#sorry this is so long omg jgkldfjlhgfd

[jostenneil]

Hi, what has happened since Barry returned that made you dislike him? Or rather, do you dislike him?

i don't think i dislike HIM him it's more that i dislike what editorial has made of him and how they've used him to regress so much of the canon that was built prior to his resurrection. i think the harms of flashpoint are pretty obv but what's also frustrating is having to sort of do this whole backtrack to where wally has to work to reestablish himself when he already did that after barry died. moving out of barry's shadow and establishing his own legacy was a huge part of waid's flash run and that slowly started being worked back when johns came onto the book and decided to start centering barry as a primary figure in wally's internal conflicts. that's not to say that i think barry should never be present in stories about wally, but i think there was a difference in wally looking up to barry and seeing him as inspiration and guidance versus being brought back into the shadow of wondering whether he would ever be as good enough as barry when waid wrote concrete arcs to tackle that very notion. additionally what i think made that new direction worse is that it involved johns heavily emphasizing upon barry being a cop and doing the things that cops have to do, like use lethal force, or stand strong with your fellow cops even if they're doing something wrong, which. . . was just all around very unpleasant to read about. barry's role as a police scientist wasn't so heavily emphasized in his original flash run from what little of it i remember like it was just a job that he did and that gave him some good background on science matters but it wasn't really used to ground his personality or his morals, esp since he wasn't even a real cop, he was just the guy who worked in the lab with evidence. he was for the most part a good guy at heart who cared about his family and about saving people. and even with the arc where he killed reverse flash, his decision and whether he could have handled the situation differently was brought into question, which to me stands in really stark contrast with the way barry's choices were depicted by johns and the identity crisis tie-in stuff. aside from that, i also just think the implications of flashpoint on his character are. really bad lol. like i know rebirth retconned it to say that oh no abrakadabra is actually the reason why these people disappeared! but it's incredibly lazy (not to mention proves just how lost flash writers would be without mark waid bc they LOVE to reuse his stuff and somehow mutilate it instead of coming up with anything original) and i think it also just felt very jarring next to what wally had been built into as the flash bc like, so much of his run was about selflessness and how you can't put your own trauma or fears above the greater good. but here we have barry more or less shifting the whole fabric of time bc he goes back to save his mom WHO WAS GIVEN AN ENTIRELY NEW HISTORY JUST TO MAKE FLASHPOINT HAPPEN. like the whole of it is just so contrived and i think it really drives in just how much johns was stuck in the past and on highlighting barry again to the point that he was willing to destroy anything and everything that had made the flash mythos enjoyable in the two decades since before he took over. and within context of rebirth it's just esp shitty how flashpoint's consequences are used to make wally go psycho to the point of killing other mentally ill people, which they then had to retcon THAT as well in the recent flash annual bc the reception of it was so bad

so tldr i don't necessarily hate hate barry i just think his resurrection has done more harm than good over the years and that he was more likeable and easier to admire when he was still dead