A word I see used far too often when discussing comic characters - and fictional characters in general - is the word "agency". This word, I believe, has been thrown around so much and in so many different situations over the past few years that it has essentially become a meaningless buzzword people use to separate characters they like from characters they don't like.
No fictional character truly has "agency". Everything about them - what they look like, what they wear, what they say and do - is dictated by their writers and artists. They can't jump out of their concept art to tell their writers and artists what they think they should do. Even movies based on real-life people often take several artistic liberties with the subject's life in order to make a good movie.
Another good example to see why "agency" is so useless as a concept is how selective - or downright hypocritical - people tend to be about when they can believe a character can have agency. For example, discussions about when it's "okay" to depict sexualized female characters in comics. Many will say it's "okay" if the characters in question have "agency". Yet when writers try to do just that, it's often dismissed as "wank justification" or with statements like "Oh please we all know the REAL reason!" or other such statements of rejection. In other words, characters only have "agency" if I like them.
Face it: your favorite fictional character has no more "agency" than your least favorite. Fictional characters, by their very nature, are objects of their writer's/artist's will. Maybe I'm looking at things from too much of a Doylist perspective, but I'm sick and tired of people using such a subjective and ultimately false word to say when it is and isn't "okay" for characters to do something or be portrayed in a certain way or whatever the controversial subject of the month is. And especially because many of them are complete hypocrites about it too.