#I compare them to Bruce Banner and the Hulk quite frequently

[funtimeanimatronicsofficial]

“Hah… I’m not as good at it as you. You’ll teach me sometime, alright?”

Freddy, what are you doing on my stage?

@ghost-inthe-machine

"Making it look good, of course! Is it that difficult to grasp~?"

[paragonrobits]

@fancyfrogg said: Yes yes yes I am always down to learn more about hulk/Bruce from the comics. I have only seen the movies and he is lacking in depth.

alright! -cracks knuckles- here I go, and i think these panel selections probably do a good job to illustrate the complexity of the character despite being VERY different takes on him:

(The precise nature of Hulk’s relationship to Banner varies quite a lot, as these panels indicate. I placed the majority of this essay below Read More since it got kind of long.)

Right so, the first thing you need to know is that Bruce Banner is prone to different writers writing him in very different ways. Sometimes he’s a tortured idealist hampered by his own feelings of self-doubt, other times he’s honestly a bit of a jerk who means well but is vitriolic at the best of times (and causing others to prefer the Hulks, who are at least earnest and straightforward, whereas Bruce can be INCREDIBLY passive-aggressive), and sometimes he’s a pretty regular guy just doing his best who likes science and is a very vulnerable person. (And sometimes he’s also kind of meta and talks about his constant misfortune in a way that makes it sound like he’s criticizing the writers for never leaving him be.)

To understnad Bruce Banner, you must understand his father, Brian Banner. A man frequently shown to be petty, self-absorbed and prone to bullying other people to make himself feel big, when his son was born, he felt threatened (of a baby) and that his wife’s love had been stolen from him. He came to resent his son, particularly when Bruce performed incredible feats such as creating fully functional complex machines at the age of four, reading Paradise Lost at even younger than that (though it’s ambiguous whether he COULD read it, or what just looking at the pictures), and became emotionally and verbally abusive to his son and his wife, and then physically abusive.

This atmosphere colored Bruce’s childhood; harmed both physically and emotionally, as was his mother, he began to feel responsible for their mutual suffering, that if he had been a better son his father wouldn’t be so constantly angry. This created two issues for him: first, even at that age he began to try to bury his feelings and abiltiy to get angry, believing ANY expression of anger would make him a bad person. The second is that he also thought that he should have been big enough and strong enough to protect his mother.

(The way these two wishes mix together and conflict pretty much sums up the big problem Bruce has, in accepting himself.)

As a result of this abuse, and in order to cope with it, Bruce developed Dissassocative Identity Disorder. The Hulks we know are alters, though it’s unclear whether most of them formed recently or when he was a child. The first of them to appear was the Devil Hulk, who took his name and form from Paradise Lost, as Bruce desperately wanted a father figure who loved him and wouldn’t hurt him... but he was so hurt, he couldn’t imagine a father’s love without being hurt, and so he materialized as a monstrous figure begging Bruce to let him out so he could kill Bruce’s dad and make him leave Bruce alone.

Brian’s abuse culminated in an incident where he attempted to kill Bruce, having come to see him as a monster, and his mother Rebecca tried to stop him; he killed her, leaving Bruce to watch, and left to go to a bar to go brag about it, but not before lecturing Bruce and telling him that this was all Bruce’s fault, that her death was his fault. For years, he blamed himself for this, and it colored his negative attitude towards his own feelings: if he allowed himself to feel ANYTHING at all, he’d be just like his father.

So he gets put into the care of other members of the family, when Brian is shortly arrested afterwards; eventually as an adult, Brian is put into his care, but when visiting his mother’s grave, Bruce and Brian get into an argument that winds up with Bruce smashing his father’s head against his mother’s gravestone, killing him. It is highly ambigious whether or not this was an accident, if Bruce tried to kill him in a fit of vengeful rage and spent years trying to forget it, or if this was his first true Hulk out even before the accident.

(The other Hulks are believed to be a result of Bruce’s damaged life as well; the Savage Hulk, the green and simple brute most are familiar with, is the wounded child he was, endlessly crying out in fear and rage at a world that will never stop hurting him. Joe Fixit, the iconic grey Hulk, is a cunning and smart streetwise hedonist who believes himself to fundamentally be a bad person, saying all the cynical and bitter stuff Bruce won’t say; Bruce won’t let him say or feel so many things, and Joe does it for him. There is the Professor Hulk, who in the comics is a merged state between most of these alters and Bruce, an idealized state, but ultimately falling apart just as Bruce’s life tears himself apart.)

The two most important aspects of Bruce’s life that seem to be iconic to his character are this: one, he has some of the most horrific luck in the Marvel universe, even worse than the X-Men. (To the point that, when believing Xavier to be responsible for his most responsible bout of horrific lamenting and grief, Hulk came to make Xavier pay only to discover that the X-Men constantly are in such misery that he didn’t have the heart to do anything.) If he finds love, it will be destroyed. If he and the Hulk system stabilize, something will come along to put it out of balance. His mindscape is a chaotic, seething mass of uncertainty and weirdness. Bruce simply can’t win at anything, or even find long-term stability; this could be compared to someone with mental health issues who has periodic Bad Brain Days and causes himself grief, unable to stop it from happening.

The second one is ambiguity. Is the Hulk a man, or a monster? Is Bruce Banner a hero, or a great threat to the world (as suggested a few times when he was depowered, and immediately became a massively manipulative mad scientist). He could be one, or the other, or perhaps both. Planet Hulk demonstrates this well, when Hulk (banished to an alien world, and making a found family with a group of outcasts and sole survivors) retorts to Korg’s comment about the strength of the heroes of earth: “Their heroes won’t save them.”

This statement can be taken two ways; that Hulk plans on coming back and taking revenge on the world that cast him out after he saved them. Or that he predicts some other threat will come after Earth, and their heroes won’t be able to save the ungrateful puny humans.

Hulk, needless to say, has some VERY complex characterization even at his most basic (such as Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, where we got a smart but ferocious Hulk contrasted with Banner as a morality agent, who had some interesting complexities), and the MCU largely dumbs him down to just a scientist who gets angry and turns into a monster, but he has some VERY good reasons and experiences to justify it, and he can’t be a bigger monster than many of the people he’s known.

[princesslizzyfnafton]

"Of course we will, Ballora, and you should too!"

Freddy, what are you doing on my stage?

@ghost-inthe-machine

"Making it look good, of course! Is it that difficult to grasp~?"