Board Thread:Television/@comment-1713281-20151029033607/@comment-1894786-20170224014928

LoveWaffle wrote: Alright, let's try and figure this thing out that will likely explain itself anyway six weeks from now.

SPOILERS for the alternate timeline What If? fanfiction universe follow.

If Coulson never joins S.H.I.E.L.D., then he never dies on the Helicarrier. The Avengers never unify around his death, so they bungle the battle in New York. They're all killed when the World Security Council nuke the city if the Chitauri didn't already kill them first. Maybe the Hulk survives? The Hulk's not really the sole survivor you want, anyway. Since New York is destroyed, fear and hatred of aliens and enhanced people is much more rampant.

Fitz' regret is his relationship with his father, so rather than join S.H.I.E.L.D., he uses his tech skills to become like a Scottish Tony Stark in some feeble attempt to gain daddy's approval. No Fitz means no FitzSimmons; no FitzSimmons means no Mouse Hole to save Fury from the Hydra assassins.

Without Nick Fury, Captain America, or Black Widow (or any of the other Avengers), Project Insight goes as planned. Hydra takes over S.H.I.E.L.D., and S.H.I.E.L.D.'s failure to save New York makes people - including S.H.I.E.L.D. agents - more willing to accept their new, crypto-fascist overlords.

May saved the girl in Bahrain, so she never left the field for a desk job. She gets ready-to-comply'd into Hydra's service if she doesn't join up willingly. Without Coulson, "Skye" never joins S.H.I.E.L.D. and undergoes Terrigenesis in the Kree Temple. She's never reunited with her parents at Afterlife, nor does she meet Lincoln. Hydra eventually finds her anyway with Zola's algorithm. From there, it's easier to imagine a string of coincidences that end with her together with Ward. Or since Skye was hacking SHIELD to find info on Jiaying and Cal, she was found like she was originally, and pulled into the organization as before, where she teamed up with Ward somehow.

Shocking as hell how integral FitzSimmons and Coulson are to the MCU canon (FitzSimmons being more surprising than Coulson, obviously).

And if New York gets nuked, no Defenders. But someone did mention that Thor would still be imprisoned in New Mexico without Coulson, so Loki wouldn't attack out of revenge to begin with.

What I wanna know is how Simmons "dies" in this chain of events where Coulson and Fitz (and presumably Mack) aren't part of SHIELD. We know from Season One that she's the one who wanted to be out in the field, and her date of death is apparently the release date of the episode FZZT, where she gets inflicted with that killer Chitauri virus. That would imply that both the attack on New York and her infection both happened in the Framework. Thought let's be honest, she's obviously still alive. It's Simmons.