Yeah, with Cynthia I could soooort of see where Bendis got the "corrupting Victor with dark magic" take from, even if I really didn't like it, but making his healer dad suddenly a stick-fighting hardass with no time for compassion is even more egregious. It's like they think that if they want to reframe Victor as moving away from villainy they've got to make his parents crueller so they can blame more of it on them, when that's practically the opposite of how that works. The best thing about Doom's origin is that it's so basically a standard hero's origin story but his choices sent him down the wrong path. Now they seem to be retconning that into a much more boring "he was trained to be hard and cruel from childhood so he never had much choice about growing up a bad guy". Gah.
I could have lived with young Doom beating up the beggar if it wasn't for the rest of the retcons with his parents. If it was played as him being angry enough but his dad stopping him or being disappointed with him afterwards, it would fit much better with the idea that it's the loss of that loving family that took the brakes off his darker side and led to him becoming a villain. But the way it's written in this issue, it just seems like his dad would probably encourage him to do it or just not care either way because the guy's not Zefiro. :/
And I wouldn't have minded them following up on Secret Wars if it had actually added something, but this was just filling in stuff that's implied by the original story anyway. We already knew Reed had sent him back to make a fresh start, and although it wasn't previously clear Doom genuinely thought Reed was dead, if that had become obvious, then, duh, Reed deliberately messing with his memory was the only possible explanation. They could have saved that revelation for when he was finally reunited with Reed, or just left the question of how much Doom really knew ambiguous the whole way through. (Because really, I feel like his role in this story made 1000% more sense when I thought he knew the others were still alive and was manipulating Ben and Johnny to help reunite them. If we're supposed to take all his early scenes at face value he comes off much cheesier and less interesting. Though I guess we could go with the theory he thought Reed was dead but was still deliberately manipulating Ben and Johnny into taking on this quest to shake them out of their depression or something.)
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I could have lived with young Doom beating up the beggar if it wasn't for the rest of the retcons with his parents. If it was played as him being angry enough but his dad stopping him or being disappointed with him afterwards, it would fit much better with the idea that it's the loss of that loving family that took the brakes off his darker side and led to him becoming a villain. But the way it's written in this issue, it just seems like his dad would probably encourage him to do it or just not care either way because the guy's not Zefiro. :/
And I wouldn't have minded them following up on Secret Wars if it had actually added something, but this was just filling in stuff that's implied by the original story anyway. We already knew Reed had sent him back to make a fresh start, and although it wasn't previously clear Doom genuinely thought Reed was dead, if that had become obvious, then, duh, Reed deliberately messing with his memory was the only possible explanation. They could have saved that revelation for when he was finally reunited with Reed, or just left the question of how much Doom really knew ambiguous the whole way through. (Because really, I feel like his role in this story made 1000% more sense when I thought he knew the others were still alive and was manipulating Ben and Johnny to help reunite them. If we're supposed to take all his early scenes at face value he comes off much cheesier and less interesting. Though I guess we could go with the theory he thought Reed was dead but was still deliberately manipulating Ben and Johnny into taking on this quest to shake them out of their depression or something.)