#TL;DR: I explain Barry and Eo's dynamic poorly and also Thomas is Eo's side hoe LOL

[emin-folly]

Thank you for your answer! I was the one who asked about what Eobard's doing earlier haha

I also have this other question, but do you think he's able to get attached to someone else to the level he is to Barry? Since it's an obsession from his childhood, I imagine it would be hard to replicate, but I would love to see how his character plays out with others outside of the Flashfam, as much as I love them already

Hey! Welcome back! And you are very welcome~! I hope it was helpful to you lol

Excellent question! To really properly answer this, I'd like to briefly break down Eobard's relationship with Barry, if you don't mind! Now, for characters like Eobard and Barry, trying to accurately and fully explain in depth their dynamic in just a paragraph or so is basically nigh impossible lmao. These two just have such a rich and multilayered relationship that I can really only give you the bare Cliff Notes lol. Also, I just want to apologize because uhhh. I get really kinda rambly here haha oops

Okay so, let me first preface this what exactly the core of Eobard's whole character is: Love.

Eobard just wants to be loved. That's it. That is the root of everything he does.

To explain, we gotta go all the way back to Eobard's childhood. From what we see in the comics, Eobard is a very abused and neglected child. His parents wanted a gifted and successful child so they handpicked all his skills and made him very good looking. Unfortunately, they didn't get the memo that they still had to actually show love to their child for him to be successful. Ignored and shunned by his parents, baby Eo was very depressed and extremely desperate for any kind affection/attention. That's when he discovered the Flash. And I think the fact that it was Barry specifically played a major factor in his obsession with him.

Of course the Flash is very important to Eobard but something deeper that really resonated with him was Barry's ultimate pureness and unconditional love and compassion.

Eobard looked at Barry and saw someone who would love him unconditionally and without hesitation. In every sense, Barry really is pretty much the only thing that got Eobard through the dark times in his young life. The older he got, the more and more his parasocial relationship with Barry and the Speed Force began to consume him.

Eobard is very capable of love. The problem is, he's never been taught how to actually express it in a healthy, normal way so he lashes out, violently and obsessively. Because that's the only way he knows how. I think he definitely, on some level, recognizes that he is unlovable that's what drives people to reject him. To deal with this, he just retreats back to his fantasy; "Barry would understand, Barry would love me."

Sooo, yeah, you can imagine when the fallout eventually happened, you can see why it would utterly break him, emotionally and mentally.

To answer your question of if he would be able to love someone on the level he loves Barry, I would say definitely no lol.

Barry is just so, SO deeply intertwined with Eobard at this point that you can't really tell where he begins or Barry ends. It also has a lot to do with his obsession being formed during the most vulnerable and formative years of Eobard's life. Even if you hard set restarted the universe, these two would always have a cosmic connection with each other that you just can't erase.

As for other people, he is shown to have definitely gone back into other peoples' past and altered them drastically to suit his needs, ex: Hunter and August. But it's really only just more or less the one time and for certain reasons like he either wanted to manipulate events to play out a certain way (Hunter) or because he also saw a little too much of himself in them and was extremely jealous of their relationship with Barry (August). But honestly, most of the time when Eobard interacts with others, it's always either because he joins a supervillain group or he just happens to run into them coincidentally (like with Hal, the Justice League, Wally, etc)

Except for Thomas Wayne. Specifically the Flashpoint version.

I know I already talked about him but his and Eobard's relationship is really kind of unique and bears going more in depth.

Long story short, their whole thing started in Flashpoint, when Thomas killed stabbed him through the back. Then, in the Button storyline, after Eobard is revived (by the power of gay) and broke out of prison, he decides to immediately go and rough Bruce up as a kind of "gotcha" to Thomas. In the middle of their fight, he comes across Thomas's letter to Bruce and then he just?? Starts waxing poetic about "Oh Thomas, Thomas, did writing this make you feel better? As you burned with your world?" etc and it's like b r u h

This is literally the only interaction you had!! You just beat him up, mocked him and then he killed you. Why are you acting like you suddenly have a deep history together asjdgfsKJLGK

And it doesn't stop there. In a one off comic Tales From The Dark Multiverse Flashpoint, Barry dies and so to cope with this, Eobard tries to turn Thomas into his very own "Eobard Thawne", a ruthless stalker who would obsess over him. Because in Eobard's mind, to be obsessed over is the same as being loved, it means attention. Which is, notably, pretty much exactly what he wants from Barry. In the end, Eobard even went so far as to give Thomas a gift, what he so desperately wanted: his son and his family back. Whether Eobard did this out of any kind of sense of generosity or a more selfish motive is up for debate but it definitely says a lot.

In a following comic that's a prequel to the Button storyline, we see Eobard actually saves Thomas from the death of the Flashpoint universe and pulls him into the main timeline.

This is really significant because who else do we see Eobard go through this much effort to torment them? That's right--Barry. Now, of course Thomas isn't close to being on Barry's level in Eobard's eyes, far from it. But it's really clear that Thomas has become such a fixated point of interest for Eobard. By pulling Thomas out, Thomas essentially becomes a paradoxical being, and I think Eobard is really fascinated by that. He really likes having someone else on the same playing field as him. It's like Eobard, Barry and the other speedsters are playing a game of invisible chess which pretty much everybody on Earth is oblivious to, except for Thomas. Thomas is the only non speedster who actually knows the scores.

Could you argue that Eobard is just doing all of this for revenge? Sure, I suppose you could. But knowing how Eobard works, it doesn't feel quite accurate to just leave it at that. There's just too many little hints and cues of Eobard's love languages at play to just ignore that. Also like, Eobard doesn't like talking about his (true) feelings hardly ever, instead he wraps them up and disguises them with pretenses. He will say one thing while doing a completely different thing, a lot of times you can't take Eobard's words at face value.

As it is, Thomas seems to have become pretty synonymous with Eobard to the point now, whenever you see Flashpoint Thomas, it's very safe to assume that a certain yellow rat isn't too far behind~

I definitely agree with you~! I also absolutely love seeing Eobard interacting with other characters outside his scope of obsession, but sadly, Eobard doesn't really? Have much in the way of dynamics with other characters, as he really doesn't do people and people also tend to kinda hate him? But! There are a few exceptions, off the top of my head:

Eobard and the Rogues from the Justice League animated comic

Eobard and Poison Ivy's interaction from the Injustice 2 game (bow chica bow wow)

He and Superman actually have a brief but really poignant moment in the Tales From The Dark Multiverse

He and Al Desmond also had a brief partnership in the Sliver Age comics which basically consisted of Eobard mind controlling and pressuring Al into a life of crime, but I did definitely get the vibe that Eobard liked him--tho again, he has a very horrible way of showing it LOL

Also in the Silver Age, he had a brief dynamic with Star Sapphire (not Carol tho unfortunately) He was very flirtatious with her (he was like that with a lot of other women too--which definitely comes back to him being desperate to be loved) Anyway, uh wow, I didn't mean for this to be this long?? LOL If you'd like more concise, shorter answers in the future, just lemme know~!