I’ve been wanting to do a longer analysis of Nora W*st-Allen, her story arc, her motivations and how she is really a tragic character.
Nora is born as the daughter of Barry Allen and his foster sister Ir*s W*st-Allen. In 2024, when Nora is still a toddler, Crisis hits and Barry disappears, without returning. Nora is brought up by Ir*s and (presumably) her grand-dad Joe and his wife Cecile.
Nora turns out to be a speedster like her dad, and Ir*s, for reasons not really made clear, implants a meta-human dampening chip in her baby daughter. Ir*s also does not tell Nora who and what her father really was, and apparently instructs everyone else (like Joe) to do the same. Iris also is kind of absent, being distracted by her work, leaving Nora to spend long hours in the Flash museum, obsessing about the Flash without knowing that he’s actually her dad, and she has the same powers.
Nora finds out about all this as a adult, when the chip is accidentally destroyed in a fight with Godspeed. Not knowing who to turn to, she decides to visit the only speedster she knows apart from herself: Eobard Thawne. Of course Eobard starts to manipulate her immediately for his own goals, sending her back in time to “get to know her dad” and the events in S5 unfold as we’ve seen them.
Nora’s identity as a speedster and daughter of the Flash is suppressed by her mother. This abuse lasts from a very young age well into Nora’s adulthood, when she’s already working as a CSI. When she finds out she is devastated (as she should be) and no longer trusts her mom.
Ir*s may have had a good reason to dampen the powers of a small child - even for safety reasons. But there is NO excuse at all that would justify doing this to an adolescent, let alone an adult.
So Nora was abused by her mum and turned to someone else she thought she could trust. Since Nora never knew about the Flash’s personal history (Ir*s never told her), she did not know Eobard Thawne murdered her grandmother.
While she’s of course being manipulated by Thawne, the whole sequence of events is also made possible by Ir*s and Barry deciding to “keep” her in the past, despite having had NUMEROUS experiences with time travel and the disruption of timelines. I want to make the point that Barry wants to send her back, but gives in to Ir*s. Also Barry and Ir*s fight over how to deal with the Thawne situation, with Ir*s again “winning”.
Nora ultimately pays the price for the mistakes of others (and a few of her own): she is erased from existence, and Crisis comes up 5 years earlier. Many lives have been changed (and destroyed) by this.
In my view Nora is really a tragic character, lied to, manipulated, alone, caught up in events that led to her undoing. The real responsibility lies with IR*S and Thawne. Thawne is a bad guy, we know that. So what is Ir*s?
