#the wests

[valenciiaa]

[mothelette]

[posebitchz]

Kanye West’s DONDA listening event. 

[grimalkinsims]

[superohclair]

Hello from the person who is hundreds of posts into your Flash tag with no intention of stopping! Wanted to send this ask mostly to say how much I love your meta--how smart and nuanced it is and what a good writer you are--and also to ask a question about Joe. I just got to your reblog of a gifset from 6x18 when Barry goes to see Joe and tell him about Iris and they hug, and you tagged it by saying you love Joe and Barry scenes and how their relationship is one of your absolute favorites in the DCTV world. That is also me, which feels like an increasingly unpopular opinion in the Iris fandom. I also saw your post last night about what they've done with Joe this season and how it has to be to protect Jesse's health, which I think makes a lot of sense. I guess my actual question is whether you think it is possible to meaningfully salvage the Joe/Iris and Joe/Barry relationships after this season, and Joe as a character generally? And what would it take to do so? As someone who loves those relationships a lot, it makes me very sad to think the show might end with them being practically non-existent.

hello! thanks for your ask, and I'm glad you found my meta posts interesting! oddly, I've lost a little bit of the streak for making them in recent episodes; I think this season's arcs have been pretty hard for me to sit with in the same way because they're not subtle, and there's not very many cues and callbacks and layers at work. that's not a bad thing! I just definitely appreciated the show a lot more when it was openly introspective, and less in your face about it's "tell not show" storytelling. oh well.

as for the joe x barry relationship, it absolutely remains one of my most favorite representations of fathers and sons in the DCTV. for one, it's longstanding. we've got seven years worth of content of their very close bond, showing just how much barry looks up to joe, and how much joe looks up to barry, too, in that way that parents begin to admire their children as they see them become better people than they are, which I'd imagine is any parent's hope. I think a lot of the early episodes and a few here and there since did a good job of setting up their dynamic, though I do think it could have been more explored. I'd have loved to see joe and barry get into a legit disagreement with one another that lasted as long as joe and iris's disagreements in S2/S3 did (the flashpoint era), for example. instead, we mostly got lots of hints about their very close connection, but very few of how they balanced each other. a lot of times, barry was parenting joe, for example, being the exposition voice for him, or vice verse. that's not terribly interesting as a viewer, but it makes sense why the show would rely on them to do that kind of narrative work. they simply have that kind of relationship where they are very good at communicating with each other in a very healthy way, so it's a perfect vehicle for moving plot points forward in dialogue.

I'm guessing that that's actually where a lot of the bitterness comes from among fans like me, who loved the joe x barry scenes and even some of the less frequent joe x wally scenes, but wanted above all else joe x iris. we got so many important scenes in the first three or four seasons, and then for some reason the show decided to put that relationship on the back burner, leading to the kinds of choices that made no sense based on everything they'd told us about these characters before. iris should have been the first person joe would go to when he hears about his grandkids. joe should have been the first person iris would go to when she makes any kind of major life or career choice. and we consistently got less and less of these kinds of scenes, even before covid hit and affected production line ups. and this is directly tied to how the show has regularly treated iris as a character that they appear to want to give major development to, but always seem to scramble to do so in a way that falls flat or turns her into all the worst misogynoir-iest tropes around. we should have gotten as many scenes of a Black dad with his Black daughter navigating this world together, as we did with joe and barry, and we didn't, and haven't, and it's become increasingly obvious, to the point that joe west and iris west allen apparently do not have a relationship at all anymore.

and again, a lot of this especially this season has been entirely due to restrictions on filming, and prior to covid had to do with jesse's personal issues after he had to take a break from production for his health. so it's not entirely fair to blame the show's narrative for things that were just facts about the production that could not be helped, and needed to be addressed in such a way as to keep jesse's health a priority. I just think that for a show as reliant on expository dialogue as this one is, there could have been so much more thoughtful or better writing (script supervisors, where y'all been?! I swear they've been asleep on the job for the past two and half seasons) or a better editorial work in post-production to do the work of protecting a semblance of joe x iris and their father-daughter bond.

the west family is supposed to be the heart of this show, and it's a real shame it's taken a backseat so much recently. I do think it's possible to salvage, though. I can imagine scenes of joe and iris finally getting to reminisce about the west-allen speedster kids, or iris confiding with joe her experiences being so sensitive to timeline changes or her aftereffects from the mirrorverse trauma. they could talk about her job, or what he'll do now that he's quit the force (father-daughter crime fighting unit with an investigative journalist/private eye twist, anyone? YES). I still see potential, but it's a matter of rectifying not only the production restrictions if they ever ease up, as well as addressing a pretty long history of willfully ignoring these two. so my most sincere hope is that season 8 resets joe and iris's relationship. I miss the wests!

[kimkallday]

www.kimkallday.tumblr.com

[myl0vef0rpics]

Family 🖤