★ Character Information ★

Character Name: Dr. Stephen Strange
Character Age: Early/mid forties.
Character Species: Human - with a third eye in his forehead that remains hidden most of the time but can be opened up for peeking at magic things.
Current Health: Alive, uninjured, though his hands are irreparably damaged from a past car accident.
Outfit: His sorcerer’s getup, ft a sling ring hooked onto his belt. The cloak and the Eye of Agamotto he’ll receive from a chest via the tdm if that’s okay!

Character Canon: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Link to History: wiki!
Canon Point: Some nebulous point in time post-Multiverse of Madness but before the mid-credit scene.
Canon Iteration: Original canon.

★ Folkmore Roles & Attributes ★

Skills: 🔮 M.D, as a neurosurgeon, Stephen used to be at the absolute top of his field. He can’t practice with that level of precision anymore but he’s still a knowledge base and a capable doctor where precise work isn’t required.

🔮 Ph.D, the man has a passion and talent for learning. Ravenous for new skills and experiences, a perfectionist in spite of himself, he’s a seasoned academic with a boundless imagination which makes him perfectly suited for research, discovery and self-development. As an example, he was able to pick up enough ancient sanskrit to read mystical texts deemed beyond his skill level in very little time when training at Kamar-Taj.

🔮 Close combatant, as a Master of the Mystic Arts, he’s well trained and practiced in both hand to hand combat and the use of close range weapons.

🔮 Tactician, combining imagination and intellect, Stephen is capable of thinking outside the box to strategize in ways that regularly subvert the expectations of the people around him, often helping him to find a way through apparently hopeless situations.

🔮 Big brain, on top of being a neuroscientist, surgeon and sorcerer, he has enough room in the memory banks and enough talent with storage and recall that he keeps a massive mental database of functionally useless music trivia up there as a party trick. Canon cites an eidetic memory, which usually refers to short-term clear image recall but seems to refer to a longer term recall in this case as he offered it as a reason why he was able to study for his M.D and Ph.D simultaneously.


Canon Abilities: Technically his magic is a learned skill, but given that it’s… magic… I’m going to stick it here!

Stephen is a highly-skilled sorcerer whose magical repertoire seems to expand dramatically with each appearance, ranging from astral projection and portal creation to elemental magic, construct creation, transmutation, illusion, self-duplication and that one time he made the entire world (including himself) forget somebody’s secret identity.

I tend to play fast and loose with his magic drawing from spells we've already seen used and influences from comics canon, but there’s a rough summary of the things he’s done so far in the MCU here. All of this stems from drawing on dimensional energy and reshaping it into spells.


Role: Myth.
Role Qualities/Attributes: If it’s possible, I’d like to lean toward an eldritch interpretation of the myth qualities. As a standard his nails are hardened and sharpened into small claws and his canine teeth into subtle fangs unless he actively works to reduce them, but each time he leans into more myth-like behaviours and tendencies he’ll develop new physical traits that range in severity and how long they stick around depending on circumstance and my whims. These will be inspired by the art of Abz J Harding (some examples here), to include things like: an inky staining of the skin at the site of new physical myth traits; sharp, elongated claws and teeth; calcified spine structures (can include horns); maybe shadowy tentacle-y tendrils instead of a tail? Let me know if any of these are a no-go, I’m basically just looking to lean as far into weird magic stuff that’ll make him uncomfortable as can work with the setting.

Role Reasoning: Stephen is a hero in many ways, has sacrificed himself many times to save humanity, but he’s also helplessly self-directed and, as Christine explained to him on her literal wedding day after he decided that was the ideal moment to tell her how sorry he is that they didn’t work out, he always has to be the one holding the knife.

His choices are influenced by his best possible intentions but he’s a man who won’t be governed by any authority other than his own, who always seems to land on his feet no matter how many 180s he does on his own moral code, and who has recently confessed he’s frightened of getting close to other people or letting them close to him.

So while he could work as a legend, myth is the role more likely to inspire self-reflection. My goal is to see how the setting and the role itself influences him - whether that be to lean toward change or to come to terms with himself as he is rather than as he perceives himself to be, and maybe become a better man for it.

★ Personality ★

What is your character's moral code? Do they have one? Why or why not?

Stephen was once strictly married to his hippocratic oath, but it turns out it’s difficult to save the world while doing no harm. Compromising his beliefs has become everyday, Do No Harm adapting to take the action that results in least overall harm, no matter what the cost. He’s dedicated enough to this new tenet that he breaks his oath, something he’s lived with and proudly been bound by for as long as he’s been a doctor, every time duty calls him to. Lives matter, it’s his vocation to protect them, and he’s happy to live with the weight of his actions for the sake of the people he’s saved.

Unfortunately this moral code is wide open for situational interpretation and has manifested in such directly contradictory hits as ‘I’m going to play the trolley problem on a universal scale because it’s my personal duty to make the hard choices in spite of the unquantifiable ramifications for billions of people, planets and ecosystems’ and ‘I’m going to break multiple natural and magical laws and ignore the Sorcerer Supreme’s direct instruction so I don’t have to kill a child in spite of the stakes being arguably higher than the last time I played god and queued people up to die for the greater good.’

What does your character feel like they struggle with still? Where could they improve? This could be physically, mentally, emotionally, or otherwise.

The man has a child’s drawing of a wonky-looking smiley face where his emotional wellbeing ought to be and he’s very aware that he should probably try doing something about that. There was a time when keeping himself on emotional lockdown served him - as far as switching out integrity for success could be called a service - but between being dressed down by the one-time love of his life for his inability to give up control and running into a version of him who was so unhappy that he traveled the multiverse possessing other Stephens and having them kill themselves to put them out of their misery… it’s time to run some course correction.

By the end of MoM he’s working on it, starting to push past his own discomfort with emotional vulnerability to try for honesty, offering support and acknowledging his own need for the same, but it’s going to be a long road.

Almost as long a road as learning to get the knife out of his hand. He’s probably convinced he managed it when he told America she was capable of controlling her power rather than taking it from her, but in doing so he ignored Wong’s order and went down his usual road of my way or the highway with the fate of the multiverse in the balance. Encouraging America to pick up her own knife is not the same thing as putting down his, and though it ended up being the right choice, he’s got a lot of work to do to learn when giving up control is appropriate and what it actually looks like.

What is your character's safespace? When do they feel the most settled and comfortable? When do they feel confident and relaxed?

Magic is Stephen’s safe space. On Earth, that feeling was most potent at home in the Sanctum, one of Kamar-Taj’s three bastions of defense against extra dimensional interference, surrounded by old magic and ancient artifacts over which he’d been made guardian. It’s his home but it’s also a symbol of his power: he’s a Master there, a protector, trusted with everything the building contains and represents. Both a high honour and a confirmation that he made the right choice in giving up one life for another.

But even without the Sanctum, Stephen finds both comfort and confidence in magic. Magic in the environment, other people’s magicks, will make him feel connected to a person or place in a way nothing else could. He finds ease and joy even now in the casual use of magic to help with everyday tasks or to add a little wonder to a space, and his own faith in his magical ability means that when he’s called upon to make a show of force or dispell a threat in a way that sits inside the current reaches of his experience, he’ll do it with a throw-away ease that’s easy born of confidence and a genuine enjoyment of his vocation.

What would your character sacrifice to get what they want or to reach their potential? What have they sacrificed already?

Stephen’s a serial self-sacrificer when it comes to achieving his potential. After sacrificing almost all of his worldly wealth to try and regain the fine motor function in his hands and return to his life as a surgeon following his car accident, sorcery equipped him with the power to do so and Stephen gave it up, putting his former life behind him when it was made clear that he had a greater potential for service as a sorcerer.

Since then he’s put himself bodily between cosmic entities and his own dimension to die untold times in a time loop of his own creation, acted alone to make decisions about the fate of the universe in the aftermath of the calamity of the Snap and felt the weight of the choice he made every day since, dreamwalked into his own corpse earning the damnation of his eternal spirit, let his relationship with his ex go dormant and not sought out anything with anyone else in spite of his growing isolation and unhappiness. In short, he’s been slowly giving up pieces of his own humanity to grow in his potential as a sorcerer for years, and there are very few places he’ll draw the line so long as he thinks the growth will be worth the cost: and so long as the cost is to himself, and not to others.