Earth 451 - Blog Posts

and maybe if the desire strikes you some tidbits on tetchy would be sweet

the best of boys, the worst of boys

1. he comes from an extremely screwed-up gothic Old Money family in England, with a family tree rife with (a) murder and questionable shit and (b) loads of that sweet hereditary insanity. the ancestors that didn’t die in asylums usually died in like, duels and Mysterious Circumstances. so he’s always… kind of anticipated his life was going to be colorfully awful somehow, it was just a matter of when and how

2. he inherited the family business(es) after his father died (Mysteriously) but handed them over to his sister and moved to America after the stress made him have a severe mental breakdown; plus the tutor who actually raised him died around that time (Mysteriously). he had like, no plan for what to do next but Gotham seemed like a good place to be, for some reason

3. Bruce first met him when Jervis just kind of wandered in the door at WayneTech with a disturbingly futuristic piece of tech he invented and was like ‘so are you guys interested in this’

4. despite the stuff he came up with being groundbreaking enough that WT gave him basically anything he asked for any tolerated him acting extremely odd, Jervis really hated his job. part of it was his coworkers, who he very much didn’t get along with, and part of it was that he just… doesn’t like doing what anyone tells him to do, ever. the only thing he liked was that they’d give him money and materials without too many questions after a while. 

5. All the Rogues had colorful first trials, but Jervis’s was a real standout for media attention. Not only did he debut around the time people were really starting to see the Rogues as all part of a movement that wasn’t going to fade away, he had a terrifying gimmick (fear gas and JV affect your body, but he could control minds), a sensational story that nobody could agree on the details of, and he kept on interrupting the proceedings to try and explain his perspective on things, which included such statements as ‘free will doesn’t actually exist’ and ‘actually, God isn’t real’, etc.

6. ‘fell in love’ is not the right term (seeing as Earth 451 Jervis is aromantic) but the moment he forgot his office key at home and his secretary of 2 days responded by pulling some pins out of her bag and picking the lock for him was the moment when Jervis both learned Alice Pleasance’s name and became Very Interested in her

7. He wants to take Batman’s cowl, after a while, for one main reason: Batman keeps taking his hats. look, the Bat can keep his creepy… trophy room, or lair, or wherever he keeps the items he keeps dragging off, Jervis doesn’t care, and Jervis wouldn’t even mind that much if Batman had just taken his first hat, but the damn Bat must have at least seven of them by now and they don’t grow on trees. no man could suffer this and not retaliate 

8. he has tattoos on his upper arms and back (acquired during the ‘I’m going to make all the bad decisions I couldn’t make in my teen years’ phase he had after his father’s death) which very few people are aware of, since he doesn’t like showing any more skin than strictly necessary. 

9. A lot of people tend to get misled by the fact that he’s shortish and dresses fancy and uses tech a lot, and assume he must be easy to overpower. One of those people was Batman, in their very first encounter. It did not happen again. He’s far stronger than most people expect, and was one of the few Rogues actually taught (instead of picking it up out of necessity) how to fight.

10. He went to an actual school for a couple years as a teenager, before he and his sister were both kicked out (long story) and put back into tutoring. During that time, he got really into theater, and even tho he never had much chance to perform the way he taught himself to speak and move onstage influenced him subtly for years, and more obviously shaped his Hatter persona. He tends to talk and move, as the Hatter, as if he’s in a play; staring off to where an audience would be, selecting and enunciating his words so they sound like rehearsed lines. It freaks a lot of people out.