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OOC INFORMATION
Name: Saro
Contact: saro.lynne @ gmail, sarosaron
Other Characters: None

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Natasha Romanoff/Natalia Alianovna Romanova/Black Widow
Age: Approximately 30
Canon: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Canon Point: After Age of Ultron.
Character Information: http://marvelcinematicuniverse.wikia.com/wiki/Black_Widow

Personality:
Natasha Romanoff is a woman with a past. The importance of this is illustrated by the fact that while her teammates view uncertain futures or missed opportunities when confronted with their fears, Natasha sees an episode from her own history: a distorted vision of the training that would eventually turn her into a world class assassin. While exact details of her experiences both in training and as an active spy and assassin may remain unclear, the gist has been revealed over the course of Natasha's four movie appearances.

We know that she was recruited and trained from early childhood by the KGB. We know that she excelled at the training, standing out from her peers and becoming the notorious Black Widow. She built a reputation first as a Russian agent, then working independently. She reveals to Loki, in the process of trying to coax him into revealing his own secrets that at one point in her life she didn't have compunctions about who she used her skills for, "or on." Her life changed course when she landed on SHIELD's radar as a target, and Agent Clint Barton was sent to eliminate her. The exact nature of their confrontation is still a mystery, but what is clear was that rather than fulfilling his mission, he gave Natasha the chance to change. She took it.

At the same time, the work Natasha does only changes so much. Natasha may have switched to the "good" team in an effort to find some moral center in her life, but she is still responsible for taking dishonest and ethically dubious work in the name of world security. When she first appears in Iron Man 2 she is undercover, infiltrating Stark Enterprises to learn more about both Tony Stark and his Iron Man suit. In the course of this mission she lies, manipulates, and arguably even eggs on Stark's more self-destructive impulses, all to see if he's fit to work with SHIELD. Later, in the Winter Solider, while Captain America is saving hostages on board a ship being held by Algerian mercenaries, Natasha is recovering sensitive information from its computers. Her actions cause the breakdown of the primary mission, putting both her and Steve Rogers in danger. The information, it turns out, was Director Fury's priority—Fury himself was responsible for the hostage situation. When confronted about not being told the true nature of the mission, Fury tells Rogers that he received the assignment he was comfortable with, and that "Agent Romanoff is comfortable with everything."

This context provides the motivation that propels Natasha into becoming a hero. She's not a soldier, or a philanthropist, or a noble god. She's a former assassin with more blood on her hands than she's ever likely to wash off and a commitment not to make Agent Barton's gamble bringing her in the SHIELD a loss, as well as a personal debt to Barton for sparing her life. At the same time, her skillset is still what it always has been. Natasha falls in the uneasy position of balancing her drive to make up for her past with a disillusioned understanding of the world as a place where sometimes questionable things have to be done for the greater good.

Natasha's unique mix of hope for atonement and personal obligation shows in one of her conversations with Steve Rogers in The Winter Soldier when, after discovering that SHIELD has been infiltrated by HYDRA and narrowly escaping alive, Rogers confronts Natasha about her uncharacteristically withdrawn mood. She opens up to him about her personal doubt that, after years of lying for the KGB and then SHIELD, she could no longer tell just whose lies she was telling anymore. In trying to go straight, she might have just traded in for an even more morally dubious organization than the one she started with. She then asks Steve about his ability to trust her, reaching for both reassurance and giving a rare glimpse of her own desire to be trusted.

The themes of both truth and trust come up repeatedly in Natasha's characterization. It's rarely a matter of merely being honest or dishonest, though. Rather, Natasha's relationship with truth is both strategic and fluid—depending heavily on what suits her current situation. As a spy, Natasha's ability to adapt to new situations and control how other people perceive her are crucial, and Natasha seems to have thoroughly internalized their importance.

Incidents where Natasha reveals details about her past or her emotional state almost always occur in situations where they're to Natasha's strategic advantage. When she's sent to recruit Bruce Banner in The Avengers and reveals that she started her career as a spy at a very young age, she's quite openly trying to gain his trust for SHIELD's benefit. Later in the same movie, in the scene previously mentioned where she discusses her past with Loki, she's hoping to manipulate him into tipping his hand and cluing SHIELD in on his plans. In Age of Ultron when she reveals the details of her sterilization to Banner, it also happens in the context of trying to gain his trust. While her motivations are more personal (she wants him to believe in her attraction to him and her openness to starting a romantic relationship) her strategic use of the truth is still in evidence. Even when her status as a spy comes out in Iron Man 2, it is overtly as a strategic move on the part of SHIELD, literally under Director Fury's supervision.

By contrast, in situations where Natasha does not have an objective, she defaults to cagey, more reluctant answers. When Barton asks her what Loki did to her that's inspired her to join a fight that, as a spy, is not her style, her answer is abstract. She alludes to events and emotions rather than naming them—she even has difficulty expressing her feelings directly. It's only after a false start that she tells him that she's been compromised. When Rogers engages her directly on the topic of the truth in The Winter Soldier, her answer is that the truth isn't "all things to all people, all the time. And neither am I." While not dishonest, the manner of her answer—abstract rather than specific, not actually admitting to anything—illustrates the content of her answer. The truth, for Natasha, is fluid and subjective. While she has no problem lying, she also has no problem providing a version of the truth when it suits the situation. Who she is and what she says is contextual and intentional.

Despite her formidable combat training, it's this strategic control of information that allows Natasha to steer situations in her favor in the way we see during her Avengers introduction. In this scene, she interrogates a Russian arms runner by letting him believe that he has captured and is interrogating her. She presents him with vulnerability, and he accepts it, spilling details of his operation in the course of trying to gauge what she knows.

Of course, this skill would be worthless if it were not for her situational awareness and ability to read people. Most of the time, Natasha makes up for not being superhuman by seeing through her situation and exploiting her advantages where necessary. Where in Iron Man 2, Natasha has no problem taking out several armed men, she knows in the Winter Soldier that she's outclassed facing the titular character. To compensate for this, she uses his own expectations against him twice. First when she launches an unexpected attack from the shadow of the overpass when the Winter Soldier expected her to run away, and then again by setting a trap for him using a voice recording to lure him in and attempting to garrote him.

Outside of combat, it's Natasha who helps Steve slip away from SHIELD. If people expect you to run away, then walk right under their noses. If someone is looking for you, then prey on the natural discomfort caused by public displays of affection to make them look away. If someone is looking for shared life experience, then make something up. Natasha is rarely out of control of her situation, whatever that situation is.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given how pivotal control is to Natasha's talents, she's the most uncomfortable in situations where her subtle methods can't steer events, nor is it surprising that agency is a reoccurring dilemma for her.

When Natasha first meets Bruce Banner, she shows evidence of being put off balance by him. He responds to her manipulations with anger, eventually pushing her until she pulls a gun on him—clearly not her first plan. Later, when the Hulk emerges, Natasha is afraid of him, only managing to avoid being seriously hurt until Thor arrives to divert the fight. Afterward, she's left visibly shaken and hiding until the need to engage a mind-controlled Agent Barton shakes her out of her inaction.

While we don't know the context in which Natasha initially decides to pursue Bruce Banner romantically leading up to Age of Ultron, we do see that by the time of that movie Natasha has gained control of the Hulk. She's the only person shown to be capable of drawing him out of his rage and bringing back Bruce Banner. While not explicitly a prerequisite to forming a relationship with him, it is something that fell into place prior to her attempts to link with Banner in a relationship. It is also worth noting that she is undisputed the pursuer in their interactions, both when those interactions are flirty and when they are serious, and Natasha is always the one more comfortable with their dynamic in this movie. In a very real way, she has gained control of their interactions in a way not shown in the prior Avengers movie.

And at the climax, Natasha's control the situation escalates to the extent of undermining of Banner's own agency. She forces him to become the Hulk and engage in the final battle despite his own stated preference to run away from the action. She not only determines the course of his involvement in the conflict, she also dashes the potential for a continued relationship because of her own commitment to the cause. She's not without regret for this action, but she doesn't hesitate to do it, and her resolution is as an Avenger, putting aside what might have been.

It's not surprising that control would be so important to her as an adult considering how little choice she had in her development. She was recruited to work for the Russian government well before she would have been old enough to meaningfully agree to it, subjected to training intended to create ruthless weapons (we get some insight into this training in Agent Carter, when Peggy Carter runs across an earlier incarnation of the Black Widow Program). The aspect of sterilization ties directly to the weaponization of the young women in the Black Widow Program. Red Room sought to create operatives who let nothing get in the way of their mission, even removing their reproductive choice to that end. And in Natasha's case, while she did turn away from Russia eventually, her creators still succeeded in most respects. She's a woman willing not only to take on ethically dubious missions that the other Avengers would not, but also to sacrifice her own personal happiness for the people and ideologies that she's chosen to fight for.

All of this reveals Natasha as a character shaped by and, in many ways, defined by her past, but determined not to be ruled by it despite her own insecurity that she's been too irreparably damaged to truly have a place in the world she's come to protect.

5-10 Key Character Traits:
Pragmatic
Reserved
Strategic
Perceptive
Cagey
Adaptable
Intelligent
Committed
Flirty
Efficient

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