indulge me

[puggle]

Let's talk about health for a minute.

What is your character's state of health (both physical and mental, if you like)? Have they suffered any serious injuries or illnesses? Were they ever hospitalized for a long period of time? Do they have any health concerns? Canon related responses as well as in game happenings are encouraged for sharing! Tell us of their battle scars!

Comments

[motherfucked]

BUCKY ➢
Physically · Bucky is a single-limb amputee; he blew his left arm off joyriding a 1945 smartbomb. The phantom limb pain is worse in the City than it is in canon, because in canon he got fitted straight-away with a nonsense hi-tech robot limb, here in the City he let the porter patch him up and ignored the problem for a while. He's otherwise physically fit, far, far more physically fit than he really ought to be, since he's gotten shot/stabbed/tied-up/tortured and the whole nine yards on panel way more than I can rightly count. He is always cracking ribs and getting holes blown in him, yet still go for posing shirtless all the time free of scarring or disfiguration!! He explains that he's always healed fast— he's someone who's always had the physical gifts naturally that Steve had to pump himself full of comic book juice to get, and I think that's an interesting parallel.
Mentally · Bucky has probably less PTSD than you think, but he still suffers from grim flashbacks that turn his nightmares into a Steranko homage. Recently the War Games plot has brought that to the surface, and he has been in a sort of funk.

JESSICA ➢
Physically · Jess got her powers from a car crash that left her family dead and left her comatose for months. She has been beat up a bit in her superhero career, but she got out before the normal amount of injuries could accrue. She mentions that she doesn't know if she's bulletproof— she is not sure how much damage she can take, which says something about how much damage she's taken. Jess drinks and smokes heavily, but she's too young for that to really be screwing her over quite yet.
Mentally · TRIGGER WARNING Jessica suffers from severe PTSD following her captivity at the hands of the Purple Man, who pumped her full of pheromones and made her watch him rape women, made her wish he would rape her. When Jess broke free, she attacked the Avengers and Defenders accidentally, still hopped up on the pheromones, and they fought back, not hard, but enough that her mind collapsed (she says she "popped") and she fell into another coma. This is why she drinks and smokes and makes her bad life decisions, she feels the need to punish herself, to feel something different. She's gotten better in canon, but is still pretty raw in-game.

NATASHA ➢
Physically · Natasha has some Soviet super-science inside of her that keeps her from not aging, it probably makes her heal neater, too. She's been hurt a whole bunch from the standard superhero career, but rarely in any Big Time multiple-arcs significant way, pretty astounding for a female character who has been appearing since 1964!! Most recently I guess she was brutally stabbed in Marjorie Liu's run. One wacky feminist-commentary twist on Natasha's Soviet super-science treatment is that it made her infertile. Take that, tumblr!!
Mentally · There's a big stupid retcon that has vague bunches of Natasha's past being false memories implanted into her by the KGB!! This is a stupid retcon because Natasha isn't really about rediscovering herself, she is about mining the tragedy of her past and finding ways to draw strength from her sorrow. So I tend to minimize all the brainwash canon as much as possible, thanks Brubaker for drudging it all up again to draw annoying shipper parallels. There always has been some degree of, I don't know how to put it, the politics of propaganda writ large, in Natasha's superhero backstory, there have always been questions about the degree to which she belongs to herself. But her superhero origin is her reclamation of herself, and I think it's wrong to see her as fractured. Not unscarred, but not unwhole, either.

[gevurah]

Oh, wow. I knew Jessica's backstory had something like that in it, but not that... exactly... :(

[motherfucked]

It was pretty well-handled and not something tacked on for trauma, but yeah :/

[gevurah]

also what about loki

[motherfucked]

LOKI WAS BORN THIS WAY