosion of the Expo out in Flushing Meadows, the Hulk in Harlem, and then Loki in Manhattan a year later ... MCU NYC must really hate superheroes by now -_-;). In the middle of all this, while Thor sorts Loki out and Bruce saves the people who persecuted him from the weapon they made, Clint and Coulson apparently make off with the Destroyer's remains, and someone from SHIELD was apparently sticking with Bruce all the way out, since SHIELD has tabs on him hereafter. So Fury knows how to keep tabs on multiple situations at once, and can multitask forces like a boss. Also, has little to no concept of privacy and/or freedom of information, but I think that comes under 'spy', so.
- Strings Tony along emotionally following the events of IM2 in order to make him more ameniable to the Initiative at a later date, presumably when Fury deemed him stable enough and/or the situation dire enough. At the same time, also does Tony a small personal favour in getting the Senator to be the one to present his and Rhodey's medals.
- Sends Tony, via Coulson and some neat little chicanery, to swindle General Ross out of releasing Blonsky, and keep Bruce online for Avengers if necessary. Apparently then sits on Bruce for the next year-ish, without actively doing anything about him save keeping up to date on where he is and what he's doing (judging by the fact that within hours of Loki landing, Natasha has been dispatched to Bruce's exact location). So. They kept an eye on Bruce, made sure Ross couldn't, and then ... not a lot else, until crisis hit.
- Hires Selvig to begin examining the Tesseract, and SHIELD starts developing weapons around both old Hydra tech/the Tesseract and the Destroyer's remains.
- Found Steve Rogers' body, at some point, thawed him out, and set up an elaborate deception in an attempt to ease Steve into the future. When this deception spectacularly fails within about five minutes of Steve waking, comes in personally to do damage control and introduce Steve to the future properly. Apparently keeps a personal eye on him, including later personally recruiting Steve for the events of Avengers.
- Beginning of Avengers movie, Fury comes to find out what's starting to go wrong with the Tesseract project (listening to Maria, Clint, Phil and Selvig in the process). Immediately sets up an evacuation order for both his people and the weapons they were developing, before heading down to ground zero. In the brouhaha as Loki emerges, Fury tries to stall Loki long enough to attempt to drop the cavern on him with the blowback energy from the Tesseract. While, it must be said, Fury himself is also still at ground zero. Sends the alarm out through his people (including Maria, who is then thoroughly badass about it).
- In the aftermath of Loki's arrival, Fury sends out a general alert that SHIELD is at war, and begins gathering assets to go up against a god. This includes sending Phil to get Tony, Natasha to get Bruce (which proves that a) he has a massive amount of faith in Natasha, and b) that he was listening to Selvig earlier, enough to form a plan from it), and himself to sign up Steve (being oddly patient and relatively honest, too). He sets up the Helicarrier as the main base for the crisis, which personally I think was a questionable decision, but howandever. He also gets in a fight with the SHIELD Council over what approach he's going to take, with Fury in favour of a first response team in the form of the Avengers, and the Council in favour of lots and lots of weaponry dialed high (which Fury doesn't disagree with, as such, you should always be armed enough to back up your actions, but it's not his first line of defense. Largely, I think, on the grounds of collateral damage).
- Things happen really, really rapidly, and in short order Fury has a flying deathtrap containing two pissed off alien gods, a really paranoid pair of scientists (one of which can hack anything ever and blow it up too, and the other of which is the Hulk), and a supersoldier who's just discovered that SHIELD has been making weaponry off the bones of the war he died fighting, from his point of view, around two weeks ago. He also has a rogue agent out there somewhere with a reason to come for them (rescuing Loki), and a captive who is very obviously perfectly happy to be in his custody. Oh, and a power source capable of blowing up an entire base still in the wind. Fury's main tactic in these circumstances? Send the operative he trusts to be able to handle anything from a paranoid dying Stark to the Hulk to go find out what the alien god wants, and then go have an argument in a room full of paranoid superheroes and back his position up verbally, with no show of force save his and Natasha's move to defend themselves when Bruce took up the sceptre.
- Proceeds to be both badass and pragmatic in the ensuing battle as Clint arrives and the Helicarrier is breached every which way. Myself, I'm particularly fond of the old-school navigation when the electronics are down ("Is the sun rising? Then put it on the left!"). Because yes, the sun still rises in the east, and that is still a viable data point that you can use to steer the goddamn carrier. Also him sending out the message through the carrier that Clint was still there, giving Natasha a chance to get him back.
- Finds Phil. Sends out the death notice.
- In the aftermath of the battle, he takes Steve and Tony aside and lies through his teeth, playing on every emotional button he knows they have, in order to a) snap them out of the shock and paranoia and back up to fighting strength, and b) try to keep them onside. Factors to consider in this: Phil gave him explicit permission to use his death as motivation ("This was never going to work unless they had something to ..."). Steve and Tony are the only heavy-hitters he's got left, with both the Hulk and Thor gone violently AWOL and possibly no longer really inclined to like SHIELD. His flying base is dead in the air, he's almost lost two bases worth of personnel in the last two days, the alien god has escaped and is en-route to hooking up with his powersource and ending the world. The Council will have decided by now that the whole 'response team, Avenger initiative' angle of attack has failed, and will be switching to the conventional 'blow everything the fuck up with really big guns' strategy unless he can get shit moving again in time to stop it. I think we can safely say the situation has cleared 'desperate' and moved into 'clusterfuck', hence him deciding we've cleared the threshold for viciously underhanded tactics.
Also to consider, he admits his lies straight out to Maria, so it's fairly obvious, between Maria, Phil, and the fact that Natasha trusts him as much as she does, that within SHIELD it's pretty much known that Fury will do whatever the hell it takes, including lying to you, but at least he's honest about it.
- While the Avengers muster themselves and move out, Fury can't do much physically, what with the crippled base and the massive SHIELD casualties over the past few days. However, he does start running interference between the Avengers and the Council, up to and including telling his superiors they had made a 'stupid-ass decision', and then personally going out and shooting down his own people in order to back the Avengers up. When the missile flies despite his best efforts (which included instinctively trying to shoot down the escaping plane with a pistol), his first reaction is to call Stark and warn him ahead of time. Which, again, shows quite a bit of trust in Tony.
- When the Avengers manage to triumph despite all possible odds, and Fury has been very much vindicated against the Council, he doesn't stop backing them up. Fury continues shielding the Avengers from the Council at the end, allowing Thor to take Loki (though he didn't have much choice, there), and allowing the others to leave. Including Bruce, to the point of pretending to the Council that Fury had no idea where Bruce was, which I find ... somewhat unlikely, past evidence considered. When Maria questions him on the wisdom of letting them go their own ways, he responds with what is essentially faith that they'll show up again when they're needed.
END OF MCU SO FAR
Okay. Now. Looking at that list. Most of the impression I'm getting is of a man who is trying to keep a lid on a lot of really, really volatile, really, really powerful situations at once. A man who has backups to his backups, a man who likes to have every possible asset in his stable going into a situation, a man who likes having the force capability to back himself up when the shit hits the fan on a scale that has repeatedly threatened to annihilate population centers.
However, given that he is in charge of evaluating threats on a scale from 'strange lights in the sky' to 'the Hulk has broken Harlem' to 'the sky has opened and aliens are invading', I'm not actually seeing a problem with most of those. Steve and Tony have problems with the source of SHIELD's tech, and those sources are highly questionable, but Tony is a nuclear deterant all on his own, and he's really got no right to be taking SHIELD to task for attempting the same. Tony regularly armours up with something that can at least start to take on an entire aerial assault force on his own. Not to mention that the reactor is strongly hinted to be reverse engineered Tesseract tech itself. When SHIELD is tasked with dealing with everything from the Iron Monger to the Abomination to, again, the sky opening on an alien army, I think they get leave to do the same. (Remember, the gun Phil used to challenge Loki? His moment of awesome? Scavenged Destroyer tech that SHIELD stole and reverse engineered. That shit is useful, yes?).
And on top of that, how many of those weapons do we see SHIELD use? As far as I can remember, one. Phil's gun. And the cage. And sort of the Tesseract, if you count Fury trying to use the blowback to bury Loki under a mountain. The Council wants to use a lot more, but Fury is more for putting his faith in people on the ground rather than weapons at one remove, which says rather a lot about him, really. He wants to have the capability as a backup measure. Fair enough. But they've never once been his first response (in distinct contrast to, oh, every other military agency in the movies, but Ross is a particular contrast).
Fury is also manipulative. Incredibly so. This is a fact. And yes, in most of the movies so far, the person he's been manipulating is mostly Tony, between IM2 and Avengers, though also Steve. He also sends people, mostly Phil and Natasha, to manipulate people too, with the list expanding there to include Bruce and Loki. He's lied or attempted to lie to pretty much all of the non-SHIELD Avengers (regarding the weapons, primarily, and Phil), has lied to his own Council's face (regarding the Avengers), and regularly sits on secrets that could blow up spectacularly (including Bruce's location, Steve's existence, what SHIELD was doing with the Tesseract and the Destroyer). He used the death of one of his own people as an emotional manipulation to keep people in the game, including faking aspects of the scene to make a bigger impact. Yes.
Things to consider here: Fury is a spy, first and foremost (judging from the titles and ranks, SHIELD is structured more like a spy organisation than a military one). He is also stuck between multiple forces in the form of the Council on one side, plus whatever militaries are involved, and the superpowered forces he's tasked to deal with on the other. Judging by Avengers, Fury has considerable problems with the Council and their mandates, and goes out of his way to work around them where possible. He's gonna lie (well, severely bend the truth) every which way to do what needs doing, and that has fallen as much to the team's benefit (Fury protecting them from the Council and other agencies) as it has been used against them. Also, Fury's own people expect that of him (Maria, Natasha, Phil), and trust him anyway, so there are a number of very paranoid people who seem to think Fury is usually right in goals, if not in methods. And, again, Phil gave him explicit permission. Not only expecting the manipulation, but deliberately invoking it. So there's that. (Why does no-one give Phil credit for being an extraordinarily manipulative man in his own quiet little way?)
Second thing to consider, leaving aside for a second what we know about the Avengers, because we've watched their movies and seen what's happened to them, what does Fury know about them? Tony used to be a weapons engineer, with a company XO who was cheerfully warmongering on the side. He also refuses to accept oversight from anyone, and runs around in toys that can blow up cities on their own. Steve is new to the future, and sort of an unknown factor. Thor showed up on earth very briefly, had a knock-down drag-out fight with the Destroyer which flattened a town, and then vanished to fight an alien war. Oh, and his brother is a genocidal maniac who tried to take over the Earth. No biggie. Bruce they've been sitting on for a while, enough to realise that pretty much all he wants is to be left alone, and until the crisis happened, they did. They left him alone. When the crisis was over, they let him leave again. The cage existed, because the Hulk broke Harlem, you need backups, but it was never used or even threatened to be used on Bruce himself. So while Fury needs them and tries to ask them to get onside, he needs both backup in case they don't, and multiple tactics to make sure it doesn't come to that. Because the Avengers are genuinely dangerous, and if they flip out and go for Loki uncoordinated, that will be a clusterfuck to put everything that's happened so far to shame. SO.
And yet, for all that, Fury does actually account for their personalities. If he didn't, he'd probably have gone for the Council's plan from the start, but he was the one who insisted they could trust the Avengers to get into gear and help. In all the previous movies, Fury basically sent people in to evaluate the situation, decided what needed doing as a result of that, and in almost every case decided that the Avengers were stable and/or uncatchable enough to leave alone for now. He also noted all of them down as potentially helpful in bad situations, even Bruce, and when they go for Bruce it's his gamma expertise they're asking for, indicating that Fury is plenty aware that Bruce is still a person, rather than just a monster. Now, this is in part because Fury is manipulative, and therefore his preferred first options for dealing with most situations tend to be 'bribe/negotiate/manipulate' rather that 'fight head on', but in the long run it does mean he takes a far softer approach than most everyone else going.
*shakes head* Basically, what I'm seeing is a man in charge of an organisation, trying to go up against and keep control of multiple superpowered emergences, most of which can level small towns by themselves, while also running interference between multiple other agencies, militaries and oversight Councils, with the aid of people who are almost guaranteed, for various reasons, to hate him and what he does sight unseen before he ever goes near them.
Fury does this with the aid of operatives of fairly spectacular courage and badassery (Maria who takes on an alien god and mind-controlled operatives with a truck, Natasha who walks up to talk to a badly erratic Iron Man and/or Hulk before scamming a goddamn alien god and taking on an army, Clint who is apparently James Bond minus the womanising tendancies and who also can read an emerging situation like a dream, Phil who sort of ambles into the midst of whatever crisis is ongoing and raises an eyebrow at it until it does what he wants). Operatives who trust him enough to obey his orders despite knowing the questionable things he personally is capable of. Operatives who believe he'll back them to the hilt, mostly because he has (running personal backup to Natasha in IM2, running interference for the Avengers with the Council, allowing the attempt to get Clint back rather than writing him off). Operatives who apparently have no qualms about questioning his reasoning or orders, because they appear to trust him to listen to them (which, considering he definitely listened to Clint and Selvig, and took the time to explain himself to Maria when an opportunity presented itself, doesn't seem to be unwarranted either). Operatives who are willing to die for his cause, and give him permission with their last breath to use that death to further it (Phil).
And he does it with the aid of several superpowered agents who he has chosen to back over and beyond his own superiors. People he asked, bribed and tricked into helping him, but not forced (Bruce is questionable, but the armed backup seems to have been largely to extract Natasha if things went badly, and the Hulk really can't be forced). And he probably could have forced them, considering SHIELD had access to Jane, considering they had proven capable of infiltrating SI, considering Steve was mostly alone in a strange world and Fury could have fucked him over a lot worse, considering that SHIELD has known where Bruce was since Harlem and could have pointed Ross at him at any time, not to mention being aware of Betty the same way they're aware of Jane. But they didn't. Fury didn't. In fact, he backed Tony up during IM2, he sat on Bruce and deliberately intervened between him and Ross, he gave Steve access to whatever information he asked for about the world since the war (considering Steve's bitter "No-one told me we lost" and the fact that Fury didn't bother softening anything in the gym). He turns a blind eye when they depart at the end of the movie, makes no attempt to hold onto any of them, not even Bruce, and tells the Council to piss off. He shot down his own birds, personally, to give them more time in the final battle.
All of which are, for a man in his position who knows what he knows and has to do what he does, indicative of a rather shocking amount of trust and hope. In his people, in his cause, in the Avengers. He really must believe in them, to take the risks he takes dealing with them, to back them over his superiors and over what normal paranoia would say was a bad move (such as letting Bruce go, pissing Iron Man off, bringing Steve onto a carrier containing cannibalised Hydra tech when Steve has no cause to trust him yet). To answer Maria at the end with "because we'll need them to" and seem to believe that will be enough.
... In short, I'm not seeing the enemy here. At all. Yes, Nick Fury is a man of questionable and highly manipulative methods, who keeps secrets like its going out of style and has layered backups for every situation that do, in fact, go all the way up to 'show of force capable of blasting a god across the room'. He is a paranoid man who does not trust any of them on sight, and even then keeps backups in case that trust blows up on him. However, he's also a man stuck between every possible faction the MCU has presented so far, who is tricking his way through to saving the world and protecting his people by hook or by crook, including backing them to the hilt and helping protect their personal liberties against all comers (Tony, looking at you, also Bruce and Steve). He's a man who deliberately goes out of his way to avoid committing several acts that are arguably warranted by the circumstances but cross what he considers a line (firing on civilian populations while there's still a chance, keeping the Avengers forcibly on hand, abandoning operatives while there's still hope for retrieval).
Fury, throughout pretty much all of the MCU so far, has been on our side. The side of the heroes. He's in charge of the first line of defense, in charge of mustering the fall-back lines, and in charge of telling what's needed where, and at every step along the way he's tried to do that without robbing people of agency. While the Senate, the Council and the militaries have been doing their damnedest every which way to acquire what the Avengers have by force or legal wrangling, Fury got it with some judicious license with the truth and genuine requests for help when -and only when- the situation meant he had no other option. And then let it go again, because he trusted that request to continue working.
So I am not seeing how he is a villain. I'm not seeing how he's an enemy. And for the record? Both Fury and pretty much the entirety of SHIELD are goddamn awesome, as far as I'm concerned. *grumps*
And. Um. Apologies for the rant -_-;
- Sends Phil Coulson plus backup to investigate the circumstances of Tony Stark's escape from Afghanistan in IM1. Either he gave Coulson a fairly loose brief, or Coulson has the field authority to change mission parameters on the fly, because this went from 'debrief Stark' to 'find out what the hell technology Stark's invented' to 'help Pepper/Stark take Stane down' in fairly short order.
- Personally appears at the end of IM1 to extend what is essentially a job offer to Tony Stark, regarding the Avengers initiative. At this point in the verse, the initiative must be fairly tentative, because the potential candidates are Tony, possibly Bruce, and whoever else SHIELD's been watching that we haven't seen. Anyway. Things Fury does NOT do, at this point, include attempting to take either the reactor or Iron Man tech from Tony, despite the fact that Tony's already made clear via Gulmira that he absolutely intends to actively use the armour for whatever cause takes his fancy (up to and including interfering, as Rhodey says, in active war zones).
- Sends Natasha to infiltrate SI in IM2, after the Senate hearing where Tony refuses to surrender the Iron Man technology. I'm presuming this is mostly because Tony has now very clearly announced that he has privatised world peace and intends to keep going with that, as well as also become visibly more erratic in the intervening months. Natasha's brief seems to be mostly 'find out his intentions and also what the fuck is wrong with him', because the first time she takes action in any manner in IM2 is after she's reported to Fury and he's personally shown up to do something about it.
- Personally shows up to do something about what Natasha's revealed to him. This takes the form of a) having Natasha give Tony an injection to take the edge off the heavy metal poisoning, b) reading Tony the riot act regarding recent behaviour re things like getting drunk in tank-killing armour, having a knock-down, drag-out fight with a member of the US military, while drunk, while in armour, and flying around hungover in public in, again, tank-killing armour ("You are making yourself my problem"). And then c) giving Tony information that might help him with his problem of encroaching death, assigning Coulson to sit on him to make sure he stays mostly sober to do something with it, and leaving Natasha on Pepper and SI in case Vanko and/or the US military decide to be a problem. Which means for most of the events of IM2, Fury had left people assigned around Tony as dual support-structure and information-gathering infrastructure, while shit went down involving technologies that could comfortably take out small armies on their own.
- Pulls Coulson from Stark's detail to head instead to New Mexico, (forcibly) get any and all information on what the hell Jane and Selvig found, and quarantine the crater site. Sends Clint to back him up. Is also monitoring Bruce's situation as well, by this point. There is a series of clusterfucks involving Thor, the Destroyer, Bruce, the Abomination, the US military, and the destruction of most of a town in New Mexico, a large portion of Culver University, and Harlem, New York (... between the implosion of the Expo out in Flushing Meadows, the Hulk in Harlem, and then Loki in Manhattan a year later ... MCU NYC must really hate superheroes by now -_-;). In the middle of all this, while Thor sorts Loki out and Bruce saves the people who persecuted him from the weapon they made, Clint and Coulson apparently make off with the Destroyer's remains, and someone from SHIELD was apparently sticking with Bruce all the way out, since SHIELD has tabs on him hereafter. So Fury knows how to keep tabs on multiple situations at once, and can multitask forces like a boss. Also, has little to no concept of privacy and/or freedom of information, but I think that comes under 'spy', so.
- Strings Tony along emotionally following the events of IM2 in order to make him more ameniable to the Initiative at a later date, presumably when Fury deemed him stable enough and/or the situation dire enough. At the same time, also does Tony a small personal favour in getting the Senator to be the one to present his and Rhodey's medals.
- Sends Tony, via Coulson and some neat little chicanery, to swindle General Ross out of releasing Blonsky, and keep Bruce online for Avengers if necessary. Apparently then sits on Bruce for the next year-ish, without actively doing anything about him save keeping up to date on where he is and what he's doing (judging by the fact that within hours of Loki landing, Natasha has been dispatched to Bruce's exact location). So. They kept an eye on Bruce, made sure Ross couldn't, and then ... not a lot else, until crisis hit.
- Hires Selvig to begin examining the Tesseract, and SHIELD starts developing weapons around both old Hydra tech/the Tesseract and the Destroyer's remains.
- Found Steve Rogers' body, at some point, thawed him out, and set up an elaborate deception in an attempt to ease Steve into the future. When this deception spectacularly fails within about five minutes of Steve waking, comes in personally to do damage control and introduce Steve to the future properly. Apparently keeps a personal eye on him, including later personally recruiting Steve for the events of Avengers.
- Beginning of Avengers movie, Fury comes to find out what's starting to go wrong with the Tesseract project (listening to Maria, Clint, Phil and Selvig in the process). Immediately sets up an evacuation order for both his people and the weapons they were developing, before heading down to ground zero. In the brouhaha as Loki emerges, Fury tries to stall Loki long enough to attempt to drop the cavern on him with the blowback energy from the Tesseract. While, it must be said, Fury himself is also still at ground zero. Sends the alarm out through his people (including Maria, who is then thoroughly badass about it).
- In the aftermath of Loki's arrival, Fury sends out a general alert that SHIELD is at war, and begins gathering assets to go up against a god. This includes sending Phil to get Tony, Natasha to get Bruce (which proves that a) he has a massive amount of faith in Natasha, and b) that he was listening to Selvig earlier, enough to form a plan from it), and himself to sign up Steve (being oddly patient and relatively honest, too). He sets up the Helicarrier as the main base for the crisis, which personally I think was a questionable decision, but howandever. He also gets in a fight with the SHIELD Council over what approach he's going to take, with Fury in favour of a first response team in the form of the Avengers, and the Council in favour of lots and lots of weaponry dialed high (which Fury doesn't disagree with, as such, you should always be armed enough to back up your actions, but it's not his first line of defense. Largely, I think, on the grounds of collateral damage).
- Things happen really, really rapidly, and in short order Fury has a flying deathtrap containing two pissed off alien gods, a really paranoid pair of scientists (one of which can hack anything ever and blow it up too, and the other of which is the Hulk), and a supersoldier who's just discovered that SHIELD has been making weaponry off the bones of the war he died fighting, from his point of view, around two weeks ago. He also has a rogue agent out there somewhere with a reason to come for them (rescuing Loki), and a captive who is very obviously perfectly happy to be in his custody. Oh, and a power source capable of blowing up an entire base still in the wind. Fury's main tactic in these circumstances? Send the operative he trusts to be able to handle anything from a paranoid dying Stark to the Hulk to go find out what the alien god wants, and then go have an argument in a room full of paranoid superheroes and back his position up verbally, with no show of force save his and Natasha's move to defend themselves when Bruce took up the sceptre.
- Proceeds to be both badass and pragmatic in the ensuing battle as Clint arrives and the Helicarrier is breached every which way. Myself, I'm particularly fond of the old-school navigation when the electronics are down ("Is the sun rising? Then put it on the left!"). Because yes, the sun still rises in the east, and that is still a viable data point that you can use to steer the goddamn carrier. Also him sending out the message through the carrier that Clint was still there, giving Natasha a chance to get him back.
- Finds Phil. Sends out the death notice.
- In the aftermath of the battle, he takes Steve and Tony aside and lies through his teeth, playing on every emotional button he knows they have, in order to a) snap them out of the shock and paranoia and back up to fighting strength, and b) try to keep them onside. Factors to consider in this: Phil gave him explicit permission to use his death as motivation ("This was never going to work unless they had something to ..."). Steve and Tony are the only heavy-hitters he's got left, with both the Hulk and Thor gone violently AWOL and possibly no longer really inclined to like SHIELD. His flying base is dead in the air, he's almost lost two bases worth of personnel in the last two days, the alien god has escaped and is en-route to hooking up with his powersource and ending the world. The Council will have decided by now that the whole 'response team, Avenger initiative' angle of attack has failed, and will be switching to the conventional 'blow everything the fuck up with really big guns' strategy unless he can get shit moving again in time to stop it. I think we can safely say the situation has cleared 'desperate' and moved into 'clusterfuck', hence him deciding we've cleared the threshold for viciously underhanded tactics.
Also to consider, he admits his lies straight out to Maria, so it's fairly obvious, between Maria, Phil, and the fact that Natasha trusts him as much as she does, that within SHIELD it's pretty much known that Fury will do whatever the hell it takes, including lying to you, but at least he's honest about it.
- While the Avengers muster themselves and move out, Fury can't do much physically, what with the crippled base and the massive SHIELD casualties over the past few days. However, he does start running interference between the Avengers and the Council, up to and including telling his superiors they had made a 'stupid-ass decision', and then personally going out and shooting down his own people in order to back the Avengers up. When the missile flies despite his best efforts (which included instinctively trying to shoot down the escaping plane with a pistol), his first reaction is to call Stark and warn him ahead of time. Which, again, shows quite a bit of trust in Tony.
- When the Avengers manage to triumph despite all possible odds, and Fury has been very much vindicated against the Council, he doesn't stop backing them up. Fury continues shielding the Avengers from the Council at the end, allowing Thor to take Loki (though he didn't have much choice, there), and allowing the others to leave. Including Bruce, to the point of pretending to the Council that Fury had no idea where Bruce was, which I find ... somewhat unlikely, past evidence considered. When Maria questions him on the wisdom of letting them go their own ways, he responds with what is essentially faith that they'll show up again when they're needed.
END OF MCU SO FAR
Okay. Now. Looking at that list. Most of the impression I'm getting is of a man who is trying to keep a lid on a lot of really, really volatile, really, really powerful situations at once. A man who has backups to his backups, a man who likes to have every possible asset in his stable going into a situation, a man who likes having the force capability to back himself up when the shit hits the fan on a scale that has repeatedly threatened to annihilate population centers.
However, given that he is in charge of evaluating threats on a scale from 'strange lights in the sky' to 'the Hulk has broken Harlem' to 'the sky has opened and aliens are invading', I'm not actually seeing a problem with most of those. Steve and Tony have problems with the source of SHIELD's tech, and those sources are highly questionable, but Tony is a nuclear deterant all on his own, and he's really got no right to be taking SHIELD to task for attempting the same. Tony regularly armours up with something that can at least start to take on an entire aerial assault force on his own. Not to mention that the reactor is strongly hinted to be reverse engineered Tesseract tech itself. When SHIELD is tasked with dealing with everything from the Iron Monger to the Abomination to, again, the sky opening on an alien army, I think they get leave to do the same. (Remember, the gun Phil used to challenge Loki? His moment of awesome? Scavenged Destroyer tech that SHIELD stole and reverse engineered. That shit is useful, yes?).
And on top of that, how many of those weapons do we see SHIELD use? As far as I can remember, one. Phil's gun. And the cage. And sort of the Tesseract, if you count Fury trying to use the blowback to bury Loki under a mountain. The Council wants to use a lot more, but Fury is more for putting his faith in people on the ground rather than weapons at one remove, which says rather a lot about him, really. He wants to have the capability as a backup measure. Fair enough. But they've never once been his first response (in distinct contrast to, oh, every other military agency in the movies, but Ross is a particular contrast).
Fury is also manipulative. Incredibly so. This is a fact. And yes, in most of the movies so far, the person he's been manipulating is mostly Tony, between IM2 and Avengers, though also Steve. He also sends people, mostly Phil and Natasha, to manipulate people too, with the list expanding there to include Bruce and Loki. He's lied or attempted to lie to pretty much all of the non-SHIELD Avengers (regarding the weapons, primarily, and Phil), has lied to his own Council's face (regarding the Avengers), and regularly sits on secrets that could blow up spectacularly (including Bruce's location, Steve's existence, what SHIELD was doing with the Tesseract and the Destroyer). He used the death of one of his own people as an emotional manipulation to keep people in the game, including faking aspects of the scene to make a bigger impact. Yes.
Things to consider here: Fury is a spy, first and foremost (judging from the titles and ranks, SHIELD is structured more like a spy organisation than a military one). He is also stuck between multiple forces in the form of the Council on one side, plus whatever militaries are involved, and the superpowered forces he's tasked to deal with on the other. Judging by Avengers, Fury has considerable problems with the Council and their mandates, and goes out of his way to work around them where possible. He's gonna lie (well, severely bend the truth) every which way to do what needs doing, and that has fallen as much to the team's benefit (Fury protecting them from the Council and other agencies) as it has been used against them. Also, Fury's own people expect that of him (Maria, Natasha, Phil), and trust him anyway, so there are a number of very paranoid people who seem to think Fury is usually right in goals, if not in methods. And, again, Phil gave him explicit permission. Not only expecting the manipulation, but deliberately invoking it. So there's that. (Why does no-one give Phil credit for being an extraordinarily manipulative man in his own quiet little way?)
Second thing to consider, leaving aside for a second what we know about the Avengers, because we've watched their movies and seen what's happened to them, what does Fury know about them? Tony used to be a weapons engineer, with a company XO who was cheerfully warmongering on the side. He also refuses to accept oversight from anyone, and runs around in toys that can blow up cities on their own. Steve is new to the future, and sort of an unknown factor. Thor showed up on earth very briefly, had a knock-down drag-out fight with the Destroyer which flattened a town, and then vanished to fight an alien war. Oh, and his brother is a genocidal maniac who tried to take over the Earth. No biggie. Bruce they've been sitting on for a while, enough to realise that pretty much all he wants is to be left alone, and until the crisis happened, they did. They left him alone. When the crisis was over, they let him leave again. The cage existed, because the Hulk broke Harlem, you need backups, but it was never used or even threatened to be used on Bruce himself. So while Fury needs them and tries to ask them to get onside, he needs both backup in case they don't, and multiple tactics to make sure it doesn't come to that. Because the Avengers are genuinely dangerous, and if they flip out and go for Loki uncoordinated, that will be a clusterfuck to put everything that's happened so far to shame. SO.
And yet, for all that, Fury does actually account for their personalities. If he didn't, he'd probably have gone for the Council's plan from the start, but he was the one who insisted they could trust the Avengers to get into gear and help. In all the previous movies, Fury basically sent people in to evaluate the situation, decided what needed doing as a result of that, and in almost every case decided that the Avengers were stable and/or uncatchable enough to leave alone for now. He also noted all of them down as potentially helpful in bad situations, even Bruce, and when they go for Bruce it's his gamma expertise they're asking for, indicating that Fury is plenty aware that Bruce is still a person, rather than just a monster. Now, this is in part because Fury is manipulative, and therefore his preferred first options for dealing with most situations tend to be 'bribe/negotiate/manipulate' rather that 'fight head on', but in the long run it does mean he takes a far softer approach than most everyone else going.
*shakes head* Basically, what I'm seeing is a man in charge of an organisation, trying to go up against and keep control of multiple superpowered emergences, most of which can level small towns by themselves, while also running interference between multiple other agencies, militaries and oversight Councils, with the aid of people who are almost guaranteed, for various reasons, to hate him and what he does sight unseen before he ever goes near them.
Fury does this with the aid of operatives of fairly spectacular courage and badassery (Maria who takes on an alien god and mind-controlled operatives with a truck, Natasha who walks up to talk to a badly erratic Iron Man and/or Hulk before scamming a goddamn alien god and taking on an army, Clint who is apparently James Bond minus the womanising tendancies and who also can read an emerging situation like a dream, Phil who sort of ambles into the midst of whatever crisis is ongoing and raises an eyebrow at it until it does what he wants). Operatives who trust him enough to obey his orders despite knowing the questionable things he personally is capable of. Operatives who believe he'll back them to the hilt, mostly because he has (running personal backup to Natasha in IM2, running interference for the Avengers with the Council, allowing the attempt to get Clint back rather than writing him off). Operatives who apparently have no qualms about questioning his reasoning or orders, because they appear to trust him to listen to them (which, considering he definitely listened to Clint and Selvig, and took the time to explain himself to Maria when an opportunity presented itself, doesn't seem to be unwarranted either). Operatives who are willing to die for his cause, and give him permission with their last breath to use that death to further it (Phil).
And he does it with the aid of several superpowered agents who he has chosen to back over and beyond his own superiors. People he asked, bribed and tricked into helping him, but not forced (Bruce is questionable, but the armed backup seems to have been largely to extract Natasha if things went badly, and the Hulk really can't be forced). And he probably could have forced them, considering SHIELD had access to Jane, considering they had proven capable of infiltrating SI, considering Steve was mostly alone in a strange world and Fury could have fucked him over a lot worse, considering that SHIELD has known where Bruce was since Harlem and could have pointed Ross at him at any time, not to mention being aware of Betty the same way they're aware of Jane. But they didn't. Fury didn't. In fact, he backed Tony up during IM2, he sat on Bruce and deliberately intervened between him and Ross, he gave Steve access to whatever information he asked for about the world since the war (considering Steve's bitter "No-one told me we lost" and the fact that Fury didn't bother softening anything in the gym). He turns a blind eye when they depart at the end of the movie, makes no attempt to hold onto any of them, not even Bruce, and tells the Council to piss off. He shot down his own birds, personally, to give them more time in the final battle.
All of which are, for a man in his position who knows what he knows and has to do what he does, indicative of a rather shocking amount of trust and hope. In his people, in his cause, in the Avengers. He really must believe in them, to take the risks he takes dealing with them, to back them over his superiors and over what normal paranoia would say was a bad move (such as letting Bruce go, pissing Iron Man off, bringing Steve onto a carrier containing cannibalised Hydra tech when Steve has no cause to trust him yet). To answer Maria at the end with "because we'll need them to" and seem to believe that will be enough.
... In short, I'm not seeing the enemy here. At all. Yes, Nick Fury is a man of questionable and highly manipulative methods, who keeps secrets like its going out of style and has layered backups for every situation that do, in fact, go all the way up to 'show of force capable of blasting a god across the room'. He is a paranoid man who does not trust any of them on sight, and even then keeps backups in case that trust blows up on him. However, he's also a man stuck between every possible faction the MCU has presented so far, who is tricking his way through to saving the world and protecting his people by hook or by crook, including backing them to the hilt and helping protect their personal liberties against all comers (Tony, looking at you, also Bruce and Steve). He's a man who deliberately goes out of his way to avoid committing several acts that are arguably warranted by the circumstances but cross what he considers a line (firing on civilian populations while there's still a chance, keeping the Avengers forcibly on hand, abandoning operatives while there's still hope for retrieval).
Fury, throughout pretty much all of the MCU so far, has been on our side. The side of the heroes. He's in charge of the first line of defense, in charge of mustering the fall-back lines, and in charge of telling what's needed where, and at every step along the way he's tried to do that without robbing people of agency. While the Senate, the Council and the militaries have been doing their damnedest every which way to acquire what the Avengers have by force or legal wrangling, Fury got it with some judicious license with the truth and genuine requests for help when -and only when- the situation meant he had no other option. And then let it go again, because he trusted that request to continue working.
So I am not seeing how he is a villain. I'm not seeing how he's an enemy. And for the record? Both Fury and pretty much the entirety of SHIELD are goddamn awesome, as far as I'm concerned. *grumps*
And. Um. Apologies for the rant -_-;