Originally Posted by
Sutekh
Your avatar is Hawkeye. He's a carnival sharpshooter turned criminal turned classic Avenger, despite having no super-powers and a lackadaisical and casual (some might even say disrespectful) attitude in general. In theory, he's pretty darn close to the last person who 'deserves' to be on the franchise superhero team of the 616.
I definitely do not agree with the idea that the Avengers need to be some special elite, since some of the best of them (Hawkeye, the Scarlet Witch, Vision, Hulk, Namor) have been former or recurring foes, and stretched the definition of 'hero.' They've got room for the paragons of virtue like Captain America, and the scary and not-exactly-a-superhero types like Blade or Moondragon, for the cosmically powerful like Thor or Blue Marvel, or the mostly or completely powerless like the Black Widow or Shang Chi. That's cool.
I do recoil a bit when seeing individuals who had earlier been told (or shown) to not really work as Avengers, like Spider-Man or Wolverine on the team, but things change and people change (Spider-Man has grown a lot from the teen who tried to join the Avengers for the paycheck, so I'm okay with that one). About the only members recently I'm not keen with are people with huge bodycounts and happy to add to them like Wolverine or Deadpool or Ares (and even with those three, it depends on who is writing them, since Logan can be a noble philosopher soul wannabe-samurai, when he's not a beer-obsessed psycho who wants to gut Wiccan because he *might* turn out like Wanda...).
Cranger does have an interesting point that Marvel seems to do the same thing with the X-Men. At times it seems like every Marvel mutant defaults to becoming an X-Man eventually, including former foes like Magneto, Emma Frost and (kid versions of) Apocalypse, Krakoa and Gladiator. Around the Utopia era, there were a fair number of former supervillains like Frenzy and Lady Mastermind hanging around, and it was a little weird since some of them were known murderers (Frenzy, for all I love the character, having killed an X-Men ally (Tom Corsi) *on mansion grounds* before, and being an odd one to just be walking around).