fairandfatalasfair

YMMV but I don’t really feel an impulse to try to pin down a single overarching reason why Charles decided not to go to his afterlife. I think motivations are messier than that.

I think he was afraid while he was dying, and Edwin made him less afraid; I think he was afraid of going to an unknowable afterlife and Edwin offered him an alternative.
I think he’d fought so hard for every inch of joy he could get and didn’t want to give it up, and he had dreams of a better future he’d never gotten to see come true, and this wasn’t the same as getting to live, but at least he could still see the world he should have gotten to grow up in.
I think Edwin had been kind to him, and Charles makes friends easily, and going off with a kind person who wished they could have been friends for longer felt better than facing the unknown alone.
I think Edwin was a light for him on the darkest night of his life, and Charles, who wants desperately to be a hero, to make a difference, to help, latched onto that and decided that was what he wanted to be.

I don’t think you can nail it down to one thing. Motivations are complicated and all exist at once, and they shift and change with time and circumstance.

Charles tells the Night Nurse that he’s here because he still has a purpose: he’s a dead boy detective. He tells Edwin that he’s not going anywhere without him. Maybe those reasons aren’t why he ran from Death in 1989, but they’re why he’s running now.

My bias is that I don’t tend to be as compelled by the idea of love at first sight, or soulmates as something that happens to you. I’m more interested in the idea that you can capture someone’s attention quickly, but love is something you build. Charles and Edwin spent 34 years building a life together. If they’re soulmates, that’s why.

I love Edwin’s clumsy kindness; the way he struggles to connect with and understand people but he tries.

He tells Charles when they first meet that he’s not good with people. He probably never has been, and hell can’t have helped (70 years alone, where he had to close himself off against any empathy because if he tried to stop to help anyone else it would cost him time he didn’t have.) We see how he stumbles in his efforts to engage with strangers, how he doesn’t understand Monty’s interest in him, how he struggles to sympathise with Crystal’s fears, how sharpness comes easier for him than vulnerability.

But he tries and he keeps trying. He doesn’t have the context or the emotional intelligence to understand Charles’ headspace after the Devlin house, but he keeps offering to listen, to help if he can. He reassures Crystal that it’s who she is now that matters. He catches himself when Shelby snaps at him, and listens gently to her, and doesn’t try to dismiss her version of events again, even though he’s reserving judgment.

He’s not good with people, but he spent 35 years risking being sent back to hell so other people could have the justice he never got. He doesn’t see the hurt that Charles carries around, but he gave him an afterlife where he was loved completely and unconditionally and felt safe. (As long as I’ve got my best mate, and a case to solve, I’m aces.) He’s scared shitless of how Crystal is upending the most important relationship of his existence, but he’s not going to let her get hurt.

I don’t think Edwin particularly likes his own cold, self-interested analysis or his quick temper or his venomous tongue. I think he’s accepted them as faults that he probably won’t be able to change, but I don’t think he’s proud of them.

He tells the Cat King that he’s ashamed of wanting to make a case for his innocence, to protect himself in the process of helping others, as though that would undo the good he does. He immediately calls himself out on his own vindictiveness when Despair tells him he was about to gloat over Simon’s suffering.

I don’t think he’s particularly beating himself up for those things, but I do think he thinks of himself as selfish, and possibly cruel, and Charles as the opposite of those things.

Charles is the one who helps Edwin, and their clients, out of the goodness of his heart with no hope of reward. Charles is the one who had the option of heaven and chose Edwin instead. Charles is the one who never has a harsh word to say about anyone. When he says Charles is the best person he knows I think that’s part of what he means: that he sees in Charles all the virtues, the kindness and selflessness, that he thinks he lacks.

(Charles, meanwhile, loves Edwin’s bitchy side, and I think attached himself to Edwin at least in part because the kindness Edwin showed him in his last hours epitomises the good guy he desperately wants to be. But I don’t know if Edwin fully believes that.)

I dunno I just think there’s something fascinating in that - in Edwin’s ruthlessness in holding himself to these impossible standards, and his view of Charles as someone who meets them.

I think there’s an extent to which Edwin plays trauma olympics just because he honestly thinks he’s earned the right to be a bitch about it. If he had to spend 73 years in hell, it’s going to be good for something. (And y'know what? He’s right. He can have this one.)

And I think he does it more with Crystal because her presence is setting off insecurities about his relationship with Charles and he’s lashing out about it. (and because sniping at Crystal feels safe because she gives as good as she gets, so he doesn’t have to feel like he’s picking on someone who can’t defend themself.)

But it’s also a real thing for some people who have been through life-threatening (or life-ending, in Edwin’s case) experiences, especially if they haven’t really processed any of those experiences, to have a hard time giving weight to things that seem less urgent and terrible than the upper end of their own personal scale of Bad Shit. To feel like they can’t afford to spend energy on smaller issues because they never know when they might be back in the middle of the worst thing that ever happened to them and need every resource they can scrounge. And Edwin’s scale for bad things happening is about as broken as it gets.

Like, I do think he plays trauma olympics on purpose to be a bitch, and I love that for him. But I can also believe there’s a real part of Edwin that looks at serious-but-not-life-and-death problems and reflexively dismisses them on the grounds that worrying about them will take up mental energy better spent on surviving being hunted for sport.

A few years ago I ran across a post talking about flood gifts - things that come out of a terrible experience that are nonetheless good and valuable to you.

I think about that a lot in relation to Charles, because Charles very much strikes me as someone who has made a life (or an afterlife) for himself out of flood gifts. I’m fascinated by the contradictions of him, the way so much of his character consists of things that are fundamentally good and valuable and beautiful, and that come from such heavy and tragic experiences.

His protectiveness, which grew out of the experience of never being safe at home, of being determined to protect his mother even though he was a child and deserved to be protected himself. But that protectiveness is something he’s proud of and should be proud of, something that keeps him and his friends safe, a gift that he gives to the people around him.

His skill with people, which he needed to survive in a house where things could go south at any moment, and to navigate a friend group that ultimately turned on him for being brown and working class and daring to step out of line. But that skill is still worth having. It makes him good at the work he’s chosen to spend his afterlife on, balances Edwin’s brusque manner and puts people at ease, allows him to create warmth and family and safety with people who push others away without even trying.

His relationship with Edwin, who only met him because he was dying. Charles didn’t want to die. He had a life to live, dreams and goals and joys yet to be attained. That he died at sixteen, with so much of his life still unlived, was a tragedy. And also, his death was the start of the most important relationship of his life, with someone who means everything to him and loves him in ways he never was while he was alive. He can grieve his life, and still know he wouldn’t give up his partnership with Edwin to have it back.

There’s a lot to love about Charles Rowland as a character, but this is one that I keep coming back to in my head, the way he made and continues to makes good things out of the horrors and tragedy of his life.

I think Charles grins fondly when Edwin’s being a bitch because he genuinely thinks it’s hilarious and adorable. But I also think he admires the shit out of Edwin’s unwillingness to tone himself down or file off his sharp edges. Charles needs to be liked so much, and he spends so much time setting himself aside and tying himself in knots to be what other people need, and Edwin just doesn’t. He is exactly and entirely his snippy bitchy self and everyone else can take it or leave it. I think there’s something exhilarating in that for Charles - both a sense that by attaching himself to Edwin he can borrow some of that fearlessness about outside judgments, and a thrill of knowing that Edwin can ignore everyone else’s opinion because Charles is always, entirely, inarguably enough for him.

And there are downsides to that dynamic. Charles works really hard to manage the vibe, and the fact that Edwin doesn’t really do that back (isn’t equipped to do it back, because he doesn’t read people and intuit what they need from him the way Charles does) sometimes leaves him feeling like he’s carrying that weight alone. (who else is gonna keep spirits up? you?)

But also there’s a reason Charles is drawn to stubborn difficult people with sharp edges who don’t apologise for who they are, and I don’t think he’d give up Edwin’s bitchiness for anything.

I know people have posted about this before but it honestly it striking how much the boys do not default to violence as a way of solving problems. They’re detectives in the classic sense - they’re looking for clues and unravelling mysteries, and most of the time they can handle things with subtlety instead of force. It’s not off the table, but it’s very much an option of last resort.

The first time we meet them they’re dealing with a ghost that is actively trying to kill them, and they’re not fighting, they’re running. While trying to figure out what happened so that they can go back in with a better strategy. Even when the cursed ghost catches up with them, Charles hits it exactly once, to get enough breathing space that they can get back to the office and get the resources they need to break the curse. Their plan with Becky was to slip in and out while Esther was distracted - they only ended up in a fight because hauling Edwin and Becky out of the magical void took longer than expected.

And as much as Charles comments in Ep. 3 about puzzle solving being “Edwin’s way” and hitting things with a cricket bat being his, that absolutely goes for him as well. In the flashbacks where he confronts his friends, he pulls them off and puts himself between them and the kid they’re beating up - he doesn’t continue the fight once the victim is safe. In the Devlin house he’s visible shaken and upset from the first round of the cycle, but it’s not until they’ve witnessed the murder several times and Edwin’s plan to break the loop has failed and he’s confronting the possibility that there may not be another option that he tries to fight Devlin directly. Most of what he does with his cricket bat is pull it out and plant himself between Edwin and whatever he’s decided is a threat.

I suspect that’s part of why Edwin was so rattled by the first encounter with the Night Nurse - not because it was wrong or unjustified, but because it’s not normal for Charles to hit first.

And these are not normal circumstances! Charles has been pushed pretty hard at this point, and has just been assaulted in a way that Edwin probably isn’t fully cognizant of, and was acting urgently to stop the Night Nurse from doing the same thing to Edwin. I think his reaction was absolutely justified, and possibly necessary. And I think Edwin’s response, whether it was intended that way or not, did read as condemnation - at least to Charles who is already beating himself up for not being able to protect the people he loves and doubting whether he’s a safe, trustworthy person.

But I also think it’s notable that the next time he deals with the Night Nurse - after he’s processed some of his feelings of anger and helplessness, after he’s been reassured that he’s still the best person Edwin knows - he takes a different tack. She’s still imminently threatening to split them up and send Edwin to hell, which is probably Charles’ worst nightmare. But this time he turns to negotiation, to appealing to her sense of justice, to looking for a loophole that could let them stay together. He’s back to trying to solve problems by working through them.

And in fairness, the fact that she came back after being eaten by Angie is also a pretty strong indication that trying to fight her wouldn’t have worked. But I do think it says something about Charles’ attitude to the world that despite describing himself as “the brawn” and thinking of himself as the fighter between him and Edwin, his reflex is still to problem solve first, to use force defensively and only when necessary. That yes, he’s angry and justly so, but unlike his father, or the boys who killed him, he doesn’t choose to turn that into an excuse to hurt people. That his use of force is judicious and careful and is always, always about preventing harm.