#Williamson tried for a redemption arc and they very much did not let him write it

[zeroducks-2]

The more and more I see your analysis of Flash Comic the more and more I think ‘damn these bitches Gay Gay.’ And like I thought they were kinda obsessed in the cw show, but like making villian hero pairs a little fruity is just good writing. Comics though? Like they are the most important person to each other and one literally has a wife and children half the time. Like even if they’re not gay for each other whatever they have going is debatably worse.

They are gay for each other and they're even in love and this is INSANE considering how much they hurt each other (ESPECIALLY how much Eobard hurt Barry of course), but once you start seeing the pattern and putting Eobard's actions in context it's impossible to unsee. Like every time he hurts Barry in a specific way it's for a reason. The things he says, the simple fact that he IS A SPEEDSTER at all ties into how they're each other's lightning rod. You know that if someone tries to take the speed force "forcefully" they die? Normally by growing old so fast they wither and turn to dust. Not Eobard, who harnessed the speed force centuries after Barry had been dead, who was the first strong conduit in so long, who took it by force and he should have died a horrible death but he very much did not. The speed force became his hope and his freedom, and through his many alterations of the timeline he made it so many more speedsters were born, and even managed to change fate on a molecular level by bodily bringing Barry back from the dead. He very much breathed new life into it. And then made himself the negative speed force, counterbalancing Barry's light and becoming the dark aspect of the very fabric keeping the multiverse together.

Of course their dynamic is not present in all Flash comics - it very much depends from the writer, and while Eobard's obsession towards Barry needs to be there to make the character work, the romantic subtext (or text, because sometimes it's very much in the text even if subtly) is not present. But the main canon continuity so far has been pretty consistent, and everybody say thank you Joshua Williamson especially, for consolidating it.

[gorogues]

one-rogue-army replied to your text post: I believe they made the point that Iris had just been murdered, so Barry was grasping at straws to make sure no-one else suffered at villains' hands. Since merely locking up the Rogues wasn't making them stop being supervillains... he went with much more drastic measures. Doesn't absolve Barry, though.

The justification was more about Roscoe possessing his dad, and I actually understand that motivation, but Johns also stuck in retcons that Roscoe violently attacked Patty Spivot and the Allens right afterwards, and then tried to dig up Iris' grave....so, that was notably worse than the original story about him simply possessing Henry Allen after Henry had died.  And I generally sympathize with Barry in this situation because he didn't have a lot of options.

Of course, Barry may not have felt he'd had to do all that if Johns hadn't stuck in retcons to make Roscoe significantly more horrible.  So this comes back again to Johns' dislike of Roscoe + lots of retcons.

one-rogue-army replied to your text post: @gorogues -- so Geoff Johns vs. Roscoe, is like Tom and Mary Bierbaum vs. 1/3rd or so of the LSH?

Kinda, yeah.  Johns did increase his powers significantly so he clearly wanted to make Roscoe a good foe, but he seemingly wanted to make him a foe of the Rogues as well as of the Flash.  We all remember that the Rogues had somewhat mixed feelings but were mostly sorry when Roscoe died, and then he didn't really interact with them on-panel for a very long time, not until Johns' run...and when he returned, they were extremely hostile to him and he acted weird towards them. (By 'weird' I mean that he was hostile to them but also still wanted to be part of the group, which he expressed in unhealthy ways like trying to take leadership.  But it's clear he wanted to be part of them again with his comments about how he's part of Hartley's family, and "I deserve to be here"...he was just expressing it very, very badly instead of admitting he'd made mistakes). 

That mutual hostility mostly came out of nowhere, as pre-Crisis Roscoe was a fairly friendly guy and got along with the others pretty well, and Johns just started adding retcons to suddenly make the Rogues hate him and him into an unpleasant jerk.  That didn't have to happen, so that's why I've always been salty about Johns' comment that Roscoe deserved to be murdered when he (Johns) had started writing him that way.  It's like he slated Roscoe to be the group's asshole and then killed him for it.

And then that hostility bled into the fandom, meaning it isn’t always a comfortable place to be a Top fan :\

sammysdewysensitiveeyes replied to your text post: Owen really got the short end of the stick (story-wise) in Blackest night. Can we not have two Captain Boomerangs (or two Tricksters) without making one suffer?

Yeah, I'd love to know why DC felt there couldn't be two of them at once.  One could retire or take on another identity!  But maybe they were looking for angst and didn't want to have a father-son relationship happening, even though that'd be a great example of a living legacy.

sammysdewysensitiveeyes replied to your text post: Also totally agree about the retcon with the Top. It's a lot less meaningful to have those redemption arcs be "brain-washing."

It very much is.  I think it's a bit strange that Johns did it towards the end of his run, so he didn't even truly get to play with the idea of making the Rogues scary again if that's what he'd really wanted.  And he seems to have realized what kind of genie he'd let out of the bottle by having the Rogues be overtly bad while written by writers who didn't really care about them, so he walked it back a bit later by having Hartley say that James was just pretending to be back with the Rogues.  But the damage was done, and as noted earlier that retcon was Williamson's reasoning for making James evil in 'The Greatest Trick Of All' arc.  The genie really won't go back in.

belphegor1982 replied to your text post: In hindsight, the Piper & Trickster bit of CDtoIC was... very Not Great. Like, make a character who was totally fine with his friend being out suddenly homophobic? Check. Queerbait the whole run? Check. Fridge the character before he gets a chance to do more than hint at being bicurious? Check. The only good things in that mess were JJ's hand puppets and Piper's awesome Queen moment.

Nothing was great in Countdown :]  That whole project was such a colossal misfire, and best forgotten.  I don't even mind James' recent dismissal of it as "I faked my death", because who can blame him for wanting to get out of Countdown?