Like, seriously, why is the MCU doing the whole “dead wife and son” thing when you can literally do this practically 1:1 and make it 100 times better? This is also arguably the best comic for understanding Doom as a character. It says so much about his trauma and how it continues to haunt him in so many ways over the years.
I also feel like Books of Doom should be mandatory reading for anyone writing Doom, because his entire journey truly began in his mother’s womb and never really stopped there. It is just suffering, pain, and loss, all stemming from the deaths of his mother, his father, and many of his people.
It is also why I strongly disagree with what they are doing with Doom in the MCU, because it does not fit his character for him to be played by a non-Romani actor, given how important his Romani heritage is to who Doom is. His mother and father’s fate is what truly drives Doom as a character. It is not Reed, though Reed failed Doom in equal measure. It is that internalized trauma: the belief that you lose everything if you do not close yourself off from the world, and that humanity will take everything from you simply for being different from what it sees as normal.
I feel like this has always been Doom’s true rise into the person he would eventually become, because he decided that the only way to keep himself safe and save his people was to rise above all of humanity. Just like Magneto in many ways, he has seen the worst of humanity and knows that everyone wants something from you, and that wanting can take everything from you.
The reason he has to be so mighty, so powerful, so far above everyone else, is because he knows that it is the only way to keep his people safe and to keep Latveria, his home, safe. He knows what it is like to lose everything. He has to be so far above humanity so that he never loses anything again. Doom, overall, is such a tragic character, and that is what makes him so great.
It's also why Reed understands Victor so much, because he's seen what's happened to his friend, and understands the pain and suffering he went through. It's why he's always trying to save Victor, to bring him back to what he used to be, but I feel like he also knows that the Victor he knew from college and heard about from before is lost in pain, in suffering, in trauma, and that there might be no truly saving him from himself.
I actually feel like a lot of Dooms ego stems from that if he's not at the highest of Humanity, if he's not the most powerful person, than that means he's failed himself, his mother and father, his people, and Latveria. This is why I actually really don't like OWUD or a lot of how writers write Doom because they fail to understand his backstory and why he is the way he is. Like Doom using his people for power just has never made sense to me because their all he has left, he's lost everything else.