speaks friggin epics about the relationship between Bart and Wally. Because while there were a lotof positive, influential things flowing between them, a lot of their relationship, from the time Iris brought him back from the future up to just after the incident with Linda and Zoom, was really, really negative.
Wally wasn’t ready to handle the responsibility of raising and training what was essentially the world’s fastest toddler, so he pawned it off on Max. Bart would probably be an insanely different person if Wally (and Linda) had raised him in Keystone. After Max vanished into the Speed Force, Wally passed him over yet again so that Jay and Joan could take care of him. That being said, at the time, Wally had a lot of his own stuff going on, but look at it from Bart’s perspective. His only family in this time period either has to stay away from him for his own safety (Iris), wants to destroy him (Thad), or seems to outright dislike him (Wally). No wonder he latched onto Jenni so hard when she came to the 20th century.
Wally wasn’t born with his speed, like Bart was, so he couldn’t actually relate to him at all. He’d had time to learn how to deal with how slow the rest of the world got at times, Bart didn’t. So of course, Wally came to think of him as a restless, stupid kid by default. Because he never spent any time with Bart in order to learn otherwise. One of my least-favorite panels of all time comes from the first issue of the 03 Teen Titans series, because it says exactly what Wally thinks of Bart, and sets up Bart’s attempt at transformation a few issues later:
Impulse never will. That’s it, that’s their relationship. Wally is stuck on the belief that Bart will always be the dumb, impulsive kid he teamed up with every few months. Which is why, after Deathstrokes kneecaps him, Bart heads for the library. To learn. Because he can do something that no other speedster can: Bart has the power of memory. He can remember everything he reads. More than that, he can remember when the past changes, because he’s not from the past. He can detect shifts in the timestream based on what he remembers about people. He remembered Linda when literally everyone forgot her, Bart is not stupid. But he’s so used to people telling him that he is, that his first step in ‘growing up’ is to acquire more knowledge.
And then he takes the leap to be Kid Flash…and Wally still doesn’t believe he’s changed. Teen Titans, issue 6:
Wally, he is doing all of this for your approval and you are verbally shitting on him. You told him that he didn’t try hard enough to honor the legacy of the Flash, and now that he’s trying harder, he’s ‘trying too hard’. This drove me insane, because goddamnit Wally, remember Sins of Youth? When you were constantly fucking up because you were a kid again and Bart was the adult, and he didn’t try and make you feel like an idiot at every turn? Because I remember that. It was great! Too bad no one ever mentioned it again am I right folks.
After the incident with Zoom, and Wally had his identity made secret again, he stopped being so much of an ass to Bart. Bart hadn’t even had to think about it before going to protect Linda. Linda had never treated him like a pest or an idiot, and had always made attempts to understand him and communicate with him on his level (when she made him ringbearer at their wedding, she told him to keep the rings safe with video game lingo). Linda has always been more of a cousin to him than his actual cousin, and it took the wrath of G-d literally reaching into reality and twisting before Wally saw that and augh that was just…
When Bart died and Wally came back, he ‘avenged’ his cousin, and then almost promptly forgot about him again, until the museum was on fire. When Bart came back to life, when Max came out of the Speed Force, when the Flash family really got to be a family again, we could have gotten to see the repaired relationship between Wally and Bart (his daughter idolized Bart, for heaven’s sake)…but then Barry’s series was a thing and the reboot happened, and now we have nothing.
I know no one asked for these thoughts, but here they are.
