#and this doesn’t even get into how wallace’s dad potentially factors into this my god..

[roobylavender]

Do we ever see iris's relationship with her sister? i'd think it'd be a huge thing considering her son became the flash, do they often talk about Wally's parents?

(no worries anon i know you mean rudy i am just too lazy to copy paste your correction while on mobile) the interesting thing with the west family at least as far as pre-flashpoint goes is all of these huge revelations about them are pretty much disjunct of each other. so when you get the reveal about iris actually being from the future, that’s in volume one and at that point rudy is still completely normal. my reading of volume one is a bit here and there so i don’t quite remember how he reacted to her death but mostly mary and rudy exist in the periphery as the decent parents who don’t find out about wally’s powers until he’s about to enter college, long after iris’s death, nor do they know iris isn’t actually of their time and hails from the thirty first century. or maybe it’s the thirtieth

then volume two rewrites mary and rudy as abusive parents from whom iris and central city were an escape for wally. there’s an article from her published way later as extra content—i forget where exactly it’s from—where she talks about what an inspiration wally is to her and expresses her frustration over not being able to help him more in escaping rudy’s abuse. but since she’s more or less “dead” by the time volume two begins we don’t get any explicit depiction of her relationship with rudy nor how wally’s revealed identity factors into it. nor do we get any reaction from her to rudy being a freaking manhunter who more or less views his whole family as chowder bc he’s a cultist (the manhunters still confuse me that whole storyline wooshed over my head please look into the replies to see diana explain it far better than i ever could!)

and by the time iris comes back in the waid run, mary and rudy are more or less nonexistent and living their own lives separate of wally so they literally never show up until it’s time for wally to get married by which time iris has conveniently disappeared again bc she now mostly lives in shadow, wary of messing with the time stream. so there’s ultimately lots of big things that happen with iris and rudy respectively that are just never talked about in conjunction with each other bc they’re all coming from different writers with different visions and priorities. i really like that you’ve brought this up bc it’s kinda driving me crazy now like we haven’t even gotten into the fact that ira (their father) is an amnesiac who probably doesn’t know shit about the fact that his son is also super fucked and no longer completely his on top of the emotional trauma of knowing his favorite daughter was never his either. the whole family is incredibly fucked up when you take a step back and look it all over and yet so much of it goes unaddressed bc once a new writer takes over the priorities of the last are forgotten 😭