#all of their backstories technically have it but jonathan's is impossible to skirt around without completely removing half his backstory

[batvvvvv]

ALRIGHT last ref for a bit🎉 had every possible technical difficulty during the process of this so it's a little rough. stuff below the cut, some warnings for child abuse and mentions of drugs! be safe!

jonathan's childhood is.... a lot. this is definitely an oversimplification, but i'll get into it more later on!

his father wanted a son. that was all he wanted

first, he had a daughter. then, nearly a decade later, jonathan was born. but everyone told him something was wrong with his child, that he was a changeling, or the antichrist. really jon just.. didn’t express things. never smiled or cried, rarely spoke until it was beaten out of him. jon's father resolved to make him a man. the boy was scared of his own shadow! what scared jonathan most, though, was the scarecrow in their field. it always just watched.

one night, jonathan's mother disappeared without a trace, to escape her husband. jon's older sister followed suit, refusing to take her mother's place, and leaving jonathan alone with his father.

and, when he was 16, jonathan snapped. this is an event that... probably requires its own post to do it justice lol. but with this they had begun to conquer their fear, and everyone left them alone afterward!

jonathan applied to every college he could, desperate to get out, and when he was 19 he moved across the country to study medicine at gotham u. there, he met pamela isley, soon to be his first and only friend.

later, jonathan switched to psychology instead, and moved in with pam. life was good for once. money, however, was not, and with jonathan's knowledge of chemistry he... created and sold some things to get by! gotta pay the bills somehow!

eventually they both graduated and lost touch. jon got a job as a psychologist in training under a professional, but the times he got to work one on one with patients were where he really... flourished

jonathan had been intrigued by fear for a long time, and now he could explore that. they just asked questions at first, but he wasn't getting the answers he wanted. they needed to SEE the fear firsthand! so he took to scaring them himself, bringing spiders and needles into the office under the guise of exposure. until that was no longer enough, and they turn to their past explorations of chemistry. if they could create something to stimulate fear, they could study it as much as they wanted!

until he's fired for mistreatment of patients. lmao

jon once again turned to his Chemical Experiments to make a living. but their creation (fear toxin, they later name it) had made its way into their head, and they became obsessed with perfecting it. the drug tears through the streets of gotham like wildfire. and, hey, if he uses his own drugs to test them, that's fine. he's fine! this won't be a problem!

and, as jon's reputation grows, they begin to call him the scarecrow. he likes the sound of that. the master of fear.

so, with that, all four of our main characters are free to unleash hell on gotham city :) i'm sure nothing else bad will happen to them! !

#tw child abuse #all of their backstories technically have it but jonathan's is impossible to skirt around without completely removing half his backstory #but ofc i'll tag it when we get more in depth with everyone else #batman au #batman v #jonathan crane #scarecrow dc #tw drugs