Unpopular opinion: Crowley should have died in the Ark
BEFORE READING THE REST OF THE POST: This is NOT a Crowley hate post. I quite like him, so please read my reasons before downvoting.
A few days ago I finished the Noah's Ark arc in the anime and it was a pretty great arc, it def deserves to be hailed as the most iconic arc from the series. Great character moments, great twists and great fights. Overall a very solid conclusion for the first big saga of the show. However, I have been thinking about a certain thing ever since I finished it.
Crowley vs the twins was a really intense and bloody fight. One where Crowley gave his everything to win the fight and stop the twins (who should have died in that fight tbh) from hurting his friends. I honestly wouldn't have said he was one of my favorite characters when I read the manga, but after watching the anime I could say he's perfectly top 5 material, and I think this fight is when his character arc was completed, for good reason. Unfortunately, this also means that after that there's not more for him to do.
This is something I call "the Tenya Iida" syndrome, which is when a previously relevant character fulfills their character arc before the story reaches it's final points and they become sidelined for the entirety of the run of the show, and Crowley was hit full blown with this.
It's just sad to see what has became of Crowley after that fight. His last important scene in the story was in that comedic arc where Komui's medice turns everyone into zombies, which is depressing. In the Alma arc he was useless, coudln't defeat the mutated Third and had to be saved by General Sokalo and his most recent appearances have been him feeling bad for Allen and blaming himself for not helping him while doing absolutely nothing while he's partnered with Choji. He went from being basically the unofficial 5th main character of the show to become almost an extra, and I don't think the author cares much about him nowadays.
I feel that Crowley dying in a blaze of glory taking the twins with him and then reuniting with Eliade in the afterlife would have been a great closure for him. He would have had an epic fight, shown his devotion for his friends, would have forever immortalized himself in the story and would have reunited with his beloved Eliade. That would have made the end of the arc way more bittersweet, since the survivors would have developed a strong trauma due to not having been able to save him and would have made the following arc where lots of Black Order members get killed by Lulu Bell and her Akuma more impactful. Of the 4 Exorcists that disappeared in Noah's Ark, he's the one whose death would have not changed much of the story.
I'm not a person who believes killing characters randomly makes a story better (which is why I don't like Jujutsu Kaisen much), but sometimes it's better to give a character a good send-off rather than keeping them in the show irrelevant, and I feel that's what happened to Crowley. Just my two cents at the end of the day.
