Doctor Doom (Victor von Doom)

Victor von Doom

• Mystical Blasts
• Mystical Force-Fields
• Spell Casting
• Brilliant intellect, capable of developing inventions as advanced as Doombots and even a functioning Time-Platform

• Doom's ego and pride often blind him to potential flaws in his plans, resulting in them backfiring and his schemes ruined

Doom is a ruthlessly charismatic leader. With just sheer power of his words, he can rally entire armies to his command, inspiring undying loyalty from his subjects. He has a no tolerance policy for treachery; if anyone dares to betray him, Doom ruthlessly executes them. Even then, Doom is a crafty fellow, he will spare his enemies and his own treacherous underlings for their potential usefulness to him and plays them like fiddles to gain the upper hand.

Perhaps Doom's most defining trait is his spiteful—borderline obsessive—vendetta against Reed Richards and the Fantastic Four. He considers Reed to be beneath him and his scientific intellect subpar in comparison to his own, but can't stop fixating on the former's success as a respected scientist, superhero, and family man.

Despite his surface-level swagger and tough talk, Doom is DEEPLY insecure with himself. For all he has in terms of intellect, he greatly lacks stability. This is, at least in part, rooted in his guilt over his inability to save his parents from their deaths at the hands of Crown Prince Fortunov; in particular, Doom's attempts to save their souls from Mephisto with his dimensional-warp platform in college is a driving, if misplaced, factor in his vendetta against Reed, whom he holds responsible for the experiment's failure.

Doom values loyalty, but he won't hesitate to sacrifice his own loyal soldiers if it could grant him victory. He is fully aware that he is a power-hungry tyrant, but feels it a necessary evil in order to save the world from constant war and socioeconomic instability.

While Doom is cold and calculating, he does have a capacity for warmth and affection for others. He values Latveria's youth and places a special emphasis on their education—albeit education he approves of—believing it helps strengthen his nation, and more importantly, himself.

Doom rarely allows himself to feel emotionally vulnerable, but when he does, he keeps it a secret at all costs, feeling that he cannot present himself as weak to anyone. He goes as far as to activate the black visors of his mask's eyeholes to not let anyone see him cry, even if there is nobody around him to see.

While Doom does loathe Western culture, and the United States in particular, he does see value in certain mediums outside of Latveria's sphere of influence. He has a personal library of tens of thousands of films from around the world, all in different genres, and is an avid reader of great works of literature, collecting novels and poems from around the world. This mild tolerance of foreign works convinced him to open up special schools across Latveria to study and produce films (even showing a small amount of Western films such as Titanic, The Godfather, Citizen Kane, and Schindler's List, to name a few) and other artistic works, if mostly for propaganda to "demonstrate" Latveria's cultural worth.

Victor von Doom is the son of renowned adventurers, explorers, and humanitarians Werner and Cynthia von Doom, who were active in their endeavors for a period of over thirty years between the early 1950s to the mid 1980s. Natives of Latveria, then part of the Eastern Bloc following the end of World War II, Werner was a brilliant inventor and archeologist, while Cynthia was a skilled mage-sorceress. Together, the two explored the world, faced an array of villains, both superpowered and not, and tried to help those in need when they could. Their son, Victor, was born during a stopover in the Himalayas. Throughout his early childhood, Werner and Cynthia raised their child under the virtues of compassion, honor, and fairness. However, when political tensions in their homeland began surging as a result of government crackdown against dissidents during the twilight years of the Soviet Union, Werner, Cynthia, and Victor returned to Latveria to help organize revolutionaries against the communists.

The von Doom family's return to the country did not go unnoticed by Latveria's General Secretary Vladimir Fortunov, a descendant of Latveria's old monarchy and a notoriously brutal leader in the communist sphere of influence. Fortunov, who also wished to break his country free of communist influences to restore the monarchy, approached Werner and Cynthia, offering to broker a peace deal between the government and the revolutionaries; in reality, he intended to use the von Dooms to secure Latveria's independence and then dispose of them later to prevent competition. Werner and Cynthia easily saw through Fortunov's deception and refused to help him. In turn, Fortunov declared the von Dooms, as well as the rest of their clan, the Zefiro, fugitives and ordered them to either be captured for execution or expelled from the country's borders.

In a desperate bid to protect her people, Cynthia made a deal with the demon Mephisto to grant her the power necessary to fight against Fortunov's men in exchange for her soul. However, true to type, Mephisto betrayed Cynthia by causing her newfound powers to go haywire, killing her and her husband and destroying a large swath of the city of Yhushire. Boris Karela, Werner's best friend and Victor's godfather, took advantage of the chaos and confusion to lead the Zefiro out of Latveria. Unbeknownst to anyone, Mephisto also claimed Werner's soul along with Cynthia's just to add insult to injury.

Over the next ten years, Victor became a brilliant, if not emotionally fragile and distant, teenager, developing a myriad of fantastical inventions from little resources as early as 10 years old. His only friend was Boris' granddaughter, Valeria, whom Victor would later come to love. When Victor was 16, Boris gave him a trunk filled with mystical artifacts and books that his mother previously owned. Boris did this in the hopes that it would inspire Victor to finish what his parents had started; the liberation of Latveria and all its people. Indeed, Victor did train and practice with these items, becoming moderately proficient at it, but his heart still lay in science, and in particular engineering.

At some point, Victor began contemplating if it was possible for him to combine technology and sorcery together, ostensibly to rescue the souls of his parents from Mephisto's realm. He prototyped various concepts, but without adequate resources, he was unsuccessful.

When Victor was 21, he was approached by a representative of Empire State University, based out of New York City. The school had heard stories of Victor's brilliant inventions and technological wizardry. After giving a demonstration using an anti-gravitational module as an example, Victor was awarded a full scholarship to E.S.U. He pleaded for Valeria, his girlfriend by then, to join him, but she refused, citing her commitments to her grandfather in leading the Zefiro; her true reason was her growing unease over Victor's increasing obsession with his theories on dimensional displacement and "communicating with the dead," as he called it.

Heartbroken, Victor went to America anyway and enrolled at E.S.U. He became a star student among his professors and peers, but routinely kept to himself. The largest turning point in Victor's life would come when he met Reed Richards, a fellow prodigy who was also the only one at the school whose intelligence rivaled his own. Reed tried to befriend Victor, who rebuffed him, claiming no time for friendships when his studies took precedence. In actuality, Victor was taking full advantage of the school's resources to build a machine capable of piercing the realm between dimensions through a combination of technology and magic.

As Victor neared completion, Reed discovered the device. However, when he questioned Victor, the latter evaded giving a clear answer and threatened to kill Reed if he told anyone else what he was doing. Unintimidated, Reed told the dean, who barged into the lab just as Victor activated the device for the first time. Its insufficient power output caused it to backfire—literally—and explode, destroying a section of the university's science wing.

Victor, who only suffered minor injuries to his face, was expelled from E.S.U. for his recklessness. Before leaving the United States, Victor swore revenge on Reed, believing he sabotaged the device despite the latter's insistence he did no such thing.

Returning to Europe in the aftermath of the Cold War and the fall of communism, Victor learned that Latveria was in the midst of a civil war following Vladimir Fortunov's attempt at reinstating the old monarchy with himself as King, which catalyzed a massive uprising against him by the populace. After Victor attempted to rekindle his relationship with Valeria, who rebuffed him for abandoning their people, he left again. He wandered aimlessly, seeking either purpose or absolution, until he happened upon the very same Himalayan monastery where he was born. The monks who resided there found Victor, who had collapsed in the snow and was close to death, and resuscitated him.

Still desiring to fulfill his parents' hopes that Latveria would one day be free, Victor convinced the monks to help him construct a suit of armor which he could use to fight. He returned to Latveria and reunited with the Zefiro. Organizing other dissidents together into a more cohesive revolution, Doom marched on Hassenstadt, the capital city of Latveria, and stormed Castle Hassenstadt, slaughtering most of the staff as he hunted for Fortunov. Confronting the would-be monarch, Doom easily bested and seemingly killed him, but secretly kept him alive and had him chained in the dungeons beneath the castle as his prisoner, visiting him every year on the anniversary of his defeat and overthrow to mock and torture him.

After the overthrow of Fortunov and the subsequent defeat and exile of his loyalists, Victor took the throne of the Royal Federation of Latveria for himself. He renamed Hassenstadt and its namesake castle Doomstadt. He appointed the Zefiro to many positions of power throughout the country, with Boris in particular becoming the Latverian Chancellor. In less than seven years, Victor managed to rebuild the long-suffering Latverian economy, turning it into the fifth largest economy on Earth. With Latveria saved, Victor turned his sights to exacting vengeance on Reed Richards...