Being a fan of the CW’s Arrowverse means making some concessions with your disbelief.
That doesn’t just apply to spending four hours a week accepting the existence of superpowered people, aliens, time travel, and that a person would have enough time to be both a masked vigilante and the mayor of a major city. If you can blind your brain to that stuff, though, they’re a pretty good time.
However, just letting things like this slide isn’t enough for some fans of Arrow, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, and Supergirl– and they’ve found some issues.
Even better, they’ve shard their findings with the world using the internet’s native language: memes.
We’ve already pointed out some things that don’t make sense about the Arrowverse, and these observations only help us add to the list. Honestly, it’s gotten pretty long at this point.
However, these superhero shows are still a good time, even if they make our brains hurt sometimes. Also, it’s not just the internal logic– the different series also have some crazy logical disagreements between them, which is just a really weird thing for a shared universe to do.
With that said, here are 17 Memes That Show The Arrowverse Makes No Sense.
Are you sure, Barry?
Every episode of The Flash starts with Barry Allen proclaiming himself “The Fastest Man Alive.” That may be true in the comics, but for at least the first few seasons, he wasn’t even the fastest man in most episodes.
In fact, the whole dramatic arcs of the storylines involving Reverse Flash, Zoom, and Savitar were specifically that Barry wasn’t speedy enough to defeat them. Then he spent all year getting either fast or smart enough to take them down.
That bit at the beginning is probably just to keep consistent with the comics and for expedience. If he started out saying, “I’m Barry Allen, and I thought I was the fastest man alive until this other guy showed up and punched me so hard that I went back in time,” the intros would just run way too long.
He still has his whole backstory to get through.
What, like sky traffic?
When Tyler Hoechlin joined the cast of Supergirl in its second season as The Man of Steel, it opened up some more possibilities for the show.
However, mostly he was just handy to have around so that he can provide backup for Kara and help her lift even bigger things.
It also provided some opportunities for superhero banter between two characters with similar abilities– and that’s how we got exchanges like the one above.
We know it’s a joke, and Superman was probably late because he was punching some robots or getting a kitten out of a tree.
However, we also like to imagine the Big Blue Boy Scout carefully making his way to the crisis while obeying all the traffic laws. It’s like that scene in the 1966 Batman movie when the Caped Crusader refuses to throw a bomb away because he might hurt some ducks.
He’s so close
Back before he finally found out that Oliver Queen was the masked vigilante taking on Starling/Star City’s criminals, fans loved to point out how improbable it was that Quentin Lance hadn’t figured it out yet. He’s usually such a good detective.
Regardless, Roy definitely didn’t do much to hide his night job. When he wasn’t fighting crime in a red hoodie, he was running around town in a red hoodie. Also, the show only has about eight characters anyway, so that narrowed it down considerably.
However, the ease with which Lance deduced Arsenal’s true identity only made his inability to figure out Roy’s boss that much less probable.
He had to have noticed that they knew each other, for one thing. Also, barring that, he surely saw that all that vigilante activity started as soon as Oliver came back from the island.
Nobody likes a double standard
Ever since Legends of Tomorrow premiered, the Arrowverse has had trouble keeping a consistent policy on time travel. It’s hard enough to do with one show, and having two just doubles the trouble.
In fact, the entire premise of Legends of Tomorrow is that its superteam travels the time stream intentionally trying to change history. They put some arbitrary limits on their activities when dramatic purposes call for them. However, messing with the space-time continuum is still what they do.
That’s not the case on The Flash, which devoted an entire season to having Team Flash take turns being mad at Barry for putting them into an alternate timeline.
Granted, the hero going back to save his mom was a slightly bigger change than the time the Legends inspired the garbage compactor scene in Star Wars, but really, where’s the line?
It works if the show says it works
Our biggest problem with early Arrow was this bizarre costume choice from Oliver Queen. He had the time and resources to just pop over to any costume shop and buy a mask — or barring that, make one himself — but he went for this painted on, economy version.
Maybe he thought that his ability to afford a costume would tip people off to his billionaire secret identity? We don’t know, but we’re sure that just strapping on the face cover was faster and easier than breaking out the airbrush every time he wanted to go out.
Also, we can’t imagine how long that took to wash off every morning.
Luckily, as Ollie developed from The Hood to The Arrow to The Green Arrow, his costume also evolved. Now he just wears a proper mask, which both looks better and makes far more sense.
Do your brand, Barry
If you’re called “The Flash,” and your power is moving really fast, you only have so many ways to approach a problem. That’s especially true if you’re on a show that’s all about how you’re super fast and use your speed to fight evil.
Like in the comics, Barry Allen’s enhanced movement just splits off into a bunch of other powers. These include throwing lightning, phasing through solid objects, and traveling through time.
His super-quick metabolism also means that he can’t get drunk and has to eat almost constantly, but that’s either a bonus or a curse depending on how you think about it.
However, it all comes down to “going really quickly,” so we’re pretty sure that’s how he’s going to handle everything.
We do need full episodes
Like her cousin, Supergirl has a potentially plot-killing problem. She has just about all of the superpowers, so nothing should slow her down for too long.
Comics and TV have had to figure out ways around this because otherwise stories would be over pretty quickly.
The CW’s earlier Kryptonian-centered series, Smallville, got around this by slowly doling out Clark’s powers over time. Barring that, they just threw some Kryptonite at the problem. It was all over the place in that show.
The Arrowverse has a different solution, though. Supergirl has all of her powers– she just doesn’t use them all the time.
Sometimes the show comes up with reasons for her not to, but usually it just feels like the writers are making sure they get full episodes.
Sometimes motorcycles are sharp
Coming up with cover stories for your vigilante activities is a careful art. Your lies have to be plausible enough to convince both your friends as well as medical professionals that you didn’t dislocate your shoulder from falling off of a rooftop during a fight with a supervillain.
Batman has mastered this skill and masks his injuries with normal rich-people activities like ski trips and polo. However, Arrow’s Oliver Queen rarely even leaves the city that he protects, so he has to be a little more creative.
By “creative,” we mean that his excuses for his constant, inexplicable wounds wouldn’t fool anyone.
He’s pretty fond of the motorcycle accident excuse, which would cover bruises and broken bones but not the knife wounds and gunshots he’s suffered from time to time.
Somehow, no savvy ER doctor has ever called him on it or notified the police.
It’s for her ‘protection’
Once a person gains superpowers or otherwise decides to live a life of crime fighting, they have some tough decisions to make. These include picking a costume and getting their preferred name out there before the press comes up with something dumb like “The Red/Blue Blur” in Smallville.
They also have to decide who they’re going to let in on their secret, and almost all of them get this wrong. They let their friends know so they can help out, but they don’t usually tell their loved ones. However, they all eventually find out anyway, and it is always, always a thing.
Barry built a whole team before the most important person in his life found out what he was doing in his spare time. If he kept her out of it for her safety, he should have passed that on to all of the villains who had kidnapped her by then.
It’s important to get the order right
This is one of those things that becomes impossible not to notice after someone points it out to you. Once Ollie learns about some crimes and decides to suit up, he almost always grabs his bow and walks off-screen to get his costume.
Even when he’s at home, he keeps the weapon close at hand and apparently carries it with him from room to room just in case he needs to make this dramatic exit.
What we miss during the scene transition or the commercials is the part where he gets to the display case and has to free up his hands again to get into costume. In fact, movie and TV superheroes owe most of how cool they look to good camerawork and editing.
Us normal people don’t have that benefit, which means that many of our awkward moments get to happen where other people can see them.
Really, Barry?
This is one of those things that makes us wonder if the writers of Legends of Tomorrow and The Flash ever talk to each other before they crank out their scripts. We’re guessing they don’t.
Not only do the two shows have completely different attitudes toward what it means to change history, but they also have different models for how the whole process works.
Legends includes phenomena like “time quakes,” which are an external and measurable sign that somebody has bent continuity too far.
Meanwhile, The Flash has “time echoes,” which are either remnants from defunct alternate universes or handy ways to use up the rest of the season’s special effects budget. It depends on what the story needs.
This is another case of the two shows not agreeing on what changing history means. Also, the magnitude (or not) isn’t even consistent within themselves.
Why doesn’t he just put it on the internet?
Since its inception, Arrow has featured a rotating cast of DC heroes and villains for Ollie to join up with, fight, or both. No matter which side of justice they fell on, all of these characters had one thing in common: they all figured out who the Green Arrow really is.
Since it is the longest running series in the Arrowverse, the list of people who know how Oliver Queen spends his nights is ridiculously long now.
The creators have managed that number a little by writing some of these characters out over the years, but it’s still way more than we’re comfortable with.
The Flash has a similar “problem.” However, Legends of Tomorrow has avoided it by only including characters whose secret identities don’t really matter.
You were saying, nerds?
This isn’t so much a case of Supergirl not making sense. It’s more about fans either not knowing what they want or not understanding that TV shows don’t always have to be for them.
Even though the CW shows take place in the same multiverse, it doesn’t make sense for them to all be the same.
Arrow is dark and broody, The Flash is lighter and more optimistic, Legends of Tomorrow is just straight-up hijinks, and Supergirl throws in feelings, relationships, and other things that these critics apparently don’t want to see in their superhero shows.
The Arrowverse caters to a variety of tastes and preferences. That’s alright because you can completely hate up to three of these shows and still have one to watch.
It’s all circumstantial, really
We can’t get over the fact that nobody on Arrow seemed to notice that the spray-masked vigilante appeared in Starling City right when Oliver Queen returned to town.
Anyone who noticed that connection probably just thought it was a weird coincidence, but those aren’t the only dots they should have connected.
They also should have noticed that the playboy came back way different than he’d been when he left.
Sure, he’d had a traumatic experience and survived even more adversity than the official story mentions, but even the most strict adherents to plausible deniability had to notice that Oliver came back super intense.
He held a press conference where he said that he was going to dedicate himself to helping the city… and then bodies started piling up.
Never touch another show’s canon
Here’s another one from the “writers don’t talk to each other” department. However, in this case, it’s a matter of keeping shows separate — other than the annual crossovers, obviously.
Once Legends of Tomorrow introduced time travel to the Arrowverse, it also created the potential to write around seemingly permanent plot developments.
Well, it created more of it, anyway. The writers can also use things like the Lazarus Pits that brought Sarah Lance back from the grave.
Barring that, they can just pull someone in from another universe. That’s how The Flash has kept Tom Cavanagh on even though his character has passed away at least twice.
However, even though the Legends could go back and save Laurel Lance, this meme gives an amusing reason why they really can’t.
The sensitivity of Oliver Queen
Part of making a superhero take on legendary status is presenting them as indestructible. Deadpool says he wears red so that his enemies can’t see him bleed. It also saves him some trouble doing laundry (but that’s not relevant to the point we’re making right now).
The Green Arrow doesn’t just seem indestructible, however. He basically is.
Ollie shrugs off punches, kicks, and people hitting him with cars. And he even came back after Ra’s al Ghul stabbed him in the gut and punted him off of a mountain. For a guy with no superpowers, he sure does come off as invincible.
That’s only when it’s action time, though. When he’s not working, Ollie’s as weak as any of us. As this picture points out, he’s especially vulnerable to Felicity’s slaps. This is either because love is his weakness, or it’s just a weird continuity thing.
A pattern emerges
After a few seasons of Barry Allen seeing how dangerous time travel is (on his show) but deciding to do it anyway, it’s hard to understand why he even asks for advice on the matter at all.
Everyone tells him not to go Flashing up history, and then he mopes about it for a while before he goes ahead and does the exact opposite of what he’s heard.
We can almost forgive him for not listening to Harrison Wells because he’s just a guy.
However, most of the people telling him to find some other way to solve his problems beside timefoolery are either fellow speedsters, who understand the Speed Force better than he does, or future versions of himself who know for a fact that his idea won’t work.
This is just a special kind of dumb, and Barry is supposed to be smarter than that.
What do you think? Do you know of any other Arrowverse memes that prove the show doesn’t make sense? Sound off in the comments!
