Yeah, no, I'm not done with the Thawne thing. *somebody just squeed* (I looked up past tense of squee. Got it right! lol)
I'm a Joseph Campbell fan from way back, was one of the first jumping on board many years ago and even attended a special guest talk at my college when his book The Power of Myth first came out. I'm about to stick a toe out past the Hero's Journey motif (click that, very cool) into application. This might be important.
Of course, anyone would jump on Barry Allen going through the hero's journey, but what about Eobard Thawne? He wants to be the hero.
In a world of heroes vs villains, one could jump into all kinds of psyche analysis, behavioral assessment, character history, and I'm going to skip all that. Not where I'm going at all. I'm sure this has been wrung to death over the decades of comics.
In my last The Flash review post regarding Eobard Thawne's many rewrites I kept asking, "Why in the world is he so obsessed? Where did this even start?"
This actually starts with the writers. Let's look at this conundrum they seem to be having with all the origin rewrites.
Defining a hero's journey gone hopelessly south to the point of nastiest villain of all time is a very fun thought experiment. Who can resist? What the writers are creating are simulations that they let run to see where they go. Granted, these stories come from within themselves, which is fine. The whole point of this exercise in experimentation is to discover new knowledge about ourselves and the universe we live in. Oh, crap, did I just go metaphysical on this?
Trying to define a journey with no idea of the destination leads to many simulations. We want to know how something could or will play out, so we mock it up in our minds and follow it to some kind of conclusion. In the instance of Eobard Thawne, we begin with a few character rules, and one of those is that this guy is hopelessly psychotic. He cannot feel empathy or remorse, so he tragically misinterprets what a hero's ultimate job is. He attempts to set up situations in which he is the hero, because he wants so badly to be one, but he fails by default to be able to see that he's automatically slotting himself as the villain to begin with. The shock of discovering he can't help being the villain hits him later on, at which point he goes through his own brand of 'dark night of the soul' and then emerges having embraced his destiny as a super villain.
The writers don't venture into those murky depths as bluntly as I did, although their storylines are fantastic. Eobard truly struggles with who he is for many years. And if he is an antithesis, he is by definition completely dependent on that enemy who is the real hero in order to be who he himself is. We see this all the time in comics, beautifully constructed by comic artists as tragedian theater.
The beauty of the Eobard Thawne story is that it can go on and on without resolution. The problem with the Eobard Thawne story is that it never reaches a satisfactory conclusion. Why is this? Because the writers and likely all the readers and viewers are stuck in third density thinking.
The hero's journey is all well and good, but it's a bit sterile as a program. It seems to have an inherent loop counter that grinds the story back to start over and over with no way to resolve. (At least one of you went very pale with the thought Oh no, she's about to ruin it all. No, I'm not. Be patient and open your mind. You, too, can jump into the Eobard journey experimentation!)
If we broaden our perspective, we might be able to better grasp what the conundrum really is, both for the writers and for Eobard.
Third density is our perspective right now on earth. It isn't the same as 3 dimensional. It's not a physical property, more like an awareness mode. If you are mentally blocking with Wait, wut???, you can stop here and go read Ascending the Densities of Consciousness. If you want to keep reading this without stopping, I'll try to be gentle.
In third density, our awareness is such that we have a sense of autonomous self in relation to other selves, and each one of us eventually asks the ultimate question- What is my purpose here in this life? It doesn't matter what your belief system is or whether you are a good person or a bad person, it simply just happens to all of us sooner or later unless you've acquired some form of injury that disables this part of your existential awareness.
So Eobard is consumed with his purpose to the point of going to extraordinary lengths finding ways to accentuate his abilities. He goes out of his way to create scenarios upon which to apply those abilities. He experiments with his purpose. He tries to solve the problem of himself without being aware for years that is what he is doing.
After Eobard's dark night of the soul, wherein he comes to grip with his behavior defining who he ultimately is, he accepts and embraces that he plays the role of villain. This is fourth density thinking. We don't need to be aware of it for it to happen. Fourth density is aligning oneself to a side of duality. We can term it good and evil, but the easiest way to to define it simply might be saying we are either in service to self, or service to others. Both can blur the lines of good and evil, which is why it's easier to use in a thought experiment.
Eobard is definitely in service to self. He doesn't play hero in the beginning to actually save people or be the good guy, he plays hero for attention. He very much needs validation as a third density being that he matters more than the genetics that originally defined him, since he's a future designer baby. He creates situations over and over where he plays out making a difference, although the actual differences that he makes at first are catastrophic soul failures, if you will. If we allow spiritual definition into his soul searching for who he really is at his core, he dismally fails the humanitarian award. He literally lives the duality and can't understand it until he realizes and accepts his purpose is service to self.
Fourth density is not the end of growth awareness. Once a person embraces a side (and here every Star Wars fan will click and go Oh, yeah...), extreme imbalance can happen, for both good and evil.
An example of 'good' imbalance would be service to others to the extreme end of neglect to self, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Intentions may be good, but they can precariously collapse if the person playing out those intentions experiences a cascade of life fails resulting from the neglect of self.
An example of 'bad' imbalance would be service to self to the extreme of exhausting all non-self resources, resulting in multiple fails that collapse upholding service to self. You can't continue being a physical, emotional, or spiritual leach once you've decimated your supply chain.
Fifth density awareness growth is when a person who has chosen a side in the duality realizes that they need to find a balance with that other side in order to thrive. This means a 'good' person, while focusing on their service to others, takes the time for self care and revitalization. It means a 'bad' person, while focusing on their service to self, creates positive give and take relationships with others that keep the supply chain healthy.
Eobard is struggling with learning fifth density. He's kind of stuck in fourth density duality, learns that he can't really extinguish the Flash from ever existing in the first place without exterminating himself, and goes on from that point with his neverending crusade to make Flash as miserable as possible by bringing harm onto his family and friends and redirecting the good Flash does into calamity after all.
I don't think the writers are quite aware they are struggling with this, as well. They do a great job of it in their simulations through comics and TV shows, of course, but if they could really think this through, they could have Eobard mature even further into being an even better evil genius.
Let's look at this a little more slowly. Eobard reasons that he must recreate Barry Allen becoming the Flash in order to get what he wants. He's doing this begrudgingly. He doesn't want to create a healthy balance at all. Several times in the Arrowverse version TV series we see him longing to kill Barry and coming pretty close to doing it, and the only thing stopping him is that he won't get what he wants in the end. So he stays firmly focused on what he wants, not what anyone else needs.
If Eobard could ascend into fifth density thinking, he might be able to reason that a healthy happy Barry aka Flash might be more fun in the long run to harass. Once Eobard outs himself, he essentially gives Barry the power to choose fifth density thinking over him.
Let's give it a second for that to sink in.
Barry grows spiritually with Eobard as the catalyst. He learns fourth density awareness as he is learning to be the Flash, and he advances into fifth density thinking after Eobard has used Barry's daughter (to her expense) to free himself from a death penalty. Barry is able to rise above the duality because Eobard so consistently shoves that duality in his face. He'd like to kill Eobard back, a very natural and powerful human reaction, but he refrains from slipping back into third density awareness and remains firmly on one side of the duality. Once his daughter's timeline erases her, Barry launches into fifth density knowing that in order to find his own karmic balance on his hero's journey, he can't become like Eobard and simply cave to emotionally reacting.
When Eobard can no longer pull Barry's string, as it were, he also faces a new consciousness awareness. Can a psychopath become cognizant of fifth density decision making? Could Eobard possibly forge ahead as a villain keeping a balance? By sixth season in The Flash TV series, Eobard winds up trapped inside Nash and then expelled by Team Flash. Eobard at that point is an energy soul without a body. We have no idea if and when he'll be back and how they'll explain that, but he's certainly not dead.
When Eobard took over Nash's body and kept trying to kill, he was acting out his natural psychopathic impulses in fourth density. Is he capable of ascending to fifth density at all? I believe so. What would that mean in terms of his character development?
This is where anyone can continue the thought experiments. Eobard has essentially created himself to be a god, he's a super genius, and he could easily just wipe everyone out with a fingersnap at any time through the entire series, so... Why isn't he doing that?
Eobard's original refraint was that extinguishing the Flash meant extinguishing himself. He doesn't have that problem in the 6th season in Nash's body. He simply wants them all dead by now. He's done with this whole game he set up. After decades of his entire life revolving around Barry Allen, he's done with all of it.
In that mindset, what comes next for Eobard Thawne?
*millions of fans all over the world gleefully rub their hands over a macro burst of story ideas*
Waiting patiently for season 7.
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