#flynn is a mess of a character but inserting him into canon can be so interesting if you do it right

[queenofthursday6599-blog]

You know as much as I hate Flynn Fenton it would have been interesting if the backstory Hartman proposed in that lame video was true, and he did exist in the canon timeline. Just because of how the math works out and how it would have affected the show’s story.

Because if he did exist in canon, we the viewers and Danny would have encountered, met, and learned about what happened to Flynn without anyone ever mentioning him, or Danny even encountering him in the Ghost Zone as Exodus*.

*Which is another dumb thing I hate and I’m getting rid of. No Exodus only Flynn.

The thing is that Flynn is 8 years older than Danny. Danny got his powers at age 14, which is the same year as his parents and Vlad’s 20 year collage reunion. Flynn would have been 22 at the time Danny got his powers.

Meaning he would have been alive, well, and 2 years old at the point of the proto-portal accident that turned Vlad half-ghost.

Implying one thing:

Flynn is biologically just Maddie’s kid, from a previous relationship back in her hometown, where Flynn is staying with her family while she goes to collage. [Flynn’s green eyes, the fact that he’s nowhere to be seen at the collage.] She meets both Vlad and Jack at the same time and become friends, and she and Jack eventually start dating and get married after collage, and Jack adopts Flynn as a Fenton.

Vlad and Jack were roommates, and Jack is the kind of man to never shut up about his kids in canon unless he’s ranting about ghosts. So if Flynn was Jack’s kid by blood, Vlad would have known about him, and Jack’s relationship with Maddie with in an hour of knowing him.

I also don’t think Jack and Vlad would have been roommates if Jack was already with Maddie in some kind of capacity before collage. So Jack can’t be Flynn’s biological father.

So if Flynn existed in canon, we and Danny would be introduced to Flynn, even if indirectly, in the episode Masters of All Time. Where Danny goes back in time to change the proto-portal accident, and stop Vlad from becoming a Halfa, leading to Jack becoming a Halfa instead, and Vlad and Maddie end up married.

Remember Flynn would already exist and be 2 years old by the time of the proto-portal accident, irregardless of the accident itself and who ends up half dead in the aftermath of it. So in a timeline where Jack ends up as Jack Plasmius and Maddie ends up as Maddie Masters, Flynn is still in the picture irregardless.

Danny would have at the very least encountered pictures of a redheaded green eyed boy, teen, and eventual adult scattered through out Vlad’s castle. He would have heard about Flynn going off to collage, about Vlad adopting Flynn as Flynn Masters after he and Maddie married.

About Flynn being born from before his mom met Jack or Vlad, meaning he would be his (Danny) and Jazz’s older half brother. Who Danny had no idea even existed for some reason.

Heck, Flynn could have very well been home visiting, or live at home with Maddie and Vlad. Or Vlad or Maddie could have called him back home after a strange young boy showed up on their doorstep calling Maddie mom.

Danny could have physically met Flynn, could have even found himself enjoying his company. Finding things in common with this strange older boy, who was supposed to be in his life, but isn’t for some reason. Things that Flynn did that reminded Danny of himself, reminded him of Jazz.

Maybe it’s Flynn who believes Danny when he says he comes from a parallel timeline, and he accepts this nervous kid as his baby brother. Maybe it’s not Maddie or Jack who tell Danny he has to fix the timeline back to how it used to be, it’s Flynn.

Because how could Maddie ask this boy she barely knows, even if he is her son from another timeline, to change the timeline. From one where she knows that her first born son, the only child she’d gotten to have in this life, is safe and healthy, and if not happy is at least alive. And change it to one where no one knows what happened to him, and she’s gone so far as to hide his very existence from her youngest son.

Even if she’s somehow, in spite of the loss of her oldest son deliriously happy and in love with her husband, doing what she loves. Even if she has a daughter she wants to meet, and a younger son she wants to get to know.

How could she trade the life of the child she’d loved and raised for 22 years, for a boy she barely knows, and the concept of a daughter? No matter how angry she is at Vlad for lying to her and manipulating her into staying with him for years, or how much of a missed opportunity everything with Jack feels like, she can’t bring herself to ask this strange boy who is also somehow her son to change anything at all.

Flynn who’s 22 years old and lived a life full of secrets and subterfuge looks this 14 year old kid in the face, who’s so obviously used to hiding things from everyone around him. And he says, “You do what you have to do to get things back to how they’re meant to be. Don’t worry about me Kid I’ll be fine, no matter what happens. You worry about yourself, and Jazz, and your friends. In that order, alright. Trust that I can handle myself, and we’ll find each other, alright.”

[”You shouldn’t tell Daddy about Mommy’s hobby Sweetie, he won’t like it. And well I’m not hurting anyone now am I?” as his mother toiled away for hours in a secret room he’d been asked to lie to his father about existing.

“Well Champ sometimes we have to keep things from the ones we love to protect them,” as his new (at the time) father burned the letters from an old collage friend named Fenton asking if he could meet up with his parents and talk.]

And when Danny, frantic, asks, “But what if we don’t? What if I never find you!?”

The red haired man smiles, shrugs and bitterly says, “Then that’s just how it’s meant to be. If you had to change the entire timeline for me to be here, then chances are I’m not where I’m supposed to be anymore than you are right now.”

So Danny does go back to the proto-portal incident, and makes sure Vlad Masters is the one hit by the portal. He learns the cause of ecto-acne and goes back to his original timeline. With the ecto-acne situation resolved Danny has something else he has to focus on.

What happened to Flynn, and how exactly was he going to find him and bring him home?

[I also like to imagine that Danny has a picture with the Flynn Masters version of Flynn. Something he shows Jazz when he inevitably confronts her about the whole “Older brother no one in the family thought I should know about” confrontation that would obviously happen at some point.

Danny can’t exactly confront their parents about Flynn, they have information on him locked down tighter than anything else in their life, and Danny didn’t even have a hint of Flynn’s existence before crossing into another timeline.

So trying to learn more about Flynn and possibly how he disappeared falls to Jazz in this case.]

[qqueenofhades]

I was (?) a Lyatt shipper who loved Flynn since S1 bc I love a good bad boy. I've been sympathetic to him since the 70s (ha!) when we found out about his wife and kid being murdered. So I found your blog and was loving all the Flynn stuff but I wasn't into Garcy. Thought "ew"--isn't he more like cool young uncle material for her? Fast forward to today and I have read every Garcy ff you have written and have fallen completely into the trash can. I know you prob hear this a lot lately...(1)

(2) but I wanted to thank you so much for writing The Tangled Web of Fate. What a masterpiece! You make the storyline in the same tone as canon somehow. You really have Flynn’s emotions and voice down pat. So good. Makes me believe in Garcy. In fact, makes me want Jessica and Logan to figure out their crap and that way everyone can be happy bc at this point I don’t want Jessica to be unhappy or go away either. Anyway, I went from Garcy sounds gross to GIVE ME MORE. So thanks?

(3) sorry. I feel panicked that we are running out of time (unoriginal pun) and might only get 5 more episodes and Flynn won’t get the full character development and happy ending he deserves. If it were up to you, would you give him a redemption arc and a happy ending or would you keep him as garbage boss? Also, dude is a full head taller than the industrial fridge in the bunker and they need to find a couch he can be comfy in. He looks like a giant living in a tiny house. My poor baby.

Ahaha. This delights me to no end, ngl. My powers are groooowing. And you have given me a lot to talk about here, so thanks. :)

Honestly, the people insisting on reading Garcy as familial/platonic/theorizing that Flynn is somehow Lucy’s son/they’re otherwise related are… very confusing to me? To say the least. Though to be totally frank, it’s often clearly by people who have an agenda in discrediting Garcy as a viable alternative to Lyatt (which they… probably don’t need to do, I mean for better or worse, the writers have made their preference/narrative direction clear. Alas). I obviously have no problem with people shipping whatever they want in whatever way they do, but… yeah, Garcy’s vibe ain’t platonic or familial (and if for some wild reason they DID end up Magically Related, like Flynn was somehow Lucy’s long-lost brother from an alternate universe or whatever, I wouldn’t stop shipping it, or even writing smut for it. I’d be like, “well writers, you got yourself into this with this far-fetched and illogical forced plot twist that does not fit with anything that has been written or acted beforehand, so I’m going to just go for Time Traveling Flowers in the Attic. Ooops?”) I’ve had plenty of posts with the way Flynn looks at/acts around Lucy (just saying, if my uncle looked at me like that, I would make sure never to be alone with him at family events) and the way she’s started to look back at him. And Goran Visnjic has straight up said that Flynn is “infatuated” with Lucy and we’ve had a lot of teasing about “does Flynn have a thing for Lucy” re: 2x06 that makes me wonder if we’re going to get some kind of more explicit confirmation of the way he feels about her. Goran has also encouraged us to read between the lines, so people can want it to be just a friendship (because they prefer another romantic partner for Lucy, and again, that’s fine, whatever) but he’s consciously acting it as a pretty romantic fascination. So yes. We aren’t just making that up.

Also, just saying, we KNOW who Flynn’s mom is, she’s a named and identified character, she appeared in an episode, Rittenhouse was originally sending Rufus, Lucy, and Assassin Goon to kill her in 1x15 with the aim of erasing Flynn from history. So “Flynn is Lucy’s son” is just… did you guys not notice Maria Thompkins? Who was awesome and I love her? Besides, if Flynn was Lucy’s son, she wouldn’t NEED time travel to meet him, and we know the journal is connected to new time tech (traveling on your own timeline). He couldn’t be anything less than her grandson and that would still be ludicrously complicated, as it would require Lucy to have Maria at some point while traveling in the past, then… straight up abandon her, then go back to her own timeline, then wait for Flynn to grow up, then travel back to meet him…. etc. It’s a mess. We know Flynn’s parents’ names (Asher Flynn and Maria Thompkins); hell, we know more about his family than we do about Wyatt’s. Why is no one theorizing that Wyatt is secretly Flynn and Lucy’s son? (I kid, I kid. But still. It makes about as much sense, if not more, which is to say it doesn’t.)

Anyway yes, I always felt like that was a pretty transparent attempt to make Garcy a non-romantic option in order to remove it as a shipper threat, but that doesn’t mean people can’t ship it as a friendship/brotp. I’m just saying, however, that it has been (at least certainly on Flynn/Goran’s end) played as a romantic thing, even if latent and unspoken and complicated. (Also, he went really quickly for the “honey…” and “what my wife failed to mention” lines in 1x11 and 2x04, so even if Flynn won’t admit it, he instinctively sees Lucy in some way as his wife.) So yes. Making them related would be a COMPLETELY illogical stretch, but… if they did that, yeah, I’d probably still ship it. (Shrug emoji.) Because I would recognize that the council had made a decision, but given as it was a stupid-ass decision, would elect to ignore it. (Insert Nick Fury gif here.)

Next, I am obviously glad that you are enjoying my fic and it has converted you to one of us. I started writing the Wyatt/Jessica stuff before she arrived back on the show and am rather pleased with how nicely it fits. Wyatt in canon needs a serious reality check, which I am hoping he gets. I obviously forgave Flynn for being a total fuckup and hurting everyone, I am absolutely willing to do the same for Wyatt, but he needs to have the “well shit I’ve been a selfish ass and am going to substantively make up for it” moment first. I hope the big finale moment is him finally owning up to his dickish behavior and putting everyone else first and otherwise reversing course. Because yeah. I’m judging.

Lastly, I WORRY ALL THE TIME ABOUT US GETTING CANCELLED AFTER THIS SEASON BECAUSE IT WOULD BE A TRAVESTY. A TRAVESTY. The short season has always hurt us narratively, though of course it’s great to get it, but then to cut it off there with no more space at all… god. It gives me the shudders just to think about. And one of the reasons is yes, give me my full redeemed-antihero Garcia Flynn redemption arc. Goran has talked a lot about how we’re seeing more of his real nature this season, and just yes. We saw throughout season 1 that Flynn hated to do a lot of what he was doing, but he did it anyway in the larger purpose of bringing down Rittenhouse (and nobody has yet acknowledged that he was right all along about them…we need more conversations/authentic character moments, guys, NOT SOAPY RELATIONSHIP DRAMA. JUST SAYING). He never really WANTED to be a garbage disaster, but he loved his wife and daughter more, and he was dedicated to taking Rittenhouse down to the point that he thought he couldn’t return to them even if he did save them. So no, he was not a character who was just out there burning shit down for the fun of it (though he does enjoy it in some ways, because… he’s a disaster). But Flynn’s character file in canon has him fighting in a lot of small-scale liberation wars (Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, etc) against occupying/oppressive regimes, and that’s basically what he’s doing with Rittenhouse. He is a good man with a very strong moral code, but also a very grey one. He has correctly identified the overall enemy and is dedicated to destroying them, but he won’t be the hero wringing his hands over it because “it’s not right” to use violence. Which the Time Team is leaning on themselves (they basically left Flynn in 1934 to be a hitman, so… no more judgey remarks about “he’s a killer” would be nice, guys. You know he is and you’re using that because you need it.)

So yes. Flynn doesn’t WANT to be a garbage disaster, so it would be cruel to keep him as one. He is sassy as hell, but he also seems happier working with the team than he ever really did alone (as Goran has also discussed). Again: MORE CONVERSATIONS!!! Did Flynn just see it as business in trying to take out the team before, since they were trying to stop him from taking down Rittenhouse, and now that they agree on who the threat is, he’s happy to work with them? Is Garcia “why do I even delegate” Flynn really trusting them (at least aside from Lucy, who he clearly does) to do what’s needed, or does he essentially think he still has to do it himself? DEVELOPMENT PLEASE!

I wanted Flynn to permanently join the team ever since 1x10 (as that episode threw me down the dumpster in SO many ways) so obviously, I want that to keep up. The 2x07 pic of him and Rufus clasping hands made me hella emotional (also: we still haven’t had a Flogan scene since Flynn arrived in 2x03 and Wyatt stormed out in a hissy fit…still judging for skipping the Messy Boys Trip in 2x05). I want him to be developed and integrated more into the team and made a part of them, because I’m a hopeless sucker for villain becomes weird family member and redeemed antihero and found family and enemies-to-lovers/enemies-to-friends. So yes. Please don’t screw it up, guys.

(Also yes. Yes, I noticed him being taller than the god damn fridge at the end of 2x05. He’s HUGE and it’s ridiculous.)