a quick summary:

Skye, an orphan, who grew up in the system/with nuns, was given the name Mary Sue Poots, which even if it weren’t for the fact that she never knew her real birth name and never found out about her parents, is a pretty shitty name.

At some point between her childhood and the pilot, Mary Sue Poots decided to give up her identity and take on the name Skye. No last name. No family, no family name to inherit. She deleted all the records of herself and for all intents and purposes erased herself from the world/system.

In season 2, Skye met her parents, which turned out to be a total disaster. Understatement of the century, I know. And yes, from the beginning of the series, Skye was searching for them, was trying to find out who her parents are and by extension, herself.

But while she was looking for her parents, she found another family. She became a shield agent, she made friends with her team members and they became a little family in their own right. Even as early as in episode Eye Spy, Skye jokingly referred to Coulson and May as mom and dad. In her dream in 2x09, Coulson and May were holding baby Skye. May and Coulson definitely grew to be Skye’s parental figures.

But back to her birth parents. The first impression her father left, were a few cut up bodies. Yikes. Daddy of the year, right? And Skye was abundantly clear about her not wanting to meet him. She even told Coulson that if she had to, she would kill him. 

We have to keep in mind that the AOS narrative is very black and white. Either you’re with shield and good, or you’re bad and need to be stopped at all costs.

And in that sense of the definition both her parents fit that category.

I don’t really want to go in depth about Jiaying, because I am still so pissed about how she got treated and written. (Trying to kill her own daughter, killing Raina, when actually all her fears and anger were reasonable)

But yeah, Skye’s mother turned out to be someone who did not value human life at all. and her father turned out to be a lovesick puppy, who killed people to please his wife. Her mother tried to kill Skye, but was stopped by her father breaking her neck. Her father got brainwashed so that he wouldn’t go on killing more people.

And that’s like the nicest way to summarize what happened to her parents.

Now, tell me on what earth, would Skye want to take on the name Daisy Johnson after all of that? She said that all her life she was looking for her parents, for herself, but when she found them, they turned out to be worse than she could have ever imagined. Because she never imagined that her parents were the bad guys. She always thought that something bad had happened to them (which it did), but instead of “rising from the ashes as good people, they succumbed to the darkness” and turned bad. (narratively speaking, ofc)

And logically any and all memory of her parents would involve pain, bitter regret and anger. Because who wouldn’t feel angry that their life’s mission was to find two people who couldn’t be more different than what one had imagined.

At the end of season 2, I thought that brainwashing Cal was their way of telling us that Skye was giving up on her wish of finding/being with her parents. Or finding herself through them.

I thought it was a symbolic way of saying, our protagonist, who has spent her childhood with a minimal sense of self, and has created an identity for herself in her teens, while looking for her parents, finally understood, that not her parents define who she is, but herself.

And she did just that. In the last two years, she changed and grew and went through so much trauma. But she came out on the other side, still standing tall. And even though her life’s dream turned out to be the biggest disappointment ever, she has found herself in the process.

Never, at any point in time, was Skye more sure of who she was and for what she was standing. She was sure enough of her beliefs to stand against Coulson and later Jiaying.

Skye, an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., an inhuman. Not ready or willing to give up one to fully be the other.

Coulson understood her wish, and offered her to take charge of the inhumans, as an agent of shield. And thus, the secret warriors plot was revealed.

Skye would need a codename, because SECRET warriors.

And that would make her: Skye aka Quake. Team Captain.

That would have been the logical conclusion, right=

But what we get instead is:

A haircut, the name that is connected to her biggest trauma yet and presumably no discussion of the damage that has been done to her.

Kind of like what they did when she gained her powers and the writers enabled her to control them by Lincoln sticking a few needles in her.

Nice job, writers. You’re really selling this thing.