(Disclaimer: I’d only read some of the Flashpoint collected materials at my library, and Future’s End #0 and the Sinestro issue. They disgusted me enough that I couldn’t make myself read all of the material involved, so if there’s anything that got printed that contradicts this, please say so?)
It all starts with Flashpoint. Eobard’s been cutting and pasting his own timeline, casually destroying anyone – including his own family and girlfriends – who didn’t do exactly what he wanted them to do. This weakened the timestream; think someone skating around on a frozen pond until the ice is so weak the next person who steps on it will break the ice? So that when Barry tried to stop Eobard from attacking the Allens, it broke into the Flashpoint timeline, which then got (sort of) repaired into the New 52 timeline. And the only way for the timeline to be fixed at all… was for Barry to *let* Eobard kill Barry’s mother and frame Barry’s father for the crime.
Therefore, the very foundation of the New52 is based on the fact that not only *can* Evil win, Evil has to be *allowed* to win in the end or Good will do even worse damage to reality than Evil would have. (Rather like the pre-Crisis Earth-3; all those supervillains, and only the one hero – their Lex Luthor counterpart – near the end of its existence?) So in a timeline that's made for Evil to be far stronger than Good, the villains are therefore more brutal and gory (as seen with the Joker) – and many of the “heroes” have to be more brutal to even have a chance at surviving. And it all wraps up with Future’s End, where Evil and its brutal tactics are clearly winning, and Good has no chance of stopping it except to resort to assassination – so to survive, Good has to become like Evil.
So either way… Evil wins.
[Thank you very much for your thoughts; I’m certainly inclined to agree with you, and I doubt this has really occurred to DC. But it’d be interesting to see if this is touched on in any way now that Eobard’s back, because if he does realize it then he’d be inclined to gloat about it. It’s definitely worthy of a story, so have you thought about writing it even as fic? -- Lia]
