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IN CHARACTER
Character Name: Natasha Romanoff aka The Black Widow
Canon: Marvel Comics; Earth-616
Canon Point: Beginning of Black Widow (2019) #1; after helping Steve, before going to Madripoor
In-Game Tattoo Placement: Left shoulderblade
Current Health/Status: Dead; a clone implanted with memories. #comics #itscomplicated
Age: So comics are a goddman mess. She's had her clone body for only a few months. In regards to her memories, Natasha was born in 1928, so if we pretend that comics have any interest in how time works she's about 90. Physically she appears in her late-20s or so, depending on who's drawing.
Species: (Enhanced? Maybe?) Human Clone
History: http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Natalia_Romanova_(Earth-616)
However, they don't include Tales of Suspense, so synopsis follows, I will do my bestest to be concise, but obvious spoiler warning:
So, Natasha gets killed by Hydra Steve. There's a funeral. The world mourns. It's very sad. Except something's wrong. Someone is killing people, mostly Hydra, in a way that the men that know her best, Bucky Barnes and Clint Barton, recognize as her style. So they have four issues of buddy cop adventures trying to figure out what's going on, and ending up with a trail that involves an uncomfortable number of dead bodies.
The reveal goes something like this: the Red Room has a way of bringing back dead agents that involves a psychic and cloning. The psychic is tied to all of the Red Room girls, allowing him access to their memories, and when one dies, he installs their memories in the new clone body. Or well. The ones they want, anyway. However a talking bear (actually a mutant-- it's a long story) convinces the psychic to give Nat all of her memories this time.
She kills a lot of people because the Red Room tells her to, and comes up with a plan. There are people in this she saves, and a fair number that she kills. Some she even kills twice. But she works her way up in the organization, and then gets herself promoted to leadership after the seeming death of the former head at the hands of Bucky (actually Natasha). And just when she seems poised to stage a coup, Clint and Bucky show up with Ursa Major, and in light of the fact that she had not actually murdered the two Avengers as she'd claimed, she just wipes the Red Room clean by killing them.
This ends with Natasha telling Clint and Bucky to wait for her outside with a group of traumatized young girls, and the clones of two people she'd killed, when the building explodes. There are notes left for both Bucky and Clint, seeming to prove she's still alive.
CRAU History and Impact: N/A
Personality: So, I am going to try to cover her personality sort of generally, and then talk about her specifically at her canon point as there are differences but I think the former is relevant as still being
Natasha is a character that sits astride a number of lines in terms of who and what she is. She's been an assassin, a killer, a spy, a femme fatale, an avenger, a hero, and for the past several years has resided somewhere in between all of these.
One of the things that is important to stress with Natasha is that appearances aside, she does care. She can be very good at presenting a veneer that implies otherwise, but generally speaking many of the choices she makes and the questionable things she does are motivated by her care for people in one form or another. This is shown in both the specific and the general-- both in her superhero activities where she tries to save the world, but also in terms of the care she has for her friends. For her the hard choices are always the ones that leave her choosing between hurting people one way or the other, and are often the situations where she makes the wrong choice -- or sometimes even makes her own choice.
Natasha's story is frequently one of balancing the worlds of the spy with that of the superhero, and the struggle is that she doesn't always come out on the right side, and as she's currently struggling with the revelation of being a clone and the aftermath of being murdered by someone wearing the face of one of her best friends, she is very much on the wrong side of that right now, with the monster that she's been before showing through, despite that it's something that she's tried to step away from ever since she first joined the Avengers.
She normally struggled to balance necessity against what is right, but if it came down to the wire, would just about always choose necessity. Even back in the days when the Avengers were strictly no-kill there were stories where Natasha threatened to kill villains, even if she was of course never actually required to do so, it was enough to show that she was a different sort of hero. And it's always noted how the Avengers would disapprove, even when it saved the world.
And this was a fairly pervasive facet of her character-- making the hard and sometimes distasteful choices that others might not be able to. Natasha was frequently, but especially recently, a character that operated best in the shadows, but that didn't make her cold.
She had committed relationships in which she demonstrated high levels of devotion and affection, a willingness to help others. And with those who were close to her, they trusted her even when things looked shady, because they knew that Natasha cared. She's even noted as looking out for strangers, such as a woman at a coffee shop she went to that Natasha recognizes as being beaten by her husband. So she arranged an intervention, insisting he divorce her and give her a large settlement under threats of violence. Which is interesting especially in light of her post-cloning characterization, because that aspect of her character has always been there, it's just currently front and center, while her warmth is hidden away.
'I work better alone' is a mantra that was often repeated in recent comics, not just in the text of things she said, but in the choices and the decisions that she made, often refusing help where doing so could make things easier. But it is a seemingly contradictory one, in that Natasha had spent the better part of her superhero career as a partner or a member of a team, ranging from the Avengers, to the Champions, to her partnerships with Hawkeye, Daredevil, Bucky Barnes, and others. This is unavoidably at least in part due to the reciprocal relationship that exists between the Marvel comics and films, but in-character, I see this as less a product of her Red Room history, and more of her memory loss post-Winter Soldier.
Memories of things and people she cared about were ripped away from her, and it took her literal years to figure out what she'd lost. She was reminded yet again that caring might not be weakness but it is something that can be used-- not just against her, but the people that she cares about. So Natasha was still working on refinding the balance between trusting the people around her and the safety that is being on her own.
And it's directly on the heels of this see-saw, where she finally accepts this- when one of her friends tells her "it's time to come in out of the cold" and Natasha actually agrees- and then Secret Empire happens, and Hydra Steve kills her. And it's not so much being taken back to that struggle, as being sort of pushed off that moral precipice. She murders all the clones of herself, Anya and Yelena, kills the Red Room Soldiers, has Anya and Yelena's memories given back to the last of their clones and then kills the psychic that did it, albeit with his implied consent.
So her morality runs very red at the moment. Even at other points when she has been willing to kill bad guys, it was generally as a means of last resort, and always with thought given to it, whereas there's something almost casual about her relationship with murder right now.
She does do what she can to not kill innocents, refraining from killing Bucky, Clint and Sally, and pointedly saving the young girls being trained. But she does murder Yelena and Anya, mostly for the sake of appearances, and to try and keep Clint and Bucky off her tail. Sure, she takes a clone and has it implanted with their memories, but her personality shift, her pain and rage comes from the fact that it's not the same. When called on that fact, Natasha has no remorse at all, pointing out that this is about her.
Her trauma, and doing what she needs to do, which colors her as much more selfish than she has been historically. And that selfishness definitely seems to come from a place of hurt and anger that she hasn't really dealt with yet. The aptly named 'red ledger' arc focuses on what she's willing to do to take back her freedom.
And while it's after her canon point in her miniseries, there's a scene where she nearly kills someone impersonating (non-Hydra) Cap, as they literally beg for her to stop. Real Steve comes in just in time and talks her down, but when he claims "we're better than that" Natasha corrects him "you're better", seeming to really not see herself as a hero anymore.
But despite that darkness, she is still heroic, having put down the Red Room and taken back her independence. The setup for her interactions with Steve is her assisting him in foiling an attack on New Years Eve. She is still in the business of saving people, but she no longer balances on the edge between necessity and heroism and is pretty comfortable getting her hands filthy in the pursuit of what she sees as 'right', which is shown to be very much her own personal view of it. She might not murder someone because it would make Steve uncomfortable to watch, but that moment doesn't change her view on murder, either.
Her current outlook is that she fights for herself, because fighting for others hasn't turned out so well for her. But that woman I talk about at the beginning, the one who cares, isn't gone so much as buried. It's not that those traits are inapplicable, so much as that they're vulnerable, and so she's trying to hide them, because those are weaknesses that can be exploited. Worrying for others, her independence, these are her classic fears, and while still present they're not so much what drives her.
Now, she's still angry, with a rage boiling inside of her, and looking for an outlet. In canon she goes to Madripoor, specifically looking for people evil enough that they deserve her rage even after dealing with the Red Room, because part of her is afraid that if she doesn't find a release what that might look like.
She's sort of in flux right now, having died, fallen down the moral spectrum, and is currently trying to find solid footing and not having too much success. But she still tries.
And even at her darkest, there is still a sense of people that are good and people that aren't, and I don't think that her view there has really changed so much as her view on what's an acceptable way to handle that has changed, in no small part probably thanks to Hydra Steve, and what those loses and her death have done to her.
But, this doesn't mean that she's incapable of playing nice, smiling and playing the spy the way she always has-- the current underneath is just much more turbulent.
Abilities/Powers/Weaknesses & Warping: Okay, so pre-cloning, Natasha was subjected to a Soviet variant of the super soldier serum, which puts her physical ability significantly higher than most. Her agility is said to be better than an olympic gold medalist, she can lift around 500 pounds unaided, run around 35 mph at distance, doesn't age, heals somewhat faster than most people, etc. She was in that not baseline human, but not superhuman range.
She'd been said to be stronger than 616 Bucky pre-cloning, but seems to take him in a fight even easier than before, so her physicals in her cloned body may have been further enhanced, but it's not explicitly mentioned. But even still her enhancements are still mostly mild; Natasha's more on par with Captain America than Superman.
She can casually jump from buildings, though. There were periods in comics where she was more comfortable climbing in through windows than using the doorbell, and even still occasionally uses her widow line to "swing" between buildings similarly to how spidey and daredevil travel.
Other than that, her powers are all skill.
Inventory: Liho (a black cat), a small bag (with her Black Widow gear, suit, bracers, and some extra power cartridges), hand gun, extra clip, make-up kit, skirt-suit outfit.
A note: Her black widow gear involves some weapon-like stuff, her gauntlets include tasers, her belt can be over-loaded for a one-shot explosive, tear gas, her gloves have on occasion been shown to sharpen to allow her to cut through glass in order to slide through windows. I generally consider it more in the category of batman style utility belt than out-right weaponry, but it is sort of nebulous. Just let me know if it's Too Much and can't be included here.
Writing Samples:
https://redweb.dreamwidth.org/809.html?thread=297#cmt297
https://nysalogs.dreamwidth.org/167767.html?thread=34957655#cmt34957655
https://soddersays.dreamwidth.org/23364.html?thread=4758852#cmt4758852 < definitely a weaker sample, but I wanted one more relevant to her canon point given the shift
OUT OF CHARACTER
Player Name: Jamie
Player Age: 25+
Player Contact:
Other Characters In Game: N/A
In-Game Tag If Accepted: Natalia Alianovna Romanova: Jamie
Permissions for Character: https://redweb.dreamwidth.org/617.html
Are you comfortable with prominent elements of fourth-walling?: Yes. The things that make me uncomfortable with fourth-walling is when it's used as a cheap in to info-mod, or used for cheap laughs, although Natasha being a comic book character does have a certain degree of OTT-ness and she's met Deadpool so it wont be her (or my) first ride on that particular carousel. That said, I'm up for most variations of identity fuckery, even if Natasha tends to handle most forth-walling with either confusion or a rather blasé disinterest.
What themes of horror/psychological thrillers do you enjoy the most?: I love survival horror, I love a group working together against the horrific and the mysterious, I love the things that you find out about characters when they're put through that kind of strain. I love things that are spooky, the suspense of trying to track down the ghost or the monster and finding the special gold box before it eats your skin from your bones. I love situations that make people struggle and that reveal things about characters. I love supernatural and other magical horror that takes characters secrets or memories and makes them face them. I love horror and survival situations as vehicles for causing character development by taking them outside their comfort zone, basically.
Is there anything in particular you absolutely need specific content warnings for?: Child abuse, domestic abuse, sexual assault, extensive gore (photos only), suicide, self-harm, loss of identity especially in cult-like contexts.
Additional Information: N/A
