Originally Posted by
Doombot
I think that Namor, at some level, sees most of humanity as a threat. So aligning himself with Doom, whenever it is in his interest, isn't as big of a deal to Namor as it would be to us, to him Doom is just another human to deal with. Namor knows when he can and can't rely on Doom, just as he knows when he can and cannot rely on Captain America. To Namor they are two sides of the same coin. In global politics, you must deal with dictators as much as you must deal with democratically elected Prime Ministers and Presidents. For us as readers of fantasy fiction stories, it's easy to say this character is "evil" and this one is a "hero", but for Namor living in the reality of the MU, he is the leader of a non-human race of beings that are constantly threatened by humanity no matter what their motives may be. Pakistan, India or China may not have anything against Atlantis, but they are still truly gigantic threats to the safety and security of his people, as the sheer amount of pollution by these countries produce and are by far the bigger threat to Namor than anything Dr. Doom could ever dream of doing. Captain America or Iron Man may yell at Namor for not rejecting Dr. Doom because he sent a robot to attack the Baxter Building the other week, meanwhile India dumped 120 million tons of plastic waste on Atlanteans' heads last year.
Thor is a different type character. He can be a true mythic hero. He's actually sworn to protect humanity, and depending on which version of their mythos you want to look at, they either created or were created by humans.
I love the BP, but T'challa can sit in his palace and be superior and talk about the morality of good and evil, but he's in a tiny isolated, land-locked nation and has a bigger stick than all his neighbours combined. Namor on the other hand has to deal with the reality that all of humanity is in a constant, daily war with the oceans themselves, and his people are right in the middle of it, with humans seeing Atlanteans as alien and hostile or invisible and irrelevant. All this and humans expect Namor to fight for them when they call, but when he defends his own people, humanity gasps, clutches their pearls and paint him as an unstable villain.