Why is The Flash afraid of parenthood?

 It’s late on Friday and I haven’t written this yet, but I had this idea of talking about media perceptions of the media, inspired by watching State of Play last weekend. I decided instead to hash out my feelings on The Flash, because that’s something I haven’t written much about. At least I don’t think so.

But! I was thinking of seeing a movie this weekend. Snake Eyes? Raya and the Last Dragon? Who knows.

Also I finished The Goblin Emperor and that’s fantastic.

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Why is The Flash afraid of parenthood?

No worries, I’m not going to go into heavy season finale spoilers. I think. But I don’t know if anyone who reads these (all three of you, tops) even care that much, but I’m not going to say what happens in the finale. 

So with the wrap-up of season seven, there are now two seasons of The Flash in which Barry and Iris meet their speedster offspring from the future, and this season had this whole thing about accidentally creating the personifications of fundamental forces of the universe (it’s weird), and acting like Barry and Iris are their parents because they created them? And how through that they learn to be parents?

Kay, so let me back up a bit. In season five (or rather the end of season four), we’re introduced to Nora, Barry and Iris’s child from the future. She’s a major character all season. And yet we don’t really see Barry and Iris having a conversation about having kids, or trying to have kids, until about a year and half later in season seven. And there’s that storyline with the fundamental forces of the universe which paints them as parents of a group of four adult people. And then the last few episodes of the season has Nora and Bart appear from the future, and--

...does The Flash not want to actually deal with children? Or families raising young children?

And normally I wouldn’t ask this, but there’s another couple of the show, Joe and Cecille, who had a baby a couple of seasons ago, and guys, that baby’s gone. I don’t think we’ve seen her on screen in years. Occasionally, it’s mentioned that the baby’s been put to bed, or is being taken care of by some offscreen character. Right now it might be a pandemic thing, but even before the pandemic the baby hasn’t appeared. I’ll admit that I’m not good with names so maybe this means nothing, but I don’t remember this baby’s name at all.

Arrow didn’t have this problem. Yeah, John Diggle’s kid was retconned from a girl to a boy because Flashpoint (if you didn’t watch The Flash that must have been so confusing and annoying), but the kid was mentioned. A lot. And actually had appearances. Diggle’s family role as a father is an important part of his character arc. He was often screwed by the show’s writing, but so was everyone, and that was still a big part of this character.

Joe and Cecille’s kid is… I think Daisy’s kid has more of a presence in The Great Gatsby.

I wonder if the writers of this show don’t want to deal with young children. And that’s something easy enough to screw up, and people complain about dealing with child actors, I guess, so I kind of understand being hesitant to do those kinds of storylines. It’s much easier in a show heavily featuring time travel to just have the kids appear fully grown, and we don’t have that mess of young children growing up and being a nuisance.

And yeah, sometimes people marry after there are already kids and they’ve grown up. It happens. And those stories can be told and have a place! But that’s not what’s going on here. Barry and Iris are going to have children, they just haven’t yet because… I don’t know, we don’t want to do that? They’re a married couple who want to start a family and they are destined to have kids we just haven’t gotten there yet because the show has been edging around the subject for a while.

They sit and talk about being proud of their children and how they turned out, and they haven’t done any of the raising part! There’s some mentorship, sure, but they didn’t raise these kids. It’s a plot point in season five, that Nora never knew her father, but they’re expecting these characters to slip into parent roles when they haven’t even had the kids they’re talking to yet what the fudge.

Maybe they decided with Black Lightning and Superman & Lois (and Arrow covered some of this too) that the whole idea of raising a family with being a superhero is already covered with their CW shows. But there’s a ton they can do with this! With small children speedsters! With being superhero parents! With being a biracial family!

Right now it just seems that they are really, really scared to have the lead characters actually be parents for children. That’s weird. Why even write this into the story if you’re not going to deal with it? It’s something that you can’t ignore, and the show is trying to do just that anyway. A major character has a toddler and that toddler hasn’t appeared on screen in ages! That’s not normal! If you’re going to explicitly write these characters as raising children, then they should be doing that! This needs to be addressed!

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