#arabriddler

My side of the art trade between Sarsee and @arabriddler! Just some silly boys.

Learning the design

so the thing is.... i mean i don't have a lot of thoughts that i've verbalized on this topic (besides this. lmao) but i DO have thoughts. like the thing about crowley is that i think like. and this is really in the realm of headcanons and vibes. i think that when rowena is not in the room he lives his life to spite her. or, a bit more complex than that: i think many of his conscious choices are a direct result of the thought process "what would my mother most absolutely hate? i'll do that."

but at the same time i think he admires her competence in a detached sort of way. both rowena and crowley are at their hearts cockroaches: their drive is to survive. they have immense wits and skills and they bend all of that towards slipping out of the next bad situation. and i think that it also seems like that's something crowley became like as a demon. (i say this because we know crowley went to hell for a deal, and i don't think the crowley we know would ever sell his soul - at least, not if it weren't for someone he loved very much, and crowley learning to be capable of that kind of vulnerability is something we see happen on the show, i don't think it was happening before for him.) it's not an impulse that he learned under rowena's tutelage (she barely gave him any), but rather one he learned from living under her emotional shadow. he knew her, and once he was in the situation of, you know, being in hell, when his drive to survive was tested, that was the model for survival in fight or flight situations that he learned. so he adopted it. not consciously really but like. that's how he became more similar to her.

so the thing is a lot of their tortures are similar. crucially, i think the "why do you hate me" conversation in devil's in the details is really revealing for rowena, but what she says also applies to crowley and how he relates to the world: "love… love is weakness. and i'll never be weak again." both rowena and crowley fear vulnerability deeply, and this is a barrier between them and other people. it's a barrier between them and meaningful relationships. but of course they both crave meaningful relationships anyway because they're people and people like, want those.

but they're also really different people, and i think a lot of that comes down to the fact that rowena is just much more dysfunctional than crowley. like, they're both fundamentally self-interested, afraid of other people, and incapable of vulnerability, but rowena is so afraid, so impulsively selfish, that she can't function within a system. she's basically incapable of thinking long term, because she's used to nothing she builds or involves herself in being stable, so she might as well cash all her checks now and run. crowley on the other hand is also self-interested, but is more capable of like, thinking long term in a sort of economic, game theoretical way. rowena and crowley are both thinking of the world as a game of prisoner's dilemma without ethics or empathy, but rowena defects once and runs, whereas crowley is perfectly happy to play iterated prisoner's dilemma forever. this is why he comes and yells are the leslie odom jr. demon in season seven, time for a wedding: crowley serves his own interest, but it is in his interest to be trustworthy and stable, so he will happily give up short term gains for long term rewards. crowley would never have pulled the shit that rowena tries on him in s10 where she gets just barely into his good graces and then immediately starts snooping through his shit for her own gain, not because he would feel bad, but because it's a stupid thing to do if you're thinking about the future. but if you have no confidence in the future, if you expect everything to fall apart and blow up all the time and you expect everyone to be out to get you, well, it's a fine idea. because a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. essentially, it's about the marshmallow test. rowena fails, crowley passes. so crowley is much more able to function in a system because he doesn't show up, nakedly attempt to suck everything dry, and dip. he tries to win at the system because he expects the system to still be there and also not randomly hunting him for sport tomorrow.

and then the other difference is really just that crowley is more of a soft touch. like, both rowena and crowley have this barrier to meaningful relationships because they're so scared, but rowena's is a lot more ironclad, and i'm not going to say she suffers less from it, but that suffering is a less controlling force in her life. like, i don't know if crowley could do oskar, is the thing. like i don't know if he could do that to juliet, lol. he is fundamentally... he needs the kinds of relationships he denies himself more than she does, and he's less afraid so he doesn't have the immediate terror to drown it out. like the thing is, when rowena kills oskar, it wounds her deeply, but she doesn't hesitate. love, affection, pure feeling, those will never outweigh her fear. but they will for crowley.

like, essentially, they both slip from the path of perfect long term self-interest, but for rowena that slip comes because she's too impulsive because she's incapable of trusting the ground beneath her feet to be stable, and for crowley it's a simple slip towards the siren call of unselfish affection and companionship.

anyway that was a long compare and contrast but i think it's necessary in exploring their relationship because the thing is, a lot of their relationship is just, shadows on the walls of crowley's mind. we don't know how old he was when she abandoned him but i doubt it was that old. while their relationship deeply impacted him, i think a lot of that impact just has to do with the things she denied him: affection, mostly, and the vulnerability that comes with it, but also he was an unwanted child, and she's a deeply selfish person who also did not really have material resources at that time, she also would have denied him or failed to provide material things. i de-emphasize that because like, in the crowley we know, you can see the impacts of economic deprivation: his longing to securely integrate himself into a powerful system i think especially has to do with that, but also his performance of human class despite being a 300 year old demon. but i think that's something that has to do as much if not more with the garden variety poverty he came up in, with or without rowena's parenting failures. whereas her failure to be like, kind to him is i think one of the reasons his desire for affection can sometimes outweigh his survival instinct, despite his being so guarded.

but i also think he spends his whole life with this picture of her in his head which he alternately spits on and venerates. he takes a vessel with an english accent to spite her and then uses her magic tricks, you know?

I put a little more effort into this than I should've but I combined some obvious influences together and came up with this

The lady reading to Oz is named Isabel, and she's like an older sister to him. (They're roughly 12 and 20 here) Our version of the Penguin is heavily inspired by Danny Devito's portrayal in Batman Returns. That Penguin is often seen with his circus troupe family following him around, so I took that detail and ran a mile with it.

Owald was found by the Red Triangle Circus troupe at the age of 6, who took him in after finding him at Gotham's abandoned zoo with the penguins. Because he'd been raised by the penguins until that point, Oz didn't understand English, nor human behavior really. I'll get into that more later..... 👀

That said, Isabel was the closest to his age (and had the most patience in teaching him to understand, speak, read, and write). He still defaults to sounds and animal mannerisms before humans, but he's more willing to verbally converse if it's with Isabel.