#I'm pretty sure sure he's called Snart more in the show than anything else but I ain't gonna go and count. so I call him snart all the time

[arrow-v-flash-polls]

At this point this has become the only way I settle creative conversations (disagreements) regarding the Arrowverse. A recent one I was having was which name for Leonard Snart was more popular within the fandom. I argue he's addressed more as Snart while they disagree. So which name pops into your heard first when thinking of the icy anti hero?

[coldtomyflash]

Tangentially related to that ask about Barry and programming, do you think he designed the virus that wiped all of Len's records in Rogue Air? I know the show totally hand-waved it, so I guess I'm just curious if you think it's more likely Barry used his speed-reading trick to figure out how to do it, or if it was Cisco's work instead? (I go back and forth on it, personally; I like to think it was Cisco, but I'm not sure that Barry would want to involve him in something so blatantly illegal)

Oh huh.

I’ve always headcanoned it was Felicity, simply because erasing every single record of someone not just from the CCPD but also from the FBI, ARGUS, medical records, the internet – like, everything – is such an insane feat that I naturally assumed they’d just ask her for help with it.

But there’s really no reason to think that because I mean, we have seen Cisco engage in some expert-level hacking (doesn’t he hack the military once or thrice?) so that’s likely a lot more plausible.

I can see Barry speed-reading his way through all the relevant literature on the subject to design that virus himself though, especially because something like that would make time to make, like just to write the program omg, and he’s operating on a pretty fixed damn schedule that episode. Not to mention Cisco is busy sorting out the tech for the metahuman transport, and Barry’s whole thing during that interval of time seems to be “secure Snart’s assistance” (if only to distract himself form how terrible things are going, on the whole).

Soooo… now I’m leaning toward Barry writing the program himself? Maybe after a call to Felicity for recommended reading, or just asking Cisco, depending on which of them would be more likely to have sources readily available for them.

Of course, this is assuming it took a single virus. Alternately, someone (him, Cisco, Felicity), could’ve simply hacked the FBI, CIA, ARGUS, etc all individually and just deleted anything on Len from there with a much simpler program than what I’d be thinking. It could’ve even been a joint effort? Not sure how they’d go about erasing Leonard from the internet, that would take a lot more work, but taking down the wikipedia page on him and hacking the news websites would likely be the first step, idk. That’s part of why I assumed it was all a single “search and destroy” virus, since it was implied to take out even the online stuff? Or was that just in my head? 

But it did seem like he had an individual virus for just the CCPD so maybe the approach really was a little more targeted against each agency individually…

(Also there’s zero way that all the hard [paper] copies on Len from all those other agencies disappeared. Someone else wrote meta on that, and how Len’s request was functionally useless as soon as some intern gets the thankless task of re-scanning some of those old documents when it becomes clear that he’s been erased from their systems).