#pulp villains

[skjam]

Pulp Fanfic Crossover Fodder: Dr. Goldfoot

Note: This is primarily based on Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965).

Little is known of the background of Dr. Goldfoot. This includes not knowing his full name, if that even is his birth name, and where if anywhere he got his doctorate. He claimed descent from a pirate, a member of the Inquisition, and Attila the Hun's mentor in violence.

As of 1965, he appeared to be physically in his fifties, and had resided for some years in San Francisco operating a private cemetery and funeral home as a front for his other activities. It was in this year that he invented his best-known device, the Bikini Machine. The Bikini Machine created humanoid female-shaped robots with fairly complex programming, allowing them a limited ability to pass as human women. Each came with a gold-fabric bikini; it's not clear if they had actual female anatomy underneath that cloth.

Dr. Goldfoot supplemented the basic programming by downloading data from computer tapes directly to their memory banks. This was used primarily for giving them the ability to speak knowledgably about their targets' areas of interest.

The plan was to have these "girlbots" marry wealthy men, strip them of their assets, and transfer the wealth to Dr. Goldfoot. His goals beyond that are unclear.

Due to poor instructions by Dr. Goldfoot's henchman Igor. girlbot #12 "Diane" mistook Secret Intelligence Command (SIC) agent Craig Gamble for her target, millionaire Todd Armstrong. Craig, a nitwit only employed by SIC because his uncle Donald J. Pevney was the San Francisco office chief, only understood that the bizarre-acting woman he'd instantly fallen in love with had suddenly abandoned him (when Dr. Goldfoot corrected her commands) but this was enough to put him on the case.

Diane "met cute" with Todd and quickly persuaded him to marry her. At no time was the marriage consummated, but it's not clear if this was due to incapacity on #12's part or a part of a strategy to string Todd along until she possessed all his assets. Eventually, Craig and Todd teamed up to "rescue" Diane from Dr. Goldfoot, despite the fact she'd already been reprogrammed to forget she ever met them.

After a number of hijinks and a chase through San Francisco, Dr. Goldfoot and Igor were seemingly killed by naval bombardment. In reality, they survived, and the two men and Diane replaced the flight crew on a passenger jet to France.

By 1966, Dr. Goldfoot had become separated from Igor and Diane (the latter of whom may have married the German man she was flirting with on the plane) and was operating out of Italy. (Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs) He'd accepted Chinese funding to rebuild his Bikini Machine. This new version created "girlbombs" that could impersonate specific people and explode on command.

This time, the plan was to disrupt NATO war games by assassinating the various generals involved. The plan was thwarted by another SIC agent, Bill Dexter, and two Italian doormen named Franco and Ciccio. Dr. Goldfoot then attempted to detonate a nuclear bomb in Moscow to start World War Three, but this also failed and he was believed killed in the explosion. In fact, he survived, but no further activity of his has been recorded.

By the 1990s, Dr. Goldfoot's girlbot technology had been acquired by Virtucorp, the front organization for Dr. Evil, and somewhat improved. (See Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.)

Girlbots are very sturdy, able to take a collision with a small automobile without being moved or taking noticeable damage. They can be pierced by small arms fire, but unless vital areas are specifically targeted, this does not impair their function in any way. They're also far stronger than they appear. (Fortunately, most of Dr. Goldfoot's girlbots were not programmed to use violence.) They have radio receivers which allow them to receive commands directly from a console Dr. Goldfoot also invented.

The first batch of girlbots, including #12, were mostly able to impersonate human women, but came off as eccentric. They relied on their good looks and aggressive courting tactics to distract targets from realizing there was anything odd.

In addition to the Bikini Machine, Dr. Goldfoot's technology included: opera glasses that sprouted poison spikes (never used on camera), laser lipstick, the ability to remotely control motorcars, and either remote viewing or multiple miniature cameras placed throughout San Francisco. The latter two were incorporated into the same console he used to communicate with the girlbots. He had some way of reviving the (recently?) dead, but the only person he is known to have used it on was Igor.

Dr, Goldfoot bore a strong resemblance to the actor Vincent Price. He always wore gold-fabric slippers, and it was implied at one point that his actual feet were also golden in color. He was fey in his mannerisms, although he did seem to appreciate the aesthetics of his Bikini Machine creations. He put little value on human life, and was fully willing for his girlbots to eliminate competition the hard way.

The mad scientist's grasp of geopolitics may have been a little shaky. He sent a girlbot with the appearance of a black woman to marry a person who would have been a white man in South Africa at the height of apartheid.

Crossover potential: A rather silly mad scientist who specializes in creating femi-form robots can have many uses, as long as the story is okay with that kind of humor. Assuming nothing else happens to him, Dr. Goldfoot would die of old age in the early 1990s.

Notably, Dr. Goldfoot's headquarters was not destroyed in the movie, so the U.S. government was presumably able to access his technology and study it. ("Top men.") Also, several girlbots were already out on assignment at the time of his defeat, and are presumably loose ends.

SIC is one of the many splinter intelligence agencies the fictional U.S. government sponsored during this time period to increase plausible deniability. The budget was apparently tiny, with the San Francisco office being headquarters in a two-room office, Craig and his uncle being the only two operatives, and Craig not having access to any spy gadgets or even a gun. (His salary was also miniscule--he considered a cheese sandwich at the cafeteria a suitable date meal.)

The fictional agency your main characters belong to may have absorbed SIC and its records if the story is set post-1966.

Have fun!

@krinsbez

[maxwell-grant]

I was reading one of your posts that crosslinked to another post about someone named the Grey Claw, but the link wasn't working. What's the Grey Claw all about?

I was planning to hold off talking about him until I could finish translating his comic or wrote a story with him proper, plans I still intend to get around to but are gonna be on ice for a long while. So in the meanwhile, let's finally set the record about this guy.

Said to be the star of Brazil's first horror comic, he is unarguably the first Brazilian supervillain, and I'll make an argument that he may very well be The First Comic Book Supervillain proper, inspired by the pulp master villains but something much different than the drab Fu Manchu clones of the time, something new and costumed and strange and fantastical in ways that were years if not decades ahead of his time. Predating the first recognized American supervillains in comics, at the midpoint between Fu Manchu and Doctor Sivana, between Fantomas and The Joker, between Doctor Quartz and Lex Luthor, there is: The Grey Claw.

Murders, underground connections, secret laboratories, opium dens, a secret society of crime and a mysterious super-villain challenging all of police and society. São Paulo was still in it's quiet beginnings, but even then, it dreamed of being a grand shadowy metropolis, like the ones heard about in movies, pulps and North-American comic books.

And that dream made the success of The Grey Claw series in the 1930s. For months, paulista readers eagerly followed the perils of Inspector Frederic Higgens at the hands of The Grey Claw's semi-anarchist gang, with exotic characters such as the robot Flag and the sensual Dame in Black.

Considered by many to be the first Brazilian horror comic - due to it's plot full of monsters, mummies, grave defilings and mentions of life after death - The Grey Claw is a direct spawn from the seedy and mysterious texts of north-american pulp magazines. Soon, those masked avengers and horrific villains in non-stop action would reach the world of comics, giving birth to the superhero revolution. - The City and it's Monster, by Worney Almeida de Souza

The Grey Claw was the star of a comic published in newspaper A Gazetinha starting July 1937, just short of a full year before Superman's debut in June 1938, and it would run for a hundred installments until wrapping up it's story circa 1939. The same newspaper would eventually debut both Superman and The Phantom (second only to Superman and maybe Batman in terms of imitators worldwide among Golden Age superheroes, and I say maybe because they overlap a bit but The Phantom was definitely the go-to superhero to rip off basically everywhere outside of the States) to Brazilian audiences, running alongside The Grey Claw during his brief run. The strip is a police procedural that gradually turns into a sci-fi horror story, a pastiche of film serials and pulp novels that focuses on the titular strange, powerful masked villain running amok in a seedy metropolitan area, and a police detective's efforts to uncover who is behind said villain.

The basic skeleton of it is a fairly cut-and-dry police procedural with a square-jawed Sherlockian policeman investigating a string of calling-card murders with more suspects and victims picking up along the way. Our heroes are mostly colorless and dull archetypes, although the protagonist Higgins is amusingly dickish at several times and I'll go to bat for the female lead Kay Tornhill, she's a fairly progressive character in spite of limited screentime as the detective's partner (not romantically, she joins the investigation to protect her younger brother from the Claw). She's a skilled fencer / marksman / equestrian / swimmer who doesn't really get to show these talents in the story, but they make a point of bringing it up, and I think Kay's presentation probably did the most in convincing people for decades that this comic was penned by a woman under a male name, because, well just look at her.

But as is Pulp Supervillain Lead tradition, it is the villain who has more than enough charisma to spare to carry us through, and a lot of what makes The Grey Claw feel distinct is that he winds up remixing stock pulp/serial villain traits in novel ways, the result of him making his debut in a fairly new and developing medium and growing stranger as the issues develop as he takes center stage more and more. Everytime he shows up, he brings with him things like televised death traps (television hadn't yet been brought to Brazil), underground torch-lit lairs, rabid ape monsters in chains who used to be humans, and a gigantic automaton who walks around making turkey noises and killing everything in sight unless reigned in by The Grey Claw, who names it "FLAG" and treats him with great fondness as if he were a best friend and a sidekick and a dog all in one and bemoans that one day, he will be able to give his berserk death machine friend the power of speech.

FLAG! FLAG! It is I, FLAG! Calm yourself, FLAG!

My poor FLAG! Some day, I shall give you the usage of speech...

Here's one thing about the character upfront: The story was drawn by Renato Silva (who also did Nick Carter stories) and written by Francisco Armond, but nobody knows who Francisco Armond is. For a while, the most likely candidate was Helena Ferraz, a poet and co-editor/director of the paper who had already published under the male pseudonym Alvaro Armando (named after her two sons), but relatives of hers confirmed it wasn't her, and so currently nobody knows who wrote this. I actually still have no idea who, if anyone, currently owns the rights to The Grey Claw, because although he's had a recent reboot (by the same creator of Doutrinador and in the exact same vibe, which means it's dogshit and I will not entertain it), he's long passed the point where he should be public domain.

The comic was a great success for it's time and would achieve a level of fame none of it's contemporaries would by being reprinted internationally. In 1939, it was reprinted without permission by Mexican editor Sayrol in 1939 and made it's way to European publishers through there. Between 1944-1947 it had a very popular run in Belgian magazine "Le Moustique", and he was adapted to France under the name "La Griffre Grise", which is where I discovered the character while looking for French pulp characters. Unsurprisingly, the character was never credited as a Brazilian creation, and for 50 or so years went almost completely undiscovered by even the most hardcore researchers.

Even in Brazil, nobody knows about this guy, and it was only in 2011, 74 years after his debut, that the character's entire saga was finally collected and reprinted in trade paperback by Editora Conrad. It's not cheap and it's really hard to find and order, completely out of stock in most online stores, but I got it as a birthday gift from my sister a couple years ago. I have it on hand right now to help put this post together.

It's a fairly weird comic that's in many ways aged really poorly but also tapped into some veins superhero comics and future supervillains would take a long while to even approach. The dialogue is a couple steps clunkier than even your average Golden Age comic, almost impenetrably outdated with Portuguese linguistics (a poisoned character saying out loud "Oh no! I've just been narcotized!") and weird malapropist English terms hastily translated and inserted in, and conveying the feel of it is even beyond my own skills at translating. It's a unique time capsule of how Brazil was still adapting to rapidly developing times, recently loosening up from centuries-spanning shackles of Portuguese and Spanish colonialism and with a newfound input of foreign media in pulps and serials and theater, and adapting and developing new subcultures and ways of expression as a result.

This was one of the first times a Brazilian comic would play around this much with USAmerican tropes and archetypes (cultural imports from the USA were all extremely new and viewed as a hot new alternative to European art and culture that had otherwise been the dominant form), a São Paulo-published comic set in a seedy, Depression-choked American metropolis, a big monument of brick and poison and inequality, which is exactly what São Paulo would become. There is something oddly alien and prescient about The Grey Claw because it's rooted in a fictionalized fantasyland idea of 1930s New York, that would nevertheless predate São Paulo's trajectory into becoming the country's big American-Style Urban Center, over the decades later when it would be the USAmericans' turn to tighten those colonialist shackles back on.

The dialogue also makes it pretty funny to read as a result and especially when the villain shows up, because The Grey Claw himself is pretty goddamn funny. Not just funny: I think his characterization is actually pretty damn impressive, and it's certainly the main draw of the thing for me. There's one sequence I'm going to post the whole page to be appreciated. I can't scan it so you'll just have to take my word as is that this is the whole page.

For context: It is revealed that The Grey Claw has been on a mad quest to unlock the mysteries of life and death via a formula that can bring the dead back to life. He monologues quite intensely about having unveiled and unlocked the secrets, saying to FLAG that he was the first step in giving life and intelligence into inanimate matter ("You would be a perfect creation, if only you were able to express your feelings", he says, to the horrid gurgling automaton who murders everything in sight), but that this time, he shall perfect the breath of life.

But it is eventually revealed, when he is exposed as Dr James Stone (a "famed young chemist, one of the most well-liked men around town") after his explosive demise, that he had in fact stolen the formula's recipe from a former partner, Professor Curberry. Curberry was the ape monster he kept chained in the basement, and that he visited in order to whip while it writhed in chains, with the narrative stating The Claw was "blinded by hate" towards him. At the end, it's revealed that Curberry's corpse coming back to life as a half-man-half-ape monster was a side effect of The Grey Claw "getting the dosage wrong", and we're just gonna ignore the can of worms that ending brings to focus on when The Grew Claw actually succeded.

For his test subject, he picked the corpse of the scientist's secretary he murdered within the 2nd strip, over a week well into death, and injects her at the dawn of midnight. And I'm gonna have to transcribe it:

Mid-night at last! The "Claw" begins the grand experiment.

The ghost's hand shakes slightly as he injects the licor of life in the dead woman's arms. And this is the first time the steely nerves of that insensitive creature have ever faltered.

"Twenty four minutes and...she'll be back to life! Ah, this time the triumph will be complete!"

"Will I fail yet again? No, failure is not possible. However, the experiment realized with Curberry was definitive...how horrible it would be if the experiment failed again!"

"It would be horrible! But no! If I fail, I will not allow her to survive...Yes! I shall exterminate her! Curberry and Mac-Flagan were more than enough!"

The minutes drizzle out slowly. As the pointers walk across, the mysterious ghost feels his nervousness grow.

They dedicated an entire page's worth just to The Grey Claw stressing and worrying and having a breakdown over the prospect of his formula not working again. But he does succeed, and the secretary comes back to life devoid of any memories and in great shock. Here's how the "insensitive creature" reacts

Despite his great dominion over his own nerves, the "Claw" can barely repress his restlessness. The living dead woman stumbles around her with a look of fright.

DAME IN BLACK: "What an emptiness in my head! It's all confused, scrambled, obscured!"

THE GREY CLAW: "This time I've won completely, FLAG!"

He later tells her that, with no memories of her own, she might as well not "cling to the past" and instead join him as his "Dame in Black". But in the aftermath of this, while he's busy boasting and jeering that the world belongs to him now, FLAG immediately zeroes in and tries to maul the woman before The Claw shoos him away. And then in the next strip, he writes in his diary about how his two besties are getting along now-

The next day, certain that FLAG would no longer try assaulting the "Dame in Black", the "Claw" penetrates a discreet cabinet next to the laboratory

"My memories...they shall be worth a fortune later..."

"I have triumped! She transcended the throes of death and returned to life, thirty minutes after the injection. She showed herself a bit stunned, undecided, wowed; she spoke, she walked, she fought…yes, she fought the idiot automaton, who was startled by the new companion…But now, they are both great friends."

"I have taught her the process of turning FLAG docile as a lamb. She is of sane mind; her mind has shed, however, all impressions of the "past". My voice, however, brought her memory-"

Did I tell you guys already that, before the police blows the two up, FLAG ultimately mauls The Grey Claw to death while his last words are him desperately trying to get the robot to calm down, saying "It's me!" instead of fleeing? I'm posting like one highlight, but to post all of them would be to post basically every time this character shows up in the story.

(Art by @zanzooeditorial)

There's just such a fascinating mismatch between how the narration and everyone sees him, as this stone cold invincible death-dealer turned death-master who holds the entire country in a grip of terror, and his characterization when he's actually on-screen going about his affairs. The narrative goes through lengths to paint him as an unfeeling soulless monster that is almost patently contradicted with most of what he says and does in-text, which veers widly between pitiable and even sympathetic to, actually worse than if he was fully pragmatic chessmaster genius the police perceives him as, and it's not even really played for laughs, it's more like a side effect of this being published peacemeal over 2 years and shooting for new directions and thus contradicting itself. He's afforded this emotional range that's just really unheard of, not just in the pulp villains he's based on but in all the Golden Age supervillains that came after him, it's something that only really started catching on with Marvel and their attempts to add extra dimension to their villains.

The Grey Claw is a brutal murderer and a cutthroat terrorist who has an innocent woman shot in the heart within the second page, and he's a wisecracking goofball who delighs in showing off his advanced intellect and machinery before his police nemesis. He commands vast invisible communications networks and armies of brutal thugs, and then he writes diaries and plays pranks and poses dramatically. He is a vicious man who turned his former partner into a mutant ape and keeps him locked up and whipped while constantly berating and cursing him ("Ah Ah Ah! I wish your university colleagues could see you now!"), but he did forsake victory and spared his worst enemies from a horrible end to save the life of a woman he liked among them. He is a deeply lonely gothic dweeb who casually engages in constant banter with the monstrous unresponsive automaton, whom he asks for input and talks to and holds tight in moments of emotion or camraderie that is entirely one-sided on his end, he barely restrains it from murdering everything in sight at all times and winds up being mauled to death the second that grip is loosened. He has one friend in the whole entire world and it's the one he made himself.

He is desperately driven to prove himself and have that blasted resurrection formula he's been developing for years work, even though we learn that it was apparently stolen from someone else the whole time and he was just, what, passionately pretending to himself that it was his life's work? We never get to see his face, only a last-minute identity as a respectable young chemist and "the last suspect anyone would have", and given he was indeed able to reverse death and decay, seemingly permanently, it would have been extremely easy for the series to continue, and for The Grey Claw to come back again and again as many times as it took.

He is humorous and childish and absurd and even quite likeable, but the bodies do not stop piling near him, and the more he shows up, the weirder and bloodier things get, until what began as a bog-standard police whodunit ends with a violent struggle between a former professor turned bloodied giant ape man and a titanic lumbering murder robot deep within an underground dungeon system, where said murder robot proceeds to slaughter everything in sight including the Dr Frankenstein-gangster-pirate who created him, as the police throws dynamite at them because nothing else has worked so far in stopping them.

By all means, The Grey Claw had everything necessary and then some to make it into the biggest leagues of supervillain history, on the strength not just of his initial outing but his inspired characterization and great success and popularity by his time. Today he's remembered only among diehard afictionados and collectors, for spearheading many firsts within Brazilian comics and being one of the very, very few figures among Brazilian superheroes/supervillains to achieve any kind of fame at all. The scene and history when it comes to Brazilian superheroes, and reasons for the lack thereof, is a topic for another day.

Some fans have tried boosting the character's rep by claiming he was an influence on several marginally better-known characters such as Marvel's Blazing Skull or the nascent villain protagonist genre of comics that would pop up throughout Europe in the 50s-60s, but even I'll say that's a stretch too far. Records show The Grey Claw was popular in his time and region for sure, popular enough to be reprinted without credit across the globe and popular enough to be remembered and redrawn in present day (can't discount the strength of a good design, at least), but he was an anomaly at the end, a missing link untethered and unprotected from time.

A gothic horror alchemist who skulks around medieval dungeons, weaponizing every latest technological advancement and social anxiety to his advantage and even some that didn't really exist yet. A totem of death obsessed with life, the first comic book villain to surpass death if only for a moment, an inhuman murderous monster who turns out to be as painfully human as it gets. A skull-faced harbinger of death who foregoes the cloak and scythe to don a panama hat and fancy apparell and The Chest Logo Of His Persona and Brand. Just one year before some gringo strongman was doing that but with circus colors and a letter instead.

Pfah, fashion visionaries never get their due in time. But if conquering death was a trivial task for The Fascinora, conquering time and returning to his true self should be achievable in no time at all!

Ah Ah Ah!...

Give or take some 90 years, maybe.

(Art by @necronauta)

[her-imperius-condessy]

The sun will go down, everybody knows it...

It's basic Astronomy.

Guys. Were we warned from the very beginning?

[shhhsoftnwet]

No worries everyone! They’re just having a bloody good time and spilling ketchup everywhere 😀🥫

[pr0cyon-lotor]

Okay so I know SQH would absolutely get his ass handed to him in a fight with LQG

BUUUUTTT

I do believe that if SQH finally got to his breaking point with the Bai Zhan disciples fucking shit up and leaving his peak to do the paperwork to fix things, Shang Qinghua could get at least ONE ABSOLUTELY DEVASTATING HAYMAKER on Liu Qingge's face

And depending on the fates and how much Liu Qingge was caught off guard, SQH could maybe get away with verbally tearing into LQG. And it's always the nice ones with the more gut-wrenching, soul-crushing insults

So if SQH plays his cards right, he might be able to even get away before LQG has time to recover :)

[paranormaltheatrekid]

for my mutual @missholloween

[crimeronan]

Thinking about that anon ask about young Amillow in the princess au.

After their arranged breakup tm Willow's view of the castle and The Princess/then Empress shifting over the years. That she must be exactly like the sort of person Amity has become over the course of school, cold, calculating and cruel, coming to dread it when she gets her apprenticeship with Snapdragon. Only to find when actually meeting Luz that... no she's nothing like that.

Full on expecting a castle full of people that are just "Amity at her worst" (and in fairness that would describe a lot of people there, like Amity's roommates) expecting that obviously The Empress will be the worst one there, meanwhile Luz is still Luz in all her gentle brightness in spite of everything that's happened, still shining in spite of all the pain. Hunter is -though simultaneously a bitey angry overprotective wet cat- a surprisingly massive nerd once he lets his guard slip for one second, and even Amity sucks reasonably less than she did before and just looks at her with nothing but a sense of overwhelming longing and guilt.

AW. LOVE ALL OF THIS. thinking about hunter in the context of willow and amity delights me tbh. willow initially being like "okay, i've heard you're either her boyfriend or just her friend and i Don't Trust Like That" & avoiding him, and then she sees them argue n is like Hello. & hunter is like omg willow you have issues with her too?? i'm dying to shit-talk amity PLEASE have lunch with me.

and THEN willow makes some passing comment to him like "i'm surprised she backs off of you so quickly honestly, she must be really scared of you???" and hunter is like hahaha nah she's all bark and no bite. well. these days, anyway.

willow: .....these days??

hunter: oh you should've SEEN what she was like when she first joined the coven. wait no who am i kidding. it's you. You Know . You Know Her Whole Deal,

[glitter-stained]

One kind of hc that I really can't stand is "villain/antagonist actually lied about their abuse to make the hero empathetic", especially if the abuse in question is SA. Like, I understand wanting to push back against demonization of trauma survivors, I really do, but there's a point at which it really gives off a vibe of "feeling empathy for someone I dislike or condemn/ passing a judgement on someone I feel empathy for is uncomfortable to me so I'm going to invent a manipulative intention on their end that allows me to avoid feeling this discomfort" and it's a little too close to what victims of abuse face (especially those who don't fit the victim stere) for me.

A character could be called Liar Mc Judas Von Betrayal, if they said or yk, even hinted that they had been a victim of csa I would believe them, and if the story proved it was a lie I would get mad like how dare you make Liar Mc Judas into a liar! I don't care. I hate it.

[doolallymagpie]

I used to be annoyed Helsingard wasn't the Big Bad, and now I think it's one of the best parts of Atomic Robo, that this character who by all means should be more of a threat gets more of a *Nandor voice* fucking guy reaction

[wanderingmind867]

Batman really banks on you liking Noir and Pulp Detective fiction. But I don't. Never have and probably never will. I don't like hard boiled, dark and gritty detectives. Daredevil only works at Marvel in the pre-frank miller days, because 60s and 70s takes on him were at least willing to get silly. I don't want a gritty vigilante, and especially not one who is afraid to let some humour slip through.

Also: Batman is just downright boring. It says something that the joker (the character who's actually the f***ing bad guy) is someone I'd rather read about! At least all that laughter and dark comedy makes for a fun reading/viewing experience. Batman doing his grumpy detective shtick only serves to aggravate and/or bore me.

[skjam]

Pulp Crossover Fodder: Doctor Death, Seeker of Souls

SPOILER WARNING: This entry has massive SPOILERS for the movie Doctor Death: Seeker of Souls (1973) so fans of schlocky horror movies might want to check it out on Youtube or other perfectly legal sources before having all the twists revealed here.

Okay, ready?

The man sometimes referred to as "Doctor Death" was originally an alchemist/magus working in an unidentified European area in the Middle Ages, pursuing the goal of immortality. Having realized that attempting to make his original body immortal was a dead end (pun intended), he focused his efforts on "selective reincarnation."

He discovered that a recently-deceased corpse could be reanimated (and the cause of death fixed) with the soul of another recently deceased person. The alchemist, already near death, murdered his young apprentice and then committed suicide to test the process. It worked!

He had a long life in his second body, but planned poorly, so when the crisis came again, the only available victim was a young female servant. He enjoyed...some...aspects of being a woman, but overall female bodies don't suit him (we'd call it gender dysphoria these days) and switched again as soon as he could arrange it.

Over the centuries, Doctor Death has had many bodies, including sometimes small children, and at least one each black dude and East Asian woman. Sometimes he was able to keep wealth from previous lives, sometimes not. A source of income for him was the ability to provide "selective reincarnation" for other people in exchange for cash or later favors.

By the early 1970s, Doctor Death had been living for some years in the body of a man who strongly resembled actor John Considine and going by the name Dr. Brilliant. He'd gathered a small cultlike following that allowed him to live comfortably.

But then he met Fred Saunders. Fred's wife Laura had recently died, and he'd become obsessed with the belief that she wanted to come back to him. Fred rapidly discovered that most mediums, psychics and mystics are complete frauds. At the end of his rope, he was approached by a woman named Tana (Dr. Brilliant's "wife") and invited to a performance.

Doctor Death put on what looked like a cheap stage magic act, transferring the soul of a disfigured woman into the body of an extremely beautiful young woman who'd been murdered by a jealous lover. Doctor Death named the hybrid girl "Venus." Despite looking and sounding like a charlatan, "Dr. Brilliant" was clearly the real deal.

Fred paid $50,000 to have Laura revived, despite reservations about the ethics and actual outcome of the process.

Doctor Death had elevated Venus to his primary lover, much to the jealous rage of Tana. Since Tana had become an inconvenience now, Doctor Death decided to murder her to revive Laura. For the first time ever, the body refused this soul.

Baffled, Doctor Death tried again and again. Even after Fred withdrew his request, Doctor Death insisted on completing the revival of Laura, no matter how many pretty ladies had to die. Up to and including Fred's secretary and his new love interest Sandy.

Fatally wounded, Doctor Death finally succeeded by transferring his own powerful soul into Laura's body--and that's the last we see of him. (There was no sequel.)

Powers: In addition to several lifetimes of knowledge and the "selective reincarnation" process, each of Doctor Death's bodies has highly corrosive black acid for blood. (This appears to be a side effect of multiple reincarnations, as none of the other reincarnatees have this issue.)

Personality: As might be expected from someone who murders people on the regular to fuel his immortality, Doctor Death is very self-centered and callous about death. He can be quite charming when he wants, but is quick to drop any relationship he's not profiting from. His mannerisms are theatrical. Doctor Death is also very horny and has an eye for pretty women, sometimes letting his lust override his better judgement.

Associates: In the early 1970s, Doctor Death's primary henchman is Thor, a large, muscular one-eyed mute. He had been with the Doctor for at least two decades, and possibly more than one body, having sworn service after Doctor Death swapped him into this powerful form. He'd ripped out his own tongue to prevent Egyptian authorities from making him tell the Doctor's hiding place. He often did the actual murder, having no qualms about this, but died for real during the Saunders affair. In addition, Doctor Death has a number of hidden contacts he's either reincarnated or contracted to reincarnate at a later date that he can call in favors from.

Oh, and Tana was his "wife" during the early 1970s, doing recruiting work as well as presumably all the housekeeping chores.

Fanfic uses: Prior to 1973, Doctor Death is probably not suited to a primary opponent role. He's more of a background explanation for why another baddie has come back from the dead in a new body, and the fellow who gets out of town fast when the unexplained corpses start getting too hot an investigation. He hasn't knowingly met other immortals in his backstory, so be careful about that. He might be encountered, but not fought.

After 1973, Doctor Death will probably want to ditch the Laura body pretty quickly despite all the trouble he went through to get it. That's when more modern adventurers can get on his trail. Doctor Death can look like anyone, but that trail of bodies is pretty noticeable as records get automated and centralized.

There are a bunch of souls that he ripped out to try to stuff in Laura--it's never explained what happened to them, so that's a good story thread.

Thoughts, comments?

@krinsbez

[thedupshadove]

Anti-Nazi 1930s heroes who aren't Jewish but also are and can't seem to decide whether they're glasses-wearing nerds or pillars of machismo.

[enjamin-the-benitor]

GNAWING AT THE BARS OF MY ENCLOSURE I AM FEELING A LOT OF EMOTIONS AT A RAPID RATE

[cringefaecompilation]

alright, alright, serious post about episode 102. i was really angry when i saw ludinus ignore every single valid argument against the gods or have an ounce of sympathy for the innocent lives lost and instead cackle like a stereotypical villain about how he was right all along. but then i was also super lost when the hells came to the conclusion ludinus only showed them the vision because he wanted the same power and lack of consequences to perform them as the gods.

and then it hit me. context is key. and what's the context of them being shown this orb?

ludinus wants to show them the darkest day of the gods abusing their power. but all they have seen of ludinus are his darkest days. this is the closest to a good day they have seen from him and i can guarantee if they'd stumbled upon this orb by accident or had been shown it by allura or anyone besides ludinus they'd be a little more understanding and less punchy. not fully change their opinions, though; i think if dorian or ashton were shown this in isolation their god-hating opinions would remain, fearne's ambivalence would remain, and the rest's shaky yet mostly positive opinions would remain. but since ludinus showed them this with the undercurrent of "you'll all trust and believe me wholly after seeing this!" he kinda shot himself in the foot. of course they assume the worst.

it doesn't make imogen a mean bitch laughing at his trauma and telling him it doesn't matter. it doesn't make orym a whiny hypocrite trying to lord his pain over ludinus'. it doesn't make chetney and laudna r/iamverysmart posters for bringing up the very real facts that he is oppressing people and harming innocent lives to "stop oppression and innocent lives being lost". it doesn't make ashton telling him he's just as bad as them a false equivalency because a bureaucrat "isn't as bad" as a deity. if ludinus is allowed to be upset for seeing the worst in someone demanding unwavering trust that has done nothing but harm them, then so are they.

this isn't me saying he's worse than the gods and they've done nothing wrong. they're equally oppressive, the hells even so much as admitted that the gods fucked up and "sinned".

and here's the kicker: i genuinely think that if they sat down and had a calm talk with ludinus, if they told him that the gods were not perfect and told him about firsthand stopping the colonization in issylra and delilah causing the apocalypse with her own god, if they gave orym 400mg of weed so he would chill for like ten seconds, if fcg was alive and told him that his pain was valid, if they were as kind and sweet and supportive as humanly possible to him... he'd still get fucking pissed at them if they didn't 100% agree with him.

he is not looking for a debate. he told them to make their own opinions on what they were shown but then got enraged when their opinions did not line up with his and then triggered delilah to rip herself out of laudna out of spite. i can sympathize with what happened to him, but i cannot sympathize with how he responds to criticism that does not immediately center and for lack of a better term, coddle him.

and i don't mean that in the sassy bnf post way like "this character is a bratty womanchild/manchild that needs to grow a pair", i mean it in the sense that this is the behavior of a person that was neglected so intensely that they take all criticism as a personal attack every time. it's a trauma response that's been getting worse and worse as the campaign goes on and his mental state has been getting worse due to outside forces triggering him. (eg: laudna and orym and imogen on the heroes' side)

ludinus is very, very hurt. fucking duh. he watched aeor fall as a kid and got told to suck it up as said kid. that'd fuck anybody up! so no matter what anybody says to him, if they do not validate his feelings immediately after he's shown them how he was hurt, he's going to hear them saying "fuck off, you're just whiny" no matter what they're actually saying. that's why he smiled at the orb because he'd finally been justified, and it's why he got so angry when the hells told him they refused to join him.

i'd also reckon this is why he's parentified liliana; the one person that did show him kindness and sympathy and he refuses to let her go just as much as she refuses to let go of him. he needs her not just as the vessel, but as his only "friend". i think that's why he wants imogen or fearne to join him. then he won't have to kill the only person who cares for him. it's a fucked up abusive relationship he's convinced himself is healthy because they understand each other like no other.

but of course, then what? what next? does he really want power? i don't think so, ludinus' ship has sailed. he just wants the gods dead and doesn't care what happens next. it's why he insists with no proof predathos won't care about anyone else asides the gods. it's why he's going to sit back and let the reilora conquer exandria. it's why if he fails, he doesn't care if everything burns down and the world is thrown into chaos.

if people refuse to see a world without gods, then only way out of this for ludinus da'leth is oblivion. and he's fine with that if they get taken out with him.

[sidesteppostinghours]

having a normal time this fine morning <- is making up an au for an au

[idlenight]

how about river for 11, 13, and 19? for the guy ever <3

questions from here.

11. What is your OC's weapon of choice? Have they ever actually used it?

It used to be the energy caster - now he's afraid of what he'd do if he held another gun.

With the villain suit the closest he has to a weapon are the nanovores, he uses those a decent amount. But his 'weapon' of choice is his own body, with long legs and jumpjets there is serious power behind every kick.

so in short: leggy

13. If you met your OC, would the two of you get along?

i think i would punch him in the stomach for being an idiot.

Generally I'd say we'd get along perfectly politely, if he even cares to talk to me.

19. How does your OC behave when enraged?

answered here! (tl;dr: like a twat)