Plurk paste

She's prone to black and white thinking, and prefers her own very particular brand of moral simplicity. Often when she's presented with a situation of moral complexity or ambiguity, Shaw will attempt to flatten it out into something more straightforward - and if she can't do that (or if the people she's working with won't let her do that, as is more and more common now that she's no longer an isn't-paid-to-ask-questions government assassin), she gets grumpy about it. Doing good is important to her, but she knows where her strengths lie, and it's not in waxing poetic about the intricacies of the human condition: she'll let other people worry about that. Her job, as far as she's concerned, is to be the muscle, not the philosopher, and she's most content when she has a gun in her hands and a clear-cut idea of who she is and isn't supposed to shoot with it. This isn't a shortcoming that she tries to compensate for, nor is it born of naiveté or lack of experience with the real world: it is in many ways an active choice, and one that she doesn't always make. Throughout the course of the series, we see her acknowledging that people aren't always strictly bad or good, and that someone's goodness/badness levels can fluctuate over time depending on their choices (her evolving dynamic with Root is a good example of this, as are her interactions with some of the team's other marks); we also see her admit more than once that the problem-solving-via-killing-the-perps methodology of her ISA work probably wasn't always the best or only option. We even occasionally see her griping at other people for flattening out complexities that she thinks are important (at one point she gets annoyed at Fusco for disparaging the work of the United Nations and seemingly being dismissive of cultural differences). These times when she chooses to recognize the intricacies relevant to a situation only serve to highlight that it's not that she's incapable of seeing in shades of grey - it's that she often simply doesn't bother to.