A dear friend of mine has a theory – she calls it The Highlander Theory – when it comes to women in media and how fans react to them. It boils down to a popular phrase from the series: “There can be only one.” That is, there can only be one special girl. Fans pick which girl they like – say, Blair, the underdog, or Serena, It-Girl – and make the other girls the enemy. It’s a little like the Queen Takes Pawn thing, except it’s proximity to men, especially on male-dominated shows, that makes one more valuable than the other. It’s why people like Mary Jane or Gwen Stacy, but rarely both. It explains the vitriol between all the fans of the women on Gossip Girl, and yes, it’s behind a lot of the ship wars on Arrowverse shows. Yes, The Flash can’t have more than two women on the show at one time, and Arrow kills them off or puts them in comas way too often, but fans exacerbate that mentality because women have been conditioned to believe only one girl can be on top.
It’s why some fans of Sansa hate Daenerys for slowly becoming the most important woman in Jon’s life, because heaven forfend Jon have love for his sister and his girlfriend-aunt. And why Felicity fans were happy that Iris didn’t seem to mind having her wedding hijacked despite the backlash – because it proved that even the creators acknowledged Felicity as the better girl – but were upset when it turned out Iris did mind and started calling her and the writers bad feminists. Because a friendship between two women is only valuable to fans if it benefits the favoured woman, so Smoakwest was worthless if Iris’ feelings didn’t validate Felicity’s actions. I won’t say anything about those fans thinking a Black woman can only be a feminist if she’s subservient and receptive to mistreatment from a white woman. At least, nothing much.
That’s exactly what’s going on with Snowbarrisco – fans want Caitlin to be the “only girl.” The only girl in on Barry’s secret. The only girl on the team. The only girl allowed to counsel Barry. She lost all those things when Iris learned the secret, when she joined the team, and as it became clear that Iris is the one whose voice Barry listens to the most – the other being Joe. This dynamic exists even without race – like OTA, for example, which we’ve already said is a transparent way of keeping out Laurel, Green Arrow characters, and any woman that threatens Felicity’s status – but the addition of it makes it even worse. Remember Vanessa on Gossip Girl? Yeah, she was part Black, and viewers knew it too – because they kept complaining about her hair, which gives away the fact that she isn’t fully white. Despite the fact that she never did anything objectively worse than other characters, she always got the most hate – not because she was part Black, but because her Blackness made her less relatable than the cadre of white women on the show, so they dismissed her.
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- Iris can’t be nice to Caitlin for reasons.
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- It’s bad that Iris helped Caitlin with Killer Frost because she’s not OTF, which tells me how much some of them actually care about Caitlin.
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- As early as the second episode, Snowbarry shippers have been bizarrely obsessed with making Iris the Alpha Bitch.
Despite the fact that they’ve convinced themselves that Iris is the mean Alpha Bitch who’s too good for Barry, their behaviour around Iris reveals a disgustingly juvenile Mean Girls attitude where they want to exclude Iris from everything, paint her as jealous, and desire Caitlin to get Barry so that the popular girl loses. It’s also one of the reasons that they don’t want Caitlin and Iris to be close friends – if they are, and everyone welcomes a new dynamic where Iris is friends with everyone, there’s no need for “Snowbarrisco” anymore on the writers’ part, and they can’t continue to pretend that Caitlin is suffering from being around Iris. Caitlin must be the only girl and Iris must be the outsider left out of the nerdy jokes and superheroics. #Feminism.
OTF/Snowbarrisco isn’t a demand to get Iris off the show. It’s a demand for the writers to indicate just how much more special Caitlin is than Iris. To emphasise that even though Barry says he wouldn’t be able to do this without Iris now, Caitlin is the girl who was there when the Flash was created. If Iris were gone, who would they lord Caitlin’s “special girl” status over? What would be the point of being the most important girl on the team if there weren’t some other, less important girl to show off to? What’s the point of being the underdog who won if the popular girl isn’t there to see your victory? It’s one of the reasons that for as many fans want Iris killed off so that Barry can fall in love with Caitlin, there are fans that want her there to witness Barry dumping her and going for Caitlin instead. I mentioned earlier that a lot of these fans sound like they’re still in high school, and it never becomes truer than when they’re talking about OTF.
And yeah, okay, maybe it’s just the Highlander, “there can be only one” thing. Sure, it looks bad that they don’t want Caitlin and Cisco to debase themselves in the act of being friends with Iris, the Black girl, but the white people are just dandy. Fine, yeah, it’s not amazing that people advocating for Original Team Flash/Snowbarrisco don’t want any of the Black people near Barry for too long or in the building for longer than they’re allowed. And yes, perhaps it’s not the best look in the whole world that on top of all of this, they already hold the Black people on the show to a higher standard. For some reason. But that doesn’t make it racist, does it?
Well, yes. Of course it does.
Not just because they want to diminish all the Black people (they still have their uses for Barry, as we’ll see), but because of where they want to send those Black people, how they talk about them and, surprisingly, how they treat Cisco Ramon.
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Love this! The research you put into this series is amazing and admirable. I wouldn’t be able to stomach all this nonsense but your receipts are epic. I’ve read think pieces on fandom racism before but what sets yours apart is all the proof from the fandom you include with it. Kudos!
This Original Team Flash crap couldn’t get any more transparent even if they tried. Everyone watching the show knows these character dynamics haven’t gone away. They’re just less emphasized. They’re just upset for the reasons you’ve stated especially not being able to gush about Barry and Caitlin standing beside each other and sharing ‘special looks’ hinting at a secret relationship between them. I’ve also noticed how some of them get angry that Iris isn’t jealous or threatened by the friendship between Barry and Caitlin. It literally pisses them off that she’s so confident in herself and her place in Barry’s life. That’s why she’s an Alpha Bitch to them.
It’s fine that people don’t ship KillerVibe (my crackship) romantically but the vehement replies you get when you reveal you ship them is over the top and unnecessary. They always go out of their way to shut us down even in our own threads. They can ship Caitlin with a happily married man but we can’t ship her with her actual bestfriend?!
Tbh I always roll my eyes when people argue about chemistry. Its kind if pointless. But I look forward to what you have in store next. I’ll be patiently waiting for more!
I absolutely love your work. As someone who at one point did ship Caitlin and Cisco and still loves their relationship this piece really got to me. Snowbarry shippers are all for letting people ship want they want until it comes to Caitlin and they tend to lash out at killervibe shippers more than any other shippers. Their reasons always crack me up cause you can apply them to sb or they’ll claim what Cisco does for Caitlin is actually what Barry does for her which is good enough reason to ship them.
Thank you! I used to like the idea of Caitlin and Cisco together as well, but it’s so obvious that Cisco didn’t matter to them as much as Barry and Caitlin did until they could start complaining about this “OTF” nonsense and use him as a cover. Whenever you mention it they’re like “THEY’RE BROTHER AND SISTER” – which leads me to believe that they don’t know what a brother or a sister is.
One of the things with writing this is that I keep forgetting what actually happened on the show. They speak with such CONVICTION that you end up questioning what happened.
I think the main thing I wanted to do with this was actually PROVE the racism, and specifically prove that it’s not just people who say the n-word and are obviously racist. The majority of these tweets come from people who swear up and down that they’re not racist, or obnoxiously talk about how they’re better than WA fans even while doing all the racist stuff that people who understand actual racism are complaining about.
If you out the OTF crap in a window pane, you could use it like glass. That’s how transparent it is. You can tell that they’ve figured out that hating on Iris won’t get them what they want so they’re trying to drape it in this fake concern that’s galling to read. Barry and Caitlin have never been as close as they’ve convinced themselves they are – she’s closer to Cisco, as is he. And it’s so ridiculous that they’re complaining that the three of them aren’t friends anymore as if that makes any kind of sense.
They’re so upset that Iris isn’t visibly jealous that they’ve convinced themselves that she’s SECRETLY jealous. They’re so insecure that they can’t understand why someone else wouldn’t be in that situation, and they want Iris to be jealous because it gives an indication that Caitlin has any sort of romantic effect on Barry.
KILLER.
VIBE.
WOULD.
HAVE.
BEEN.
LIT.
They’re so awful about it and it’s disgustingly transparent. That’s why they’re so quick to make Cisco Caitlin’s “brother”, why they’re so happy about Cynthia, and why they ignore everything that he’s done for her – because at the end of the day, the brown guy isn’t good enough for her.
Oh, chemistry shall be fun.
I absolutely love your work. Everything is so transparent which is indeed amazing; but also sad that, they too, negate their arguments without research and logic. You’d think for all the reaching they do they’d try to develop or mask their wrong arguments (because they always will be as they see things that aren’t within the context of the show) with more finesse – so they can at least seem a little less unhinged.
Snowbarry shippers don’t respect Caitlin at all. They only started advocating for her character independenty because they got called out on how much they only mentioned her in regards to Barry back in S1-2. Killer Frost being added to give her something more exciting helped have them ammo to the fake advocacy for her character. They’re also accustomed to the show putting her with various men, so she is deemed “desirable” but since it isn’t Barry then they think, “Wtf is he doing with Iris when Caitlin is right there?”
They treat Cisco like total crap and never mention him independtly from OTF (now). The few that do, only do so because they’ve been called out on it by actual Cisco fans. The hierarchy is very real and very weird because I wonder who in real life wants to be treated or regarded like they do with the West’s and Cisco? None of them. They whine enough, and for the most stupid reason; for me to know that their skin is not that thick.
Really excited to read the next installment.
If you put the OTF hashtag in a wooden frame, you could use it as a window. That’s how damn transparent it is. It is so BREATHLESSLY transparent I really have no idea how to deal with the people who swear up and down that it’s not exclusionary. They’re all talking about how they’re fighting for better writing for Iris when all they ever talk about is kicking her out of Team Flash so she can go be a reporter in offscreenville or screaming because she’s apparently getting Caitlin’s screentime.
I refuse to believe that Snowbarry shippers respect Caitlin because they want her with a man who SHE SAYS ruined her life because of KF, who literally has to be told three times that she’s in danger, doesn’t bother to rescue her until someone else has done it first, didn’t want to look for her during Flashpoint until he needed a doctor, didn’t want to help her when she turned in KF, didn’t look for her when she left, didn’t beg her to stay when she came back, and has generally treated her as nothing more than a friend for four years.
They only love Cisco now because advocating for his story is a convenient way to bash Iris because apparently the show is about her now, it’s a way to mask that they just want Caitlin to be the most featured woman on the show.
Thank you!
Danielle was more than happy to be the only woman in Star Labs, as well as working with anyone but Candice. She’d rather have scenes with an actress from Arrow rather than the only ofther woman on The Flash. It wasn’t until it became apparent that the show was going all in with Westallen, as well as centering the Wests and Barry’s connection to them, did she change her tune. So, to me all her current “girl power” schtick is fake and ultimately self-serving.
http://collider.com/danielle-panabaker-the-flash-interview/
OK guys I feel like I need to be clear here.
I’m not absolving Danielle for anything she said or did. I’m not saying that she was completely blameless for any of the stuff that happened to Candice because, as I’ve (hopefully) said, her actions probably contributed to the overall picture of systemic racism that happened to Candice and to Iris. Was it malicious? Maybe. We’ll never know, and in my capacity, I don’t feel comfortable saying so one way or another. We very consciously kept this to what FANS did because they, at least, have very definite and malicious motivations when it comes to Candice and to Iris.
I never liked that interview. It seemed very odd to desire to work with all the OTHER women in the Arrowverse but not work with the one you were already working with. And if this were an article discussing the ways in which people are complicit in systemic racism, we absolutely would be discussing it. But it’s not, so I would just encourage people to look at the facts and come to their own conclusions. But, again, that interview always seemed suspect to me.
Again, an eye-opening article. Painfully so but it’s better to be aware than not. And if your point was to prove the “underlying” racism present in those dark parts of the fandom, colored me pretty much convinced. Well, I already had some suspicions but not to that extent.
The only thing you wrote that I truly disagree with – and I’m not going to spend too much time on it because I don’t want to derail the conversation – is the implication that HR was only good at twirling his drumsticks. He did a lot more than that. His accomplishments are often disregarded (in and out of the show) because of the very elitist attitude you were speaking of.
What you’ve said about the way Cisco is infantalised/desexualised, not allowed to be seen as a romantic partner for Caitlin (between Caitlin and Barry I ship him a bit more with Barry. And I love both goldenvibe and Cisco/Cynthia too. But harrisco is my true jam, my The Flash OTP. ), only allowed to support the white characters, in particular, is spot on. It’s too bad that they can’t see him for the multifacetted badass that he is.
On the Barry & Cisco issue from season 3 I fall in the awkward position of thinking both Barry and Cisco were wrong to some extent (Barry moreso … I mean, there shouldn’t be any questions about it), understandable (they both had sympathetic emotional reasons being their choices/attitudes), and in the end forgivable (at least for me).
And yes, having more quality friendship scenes between Barry, Caitlyn, and Cisco is a great idea, but as is having more quality friendship scenes between every members of Team Flash (all of TF !). Same as developping their lives outside of Starlab.
I’m warming up a bit to Ralph (I don’t care much yet) but I’d like the narrative to make room for other characters stories/development. I’m not really into watching a drag on prepilot for “Elastic Man and his friends” . So I’m relieved we get an Iris centric episode soon (speedster!Iris ? Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii !!!!!!!!!! She’s rocking the suit).
In conclusion : great article, thank you for writting it !
Thank you! With this one I was attempting to make people see that racism comes in different forms, not just over stuff.
Oh, I loved HR. He was encouraging, warm, friendly, usually level-headed, and brought a lot of humour to the show. And you’re right, his achievements are often disregarded because people are too lazy to think about what actually brings value to a team instead of just “doctor, engineer, super-genius”.
The way they treat Cisco is just so disheartening and disgusting, honestly.
Barry and Cisco were both wrong, but like you said, forgivable, so even though they both annoyed me at points during that arc, I got over it.
The thing with BBOTF is that they never went anyway, and because they’re explicitly saying “WE WANT *THIS* DYNAMIC AND *THIS* DYNAMIC ONLY ANYTHING ELSE IS FORCED!” and it’s very transparent.
SPEEDSTER IRIS FOR THE WIN!
Another fantastic article! You blow me away every time with your research and analysis! Love it!
…no idea why I just saw this, but thanks Jade! Love you <3
This is definitely an interesting analysis, and I won’t deny that some of the Snowbarry shippers may have prejudicial/racist intentions behind their dislike of season 4, but I don’t think they’re all that way. I agree that there’s no ‘Flash’ without Iris, but I also take issue with the particular statement you made about Barry becoming a hero.
“We’re supposed to ignore the fact that Iris activated his powers, named him, introduced him to the world, and Barry has literally said that – ugh, never mind.”
Iris did not activate Barry’s powers. If that were the case, he wouldn’t have shown signs of having his powers until Iris was in danger, but that’s not the case. His fast heart beat, time slowing down around him for brief seconds, the fact he survived the lightning at all and a 9 month coma without any deterioration of his health. His speed was already there, he just wasn’t aware of it yet. How do you begin to use powers you aren’t even aware you possess?
Secondly, it was actually OLIVER that gave Barry his name. Iris may have been the one to publicize the title ‘The Flash’, and only after Barry subtly hinted to her outside the suit that it would be a good name, but it was not her idea.
Green Arrow gives Barry the idea for an alias, S1E1 Pilot aka City of Heroes:
Barry: “I’m just not sure I’m like you, Oliver. I don’t know if I can be some vigilante.”
Oliver: “You can be better. Because you can inspire people, in a way that I never could.
Watching over your city like a guardian angel, making a difference saving people.
In a flash.”
Barry gives Iris the idea for what to call the Streak on her blog, S1E6, The Flash Is Born:
Iris: “When he moves, Barry, you don’t even see him. He comes and goes in the blink of an eye, in a—”
Barry: “In a flash?” *grins*
Iris: *smiles* “In a flash. Yeah.”
Iris, later on her blog: “Today, I was saved by the impossible. A mystery man. The fastest man alive. Then a friend gave me an idea for a new name, and something tells me it’s gonna catch on.”
She also didn’t introduce him to the world, you’re severely downplaying the parts everyone else played in him becoming the Flash. Iris didn’t even know it was him until nearly the end of the season. Eobard as Wells gave Barry the push he needed to fight Mardon first by playing the disapproving mentor that made him doubt himself before eventually supporting him, Cisco provided all the tech, Caitlin was his medical team, Joe was giving him advice behind the scenes.
All Iris was up until midway through the season was the woman that Lois Lane’d herself (i.e. be the reporter type that ran into danger so her love interest would have someone to save, thus making his life more difficult despite her best intentions of giving the city hope, and flirting with a masked man when she was dating/engaged, making Eddie look disposable AF). I love Iris, okay, but her season one portrayal was the weakest version of her. She was so much stronger in season two and three, when she was in the ‘know’, when she was more than just the girl Barry was pining over.
Iris West may be one of THE most important people in the Flash’s life, for sure, she’s his lightning rod, his beacon home when he was Speedforce crazy, but she did NOT ‘create’ him, and implying she does is a disservice to both the characters as individuals and the importance of the rest of the cast in the creation of arguably the Arrowverse’s best hero.
Yeah I think we probably misunderstand each other here.
I watch the show. Quite diligently, I might add. What I meant by Iris activating his powers was that she put her hand on his heart, they had their reunion, and THEN his realised he had powers. Their emotional connection is what activated them – and this is plausible because of all the Speed Force shenanigans that show plays with them. I never said anything about Iris being in danger, so I don’t know where you got that from.
When I said that Iris named him, I did indeed mean that it was her blog that introduced him as the Flash, not that she literally pushed him out into the world as The Flash – to be honest, I didn’t think I’d have to clarify this because it’s fairly obvious. Iris is the third person to call him Flash, after Oliver and Barry. himself. Like I said, I watch the show.
I’m not severely downplaying other people’s parts. This is about people downplaying Iris’ part, not about them. Find one place where I said Iris gave him tech, patched him up, or gave him superheroic advice. The Flash, at it’s heart, is a story about love, and the show repeatedly emphasises that Barry couldn’t be the flash without Iris
“The woman who Lois Lane’d herself” – Iris was doing her job, but I find it interesting how everyone who claims to “love” her thinks she was nothing but a vapid idiot who was only doing what she did because she felt like doing it as opposed to being an important part of her character. Iris is a civilian on a superhero show; her getting kidnapped isn’t a mark against her character unless you don’t understand how superhero narratives work. Iris was never “just” the girl Barry was pining over, but then I saw her journalism as important and I think romantic heroines are essential to the plot, but that’s just me. The only reason her character was weak was because the narrative was restricting her, not because she was a weak character. Again, though, I’m a writer, so I make that distinction.
Iris is not “one of” the most important people in the Flash’s life. She is THE most important person. I don’t understand how you can watch the show and not get that. I should have explained my points better, clearly, but I’m not going to apologise for anything I wrote.