AU Jonathan Crane
In our AU, the presence of metahumans has shifted the balance of power away from corporate entities (such as Lex Corp and WayneTech) and, subsequently, the state (as the two are deeply intwined, especially in the US). Leading to what governing bodies remain looking for more covert means of shifting power back in their favour. Specifically in a way that can be chalked up to spontaneous social phenomena or other thing not directly tied to state intervention.
Seeing Crane's experiments and functional prototype of distilled fear, they see promise in it as a non-lethal and undetectable (beyond the knock-on physiological effects that coincide with a general fear response after initial exposure; the serum itself degrades quickly) crowd control. They grant him much more funding than he could imagine in exchange for developing his at this point purely academic and therapeutic project to study the psychology of fear without having to subject study participants to unethical psychological torture. (In theory, the rapidly degrading toxin would stimulate the response without needed to do anything traumatic to stimulate it - not necessarily considering the toxin itself as such.)
This version of Crane is born with Urbach-Wiethe disease, which prevents a normal fear response often leading him into misadventure as a kid. Even though he couldn't understand it on a visceral level, he began to understand the very sensible role fear played to keep everyone else safe. He'd try to scare himself, train a pavlovian fear repsonse to avoid things he may encounter that could hurt him. He wasn't senseless and could avoid danger where it was obvious, but that visceral gut feeling being absent was palpable. Motivated to understand fear and its application as a non-lethal way to guide people (typically from danger - though in the case of the crowd control fear toxin project it's him picking the lesser of two evils; either a toxin of his own making he knows will pacify people non-lethally, or whatever heart attack in a jar the DC equivalent of the CIA would concoct that would effectively be a larger scale ice-bullet gun).
Crane is a guest-lecturer at Gotham Uni, having been a guest lecturer in the neurochemistry of fear at various universities across the country. His suspiciously short tenure at each place he went to was starting to leave a trail. They would avoid abducting anyone connected to the universities he lectured at, to limit the trail they might leave. In the AU, I wanted Crane's formal development of FT to be through an MK-Ultra like project. People would go missing and show up days or weeks later (if they showed up again at all; which tended to happen more as time went on as the dose was perfected to be minimally lethal while maximally effective). Sometimes catatonic - other times babbling incoherently about what they saw. What few consistencies to come from their accounts sprouted the urban legend of The Scarecrow. Here, it's the amalgamation of whatever people saw while under FT (technically they saw Crane, but not really and certainly wouldn't be able to recognise him) rather than a persona that Crane personally has.
(On a more general note, most of the rogues in our AU get their names from whatever newspaper stories come up with (with a couple exceptions). I also realise it's ironic to have Crane's introduction be through an MK-Ultra equivalent scheme, given the purpose of MK-Ultra was to investigate potential methods of mind control rather than crowd control, but a. Tetch's "mind control" is actually motor control in this AU, b. mind-altering drug testing took place and I felt FT testing would be a fitting parrallel even if the purpose is slightly different.)
