If you know anything about the Marvel universe, you know Doctor Doom and Mr. Fantastic hate each other. But have you ever wondered how that started? It goes back to when they were both very smart college kids.
Before he was Doctor Doom, ruler of a fictional European country called Latveria, he was Victor von Doom, a kid from a poor family. His father, Werner, was a traveling healer. His mother, Cynthia, was a witch, gifted in sorcery. From the beginning, Victor had an interest in both science and magic. It ended up defining his life.
Reed Richards would eventually become Mr. Fantastic, one of the founding members of the Fantastic Four. After a space mission went wrong, leaving him, his crew, his wife, his best friend, and his hot-headed brother-in-law bathed in cosmic rays, it changed them. Reed ended up with the power to stretch his body like rubber.
Before that, he was just another smart student.
Doom loses everything in Latveria
Victor’s mother, Cynthia Van Doom, died when he was young. His mother’s death was hard on him. He’d later say his heart died with her. When he got older his father, Werner Von Doom, died too.
Werner was a kind, humble healer. One day, the local ruler, Baron Fortunov, ordered Werner to come treat his wife, who was dying after being neglected for a long time. Werner tried his best. By the time he got there, it was too late to save her.
Instead of thanking Werner for trying, Fortunov’s men hunted Werner down and killed him. A good man, buried in rags, while the people who killed him lived in fine silk. That injustice angered Victor.
After his father’s death, Victor went through his belongings with Valeria von Frazen. There wasn’t much: an old caravan and a few jars of herbal remedies. He also found: a small box holding his mother’s jewelry, along with her old grimoire, a book of spells. Inside it was a freezing spell, a way to summon water and banish fire. Simple but powerful.
Victor improved it. He figured out how to build it into a grenade, blending science with sorcery. He used it on the soldiers sent after him, since Fortunov wanted the entire von Doom family wiped out. Victor froze them solid and, before walking away, told them if they saw his mother Cynthia von Doom in whatever afterlife they were headed to, let her know Victor hadn’t forgotten her.
Victor knew he couldn’t stay in Latveria. Fortunov wasn’t going to stop hunting him. The problem: he had nowhere to go.
An offer Victor couldn’t refuse
That’s when a stranger showed up. He introduced himself as a representative of the United States government. He said people back home had heard about Victor’s talents. He offered Victor a scholarship, a chance to earn a doctorate at a university in New York. One that, according to the school’s dean, was comparable to MIT and Caltech.
Victor, rightfully suspicious, asked if this was really about building weapons for the government. The recruiter admitted there was money in that path if Victor wanted it, but that it wasn’t a requirement.
Before sending him off, the man mentioned there was another scholarship student on campus worth meeting, who wasn’t interested in weapons at all.
His name was Reed Richards.
Meeting his match
When Victor and Reed finally met, Reed was immediately fascinated. He’d heard rumors about Victor’s work and said it was like the guy didn’t believe the laws of physics applied to him. Victor grunted.
They continued to talk about science. Reed was working through a problem on a chalkboard, something about a ship’s shielding weighing too much and cutting into safety margins.
Victor made a few changes, and told him to look again. Reed was stunned. He said it was fantastic, exactly the fix he needed. He can work out the safety issues later.
Victor brushed off the thanks, saying the problem was already solved. Reed was overthinking it.
That’s when Reed asked Victor to be his roommate. Victor immediately rejected the offer, asking if Reed was a slave to imaginary needs. Victor didn’t need anyone, he said, and that was that.
Two different philosophies
Later, in the school cafeteria, the two of them ended up talking again. This time the conversation turned philosophical.
Reed brought up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the idea that people need food and safety first, then belonging, self-esteem, and finally self-actualization, becoming your authentic self.
Victor agreed with the basics. He knew what it meant to go hungry and to live in danger. He understood needing those things. But he insisted he didn’t need friendship or belonging. He’d survived without it and still didn’t need it.
Reed asked what Victor thought his authentic self actually looked like? Victor turned the question back on him and asked if Reed had ever found that roommate he wanted. Reed mentioned a guy named Ben Grimm, a football player who Victor wrote off as a jock. Nope! Reed said Ben was studying astrophysics and dreamed of becoming an astronaut.
Victor wasn’t impressed. He told Reed that people like the two of them didn’t need to worry about pretending to be humble. Victor said Reed thinking he was equal to “lesser minds” was Reed’s biggest weakness.
Reed disagreed. He said he’d rather have people in his life who accepted him, flaws and all, than live on some imaginary pedestal. Victor laughed, calling humility a trap that would eventually smother whatever greatness Reed had in him.
Reed got frustrated and started to walk away, but Victor called him back, saying his space travel ambitions were too small for someone with real vision.
This time, Reed said what he really wanted: not just space travel, but access to entirely new dimensions of reality, places sideways or opposite to our own. A way to make the impossible available to everyone, not just a select few. His professors thought that was foolish.
Victor said it was the first genuinely intelligent thing Reed said. He was tired of small thinking, and for once, the two of them seemed to actually connect.
A dinner… and a warning sign
Victor invited Reed to a restaurant, where Victor introduced Reed to a Romanian dish from home, insisting it wasn’t the same unless he ate it in Latveria.
Their conversation deepened. Reed brought up the idea of moving through time, not just space, and admitted the danger of creating alternate timelines worried him. Victor brushed the concern aside, saying Reed just hadn’t read the right books yet.
Then things got personal. Reed shared that his mother died when he was young in an accident, and his father disappeared during his teenage years without a trace. He didn’t know if his father was alive or dead.
Victor, surprisingly, softened. He told Reed that at least he had hope, since he had no one to blame for his mother’s death. Losing a parent with no clear villain to point to, Victor said, came with its own kind of loneliness.
It was this moment of connection that led Victor to invite Reed back to his dorm room to show him what he’d secretly been working on.
The experiment that changed everything
What Reed found in Victor’s room horrified him. Candles, glyphs drawn on the floor. It looked like a forbidden ritual. Victor admitted he was trying to project himself mentally into another dimension using a mix of science and old, powerful magic. Magic older than Latveria itself, older than the earth. His goal? To speak to his dead mother.
Reed said it was madness. He told Victor it was some kind of high-tech séance trying to tap into the unknown. Victor accused Reed of having a small mind who couldn’t recognize genius when he saw it.
Then Reed noticed something in Victor’s calculations: a misplaced decimal point. A small error, but a serious one given how much energy the experiment involved.
Victor lost it. He refused to believe he’d made a mistake and threw Reed out of the room, convinced Reed was just jealous.
Alone, Victor searched for the error and couldn’t find it. Rather than reconsider, he convinced himself Reed had lied to him out of envy. To prove it, he strapped into the machine anyway, determined to prove himself right. He called out to his mother.
It worked! Something answered him, alright. What came through instead looked like Mephisto, a demonic figure surrounded by fire. The machine worked, technically, just not in the way Victor hoped.
A massive surge of energy erupted around his head, powerful enough to blast Reed, who was still outside the door in the hallway, into a wall.
The price of pride
Victor woke up in the hospital, bandaged and furious. He barely survived thanks to Reed’s quick thinking. But… his scholarship was over.
A university official showed up and expelled him, warning Victor that no government backing in the world would help him become a doctor now. He made it clear he’d make sure no one else would accept Victor either.
Once the bandages came off, Victor looked in the mirror and saw what the accident had done to his face. Something in him broke, or maybe hardened.
Why Reed is to blame
Due to what happened in Victor’s past, he felt like he could never let his guard down. He kept building himself up to convince himself he can succeed. Similar to how a malignant narcissist behaves.
When he met Reed, he finally met someone he thought he could connect with. Looking at it, Reed wanting to time travel is as “ridiculous” as Victor wanting to talk to his dead mother. Deep down, Victor wanted a friend, someone he could connect with… someone he could trust. Victor let his guard down, let someone into his world, and it ended catastrophically.
Can you imagine how Victor felt hearing it was Reed that saved his life?
The accident is Reed’s fault in Victor’s mind, because Victor was slowly offering Reed friendship. Reed rejected it by pointing out the decimal error. Reed, thinking they were building a connection, thought he could critique Victor’s formulas as Victor critiqued Reed’s.
Victor, along with losing a potential friend, lost a chance to get his doctorate. His experiment worked, as he did reach hell where his mother is. That is an exceptional success.
The pain of having the scars does not compare to the pain felt when Reed didn’t initially embrace Victor’s ideas. The pain of Victor letting his guard down. Knowing deep down, if he had listened to Reed, he would have been successful. He “could” have talked longer to Mephisto, perhaps have talked to his mother. How do we know this?
Because Victor doesn’t let Reed go. He becomes obsessed with him.
Becoming Doom
Later, we see him walking in the snow, blaming Reed for everything. He started a journey that would take him halfway up a remote, nameless mountain with barely any supplies.
There, Victor found what he’d been looking for: an order of monks who called themselves the Vengeful Ones. They didn’t heal wounds of the body. They healed wounds of the spirit, and their medicine of choice was vengeance.
Victor told them he’d heard stories of an ancient healer who lived among them, and vengeance was exactly what he was looking for. They welcomed him in and began his training.
Time passed, and Victor became their star student, eventually earning the title “master of all.” As his final step of creating Victor’s new armor, the monks forged a mask, heating it in fire until it glowed red hot.
The ritual would define the rest of his life. They placed it on his face before it finished cooling. When Victor asked what pain even meant to him anymore, given everything he’d already lost, the answer came with the hiss of hot metal searing into skin.
From that point forward, there was no more Victor von Doom. There was only what he’d become. When the monks asked what to call him, he told them there was only one title that fit. Everything he’d earned and learned through fire and blood needed to be worn proudly.
Call him Doctor.
