Dr. Venture's life has left him scarred, emotionally insecure, apathetic, cynical, stressed out, and addicted to pills. Other characters tend to define him by his posthumous father, Dr. Jonas Venture Sr., an incredibly renowned and universally respected genius in virtually every field of science and engineering who built a space station, fought diseases, solved mysteries, and is usually indirectly linked to most of the advanced technology. Dr. Rusty Venture, however, is a sad failure of a man in every fashion, crushed under the weight of the expectations placed upon him; He lives with inadequacy and self-imposed incompetence caused by a combination of sloth or laziness, and the trauma of brutal emotional bullying by his father as a teen. Rusty is an extremely vulnerable and self-entitled narcissist, who can be overconfident and vain at times.