#the crouch family is very family tree coded ( and ethel cain in general )

[lycoryspreachin]

barty is a narcissist. is it surprising? prehaps not, but what it is is very telling of his behaviour and upbringing.

narcissistic personality disorder is of course a difficult thing to describe or analyse over such short and relatively lighthearted writing but i will attempt my best.

barty's character takes various forms of materialisation in my mind and subconscious, however, there are specific traits i never fail to assign him. he is insecure, with no sense of self, has dramatic delusions of grandiosity and out of all the people who viscerally hate him he does the most. if we consider this hypothesis, we are swiftly presented with the scaffolding of what we can imagine barty's childhood to have been. we can easily paint in our minds the crouch's family situation. in the center of the canvas is an unattentive man, careless for nothing but his own grand ambitions. on his right, is a sick but beautiful woman, who heart only beat for barty's own, whose life has been sold and whose future holds only despair. her present, however, lies between her frail and pale hands, her only son. around the gracious trio nothing but high grey walls with cloudy and mighty windows giving out on a large and empty, dull, green land. with no stable structure on which to climb, the lonely child grabs on the unsteady and burning one, his mother. I'm fairly certain barty hates her, so much that he can only ever love her. she the poison in his veins, threatening his life and she is the very organ keeping him alive. her death was the death of his soul, he was sure of it. it left him wondering whether climbing that shaky rock to avoid the flood was worth the fall once it yeld under the stream. it was a humiliation to be alive and he would do all he could to never feel shame ever again.

younger in order to not distress and unleash his mother’s distorted bursts of emotions, he learned to observe her every move, and then everyone every move, he grew paranoid, until he couldn’t trust anyone, until he couldn’t value people anymore, except for his harem of gods of course. he had a very simplistic view of people, you were either absolute scum or absolutely divine and his view of himself often fluctuated between the former and the latter. he lies, he deceives, and he wants, he wants to be seen and heard and considered. he preys on those around him, and he will catch them because he always succeeds in everything he does.

the way he grew up greatly shaped him, or rather, his identity was never shaped due to it. he doesn't exist, he isn't anything and i would go as far as saying he views himself as dead. he devotes his life to the worship of gods he sees around. the god of knowledge, of beauty, of evil and voldemort ( maybe he saw him as the manifestation of all of the deities he followed for so long ). he had gone mad, and maybe he allowed himself to go mad, to be liberated and exist, freely, shamelessly, boundlessly. he sacrificed a life for eternity, an entire existence for a unique remembrance.

and i think within the context of his life he is somewhat dearly and betwitchingly admirable