Agent Coulson, from inception to final form, has been crafted and molded not simply by script writers, directors, and creative teams, but more extensively through many other forms of media, marketing,¹ and fan reactions, all of which are nodes in the networked self. The concept of a network is both easily understood and highly problematic. As a technology term, and in its most minimal of descriptions, a network is a connection of discrete objects. Complicating that idea of a network is the concept of nodes, points along the pathways in a network that can have their own array of connections to a plethora of discrete objects, and compounding the complication further is the addition of super nodes, which connect arrays of nodes, each with their plethora of discrete objects. The networked self, then, is even more complicated.

The networked self, as a new theory of identity, is what makes a me, me, or you, you, or a Coulson, a Coulson. But before we can discuss the me as me and you as you and Coulson as Coulson, we need to discuss the us as us. According to Albert-Laszlo Barabasi,² social systems are one of the most powerful examples of networks because we understand and relate to them in an everyday fashion. In a social network the nodes are the individuals, and the links correspond to relationships, such as with the parlor game, Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon.³ A networked self also concerns identity: the characters we play in life, as well as those in films.

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Kathleen Wallace’s work in The Network Self: Relation, Process, and Personal Identity⁴ focuses on how people, themselves, are a network . A person can only minimally be reduced to a body, mind, or social role. Wallace questions how someone identifies with whom they are. People could be identified by their heritage, their race or ethnicity, their religion, their geographical or national location, maybe even their political affiliation. Some people may identify themselves by their relationship labels, such as a mother or a sister or an aunt. However, a reductivism approach of labels and singular identity ignores the complexity comprising identity. Together, as an amalgam or composite, each one of these changing relationships or connections are nodes that form the networked self, and everyone is built of many different nodes.⁵ Taking away any node of this complex network does not disrupt the entire networked self, but depending on which node is altered, changes in the whole occur. The rise of Coulson reveals this complexity of nodes, networks, and the culmination of a networked self.⁶

From its inception, “The Agent” (as Coulson was called in the script) was nothing more than a stock character; the creators needed an expository mouthpiece for S.H.I.E.L.D. From the first words Coulson spoke, “Miss Potts,” the network had begun to form, but no one, not the creators of the character, not the script writers, not the directors, and not the fans, could have imagined to where this simple character would rise in the MCU, and no singular group could have predicted that rise, as the rise occurred within the network of all of those groups.

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Fans reaction to Coulson, both good and bad, occurred almost immediately after the film reached theaters. Source-material purists decried Coulson since he was not a character in the comic books. Those fans who did embrace Coulson made enough noise about Coulson not being in the comic books that Agent Phil Coulson made his comic debut four years after Iron Man in Battle Scars #6 in April 2012.⁷ Fans began to feel they had entered, finally, a conversation with the brain trust of Marvel whether that be comics, television, or the film.⁸ Fandom slowly began to form around Coulson, but it took a network for him to become the Coulson we know today. A networked self-character can propel a background character to rise to be a main character, such as happened with Coulson. When a stock character rises beyond to a secondary or main character (something we can only discern in retrospect), that stock character was actually a tertiary character, who embodied a Barthian enigma that would, over time, evolve the stock character into something more. However, that “something more” depends on how much an audience supports the growth of the character’s personhood beyond being a stock character. In the case of Coulson, a stock character ⁹ of the stereotype of a secret agent, the fans found an opening to accept the character and to propel the character to even greater significance within the story. So, while “the agent” may be a stereotype, the enigma within a specific character’s stereotype allows for a shift from stereotype to archetype, and for audiences to have a positive communicative uptake. Secondary characters can be more arguable as to what is or is not a secondary character; however, following Bauman’s ideas, secondary characters help the main characters move the story forward. Secondary characters are involved in most aspects of the story but do not drive the story, and of course what drives a story is itself arguable.

Hannah Bauman suggests that tertiary characters “show up in one or two times for specific reasons. They populate the rest of your world, and interactions with them will be limited. We don’t learn much about them, if anything at all.”¹⁰ However, discussions, such as Bauman’s, tend to conflate tertiary characters with stock characters. My view is that not only do tertiary characters exist outside of stock characters, but they only exist in hindsight; tertiary characters are only tertiary characters after they no longer exist as a tertiary character. This conundrum is more easily seen in practice than in theory. Star Wars fans are all-too familiar with the character of Boba Fett, but most Star Wars fans may not be familiar with a character called Willrow Hood, now affectionately called The Ice Cream Maker Man. Both characters, Fett and Hood, made their on-screen debut in the original Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Neither of these characters were ever meant to be more than stock characters. Whereas Fett rose to become one the most recognizable characters in the Star Wars universe, culminating in having his own Disney+ series The Book of Boba Fett (2021-), Hood became a fan favorite, as discussed below in the cosplay section. Both characters exist beyond The Empire Strikes Back due to a discussion, and love, among fans who collectively elevated these stock characters through a network of fandom to become networked-selves. Yet, for a character to rise above being a tertiary character, usually requires this accidental enigma.

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Roland Barthes proposes the Hermeneutic code in his 1970 S/Z, where he points out that “Meanings can indeed be forgotten, but only if we have chosen to bring to bear upon the text a singular scrutiny.”¹¹ These intentionally created enigmas keep a reader’s interest in a story through “the proposal, suspension, and eventual solution of the enigmas of a narrative;” these parts of the hermeneutic code “constitute for Barthes a hermeneutic sentence that spans the entire story.”¹² These intentional enigmas serve as puzzles or mysteries that the author may eventually answer, according to Rosalind Coward and John Ellis.¹³ Writers intentionally incorporate these enigmas into their narratives, which compels audiences to seek answers to implied questions. The enigmas surrounding characters such as Boba Fett, Willrow Hood, and Agent Phil Coulson, however, do not fit this code.¹⁴ These tertiary characters have too little presence to constitute intentional enigmas. Accordingly, their traction with the audience represents a different and less deliberate system: a new interactive concept of character development that relies on an audience’s curiosity, conjecture, and conversation, and then the creator’s willingness to listen and react. Since much of the meaning making a character’s worth stems from audience inference, unintentional enigmas irrupt into narratives. A writer writes the script, a director frames the scene, a creative team assists with settings, props, stock characters, and costumes, but one element the film cannot control is the audience’s inference of what something means to them, individually or collectively, or how much an audience will connect with a character.

The wider network of many nodes over time that audiences change their inference of what a character means that forms the totality of a character, the networked self. Who Phil Coulson is is problematized by many incarnations of him (not just before and after T.A.H.I.T.I.) but his incarnations in various positions in his rise from a tertiary character to a main character. As Scott Pratt points out, one difficult question of personhood in a network is “the diachronic aspect of selves [which] leads to the question of what makes a particular self that self over time.”¹⁵ That diachrony of who-is Phil Coulson occurs not just through the lens of the films or television shows, but through the vast array of other nodes: from merchandising (both corporate and fan-based) amplified and echoed across the network through social media platforms, brought into lived existence at conventions¹⁶ through cosplay,¹⁷ repurposed and storied in fanfiction.

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Kidults, as they are sometimes referred to, are buying toys to the sum of $9 billion worth of toys per year, and that is the estimate for adults buying toys and does not account for purchases for children to have them.¹⁸ The kidult toy economy is so significant, says Sarah Whitten, that toys are now generating new shows and films.¹⁹ Although Coulson never had much in the way of merchandise when he first entered our fandom, there are other characters that have garnered attention from collectors the world over. However, once Coulson rose to prominence in his role in the MCU, more merchandise was produced. Once such toy, a 1/6 version of Coulson sold for $175, but now can only be found on eBay as a resale for $700.²⁰ We can now buy t-shirts, action figures, and even wallets within which are Coulson’s S.H.I.E.L.D. I.D. Although a character might not have always been popular, over time and over various media entries in other nodes, these characters can rise in popularity.²¹

Although the effect of social media on film (on everything) is obvious, and the space of these nodes in the rise of a tertiary character seems evident, these social media nodes had yet to revive a character from death—until Coulson. Audiences, fans, were heartbroken at the death of Agent Phil Coulson, but they were not going to just sit back and let that happen. They wanted their voices heard; fans inundated Twitter with the hashtag “#CoulsonLives” to begin to voice their displeasure of his demise at the hands of Loki. Eric Eisenberg in “Agent Coulson Wouldn’t Be Alive Without Twitter” explains that Clark Gregg believes the reason Coulson was brought back to life was because of that Twitter campaign #CoulsonLives.²² A hashtag that was retweeted over seven million times by the fans. Traditionally, there has always been an intention behind character creation and their stories. After their initial story, characters would either grow (because of a sequel) or simply be forgotten. In film characters were produced by the script writers and the studios.

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Currently, especially in the 21st century, what was once true, no longer holds. The theory of the networked self-character reveals the intricacies of not only character creation and development, but also the dasein of the character, opening up new directions for storytelling, film making, and more importantly for fan-doms. The networked self gives the fans an opportunity to affect their favorite characters and affect the overall storyline. Fans of a non-descript tertiary character can voice their ideas over social media and join in a discourse with the studios about the character. That discourse explodes beyond a conversation between fans and production companies into marketing, Cons, cosplay,²³ fanfiction, etc. If the networked self acquires enough fame, the studios may then decide to advance the chosen character into more stories, elevating the character to a status that was never initially intended, as is the case with Coulson.

The networked self allows for further exploration of other characters in other stories and universes. Coulson (and other universe counterparts such as Boba Fett and Willrow Hood, as well as Felicity Smoak)²⁴ is merely the start of this exploration of unintentional enigmas as tertiary characters rise to prominence through intricate and vast networks. Agent Coulson, as a tertiary character in Iron Man, grew through this conversation; this networked self linked in many nodes among fans and the studios and grew to the point of being an Avenger. In “Beginning of the End” of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (1.22), Fury and Coulson discuss the use of T.A.H.I.T.I. after Coulson was killed by Loki. Fury establishes the culmination of Coulson’s rise from tertiary character to main character:

Fury: It was a break glass in case of an emergency situation.

Coulson: Yes, but that emergency was supposed to be the fall of an Avenger.

Fury: Exactly, and I’m damn glad I did it too.

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Endnotes

1. ^{[Return to Article]} Coulson’s appearance is highlighted on many websites, including Costumewall.com, where they list each aspect of his attire: “a regular-fit Poplin Dress Shirt, a CSBrother Bluetooth Headset, an Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Badge in Leather Wallet, a Men's Trent Pin Stripe 2 Button Suit, a Wide Striped Woven 2” Skinny Tie, Aviator Stainless Steel Watch, and Alpine Swiss Men’s Dress Shoes.” “How to Dress like Phil Coulson” makes the assertion that Coulson’s first appearance was understated: “If you’ve ever watched the movie, Iron Man, there’s a pretty big chance that you passed completely over Phil Coulson’s first appearance.”
2. ^{[Return to Article]} Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. “Network Science.” Cambridge UP, 2016.
3. ^{[Return to Article]} The game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” can be used as an example of nodes and connections, whereby Kevin Bacon (a node) is connected through a network to any other actor (node) in Hollywood. The game focuses on how many connections and how many “nodes” or actors it takes to connect two actors. The creators of the game in 1994 were Craig Fass, Mike Ginelli and Brian Turtle, three Albright College students who were snowed-in and bored. See Fowler for more information. As an example, someone could be given the name Clark Gregg, and that person has to connect the actor with Kevin Bacon. Clark Gregg was in the movie The Avengers (2012) with Samuel L Jackson. Samuel L Jackson was in the movie SWAT (2003) with Colin Farrell. Colin Farrell was in the movie Phone Booth (2002) with Kiefer Sutherland. Kiefer Sutherland was in the movie A Few Good Men (1992) with Kevin Bacon. Five nodes in this network connect Kevin Bacon to Clark Gregg: Gregg, Jackson, Farrell, Sutherland, and Bacon.
4. ^{[Return to Article]} Wallace, Kathleen. The Network Self: Relation, Process, and Personal Identity. Routledge, 2019.
5. ^{[Return to Article]} Diana Meyers clarifies this complexity of the changing relationships in [Kathleen] Wallace’s networked self: “First, it explicitly integrates embodiment into the self. Second, it makes sense of individual uniqueness and the differential centrality of different types of relationships for different selves. Third, it stresses both change and continuity in the network process that is a particular self” (Meyers 629).
6. ^{[Return to Article]} Agent Phil Coulson was created by Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway for Iron Man. Coulson was created as a character simply called “Agent,” and he had only three lines, yet his creators wanted actor Clark Gregg to sign a three-picture deal. Clark Gregg stated, in a 2015 interview for Den of Geek with Rob Leane, that maybe Director Jon Favreau did him “a solid [as] they kind of beefed up that scene,” as Gregg puts it. Favreau pulled him aside to let Gregg know that the writers and Favreau were going to add some more to the character. By the time shooting began, he had a name, and Agent Phil Coulson was born into the MCU. For Coulson, a first node of his networked self began with the script writers and directors of the film. Yost, Christopher, Matt Fraction, and Cullen Bunn. Battle Scars #6. Marvel Comics, 2012.
7. ^{[Return to Article]} Through Gregg’s own words we know the interconnected nodes influenced the decision to bring Coulson back, as Gregg discussed with Max Nicholson concerning a conversation he had with Joss Whedon: “Even though my friends at Marvel said, “You know, we spent a lot of time talking about how Coulson lives, and we know that there’s a movement out there, and there are t-shirts and people paint on bridges ‘Coulson Lives,’ we’re going to bring you back,’ and it’s one of the many things people tell you that never ever happens.”
8. ^{[Return to Article]} Mark Lance focuses on this philosophy in “Counterstories, Stock Characters, and Varieties of Narrative Resistance Response to Lindemann.” When a stock character subverts the rules that are expected by an audience, the audience has an opportunity to accept or reject the character.
9. ^{[Return to Article]} Bauman, Hannah. “Three Levels of Characters for Your Novel.” Btleditorial, 22 Sep. 2020. Accessed 21 Dec. 2022.Hannah Bauman in “Three Levels of Characters for Your Novel,” defines three major types of characters: primary, secondary, and tertiary types. Bauman states “Stories can always ebb and flow. While your main characters will likely remain your main characters in each series, your secondary and tertiary characters can always become more important.”
10. ^{[Return to Article]} Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Hill and Wang, 1 Jan. 1975. Monoskop. Accessed 21 December 2022.
11. ^{[Return to Article]} McCreless, Patrick. “The Hermeneutic Sentence and Other Literary Models for Tonal Closure.” Indiana Theory Review, 1991, vol. 12, pp. 35-73.
12. ^{[Return to Article]} Coward, Rosalind, and John Ellis. Language and Materialism. Routledge, 1977.
13. ^{[Return to Article]} Boba Fett, Willrow Hood, Agent Phil Coulson, Felicity Smoak, and many others, are more than character-McGuffins. McGuffins, such as the golden glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction (1994), have no, or very little, meaning to the overall plot, and although these characters are arguably not essential to the main plot, they perform a needed function, not so much within a specific story but within their respective wider universes, especially when they begin as tertiary characters.
14. ^{[Return to Article]} 658. Pratt, Scott L. “Kathleen Wallace and the Network Self: Identity, Autonomy, and Responsibility.” Metaphilosophy, 25 Feb 2023, vol. 51 no. 5, pp. 657–663.
15. ^{[Return to Article]} Pop Culture conventions (also known as Cons) are a significant aspect of science fiction and fantasy fandom. Fancons.com lists over 600 conventions around the world, of which half of those concern comics and/or science fiction (“List of Upcoming”). Such conventions are held annually in different locations, ranging from Kerikeri, New Zealand to Destination SuperCon in the village of Hethersett, UK (pop. 5,000). These conventions offer a space for fans to gather and cosplay their favorite characters. These Cons typically have memorabilia, art, crafts, as well as celebrities from both obscure areas of fandom to stars from popular comics, television, and film. Cons usually last three to four days and are filled with everything from reveals or sneak peeks of upcoming films or shows or interviews with people behind the scenes. Cons are a gathering place for fans to share their experiences with other fans and to connect with people that share these interests, and there are plenty of fans to connect with: the LA Comic Con had over 140,000 fans and The New York Comic Con 2022 had over 200,000 guests.10 Even the village of Hethersett, UK, population 5,000, hosted over 55,000 fans. 140,000 fans in San Diego as reported on Mike Roe, and 200,000 in New York as reported by Heidi MacDonald.
16. ^{[Return to Article]} Rhys McKay in “Cosplay 101: Everything You Need To Know About It” notes that “the term cosplay was coined in the 1980s but has its roots in the 15th centuries carnivals.” The art of cosplay is also becoming more lucrative concerning sales of screen accurate cosplay costumes. Like the node of marketing, especially as it related to kidults and toys, the economy of Cons is extensive and only will grow much wider in the future. The cosplay market was $4.6 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $23 billion per year by 2030. Aniket, K. and Roshan, D. “Cosplay Costumes Market by End User (Men, Women, Kids, and Unisex), Application (Video Game Costumes, Movie Costumes, Individuals, and Others), and Distribution Channel (Supermarket/Hypermarket, Specialty Stores, and Online Sales Channel): Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast 2021-2030.” Alliedmarketresearch.com. August 2021. Accessed 22 Jan 2023.
17. ^{[Return to Article]} D’Innocenzio, Anne. “Not just for kids: Toymakers aim more products at grown-ups”. AP News, 19 Dec. 2022 https://apnews.com/article/business-pandemics-stress-9d6e65d2338abd2345bd38a1010a67d4 Accessed 15 Jan 2023.
18. ^{[Return to Article]} Whitten, Sarah. “Adults are Buying Toys for Themselves, and It’s the Biggest Source of Growth for the Industry.” CNBC. 19 Dec. 2022.
19. ^{[Return to Article]} “Agent Phil Coulson.” While the website is sold out of this toy, Google reveals the price in its summary of the site during a search for Coulson Toys. The eBay resale of that same toy can be found here: “Hot Toys 1/6 Marvel Avengers MMS189 Agent Phil Coulson.”
20. ^{[Return to Article]} One story among collectors concerns the “holy grail” of Star Wars collectibles: a prototype never released rocket-firing Boba Fett action figure. In 1979 the toy company Kenner designed a Boba Fett action figure with a spring-loaded plastic rocket on his back. This was meant to be a proof of purchase toy. Only if fans purchased certain other Kenner toys could they send in the UPC codes and redeem them for this Boba Fett toy. Unfortunately, before these toys could hit the market, they were deemed a choking hazard to young children and were pulled before they were distributed. However, the prototypes that were not destroyed ended up in the hands of Kenner employees. Today it is believed that only a few dozen remain. The last known price for one of these toys was $225,000, when it was sold in 2020 (Sandell).
21. ^{[Return to Article]} Eisenberg, Eric. “Agent Coulson Wouldn't Be Alive Without Twitter” CinemaBlend. 30 Sept 2014. Accessed 23 Dec. 2017.
22. ^{[Return to Article]} This node of cosplay has a long history, with extant evidence of someone dressing up as a science fiction character to attend a masked ball in 1912.13 Three decades later, the first cosplay would occur at the 1939 World Science Fiction Convention, which even drew contemporary author celebrities Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, according to Andrew Liptak.
23. ^{[Return to Article]} One stock character, a Computer Technician, rose to becoming a central primary character in the DCEU, Felicity Smoak. In Arrow (2012 -2020), the character of Felicity Smoak was initially intended as a one-episode stock character. Smoak’s debut role in the third episode was to illustrate the technological aspect of Queen Industries. The actor who played Smoak, Emily Bett Rickards, was well-liked by cast and crew and swiftly became a fan favorite, so much so the writers made her role recurrent as a secondary character, which evolved into being one of the primary characters. The character of Smoak, a stock character, was never intended to be anything more than a trope of the Tech Girl, until the fan-driven desire for more of her elevated her above being just a stock character; this hidden potentiality of the character makes her start as a tertiary character role, which no one could identify until after she rose above stock character, to at least a secondary character.