Scans_Daily

Sorry -- you said 'no need to take a symbol or metaphor so literally,' which, coupled with some of the other things you've said, sounded to me like trying to dismiss the notion that it was symbolic at all.

That said, what I mean by your interpretation also being meta is that you said it was to make 'one of their major heroic protagonists' not responsible for Flashpoint. That's meta -- DC trying to spin the image of one of the characters in their stories, not something that grows organically out of the narrative. Looked at purely from an in-universe perspective, the whole scene is terribly awkward and makes little sense. The event in question is repeatedly referred to as 'the Flashpoint,' which was its title as a marketing event, and not something you'd naturally use to refer to 'that time the whole universe got mucked up due to time travel.' Barry's first response to this isn't 'how do we fix it' or 'what can I do to help' or anything particularly heroic -- it's a nervous, self-conscious focus on whether or not anyone can blame him for this. And Wally's response is flatly definitive -- no, absolutely not, you had nothing to do with this (even though the bulk of the evidence would say he was at least involved), it was totally all someone else's fault. A more moderate response -- like 'even if you were involved, there was something bigger going on' or 'you might have contributed, but there was someone behind the scenes' -- would have left open room for Barry to be less than perfectly innocent (and, in my interpretation, Johns, too).

So, if the conversation is meant on a meta or symbolic level, then the only question is how deep to take it. And given the references to the real comics industry interwoven throughout (Watchmen as a symbol of comics going dark, the heroes robbed of 'ten years' -- which just happens to be how much time it's been since Identity Crisis, often cited as where DC dove headfirst into grim darkness), I think reading 'who's responsible for Flashpoint' as both an in-universe and out-of-universe question is entirely defensible. And when we're assured that Barry, a personal hero of Johns's, and one that he personally reintroduced into the DC universe, and the one he wrote as creating the new timelines in the first place, is totally and indisputably blameless for all this, well...

Anyway, I probably shouldn't get too deep into this. I've already pulled back pretty hard from DC due in part to things like the Berganza scandal, and this is pushing me the rest of the way. So I don't have all that much of a stake in it. But I just wanted to show why it's easily readable as Johns trying to absolve himself for something he was involved in.