What Is Dr Doom'S Relationship With The Fantastic Four?

One of the things I notice about the relationship between Sherlock and Watson is the power of the unsaid. They almost never have a heart to heart conversation. Instead of constantly telling each other how much they appreciate each other as friends, they show their appreciation by their actions. Sherlock keeps Watson safe, and Watson tolerates Sherlock at his worst. They trust each other to be there, and it is shown and not told. The few times that there are conversations that mean something to the relationship are very powerful, like the "You are the one fixed point in me" speech from Sherlock. Those moments are incredibly powerful because for so long the weight of their relationship has been in the daily grind of their partnership and in the look they share while working on a case. It is a great example of showing instead of telling of a deep affection for each other.

The lack of a clear origin for Frank allows him to function as a perfectly plausible audience surrogate. The audience comes to the theater with the baggage of their mundane lives. They leave their backstories at home and indulge in the madness of the play for 100 minutes or so. Frank would not be nearly as magical or even functionable as a character if he had a relatable backstory. Instead, he is a blank slate of hedonism that the audience can project upon. This is why people dress up as him in the first place; they are not imitating some complex character with a rich history. Instead, they are embodying an attitude. The audience creates a backstory for Frank that allows them to unlock their own inner “sweet transvestite” and participate in the play as myth-making. That is not biography; that is participatory myth-making.

The plot is centered around the different kinds of love in the book. First, there is paternal love – Sean’s love for his calling and how it affects his son. Then, there is filial love – Isabel’s love for her brother. The book also portrays romantic love – the unspoken feelings of the two main characters and their letters. Additionally, there is love of place and love of art. “The four letters” could refer to four different aspects of love – declaration, rejection, confession and release. The way these aspects of love are portrayed in the book is beautiful but also destructive. It shows that love is not just the happy ending of a book but also a very messy, painful and glorious thing. The plot shows how love can be the motivator for good and bad actions and how we cannot separate selfish and selfless actions from love.

The relationship between the alien Venon symbiote and it’s human host is one of the most compelling aspects of the comic book series, combining elements of horror, symbiosis, and even dark humor. When the alien bondes with a human it does not simply attach itself physically to its host. Rather it merges with the host on a cellular level to form a highly complex psychological connection between two beings. It is why in most of its hosts, especially Eddie Brock, the symbiote finds the greatest source of power in the host’s negative emotions such as anger, aggression, and even despair. The more the host’s emotions match those of the symbiote, the more powerful both the host and the alien become in a symbiotic relationship of mutual empowerment. What I find especially interesting about their pairing is the way that the relationship between them changes over time. Initially the symbiote would override Eddie’s will to do whatever it wanted to do but in later stories the two have formed a sort of co-dependent relationship. The two of them rely on each other for different reasons. Venom needs Eddie’s negative emotions in order to survive and in return he gives Eddie superhuman strength to exact revenge on the people who wronged him. They even refer to themselves in the plural and have at times acted as a single entity (something that even Eddie admits to at times). This sort of relationship is explored in a number of different stories and it really makes for a compelling read as it challenges the reader’s expectations of what it means to be a hero. The bond of Venom and his host is fascinating to consider. It is so much more complex than typical hero-villain tales and actually flips the typical script for possession and interactive. It is not so much Venom possessing his host and erasing their identity, but rather he enhances their already existing identity, for better or for worse. It is a negotiation for the both of them as they interact in a dynamic, positive or negative, for better or worse relationship that cannot be replicated by other comic book characters in the same manner.

Most fanfiction commits this one error: Four is written up as an early twenties character to avoid the ‘teen instructor’ problem, but aging Four up substantially changes the character. The youth of Part Four is part of his tragedy: a child soldier promoted to the role of drill sergeant for Tris. Four is trying to protect Tris from the worst of Dauntless while being a product of it himself—and struggling to figure out how to do that as he grows up. By keeping Four at the canon age of 18, you can better preserve the tragic irony that he is trying his best to protect Tris from the worst of Dauntless while being a product of it himself. He is still learning how to be this Drill Sergeant/Leader/Protector figure and as such has a very different and more painful approach to things than an older character would.

For a long time I have thought of ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’ as a 100 year history. But 100 years pass in a novel that uses time jumps to summarize decades in just a few paragraphs of narrative. On the other hand, “Water Margin” devotes a huge amount of words to the individual back stories of dozens of heroes in real time. Wu Song’s story for example runs from his fight with the tiger that attacked a woman to his later revenge for his brother’s murder and his subsequent flight from the law. All this is told in detailed narrative. Historical fiction of a large sweep of years is often shorter than biographical fiction of detailed individual lives.

I tend to view the character of 'Venom' in relation to Spider-Man. At first the symbiote linked with Spider-Man to enhance his powers and grant him a far more aggressive appearance. But eventually the two had to be separated as it was deemed too detrimental to Spider-Man. Realizing he wasn’t good for the hero the symbiote went in search of a new host. Resulting in the miserable tale of Eddie Brock and his dealings as Venom. What I like most about their battles is that they delve into issues of revenge and identity crisis and therefore reflect in a nice way problems we face in our lives. As an anti-hero the character of Venom is flawed and tortured. At the core of Venom’s being is his struggle to come to terms with Spider-Man and his ongoing desire to destroy him. In comics, TV shows and films their complicated relationship makes for brilliant reading and viewing – it’s truly fantastic to witness their unfolding story.

This scene still makes me shudder. I had forgotten that it was Riff Raff, Frank's own servant from Transsexual, Transylvania who betrays Frank and his ‘Earthly debauchery’ and reduces him to glittery space dust with a laser from his Golden Arm. Frank had been singing ‘I’m Going Home’ in this tragic scene, and one would have thought that he would leave this planet with his followers on their spaceship. But no, it seems that after all his ‘proceeds of Earthly debauchery’ (as the curtain call announcement used to read) he is to be put away in a most ’…final’ fashion – justice, or revenge, served cold.

On cold, rainy afternoons I often open the canon and linger on the way Conan Doyle sets up Moriarty as Holmes's great foil. In 'The Valley of Fear' we learn that James Moriarty was a brilliant mathematician, a professor who slid into the criminal world and built a vast, organized network of wrongdoers. But the incendiary sentence that cements everything is in 'The Final Problem'—Holmes calls him the 'Napoleon of crime.' That label, plus Holmes's own narration of a systematic, continent-spanning criminal enterprise, frames Moriarty as the opposite pole to Holmes' law and reason. Their enmity in canon is less a long soap-opera feud and more a climactic collision: Holmes had been unraveling pieces of Moriarty's organisation, and Moriarty responded by trying to eliminate the one detective who could dismantle his work. It escalates to physical attempts on Holmes’s life, cat-and-mouse pursuits through London, and finally the fatal struggle at Reichenbach Falls in 'The Final Problem.' Doyle wanted a villain big enough to justify killing off his hero, and Moriarty fit that bill—a dark mirror intellect whose confrontation with Holmes defines 'arch-enemy' in the original stories. I still find Conan Doyle’s economy—how a handful of scenes make an archenemy—brilliant and oddly tragic.

Most dark romances have terrible, unclear, or even dreadful endings, but this was completely different. It was a completely satisfying read that ended perfectly in a traditional and utterly wonderful way. And by wonderful, I mean absolutely perfect. I didn’t want more. It was complete and wonderful and I shut the book feeling completely satisfied. These days of ‘subverting expectations’ it takes courage to simply write a completely straight happy ending and it was wonderful.