#than actually developing this dynamic or even them as interesting individual characters.......whack.

[longitudinalwaveme]

Worst Flash Storylines and Plot Ideas of All Time

As you’ve probably ascertained from the general contents of this blog, the Flash is my favorite comic book series. I love the characters and most of the stories. However, just like any series that’s been around for eighty years (counting the Jay Garrick stuff), the Flash does, unfortunately, have some truly terrible stories and plot ideas. 

In terms of terrible plot ideas that didn’t completely ruin the surrounding stories: 

1. Barry Allen uses the Mirror Master’s mirrors to manipulate Iris into agreeing to start dating him again (Flash #109). Creepy, Barry. Just creepy. The story is great Silver Age fun otherwise. 

2. Iris West: meanest woman alive. Iris was, by and large, incredibly awful to Barry up until maybe about a year before their 1966 marriage. Almost every time she shows up in an early Silver Age issue, you will admire her daring and independence (this is good) and be bewildered as to why on Earth Barry would want to spend time with a woman who is constantly calling him slow, lazy, and ambition-less (this is not good). It doesn’t really affect any one issue too much, but when read in a conglomerate, she starts looking really awful. Although as bad as Early Silver Age Iris seems as a romantic interest, she’s got nothing on Silver Age Superman and Lois Lane, the most dysfunctional couple in the DCU. 

3. Wally West’s zero-effort code name and costume (Flash #110). It really could not be more obvious how little effort the writers were putting into creating this character. The duplicate origin is also pretty cheesy, but there are enough differences from Barry’s origin for it not to frustrate me. But the name “Kid Flash” and the fact that his first costume was literally identical to Barry’s just feel incredibly lazy. Barry and Wally do have an adorable dynamic in the issue, though, so it’s by no means all bad. 

4. Barry Allen waiting an entire year after his marriage to tell his wife that he’s really the Flash. Frustrating and unnecessary; especially since Joan Garrick had been in on her husband’s secret since the 1940s. 

5. Iris Allen is FROM THE FUTURE. I both love and hate this idea. It’s so perfectly comic-booky, but at the same time, it opened the floodgates for the Allen family being a confusing, time-displaced mess. 

6. The Trial of Barry Allen. This one’s weird. I like many of the individual issues in this arc, and I actually think the last two issues are really great as an ending for Barry Allen’s original run, but this storyline dragged on for waaaaaay too long. There’s a reason I call it the Arc that Never Ends. Also, the titular trial is actually the least interesting part of the entire storyline. His battles with the Rogues and Kadabra are far more interesting. 

7. Wally West’s borderline creepy, chauvinistic attitude towards women under Mike Baron (and, to a much lesser extent, William Messner-Loebs). There’s being a hormonal twenty-something, and then there’s going through girlfriends at the rate other people change their socks. Messner-Loebs mostly avoided this issue by making it clear that Wally was under intense psychological stress that was negatively impacting his behavior, but under Baron and in some of his JLE appearances, he comes across as a real creep around women. 

8. Kadabra overkill under Mark Waid: I like Kadabra, but when he’s the main villain in like four distinct arcs, it gets to be a bit much. It’s like modern Eobard. He is legitimately written well, though, so he doesn’t drag down any of the stories too much. 

9. Pointlessly Dead Rogues: Killing off the Rogues in Underworld Unleashed for no good reason (the rest of the story is great, especially the Trickster). 

10. Pointlessly Dead Rogues 2: Electric Boogaloo: The Golden Glider’s pointless death to build up a character who was himself killed two issues later. (The rest of the story is decent.) Also, the treatment of Lisa in general post-Crisis is frustrating, since she becomes considerably more unhinged than she was before. 

11. Any time Waid tried to write McCulloch, with the exception of Flash vol. 2 #105 (and even there, he seemed off). It’s like he forgot Evan wasn’t Sam. 

12. Apparently, the Top trying to blow up both Central City and half the world makes him a loser? Also, he suddenly hates Piper for no readily apparent reason. (At least the story had some good Piper and Wally bits.) 

13. BARRY ALLEN HAS A SECRET EVIL TWIN! DUN DUN DUN! (The rest of the story, where we get to meet a whole whack of interesting future Flashes, is actually pretty good, but whoo boy, the Malcolm reveal feels like it came straight out of a soap opera.) 

14. In order for Captain Cold to ANGST, the Golden Glider’s pointless death remained in place for over ten years. It did give us a really, really good Capt. Cold story, at least...but it’s still fridging. 

15. Rainbow Raider’s mean-spirited murder by Blacksmith. Poor Roy. 

16. Albert Desmond becomes Hannibal Lecter, only twenty times as rude, for a Gotham Central arc that would’ve been terrific without him as the main villain. 

17. Owen Mercer is an idiotic child murderer and gets killed by the Rogues. Why was this necessary? (The rest of Blackest Night: The Flash is pretty good.) 

18. Josh Jackam-Mardon’s murder. The murder of small children for shock value is pretty gross. Especially since nothing was ever really done with it. 

19. Barry’s PARENTS ARE DEEEEAAAAD! (Okay, it’s really just his mom, but still. This is a very frustrating retcon, since originally his parents were alive and well until after his own death.) 

20. Albert Desmond was Barry’s jerk coworker; which never impacted the plot or led to anything. As a result, it’s just another frustrating retcon. 

21. Sam Scudder murdered someone before becoming the Mirror Master. Yet another Johns retcon that never went anywhere and only serves to darken the Silver and Bronze Age stories after the fact. 

22. Flashpoint (a decent story) wiped out a whole bunch of characters I really liked from existence for several years. Evan McCulloch’s still not back. 

23. Giving the Rogues metahuman powers doesn’t suit them, on the whole. They work better without them. 

24. Roy’s second pointless, brutal death in (I think) Forever Evil. 

25. IT WAS MEEEEE, BARRY! After serving as the main villain for like six arcs in eight years, I’m glad that Eobard finally seems to be getting a rest. The level of bad things he was responsible for was getting ridiculous. 

26. Sam/Lisa. WHY? (The only time it even kind of worked was in Forever Evil.) 

In terms of entire storylines I didn’t like: 

1. The Flash: The Most Terribly Written Man Alive. Poor Bart is aged up with no adequate explanation, loses all the traits that made him a likeable character, fights some awful villains, and then is murdered by the badly OOC Rogues. Meanwhile, Inertia goes from an at least somewhat sympathetic villain to a complete psychopath with little explanation, a murder is retconned into one of Captain Cold’s reformed periods, the Pied Piper and the Trickster completely forget that they’re supposed to be reformed, Abra Kadabra inexplicably teams up with the Rogues despite generally being a solo operative, and all of the Rogues act like total morons, willingly following a teenage speedster for no adequately explained reason. UGH. 

2. Countdown to Infinite Crisis: Even though Piper and Trickster were probably the best part of Countdown, that isn’t saying much. Both of them are uncharacteristically stupid (especially James), and James is a grade-A jerk to Piper for no reason. Also, both of them continue to forget that they reformed, and then James gets brutally murdered and Piper almost loses his mind. Also, the other Rogues cameo, and continue to act like idiots. Countdown: it really does ruin everything it touches. 

Superboy Prime will kill you! He’ll kill you to DEATH! And after you read Countdown, you’ll wish he had killed you to death. 

3. The Identity Crisis Tie-In Retcon: So, you know all that awesome character development the Rogues have had over the years? Well, forget all that, because it was all just Roscoe brainwashing them! Which was something he could definitely do before this story! And why did he do this? Why, because Barry Allen, one of the most upstanding men in the DCU, brainwashed him! Also, apparently, the Top had a huge bodycount that we never heard about back in the Bronze Age, because we need even MORE grimdark retcons for our cheerful Silver/Bronze Age history! I like Geoff Johns’ work, I really do....but BOY HOWDY does he need to lay off on the retcons sometimes. 

4. Identity Crisis: With the exception of Owen’s introduction and the establishment of the relationship between him and Digger, this story was pretty awful all around. More specifically, as far as the Flash was concerned, it was responsible for Digger’s second pointless death. It also killed off poor Jack Drake and poor, mistreated Sue Dibney, who deserved MUCH better. And the Justice League, including Barry, are A-OK with brainwashing, apparently. Comics are fun! 

These last two stories are pretty recent, and they did have some parts I liked, but on the whole I felt they also belonged on the list. 

5. The Trickster finally returns! Hurrah! Except it turns out that he’s way more like the Joker now than he ever was before, and he mind-controls the city in a super-creepy way. A very disappointing return for the character, especially since it was set up really well. 

6. Forever Evil: Captain Cold becomes a murderous dictator with a stupid Santa Beard, all of the Rogues get horrible costumes, and Sam completes his mutation into Evan-in-all-but-name. There are some good characters bits in the story (even for Cold), but on the whole, I found the story to just be unlikeable and depressing and thought Cold was pretty out-of-character. Poor Commander Cold....

So, what are your least favorite Flash storylines and plot ideas? 

#flash comics #flash rogues #dc comics

[mcdannomoment]

finale feelings

Okay, I have a ton of feelings about the finale, and now that I’ve had some time to think them through, I’ll write them. Please be kind, I’ve seen the series once only, I’m really tired, and I’m sure this was all said before.

Okay firstly let’s just put aside Catherine as a character in and of herself… that whole thing made no sense. Catherine never showed an inkling of having the sort of skills to decode anything, much less being one of only two people in the world who could decode a thing. That was silly and just an excuse to get her back on Steve’s radar. Not to mention that Catherine just never showed much interest in Steve. I’ll come back to Catherine later as she stands as an external prop for Steve’s character, but I think we can just leave it here that Catherine’s character, for herself, made 0 sense.

Let’s focus on Steve.

Steve broke my heart this episode. The worst part is that I don’t think what he did was actually OOC. Steve has a pretty long and uncomfortable history of putting his own needs over Danny’s, starting from when he first met him and forced him to be his partner. I get where Steve was coming from, but this whole army commander take what I need for the mission attitude is the whole problem. Consulting Danny even as a courtesy never entered Steve’s mind.

(more below cut)

Steve just does this with Danny continually throughout the series, like leaving him with a letter to run off chasing Shelburne. Again, he doesn’t bother even consulting Danny as a courtesy before he leaves. He has an objective, Danny doesn’t fit that objective except to keep his seat warm in 5-0. He honestly just never gives Danny even basic autonomy, from things like choosing his lunch for him right through to putting him in situations he’s not comfortable with. Sometimes Steve pushing Danny is definitely a good thing since Danny does get paralyzed by fear (the incident where Steve pushed Danny into jumping across the building gap springs to mind; if they hadn’t have done that they would have died) but sometimes it’s just more of Steve has an objective to achieve, and Danny is a means to achieve that objective (the skydiving incident).

I don’t mean to slam Steve’s character, and I’ve known quite a lot of people like this! They’re good people, they just need a lot more emotional development. Between the two of them I think Danny’s a lot more emotionally mature and empathetic, and they’re quite good for each other in many ways. But Steve is very selfish, in the sense that his focus is always on himself. What he wants, what his objective is, how the things around him make him feel. With where Steve’s head is at, I don’t think he fully and completely understands Danny as an individual human being with his own needs. Hell, he even bullies Danny into including him in his retirement plan and abandoning said retirement plan.

With Steve’s focus always within his own head, and the people around him established as tools he can use to achieve his own ends, I can really start to understand Steve’s severe control issues in season 10 in particular. His mother dying was what sealed his fate, really. I think it was really the first time a person close to Steve fully used their own initiative and choice to go against what Steve said, and Steve trying to force his mother to do what he wanted and become a controllable force in his self-directed life ended up getting her killed. And that screwed him up badly. I don’t think he fully processed his role in his mother’s death properly. He ends up dumping Danny, who is really the love of his life, saying he needs time for himself, that he’d spent a decade saving everyone else. In reality I think Steve is just spiralling from loss of control. He tries to regain some control by cutting out the more unpredictable variables: the other people in his life.

Then Danny gets kidnapped and tortured. This is obviously devastating for Steve, because Danny really is the love of his life. And Steve kind of loses it, but he loses it in a very interesting way. Steve gives up all control to Daiyu Mei. He doesn’t even entertain not letting her control the situation. Danny’s been in danger before, but Steve has never given up control so completely like this before.

Steve’s really broken by this. And it’s the hardest he’s ever taken Danny getting hurt. Because I think he’s less broken by Danny getting hurt as much as it is leftover trauma from his mother’s death and spiralling loss of control.

He winds up leaving Danny when Danny can hardly move and must have only just been released from the hospital, and isn’t that a dick move. He claims he’s going to “find himself” but I think he’s just running away from people in order to regain a sense of control. He can’t control other people. He couldn’t control Danny being taken or his mother making the choices she did in Mexico. If he’s alone, he can gain full control over the situation.

And Danny? Well, Steve sort of has him trapped. Danny can’t leave - he has a son, it’s implied Steve gave him his dog to look after and possibly his house, and while he’s injured Danny can’t go and get himself into dangerous situations that Steve feels the need to save him from. Danny sort of becomes an ornament in Steve’s home ready to welcome him when he comes back. Steve’s been on record several times being pretty aggressive about Danny staying in Hawaii, but he’s never shown remorse for leaving himself, and he doesn’t here.

I hate to characterise Danny as Steve’s “wife” but that’s the dynamic I get from them. You see it so often in married couples, particularly married couples where the husband has to travel for work, whether that’s military, mining, corporate, trucking, what have you. The husband has his goal, his life, and he sees his wife as someone to support that and make it happen. This is exactly what happened in my own family, as I had a travelling father. His need to fulfil himself drove him away again and again, and my mother, trapped where she was by children and the obligations her husband abandoned her to deal with, was left to clean up his mess. It’s what happens when the husband is selfish in the way Steve is - the emotionally more mature wife has to clean up the parts of his life he won’t deal with. In Steve’s case Danny is left with a bullet hole, a dog, a house full of ghosts, and a lot of mourning friends. Not to mention the kids Steve abandons. And there must be more too. Steve leaves a week after Danny is shot. That really doesn’t leave much time for Steve to get his affairs in order. I think he left Danny to clean up his emotional mess.

Minus the bullet hole, I’ve seen my mother go through very similar things. And it can destroy your sense of self. You end up living for the ghost of your husband as he pursues what he perceives as his destiny. It’s a really shitty thing but it’s so common. Every family I know with a travelling husband ended up like this.

Back to Catherine. As established Catherine as her own character makes no sense at all. But Catherine’s role in the finale as an extension of Steve’s character does make some sense. Steve is running away from his stable family, the love of his life, his role as a parent to Nahele, Grace, and Charlie - he’s running from all the progress he has made, because he is afraid of losing control the way he did when he lost his mother, and when Danny was taken from him. Catherine is safe. She’s Steve’s easy emotional release and fuck buddy. She’s familiar. And she’s basically Steve’s mother. A flaky CIA agent who always picks the job over Steve is far more familiar and therefore comforting to him than a stable family life with Danny. In his panic Steve runs from all the progress he has made back to Catherine.

It actually reminds me a lot of a wonderful fic I read, the love that you gave by Teeelsie. I never thought I’d read a cheating fic, let alone a McDanno cheating fic, because McDanno is my all time OTP, but this fic was highly recommended and wow, did it nail it. The fic is more about Steve’s internalised homophobia, but I think the way it relates to the show is in how Steve panics and goes back to the familiar. Back to Catherine. It’s a common thing just in life. It’s also extremely common for these travelling husbands that I think characterise Steve to be cheating on their wives, too. Now I’m just pretending Catherine wasn’t there, because it makes no sense for her to be there (jfc, she wasn’t a codebreaker and how did she know he would be on the plane anyway, and was she just sitting in transit in Honolulu waiting for Steve to get on the plane like a stalker) but I think there’s an element of “emotional cheating” to what Steve’s going through when he runs away from the emotional risk that is staying with Danny at the end.

So basically I don’t think Steve running off was OOC. I think it was very in character. What was so frustrating was that the story clearly isn’t over. Running away will not solve Steve’s many issues, and he really does need Danny - and Danny needs him. Steve desperately needs to learn to stop being so selfish and see Danny and the others as full and complete human beings with their own complex needs. It’s tough because Steve pushing Danny was very good for Danny in many respects, so I want to see them learn to thread that line where Danny doesn’t get treated like an emotional doormat, but he also isn’t allowed to just retreat to the safety of familiarity all the time either - he needs a little McGarrett magic in his life!

But after what Danny told Steve when they were stuck in the building collapse, it’s going to be hard for them after this. Danny doesn’t have to look at Steve and imagine him leaving him any longer. Danny now has the memory of it.

tl;dr Steve is a whacked out, certifiable control freak.

#hawaii five 0 #h50 #mcdanno #steve mcgarrett #danny williams #meta #sorry for word vomit #you've probably heard all this before #i'm new okay

[sugrmottas]

what actually are your glee ships?

short answer is everything, more or less. i’m too much of a multishipper lmao

long answer is under the cut.

here are my preferred endgames:

rachel: jesse/rachel, but in an entirely different way than it unfolded in the show??? also they’d get together pretty far into their twenties/maybe even early thirties vs. rachel being 21 and jesse being 23.

finn: i have an oc endgame for finn (had he lived) because i honestly don’t really see him working with anyone actually on the show. 

kurt: i do stick by my preference of adam/kurt (he needs to be someone more mature than him Honestly), but as time goes by i do find myself growing more and more fond of the adam/elliott/kurt ot3. i never quite got the appeal of any of kurt’s other ships (especially kurt/puck and kurt/karofsky) so that might be a factor there, admittedly.

mercedes: in the event that tike isn’t endgame, i do find myself pretty soft for mercedes/mike. they have such a great dynamic in s4 (that was dropped thereafter but that’s glee i Suppose) and it’s easy to see how it could grow into a romantic relationship between the two of them. they’d do friends to lovers so well. i’m endlessly fascinated by their potential. i have an oc endgame for her otherwise, because nobody else on this hellshow deserves mercedes jones.

tina: mike/tina was super undeveloped but also one of the healthiest relationships glee had so they’re automatically my endgame for them but as i delve more into the post-glee headcanons, idk. maybe not. if not mike, i’d probably end up putting her with an oc. maybe a warbler, but lbr, all but blaine/kurt/sebastian/hunter count as ocs. sooooooooo

artie: honestly? idk. i’m v soft for artie/kitty but i enjoy artie so little as a character that i find it hard to pair him with anyone. 

quinn: i ship quinn with literally everything under the sun. i don’t think i have a stable endgame for her, but i always end up coming back around to pairing her with warbler wes. (kids born into ohio’s high society and forcing themselves to live up to impossible standards until they just can’t anymore is my LIFEBLOOD.)

santana: dani/santana. i think santana does need an intellectual equal to be fully satisfied in a relationship and as much as she loves brittany, she just… doesn’t hit the mark. and that’s okay. seriously. dani and santana kind of feed into each other’s prejudices (fuck your biphobia ladies) so they need to do a lot of growing together, but i think they’d do it well.

brittany: i don’t have a solid endgame for brittany just because i struggle to understand her character, which is my bad. i think if anything i’d have her in a polyamorous relationship (usually of 4, sometimes 3, rarely more) with a group of ocs - usually a warbler’s thrown in there (jeff more often than not) but the others are completely from scratch.

puck: puck/rachel has always owned my heart, so i feel it necessary to give them a shoutout here. but honestly, lauren/puck is just… so good. 

mike: mandatory callouts for mike/tina and mercedes/mike. i think for mike, mike/tina makes a lot more sense - she pushes him to challenge his father which is Huge, but i struggle to see where he’d challenge her. he’d support her to the end, but stops short of telling her to be more. i think there’s less of him holding back in his relationship with mercedes (they have a dynamic built on mutual respect, where mike and tina started hooking up behind tina’s boyfriend’s back), so i think i’m more partial to them here.

matt: i felt weird not including him but honestly matt/screentime

sam: blam, surprising nobody.

blaine: blam, surprising nobody. seblaine’s a Big secondary ship, though.

sugar: warbler nick fuck y’all crusty bitches who don’t give a shit about boys if they ain’t gay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

rory: ??? idk man, rory deserved better than this hellshow.

joe: i have an oc endgame for him!

marley: jake/marley/ryder. jake and marley date for-freaking-ever (fuck the cheating storyline), breaking up when the time comes for college - jake gets an insane scholarship to julliard while marley’s staying in ohio. who else is staying in ohio? oh gee, ryder! so marley and ryder spend a Lot of time together, eventually begin dating, except there’s always a weird cloud of Jake hanging above them. jake ends up dropping out of julliard and drops off the map for a while and eventually jake’s mom calls ryley begging them to try and help find her baby because they were His People and even though they haven’t spoken to jake in nearly three years, they go because of course they do. there’s a Lot more to this story, but i’m trying to keep this short so: they find jake in new york eventually, in with the entirely wrong crowd and end up staying in the city (in blaine and sam’s apartment which is too small for the two of them let alone all five) to try and help him recover/through his withdrawals (they do long-distance schooling because blaine mother hens the shit out of them and refuses to let them fuck up their hard work just because jake’s struggling) and a few years laterrrr they’re all together.

jake: read above

ryder: read above

kitty: artie/kitty. also v partial to kitty/warbler thad. i just like putting the second generation of new directions with warblers oKaY

unique: i honestly. do not know. i love unique but have such a flimsy grasp on her character (probably because i hate alex) that i just never know what the fuck i’m doing with her post-canon?????? probably an oc, though.

i feel like the 3rd generation pairs itself up nicely (alistair/spencer, jane/mason) and don’t have too much of an idea of madison and roderick’s endgames (not each other, fuck y’all crusty bitches not being able to come up with unique endgames for them when they clearly weren’t super into each other) sooo uh END SECTION

i mentioned various secondary endgames above, but here are my big midgame ships.

rachel: finchel (uh fuck canon), pezberry (uh fuck canon x2), samchel, puckleberry (idk how i feel about canon here).

finn: finchel, fuinn strictly in the sense of “i don’t ship them romantically but view them as integral to each of their individual development”.

kurt: klaine. also ngl i’m vaguely interested in what Could have happened with chandler/kurt but i don’t think i ship it much.

mercedes: samcedes, idk their ship name but mercedes/shane was also a good ship, you guys are just mean.

tina: tartie. also the older i get, the more i lowkey ship sam/tina tbh.

artie: tartie, quartie.

quinn: fuinn, quick, quam, quartie. also it’s Mostly a crackship but st. fabray kind of??? appeals to me??? also quinntana and faberry but there’s so much meta there that idk if i ship them or just find them incredibly interesting

santana: brittana, pezberry, quinntana. 

brittany: brittana, bram (quinn and sam are kind of my shipping bicycles pls help).

puck: quick. also the age-difference was super whack, but i’d be interested in him and kitty dating when she’s, you know, legal.

mike: personal headcanon is that mike’s demisexual but biromantic, so i don’t do a lot of casual shipping with him. i’ve been playing with the concept of him going on a few dates with a male oc when they’re in college, though idk if it’s a Big thing yet.

matt: MATT/SCREENTIME

sam: samcedes, quam, bram, samchel, sam/tina (sina? tam? ew).

blaine: klaine. also i’ll be honest, the concept of a bi!blaine is super interesting to me (i cried when biota aired lmao) and if it was Ever a thing, i’d ship blaine/brittany/sam so hard.

sugar: rory/sugar, artie/sugar, a bunch of idiot men/sugar.

rory: rory/sugar. also i have a weird thing where i think he and marley would be super close but idk if it’s in a ship way or best friends??? sos

joe: i know it was never super developed, but i was kinda soft for joe/quinn ngl.

marley: n/a??? idk she’s a v first love/last love kind of girl.

jake: jake/kitty.

ryder: i have a Thing for ryder/tina and i don’t understand it but blake and jenna had some Super Cute moments so i blame them. also i’m adding ryder to the list of “members of new directions 2.0 randomly dating warblers”, this time the lucky warbler being an oc soooo SRY

kitty: jake/kitty. jitty? i feel like they had a ship name.

unique: n/a???

and then there’s notp’s, of which i have one: k*rtsofky :) also k*rley is…kinda gross lads. also s*btana just let thm b gay!!!

#SPICY OPINIONS UNDER THE CUT #jk i'm super boring #asks #Anonymous