who’s this Dire Crowley guy and can I get a scoop on the lore? :0
Dire Crowley is the headmage of Night Raven College in the mobile game called Twisted Wonderland, based on Walt Disney's prolific Renaissance Villains and then some. Most believe that Dire Crowley is based on Diablo, Maleficent's raven familiar, but this is less likely, given what I've seen and know of the lore (particularly that Diablo is a raven, not a crow, and that birds don't have receptors for capsaicin (the stuff that makes spicy things spicy), but he notably hates spicy food). Dire Crowley has far more in common with the literal Walt Disney himself, and I heard someone say that he's meant to be the Phantom Blot, a more obscure villain from the comics and spin-off TV shows, like The House of Mouse. I'm inclined to believe he's based on the Horned King or Chernabog, given visual cues, particularly the coffins in the Mirror Chamber, and how he opens them to induct the students into the school, with a proper ceremony.
With the amount of mystery surrounding him, Dire Crowley just felt so Cornelius-coded. He also gives me Quetzalcoatl vibes, the god of Creation, Death, and Wisdom of the indigenous, Nahuatl-speaking people of pre-Columbian Mexico. This wouldn't be a stretch, because Disney has dabbled in that sort of thing before, like The Emperor's New Groove features Inca people and their culture, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, and DreamWorks, a company consisting of former Disney employees, made The Road to El Dorado, the latter two explicitly mention and feature Hernán Cortés (no words can adequately describe the amount of hate I bear for this real historical figure) respectively.
In short, I am a sucker for Walt Disney and a simp for liches and Aztec gods, so a lot of this is speculation and wish-fulfillment until Chapter 8 is released in the West (the game is headed creatively by Yana Toboso, a mangaka most famous for Black Butler, hence the anime aesthetic which was influenced by Disney in the first place) to confirm or deny.
This is early concept art of the Phantom Blot from Epic Mickey, which resembles a lich/The Horned King, which is another reason why my lich intuition was going haywire for Crowley!
I will yap as much as you want me to on this, don't think I won't~!
