#cadell fowler

beginning to realise that fowler is kind of a huge bitch and i mean that as a huge compliment btw

how have i never noticed that fowler gets fucking ARRESTED at the end of witherward LMAOO

of course it is terribly angsty and dramatic that the wraith cassia hires just so happens to be the guy who eliot paid to kill his dad three years ago but it DOES suggest that neither hester nor eliot thought to like, delete fowler’s contact info after Dad Killing Gate, which is really fucking funny

ilsa’s affinity for fowler is super interesting because like. he is actually pretty evasive during their first meeting. he either outright ignores a lot of her questions or gives her purposefully vague (and borderline misleading) answers and goes the tried and trusted hester ravenswood method of trying to distract her by getting her drunk. and these are all qualities that ilsa pretty vehemently detests in other people! cassia gets the cold shoulder for similar hesitancy, she’s outright aggressive with hester, she’s impatient with aelius, etc etc. i think the main reason she warms to him is because a) she associates him with ‘rescuing’ her even though it wasn’t his idea and was just another job, and b) they do actually have pretty similar outlooks on the witherward’s london (that it’s better than the otherworld, that there’s a possibility for change) that most people in the zoo (certainly hester and eliot) don’t share. it’s a fascinating dynamic because i think they bring out the ‘optimistic’ sides of one another and yet they have so few interactions

rereading witherward and noticed that when fowler takes ilsa to the witherward he says ‘your people tell me you have alpha blood’ which is SO interesting for so many reasons. because first of all we later discover that CASSIA is the one who hires fowler to track down ilsa - and she’s a sorcerer, thus arguably not one of ‘ilsa’s people’! so who has been telling fowler this?? second of all, fowler clearly knows who ilsa is/who she’s suspected of being before he tells her this; he says earlier on in the scene that martha could have ‘easily passed for a ravenswood’ and that she was murdered as a result of being mistaken for ilsa. it isn’t as if he’s been questioning if he’s got the right person. so the ‘alpha’ thing feels especially Intriguing because it’s clearly not just about ilsa being a ravenswood, but more about her capability to be alpha i.e replace hester as warden alpha. and like it obviously makes the most sense for aelius to be the person telling fowler this information + hoping to mould ilsa into a hester replacement, but that begs the question of a) when he spoke to fowler b) WHY he spoke to fowler, and c) why the fuck he told fowler That, specifically. the messy power dynamics continue to stay messy!!!