#and then stubbornly double down when len told her she’d give it up within the week

[qlala]

I love your posts on religion and assigning faith to chargers, I think it's awesome and a great idea. Also, RE vegetarian Barry- how, if at all, does that effect his diet once he becomes the Flash? Asking anon because I'm worried the answer is simple and I just didn't use my brain enough

oh thank you! and listen i used my brain about one percent making that post so no need to worry about that. this is the first time i’m considering the powers thing tbh!

my first instinct is that being a strict vegetarian would definitely make it a lot harder for barry to hit all the nutritional needs his powers require once he becomes the flash, right? they brush past it pretty fast in s1, and mainly drop it in later seasons, but we know barry needs like 6x as much energy as before just to get through the day, as soon as he gets his powers

and i’m always interested in poking at the ways becoming the flash makes barry’s life harder, since the show doesn’t give barry a lot of chances to resent his powers as much as i think he realistically would (he clearly doesn’t feel like he can give them up, too many people are counting on him, but they’re the reason his parents and several other friends are dead, and eobard’s time travel that set s1 into motion made it so that barry was saddled with the powers earlier than he was ever supposed to be)

so, i’m intrigued by the vegetarian thing as one of those parts of his before-flash life that his powers would interfere with! following the show’s season 1, i think the first person who would really have an issue with it wouldn’t even be barry, it would be eobard-as-harrison-wells. since i pitched it as a response to nora’s death, eobard changed the timeline when he killed her, that means the older version of barry he knew in the future wouldn’t have been a vegetarian

and tbh he’d probably think “this version of barry has been a vegetarian for 12 years because i killed his mother” was actually really funny while barry was in the coma (he succeeded in making barry’s life a little more miserable in an extra unintended way!), and then i think it would stop being funny around the third time barry passed out mid-flash training from low blood sugar, and would become deeply, deeply annoying to eobard instead

(on top of slowing down his progress, eobard is definitely the kind of person who finds being a vegetarian inherently annoying—and, as i type that, i’m realizing leonard snart is definitely also one of those people, which is extremely funny to the part of my brain that is always looking for coldflash angles, but not the point here)

so anyway, i could definitely see eowells really leaning into s1 barry’s trust in both harrison wells and science to try to get barry to give it up, a very “time to grow up and put away childish things” type of approach. like, lecturing him with steadily increasing impatience about energy density and the food chain, and asking what happens if he passes out in public and someone pulls of his mask, or kills him, or kills barry was trying to save? do you think that’s what your mother would have wanted? for you to let others die just so you can keep punishing yourself for her death? right, cisco and caitlin?

except i think cisco and caitlin, especially in season 1, have very low tolerance for things that really upset barry, especially when they think wells is being unfairly harsh, so i think the two of them would definitely put their heads together and come up with a high-energy, plant-based protein bar behind wells’s back rather than watch him work barry up into angry tears for the third time that week. and eobard would have to give it up then, so i think that would be the issue basically settled!