INTP – the Architect, the Thinker, the Philosopher
(aka: Jonathan Crane)
Scarecrow and Mad Hatter are a pairing that BTAS hinted at but never got around to doing, and I’ve always been mildly bummed out about that. Both are Introverted Judging types with Ne-Si in the middle of their stacks, living lives of delusion and obsession that revolve around controlling the minds and emotions of others. I’m not saying I ship ‘em, but if Harley and Ivy got a girls’ night out, Jonathan and Jervis should have had a nerds’ night out.
Dominant Function: (Ti) Introverted Thinking, “The Laboratory”
Scarecrow has a drive to learn, and his field of study is fear. He’s kind of obsessed with it, as Batman villains are prone to be. Fear is an emotion, but Scarecrow’s obsession is clinical and scientifically curious. He wants to study it, analyze it, experiment upon it.
By mastering a knowledge of fear, Scarecrow gains control not only over the emotion, but over those who feel it. He induces terror in others, watches it happen, and records the results. He’s a Thinker who wants to dissect his feelings rather than feel them.
Scarecrow’s schemes are among the more clever and carefully-crafted that Batman comes up against. He’s not just committing crimes, he’s conducting experiments. Even his break-out from Arkham—which, granted is not apparently all that hard a thing to do—leaves the staff fooled for a great deal longer than normal (“Dreams In Darkness”).
Auxiliary Function: (Ne) Extraverted Intuition, “The Hiking Trails”
Scarecrow’s Ne aids him in his theoretical work by allowing his Ti to explore the possibilities of fear. Because he’s leading with Ti-Ne, fear is a concept to him, not an emotional reality. He wonders what would happen if he made football players afraid of the competition, and creates an experiment to make it happen (and profit a bit by betting against them, of course). He wonders what the city of Gotham would look like if the entire population was exposed to his fear toxin, and he’s almost childlike in his eager anticipation to see the results.
In one of his later appearances, he goes the opposite way and decides to remove fear from people, seeing what happens when they are no longer inhibited by what scares them.
He learns from this that it’s not a good idea to take the fear out of Batman when he’s hunting you down.
Tertiary Function: (Si) Introverted Sensing, “The Study”
Jonathan Crane seems quite placid and content during his stays in Arkham, much more so than almost anyone else. He has his favorite shows to watch in the TV room, he hangs out with Mad Hatter for games of chess, and he’s quite polite to his roommates. When Lock-Up takes over the Asylum and starts abusing the inmates, Crane experiences a kind of physical terror unlike the kind he induces in others, and escapes to get away from the guy.
Scarecrow’s not much of a physical threat—in fact his spindly physique probably helped him earn his name. He changes his look the most drastically of any of the villains from season 2 to 3, and also has an earlier redesign from his initial look suggesting that as he adds to his knowledge of fear, he updates his disguise to be more terrifying (okay, I know, the creators were fickle about how they wanted him to look; let’s pretend the character made these decisions for a reason).
Inferior Function: (Fe) Extraverted Feeling, “The Garden Fountain”
Scarecrow detaches himself from the emotional experience he’s studying, observing human behavior rather than living it. His Fe wants to be recognized and applauded for his work, but lacks the ethical boundaries to seek it in a healthy way. In his first appearance, he’s unleashing terror on the university faculty that fired him for taking his experiments too far.
Being in the grip of inferior Fe for most Ti-doms means they resort to attempts at emotional control and influence over others in a haphazard, unpracticed way. For Scarecrow, it’s quite literal. He’s dumping fear gas into the population to influence emotional states in his victims and produce the desired results.
When he gets doused with his own chemicals, he’s completely overwhelmed.
(Scarecrow’s revamp in Season 3 lacks some of the unhinged energy of the early version, and he’s darker, grimmer, and more stoic. We never even get a glimpse of the lanky, harmless-looking Crane beneath the mask. Either he’s completely detached from his Feeling function by this point, or it’s a completely different take on the character, a new version who’s actually an INTJ.)
Heroes & Villains of MBTI 