I said id put it down but I lied.
Barty 'Attention Whore' Crouch Jr. UGH I LOVE THIS PARTā¼ļøā¼ļø his daddy issues are SO DEEP he'll literally do anything won't he?
Care to yap about this? Maybe youll want to wait for chapter 10. I just love this omg I think its one of my favourite lines that reveals so much. (Perhaps you had a different intention than im thinking when you wrote this? Maybe its fairly inconsequential) UGH I NEED TO KNOW
Also I never mentioned your age once in my comment you came up with the granny part on your ownāļø Seems like someone's projecting hehe
asking me to yap about my favorite little brat and stepson?? of course i will. lemme just sit down in my rocking chair.... alright. (nah, i'm rocking this chair now, but in rockingš¤kind of way, y'know... ugh, cringe please pull the plug already.)
to me this part tells us, that there is still a side of barty (at least at that point in time) that feels remorse, but he's helpless. he has tried so very hard to suppress these urges, but he can't stop them. (if you ask me, he hasn't really tried hard at all...)
the father horace event, what he did that day and the feelings he felt, are on his mind constantly. even though, that was really more of an impulsive knee-jerk reaction (i had to google that word, wtf?) it definitely unlocked something in him, but he also felt torn.
i don't think rk barty was the kind of kid that killed small animals to dissect them, actually quite the opposite, i think he was really soft. (yeah, BCS, go ahead blame it on his mother)
when he was four, barty found a sleeping raccoon in the garden. it looked so peaceful and it had such soft fur that he started petting it. then he showed his new raccoon friend to his mother and she totally freaked. the raccoon was dead and she had to explain to him what death was. barty cried his little eyes out for days. (in case you ever wondered why barty has sympathy for raccoons... from the "ask noon to make you cry in 100 words or less" vault š„²)
anyway, i think that's part of the reason he got away with the horace situation in the first place, no one would've suspected him. the classic "oh he's such a nice little lad" but in actuality he's a psychopath type of guy. (well, that, and because BCS has made sure, that this can't be linked to his son in any way. i have no idea how he does it, but BCS is always two steps ahead...) but i digress...
his "meetings" with father horace were definitely some type of religious conversion therapy. maybe BCS suspected something, maybe the school was suspicious of him and reg. i don't know man, but basically one thing led to another and the whole thing spiraled...
the day barty was called into BCS's office he was so fucking scared of what he had done and his father's punishment. at that point he was already obsessed with the thought that he would be punished, he anticipated it. so when he enters the office, he truly thinks BCS is either gonna make him spend the rest of his life in jail or kill him himself. the disappointing truth is that BCS did neither. he did not even fully acknowledge what barty did. (oh he knows and barty knows that he knows, but BCS is not gonna give him that.)
in general growing up barty never received much attention or validation from his father, which only made him more obsessed with the man. but as he got older he started to despise him. barty thinks of his father as a stuck-up, rule-abiding, pious man and tries his hardest to be the exact opposite. but he doesn't want to be too blatant about it either, he wants to keep going and yes, he craves acknowledgement, but he doesn't want to have to ask for it. (jeez, man, get a tattoo or something...)
so barty continues to do what he does, mainly because he knows his father would disapprove, if he knew, but also, because it makes him feel superior, because he knows he can and BCS won't stop him. because the most important person to BCS is BCS himself and BCJ by proxy. again, that man lived with the name BARTEMIUS and made the conscious decision to name his son after himself?? (he's so narcissistic he needs to be studied.)
anyway barty thinks he's sneaky, he thinks he can keep going forever. but he also knows it's bad, that it would be better if someone would put an end to it, because he's simply not able to help himself anymore, after he reached that point of no return. which then leads him to become more sloppy and disrespectful toward his father. (a very stupid decision.)
and then, of course, there's the whole situation with regulus. we'll unpack that in chapter 10.