catalysmic: (this is fine)
Dr. Elizabeth Ross ([personal profile] catalysmic) wrote2016-03-28 01:18 pm

Application for [community profile] maskormenace

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Elizabeth "Betty" Ross
CHARACTER AGE: 42
SERIES: Marvel Cinematic Universe (specifically The Incredible Hulk (2008))
CHRONOLOGY: post-Avengers
CLASS: Hero (supporting)
HOUSING: De Chima #008

BACKGROUND:
[MCU wikia 1] and [MCU wikia 2].

Betty is notorious for disappearing off the face of the movieverse after TIH, so I'll be keeping her post-movie presence firmly out of the orbit of her canonmates for the three interim years between TIH and The Avengers, and implied to remain that way for foreseeable canon. Canonmates can opt in on how much awareness they have of her (mostly innocuous) doings, which can be summarized as: paying attention.

TIH takes place five three years after the Gamma Pulse laboratory accident that created the Hulk. Although details about the accident are deliberately vague, in essence, Betty and her then-boyfriend Bruce Banner were developing what they believed to be a method for increasing cellular resistance to radiation poisoning ("concentrated myostatin with low-dose gamma bursts"). In fact, their research was part of a secret military project associated with a super-soldier development programme. Due to false information, when Bruce tested this on himself, he wound up channeling his id in angry green form. The incident leaves Betty in a coma for two months. When she wakes again, Bruce is on the run and being pursued by her father, the project has been shut down, and information about the incident has been systematically wiped.

In the time between the Hulk's origins and TIH, it takes Betty at least two years of grieving to stop expecting Bruce to come home. She also eventually receives the seeds of a canthia tigris (it's a fake plant, the movie lied to us), a theoretically extinct orchid the very-much-still-alive Bruce acquired in his travels, and nurtures it to bloom.

Three years later, she's moved on, cutting ties with her father and dating psychiatrist Leonard Samson while working as a Professor of Cellular Biology at Culver University where the original project went awry. When she accidentally comes across Bruce while he's on campus, she immediately signs on to help him bring the experimental data he was looking for to Dr. Samuel Sterns of Grayburn College in New York City. As they attempt to leave Culver, they're intercepted by the General's forces. Bruce hulks out, rescues and then escapes with Betty, and the two make their way to New York off the grid.

In New York, the events of "Duel of Harlem" take place, where Sterns's cure fails to work on Bruce, slightly psychotic super-soldier Emil Blonsky becomes the Abomination, and Bruce hulks out to fight him. Through this, Betty is either at Bruce's side, or tearfully watching her martyr it's-complicated fall out of a helicopter so he can hopefully turn into a giant monster in order to fight the other giant monster already rampaging through Harlem. After the fight, Betty stops the Hulk from killing the Abomination but isn't able to prevent him from running away.

In a deleted scene after the events of TIH, Betty is in Battery Park City on the phone with Leonard. She tells him she's leaving for a while, and doesn't know where. My interpretation is that she would begin more proactively digging up information about Gamma Pulse, acting as an independent agent for Bruce's interests when he inevitably resurfaces. Eventually, she'll return to laying low, and, as promised, return to her professorship and ordinary life. She would continue to keep tabs and familiarize herself with the histories and fates of Blonsky, Sterns, and the bio-tech force enhancement project. After the well-documented events of the Avengers, she would begin to do the same with Bruce's teammates, but she'll be arriving pretty shortly after the news breaks.

PERSONALITY:
A great deal of Betty Ross's demeanor is designed to put people at ease. As a military brat, likely often on the move, Betty would have learned to be adept at reading social situations and forming connections quickly; her open and nonjudgmental disposition encourages others to open up, and she's good at keeping conversations going by asking the right questions or knowing when not to speak. These skills follow her into adulthood, and she tends to project an air of disarming approachability. She smiles quickly and easily, speaks softly, and drops her eyes; when she presents herself, she naturally drifts into an observer role. She also cultivates femininity, wearing skirts and professional but low-cut blouses, and speaking in a quiet, breathy voice.

The degree to which she's aware she's doing these things is probably quite high. Her boyfriend, Leonard Samson, is canonically a good reader of people, and if she hadn't been conscious of it before she met him, she would have been afterwards. It isn't that she's dissembling; Betty is a sincerely compassionate and empathetic person. She is just also practical about wielding sentiment to her advantage. Her emotional intelligence and her personal relationship with Bruce are what allow her to connect with the Hulk, still seeing the ways in which he is himself and responding accordingly.

Betty herself is also a good reader of people, another product of her lacking childhood. The defining feature of her early life was her father, General Thaddeus Ross. After the early death of her mother, Karen Ross, Betty was left to his care, and the General, preoccupied with his career, immediately sent her to boarding school. Their relationship is fraught; the General is both over-protective and distant and the repercussions of emotional abandonment follow her into all the major relationships of her life. Later, the General's controlling personality leads him to interfere with her adult relationships – making Bruce a fugitive, going through her mail, or approaching Leonard with a doctored account of the events of Gamma Pulse.

In her initial relationship with shy, withdrawn Bruce Banner, she may have been in part drawn to his emotional unavailability. When he flees (only becoming more unavailable), she isn't given details, but her relationship with her father turns cold. She begins dating a very different man and for all intents, leads a happy life. However, although she is capable of moving on, she finds it hard to let go, and if Betty has a fatal flaw it would be attachment. When Bruce reappears after five years of absence, Betty leaves everything – her job, her boyfriend, the safety of her ordinary life – in order to join him in his search for a cure. By headcanon and comic-influence, this excessive attachment extends to all the major relationships of her life, including her father. Although in the movie, she disowns the General, apparently not for the first time, I believe she will never fully be able to burn this bridge.

Betty is a private person, quick to talk about other people and their interests but less eager to talk about herself. She's easily able to form shallow connections, but getting to know her on a deeper level is difficult; her psychiatrist boyfriend admits to never having seen the depths of her. Also as influenced by comics-canon, Betty represses her own share of resentment and fear. However, by her current canon point and at the age of 42, she is largely self-aware and managing the majority of her issues healthily; she is perfectly capable of expressing anger and aggression when the situation warrants, or when she has a safe outlet to do so.

Like her late mother, Betty has a hot head under fire. There were definitely moments in the film where Betty could have thought through her options better. Admittedly putting herself in peril ultimately worked out well since it gave Bruce's emotion-driven superpowers just that much more of a kick, but it's a strategy with a dozen points of failure and she wasn't considering any of them. In her personal conflicts, she deescalates, but she's quick to jump into the fray if it's someone else's fight. It's played for laughs in the movie, but she has a temper, and her own repressed anger and resentment could come spilling out under the right circumstances.

Betty has a strong moral center, but one that isn't guided by an objective morality or particularly informed by the law. That is, she prioritizes a personal sense of justice over a more abstract concept of the greater good, and tends to act on her own judgment and in the interest of individuals, again, over a greater good. She is perfectly willing to break the law if she believes doing so is right. This seizing of responsibility is seen in Betty's faith in the Hulk and Bruce; because she believes she knows him (in both forms), she repeatedly acts against authority in order to help him, prioritizing his well-being over both military oversight and potential deaths or property damage. Her father is also this way, violating regulations to do what he personally has decided needs to be done.

Within her narrower framework, she is deeply concerned with both truth and justice, and won't be intimidated – by soldiers or sentiment. Her relationship with truth is especially personal; lack of transparency on the true nature of the Gamma Pulse project is one of the core reasons for the creation of the Hulk. More significantly for her, the General's lies about said project are also the reason Bruce became and remained a fugitive for the last decade (as of her chronology). In that case, although she takes personal action – cutting her father out of her life – she doesn't bring these facts to another authority or even an investigative reporter, indicating that while she believes in justice, she also believes enough power will override it. This learned helplessness, as well as respect for the fact that Bruce is also a very private person who isn't raising flags either, means she advocates privacy for the individual along with transparency for institutions. Out of necessity, she would work with and around authority she does not trust, but wouldn't hesitate to work against it, either.

POWER:
KINETIC BLACKBODY – Essentially the Red She-Hulk power. Not canonical, although it is modeled after the power of her comics-canon counterpart. Red She-Hulk is nearly 7 feet tall and 700lbs, and as implied, all over red. Like the Hulk, she exhibits superhuman strength, speed, agility, and durability, as well as an increased healing factor and radiation resistance. Her blood is toxic (and yellow!) and her saliva is acidic (yikes).

Hulking out can be triggered deliberately or involuntarily via distress. As Red She-Hulk, Betty would exhibit excessive aggression and mood swings, which I will be playing down from the comic's version as more of a general lowering of inhibitions and filters since the source of the power is not being "pumped full of rage" while half-dead.

The primary Red She-Hulk power I'm modifying is energy absorption. Like a blackbody absorbing EM waves at one frequency and then releasing it at another, it would take a buildup of exposure to energy (literal energy including thermal, electromagnetic, etc. as opposed to something like emotional energy) for her to hulk out. The stored energy would remain in reserve like a long-term chargeable "smash attack" from the Super Smash games; of course, she would be at risk for an involuntary hulk-out in that time. I'd like the initial charging from background energy to take at least a month or two while she settles, and maybe the process will get smoother and faster over time, or if she, I don't know, deliberately sticks her finger in an electric outlet.

MODESTY GLAMOUR – Not canonical either. A subconscious superpower that makes it so no one notices any sort of wardrobe malfunction, even if hypothetically there is no wardrobe at all to speak of. It doesn't generate the image of any specific clothing item, only the vague sense that all is well, attire-wise. It should work on digital recordings too, although I would discuss how it conflicts with other character powers if... it ever comes up.

Eventually, she'd be able to project this onto other people, "clothing" them temporarily, but in that case it would take conscious effort. I just don't want her to get caught naked anywhere weird, you know? And if she can help out a friend, all the better.

〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[The post opens with video. Betty appears wearing a heavy coat and beaming, cheeks flushed and eyes bright. She waves at the camera which is being held up at an angle that favours a view of the landscape.] Hello, everyone! This is Dr. Ross again. We're up near Port Clarence, now, and as you've probably guessed, it is freezing.

[In the background, the ground is hard and flat straight on into the horizon, dry weedy plant-life pushing up through the tundra-like earth, and the sky spread overhead in a rolling stormy grey. There's an old car nearby and to the side - a wheeled model with chipping paint - resting by the side of a road that stretches out of the frame. What really makes the scene is the mountains, rising up on either side, dusted with the suggestion of greenery like a computer-generated graphic. The camera pans, but it's more of the same with a hint of buildings in the distance.] The view is amazing, though.

I've always wanted to visit Alaska, and since the base is right here, I figure it counts, right? Just don't tell the Navy about the tourists, okay? [She winks, or maybe the rush of chilled wind is making her eyes water.] Anyway, if any of you fellow imPorts are up here, you should throw me a line. We could meet in person and I'm dying to get a real tour of the base. [The sound of the wind is audible now and the camera shakes, briefly. Betty is almost shouting.] That is, if we don't freeze to death before we get there!

Whew, okay. Getting back on the move again. De Chima! Submit your souvenir requests and see you all later!

LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
Betty hesitated, grip tightening on the tray in her hand. She'd spent the entire walk downtown cool as a cold trap, but now that she was actually outside Weapons R&D, she was nervous. She buzzed the keypad before her loitering could become suspicious.

The military set-up of this new world was profoundly familiar, but just alien enough for Betty to feel off-balance with every encounter. It was as though she was navigating blind a series of passages she had studied all her life. It was like some sort of institutional chirality, where the human elements were all the same but their order and structures had changed; any step could be a misstep.

Once, she had been a satellite to this world; here, the General wasn't around to guide her (or, more likely, to carry conversations she could eavesdrop on until she was deliberately removed from the room). Being so far out of his influence should have made her feel safe, but it only left her feeling more exposed. No matter how she resented him, she knew he had used his influence to protect her – to protect himself. She should have lost her job after Gamma Pulse, lost access to the military funding barely keeping their group afloat; instead she'd gotten a tenured research position and her personal mail censured. In this new world, she was a civilian just as lost as any civilian.

Almost as lost.

"Hello? This is Dr. Elizabeth Ross. I called ahead." She waved her tray, assuming there was some sort of camera trained on her. "I was told I could find Dr. Tevez? Or anyone really. This is more of a social visit or an informational interview, and someone said something about the analytical equipment? Um. I brought some thumbprint cookies, since I couldn't make an appointment."

She'd tried this trick before, back home. Well, it wasn't really a trick. She was being entirely genuine about her interest in networking, and she had no sinister plots in mind. Keeping an amicable connection with the sketchy but powerful armed forces of this world only made good sense. Time to test if a warm smile and free food opened as many doors when the name Ross held no power.

FINAL NOTES: Betty's history and personality section are both fleshed out with deleted scenes from the movie, details from the novelization, and some comics inspiration (e.g. her mother's name). The powers are a primarily comics-based fabrication.

additional note: minor edits for silly mistakes.

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