The Avengers: Doomsday Spoilers & The Continuing Villain Problem

We’re discussing the leaked Avengers: Doomsday. If you don’t want to be spoiled, bookmark this and come back if it turns out to be right.

And we’ve seen evidence in the now official advertising material that points a bunch of it out to be right. Which means, and if you’re coming in on the homepage I’ll keep the spoiler until after the jump, Odds are this is going to be right.

That means that the motivation of the villain in the story…yeah, we all know it’s Doctor Doom as played by Tony Stark’s actor…may also be accurate. It’s one following the Marvel Studio post-buyout tradition of knowing absolutely nothing about the characters they’re adapting and believing that to be a good thing. Because they’re snobby ego-driven morons who just want to tell their story using things people like for easy marketing…but now I’m just padding out the homepage. There’s a secondary threat with their own motivation that is character assassination straight out of the comic storyline that barely inspired this one, but that’s another discussion.

This is going to be short on the homepage, but I can’t get into even the thesis of this post without spoilers. Suffice to say Hollywood and modern writers are making the same mistake yet again, not only misunderstanding the point of a villain in stories, but completely missing the pettiness and narcissism that is “Doctor” Victor Von Doom. Because today’s writers refuse to stop….

…giving their villains sympathetic backstories!

Let’s look at the origin of Doctor Doom, shall we? Marvel Entertainment themselves can supply it. The part we need to know shows up in the first ten or so minutes of the video, and you can go past the intro part if you’re in a hurry. It takes three minutes.

TL;DR: Doctor Doom is a ego-driven master of pettiness.

His greatest acts of pettiness has always been against Reed Richards. I’m not well versed in the Fantastic Four, as I never got into their stories, but even I know of Doom’s outright hatred of Reed. His blaming Reed for his accident was there from the start, while the stuff with his mother and the fate of his father were added in later stories. I’m still convinced Doom only wants to free his mother from Hell because she’s Doom’s mom, and someone as important as Doom shouldn’t have a mother in Hell. Doom’s mother deserves paradise, even though she doomed (no pun intended) her own soul by practicing the dark arts of magic. This and his belief that he alone should rule all of existence because he’s him has led to stealing a Beyonder’s power more than once, the second time recreating Battleworld as a world where Doom is all. He’s gone after Reed’s family, and has managed to get Valeria on his side, basically taking Reed’s daughter from him, and even made Sue his wife in his recreated reality for the same reason: to take from Reed.

Yes, I did catch that Doom’s old girlfriend was named Valeria and now I’m contemplating the same creepy things you are.

Which brings us to the spoiler: that the reason Doom is trying to cause and control the incursions is to bring back his family, lost in a previous incursion due to Loki saving Captain America and his family from being pruned by the TVA. So in a sense Loki just proved the TVA and their bosses right in preserving a “sacred timeline” if messing with it caused the multiverse to go demolition derby on each other in the MCU section of the Marvel multiverse. Should you be proving your villains right? I guess from what I hear about Spider-Man: Brand New Day and it’s villains Marvel Studios thinks so.

Now let’s assume that Doom isn’t lying, hard as that is to imagine given the history of the various incarnations of Doom that isn’t 2099. That means that Doom’s motivation is recreating his family. It’s an attempt to create a sympathetic backstory for yet another villain. They’ve done with…the villain of Spider-Man: Brand New Day (we’re only interested in Doom’s spoilers) and they’ve done it with Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch. If anything, Wanda running around the multiverse trying to bring back her fake kids from that time she created a false reality that held an entire town captive because she couldn’t handle her robot boyfriend dying should be the cause of the incursion, not Steve Rogers leaving with his real life family. But we have to make Steve the bad guy because that’s the only way Marvel knows how to elevate Sam Wilson as the “real” Captain America, by ruining the previous one.

(Really, that’s the only way both Marvel Comics and Marvel Studios…along with the rest of the Disney collective…knows how to push new characters, by ruining and replacing older ones.)

Doom also doesn’t get along with Iron Man. Or anyone not Doctor Doom. Even his Doombots betray him now and then.

It follows an extended trend. Megatron and Skeletor, kids story villains, even get sympathetic backstories. The point of a villain is to be the obstacle to the hero’s goals. They’re allowed to just want to burn the world down, no matter how poorly they were treated in the past. We aren’t supposed to feel sorry for them unless it’s a redemption story, and from the reviews I’ve heard the villain of the current Spider-Man movie’s redemption leaves a few holes in the pursuit of justice.

However Victor was treated as a child by “the system”, his ego drove his quests for science and magic, looking to obtain power. If it was for his own defense he fell pretty fact into his own overinflated sense of self-worth long before meeting Reed Richards. Making Latveria storybook perfect is more about Doom than it is Latveria. Getting his mother back is about Doom more than his mom, I’d wager. If he’s true to form (good luck with an uncontrolled Kevin Feige and company), even getting his family back should be more about Doom getting back what’s his.

Sidebar: Anyone else think this will turn out to be his universe’s version of Tony Stark, but he was raised in Latveria? Or Doom took over Tony’s body after finding it after the last Avengers movie? We see he can do that, and it wouldn’t be the first BAD idea they’ve taken from the comics…like this movie’s plot. I wish they’d use more of the GOOD ideas, but good luck with that. Second sidebar: Odds that seeing Earth-199999’s Tony’s family, Pepper and Morgan, will do something to Victor? Will there be a connection? Not in the spoilers. I’m just running on a theory and I’m not sure if it’s stupid or not for them to do it.

I don’t want sympathetic Doctor Doom. He’s not supposed to be someone you feel sorry for. Every failure Doom makes comes from his own hubris or the heroes just managing to overcome whatever stunt Doom pulled. I’m also tired of the sympathetic villain. There was a time when those stood alongside the traditional evil-for-evil’s-sake version, an example of what happens when you pursue the wrong path and fall from virtue. My worry is that this is exactly what they’re going for, like they did with Wanda and it sounds like they did with the “Brand New Villain” in Spidey’s movie. If Doctor Doom were real he’d hate that…unless he could find a way to get back at Reed, Sub-Mariner, Black Panther, Iron Man, or anyone else who dared to stand between Doom and Doom’s goal. I was already apathetic to this story, and noticing this along with what I theorized from the last time I thought about the leaked spoilers just makes it worse. I want to be wrong, but signs do not point in that direction.