#casting discourse

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I keep seeing people get excited about the idea of introducing Doctor Doom as the centerpiece of a massive Doomsday or Secret Wars style crossover right out of the gate, and I just do not think that works. Not for this character.

Doom is not a plug and play big bad. He is not Thanos where you can build him up in the background and then unleash him as a force of nature. Doom is deeply personal. He is ego, intellect, pride, insecurity, and conviction all wrapped together. If you skip the groundwork, you are not adapting Doom. You are reducing him to a guy in armor with a god complex, and that is the least interesting version of him.

If I were structuring this, I would take a slower, more deliberate approach.

First, you introduce Doom in a Fantastic Four sequel. Not a cameo, not a tease. A full introduction. Establish his rivalry with Reed Richards because that is the core of the character. That jealousy, that need to prove he is the superior mind, that inability to accept that Reed might actually be better. Without that, you are missing the spine of Doom entirely.

Second, you put him in a Doctor Strange sequel and adapt Triumph and Torment. This is where you actually meet Doom the man. His code. His sense of honor. His relationship with his mother. His willingness to work with Strange toward a common goal while still being completely and unapologetically Doom. This is where the audience starts to understand him, not just fear him.

Then, and only then, do you do your big crossover. Whether you call it Doomsday, Secret Wars, whatever. At that point, Doom is not being introduced. He is arriving. The audience understands why he believes he should be in control. They might even agree with him a little, which is exactly where you want them.

Because that is what makes Doom work. He is not just a villain to defeat. He is a perspective to wrestle with.

And then there is the casting idea that keeps floating around. Tying Doom to Robert Downey Jr. and linking him back to Tony Stark is a terrible idea. It is a disservice to the character and it reeks of desperation.

Doom does not need Stark’s shadow to be relevant. Doom is bigger than that. Making him a variant, a legacy echo, or anything that ties him back to Stark immediately undercuts his identity. Instead of Victor Von Doom, you get “what if Tony went bad,” and that is not even remotely the same thing. It shrinks the character at the exact moment you should be establishing how large he is.

It also signals a lack of confidence. Doom should be able to carry himself on presence alone. If the instinct is to lean on nostalgia casting to prop him up, then the character is already being mishandled.

Marvel might feel pressure to rush into a massive event to steady the ship, and I get that. But Doom is not the character you rush. He is the character you build around.

I totally get that there's something simultaneously inevitable and revolting about the idea of a character, canonically extremely oppressed in a world in which everyone whose skin color is described is more or less brown, being played by a member of the least oppressed population demographic with which most of us are familiar. My initial reaction was not great, either.

But every time I see someone say: "Murderbot is not a cis white man!" I can't help thinking: "No, it's not. But in the TV show, it looks like one."

Look, I'm bisexual. And cis. And monogamous. The person I married happened to also be bisexual and cis. We didn't stop being bisexual when we married each other, but when we're together, we don't look queer. We look heterosexual. Which means, we get a lot of heteronormative privilege we don't ask for and I can see why more visibly queer people might resent that. But you know what happens when we try to reject that privilege? People both straight and queer look us dead in the eye and tell us that we're not really queer.

And that sucks.

Ask any light-skinned black person capable of passing for white, any Jew being told that it's okay to commit terrorist acts toward them because they're really white, any queer in any closet, any SecUnit getting a job as security consultant believing that if its soft, grateful clients didn't think it was an augmented human they wouldn't like it so much.

It's not a good idea to rate things hierarchically. Particularly not oppressions. Every person's oppression is unique, and some are more fatal than others but they're all uniquely awful. Knowing that you're not what you're passing as and that the only way to gain access to certain things that should be available to anybody is to deny part of yourself is pretty bad; especially if failure to pass properly is likely to get you lynched. Or stripped for parts and recycled.

Murderbot doesn't want to be a cis white augmented human male. It doesn't like how it feels to be treated as one. It wants to be itself. Even though being treated as itself has always meant being treated badly, and it doesn't like that either. It isolates itself a lot in environments where it has to pass as an augmented human, to minimize the time it spends maintaining its false face.

Consider what it says when contemplating what name to put in the FeedID that Senior Indah insists upon, in Fugitive Telemetry:

I could use the local feed address that was hard coded into my neural interfaces. it wasn't my real name, but it was what the systems I interfaced with called me. If I used it, the humans and augmented humans I encountered would think of me as a bot. Or I could use the name Rin. I liked it, and there were some humans outside the Corporation Rim who thought it was actually my name. I could use it, and the humans on the Station wouldn't have to think about what I was...I posted a feed ID with the name SecUnit, gender = not applicable, and no other information.

It could have an easier life and make the people around it more comfortable if it compromised on presenting itself as itself, whole entire. But it doesn't want to claim that easier life. It's not worth it.

Maybe that'll come across in the show and maybe it won't and maybe whether it comes across or not will depend as much on the viewer as on what appears on the screen. We won't know till we see it.

Twitter of Time is a persistent battle against people with let's be real, arguments against the casting that is 100% because of racism. There is no way denying it, yet these people seem to somehow.

Luckily, what a lot of the character RP accounts and the podcast accounts do is respond as thus: