#tl;dr he started being the scarecrow at 39 and is generally like 48 in most threads i think!

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there are a few different versions of what happened to get jonathan fired from the university, so i'll talk a bit about his university/professor days and a general timeline for my version of him. mostly for my own reference tbh lol

i. he took 3 years to finish his bachelor's due to taking advanced courses with dual-credit in high school. he has a dual-major bachelors in psychology and biochemistry. he graduated at 21.

ii. he immediately went into a dual MD/PHD program for psychiatry. he worked as a research assistant under professor pigeon. his dissertation was generally about jung's concept of the shadow self and its relationship with fear.

iii. this is also when he first started working on early versions of fear toxin, while having access to the research lab under professor pigeon. it was mostly out of curiosity in his early years. it related to his dissertation, so why not?

iv. during clinical rotations in his dual MD/PHD program, he met tommy at an outpatient clinic when he was 25. he was....... a bad influence.

v. to finish the program and residency, it took 11 years total; he was 32 when he finished. he immediately became a professor due to professor pigeon recommending him after their years of working side-by-side.

vi. he continued experimenting with creating fear toxin and the efficacy of shadow work as part of his post-doctoral research. outside of being a professor, he had his own practice because being a professor doesn't pay that much lol.

vii. that said, jonathan LOVED being a professor. like love-loved it. literally getting paid to make people listen to him talk about his obsessions, his knowledge. and he was actually very good at it! he was a ruthless professor with grading, but absolutely willing to work with students to understand the material. generally, most of his classes had students with As across the board.

viii. what got him fired was firing a live round in class. he fired it at the ceiling. IT WAS NOT A BLANK like some versions have it. this was an escalation over time, however, as he used to bring in prop guns to demonstrate his point. except, students talked to each other about his class, so they all came to expect his prop gun, and the trick didn't work anymore. so he. brought a fucking real one and shot the ceiling like a deeply normal person would reasonably do. he was 36 when this happened. he was promptly fired. professor pigeon didn't stand up for him due to his tenure coming up.

ix. he started working at arkham shortly thereafter. he focused completely on finishing the fear toxin. this is when his fear toxin entered testing phases, but he was unable to get test subjects or grants so that he could quit at arkham and focus solely on fear toxin. amazingly, no one wanted to be terrorized and people were not convinced that scaring the shit out of patients was ethical lmao. he sometimes tested the fear toxin on himself and it really deteriorated his mental health.

x. due to rotating staff, he ended up as head psychiatrist by 38. he started using inmates as test subjects too!

xi. by 39, he picked up the mantel of scarecrow and went absolutely bonkers, killing professor pigeon, other university staff involved in his dismissal, some high school bullies, then attempted patricide and matricide. batman stopped him!

xii. at 39, he ended up in arkham

xiii. he got paroled around 3 years in (don't ask me why), so he terrorized greenvale and started harassing becky at 42

xiv. my jon is in his late forties, so he's been at it a couple years! age depends on verse, but generally he's like. probably 48 for most interactions i have on here.