Crisis: nope

I really hate 'Crisis on Infinite Earths' (Arrowverse)
because they lose
everything everywhere is all gone the end antimatter annihilated
and we're meant to just
like
roll with that
and go watch another chapter.


And I realise in fanfic we read infinite variations on these guys and do indeed roll with it, thinking of them as fundamentally the same characters, but those stories expect us to therefore care about all of them, not to therefore not care about all the dead ones.

Like, here is this medium that is thus far the world's most powerful empathy engine, getting us to care, a lot, about all these made up people,
and then they kill them all
but we're not supposed to care about that.




... I am watching the last season of Arrow, so rewatching Crisis, and Earth 1 just died, after all the other Earths, and I am just going to feel some feelings about that.

And possibly get a snack.

Sci fi crimes

The arrowverse is really freaking casual about
imposing the death of personality
on basically everyone who looks familiar.

It isn't 'waking people up' or 'restoring their memory'.
Earth Prime people are exactly as real and valid as Earth 1, Earth 38, any other Earth.
Installing memories of earth 1 on earth prime is murder to the person who grew up there and owns that body.

It's like installing Harry or HR in Nash, which oh, hey, they also did. But it's also like installing Eobard, which the show at least noticed was a bad thing. None of those alternate universe people own that body! And those 'memories' are just made up stuff, compared to the universe as it actually stands.

It's like when Angel erased Connor. They've got Mia of earth prime right there, but they don't like who she chooses to be, so they just... overwrite her.

The characters are just going around casually murdering people in a way that doesn't leave a body.



The writers on the other hand are just working at cross purposes between shows and episodes. Multiple seasons of Flash demonstrating that different universes are different people? Oh oops, new story, secretly what they have in common is all that matters now!

But over on Legends there's whole arcs about the difference between Zari and Zari, or Ava and Ava and Ava, and Behrad almost getting his timeline changed is a major personal emergency, because who we are matters and we are not interchangeable. They never try and 'fix' Zari by 'restoring' memories of Zari! Nor should they, it would be awful.

So when all the other shows do so casually and repeatedly?

It's really freaking creepy

and does not engage with the world they have set up at ALL.



It's a major part of why I can't be having with a lot of what went on post crisis.

They wrecked their toys and tried to keep them too, and wanted us to care but only in the right way for the right length of time.


It ends up being really cruel and making decisions about who matters that I can't be having with at all.