Ceylon5

Hallelujah! Does this mean that there's no more Arrow sub-reddit and they'll just stop talking about it? Holding thumbs!

What happened to all the pre-2014 posts? I don't recall seeing any threads that pre-date about March 2014, so I just assumed that's when the website got up and running.

Did this website even exist in season 2? Or did you mean the internet in general?

To be fair, he was just responding to the question being asked. What's disingenuous of him is that he knows that the comments on Facebook are just as bad as on Twitter, but he always singles out Twitter as the place where manners and good sense go to die. To me, as someone on neither platform, I find visiting Facebook to be far worse, because the horrible comments and rudeness are all neatly laid out for easy reading and are not as easy to avoid as on Twitter, which is a bit of a free-for-all, and not so easy to make sense of.

She specifically said that what he was feeling wasn't darkness, but rather a war between different parts of himself. I don't think Felicity has ever had a problem with them killing certain people who needed it. She was against him killing random douches in season 1, but was fine with him killing Malcolm (oh, if only that had stuck!). In season 2, she was only against Oliver killing because it was something he didn't want, not because she personally disagreed with it as a blanket rule. That's why when Slade had Thea and Oliver wanted to kill him, she told him "Do what you have to do", but at the end of the season, she risked her life so that Oliver could have a choice about whether to kill Slade or not (and he chose not). In season 3, when Oliver went off to fight R'as, she told him to kill him too (which he ultimately did, and didn't seem too upset about it). So it's nothing new or different for Felicity to think that in certain circumstances, killing an otherwise unstoppable serial killer is the only option. If that's "darkly pragmatic", then she's always been darkly pragmatic. But I don't think making those kinds of decisions automatically makes you dark. I'm just tired of them going round in circles with this dark/light and kill/don't kill thing for Oliver. They've done it to death at this point (excuse the pun!), and he never seems to make any progress. Bored now.

I'm more concerned about the 15,000 unhackable nukes that have been launched. How is the world not going to end in a fiery nuclear apocalypse? This plot gets dafter by the day. Why spend 2 episodes preventing the nukes from launching, only to have them launched in the finale? Why did they have those episodes at all? If Barry's reset happens at just the right moment to save the world, then that's one hell of a coincidence and I don't see how they'll effectively explain it on Arrow.

My brother-in-law had this reaction to The Flash's idiotic finale last season. He was so annoyed with Barry and the dumb storyline that he hasn't watched the show since. They did the timeline reset thing on Fringe, which is an infinitely better written show than The Flash, and even there it was a hard sell for me. They did let Olivia eventually remember and revert to her pre-reset self for Peter's sake, but the rest of the characters didn't. Which means you're essentially throwing out the whole history of the show and starting again, which seems hugely counter-productive to me, especially with a really invested audience. I'm mostly just tired of Barry being so breathtakingly selfish and dumb. The point in the episode where they were saying that the race was just a ruse to power the thingy that would destroy all the universes, and Barry says, "I'm doing it anyway and I'll win", was where he just lost me forever. Seriously, everyone just said it didn't matter who won, Barry, as that wasn't the point of the race, and you say you're going to do it anyway? And even if winning was a way to potentially stop the universe destruction (which they specifically said was not the case), how on infinite earths was the risk that he'd lose not considered to be too great? Then they go ahead with the race and suddenly the race is irrelevant and half of Barry is magically undoing the unstoppable universe destroying thingy that he deliberately set off for no reason and the other half of him is magically winning a fist fight against Zoom, and I'm thinking "Well, why didn't you just beat him up in the first place??? Why all the risky races, and remnants and other horribly stupid whatsits if you could have just punched him in the face 20 episodes ago and finished things off that way?". And were we supposed to think Barry was heroic because his remnant died stopping the stupid thing he pointlessly started? Give me a break. I wish the creepy things that took Zoom had taken Barry too. He deserved it just as much. Side issue: if these speedsters can reset time so easily, why didn't Zoom just go back in time on his earth and save his Mom? Anyway, I'm definitely not cut out for this level of comic book suspension of disbelief. That finale was 2 parts boring, 1 part unbelievably aggravating and no part entertaining.

It's interesting. I think if the story had remained exactly as it is, but no-one had really ever talked much about Felicity or given a crap about her in previous seasons, then no-one would be complaining about her storyline now either. The backlash seems less about Felicity and more about her popularity, which is why a lot of the anger is directed at her fans, both in Arrow's creative team, cast and crew and in the audience. The more popular and talked about someone is, the more they're resented and the more disproportionate is the backlash against them. That's why people don't complain particularly about, say, Thea - she's just sort of there, and hardly anyone is getting either especially excited or annoyed by her, as people are mostly pretty apathetic about her. All this is only an on-line phenomenon, though, and I actually don't think the on-line views of shows with passionate fan-bases are necessarily that predictive of the views of the general audience, because it does often end up being more of a bun-fight between viewing factions, rather than a genuine response to a story or a character. The bulk of the viewers are casual viewers who will continue to like what they like, without anyone else's opinions colouring their views one way or the other.

You know how when kids are fighting and the parent comes in and glares at them and both kids say "She started it!" pointing at each other? Well, I think that's what's going on here. It's silly, because I suspect there were fans of Barry, Felicity, Oliver and Laurel who were all voting multiple times from the beginning, otherwise the votes for those characters wouldn't have been so disproportional (Supergirl's numbers are probably a more realistic reflection of actual individual votes). Blaming Felicity's fans specifically is just a knee-jerk reaction at this point.

Actually BC jumped 11000 votes since yesterday, nearly tripling her vote count. So clearly this poll allows multiple votes from one person (which I was already suspecting yesterday when the figures for Barry and Felicity increased quite rapidly) and is therefore essentially worthless. Pity, I thought it was one of those that gave a true reflection of things by only letting people vote once. Polls where you can vote multiple times are just a reflection of the fanbases' dedication, not a true reflection of actual popularity. And, of course, Felicity and Felicity fans are being blamed for the dodgy BC numbers, because everything is always Felicity's fault these days.

1. Missed the target and accidentally killed an innocent bystander instead 2. Missed the target and lost the arrow 3. Glanced off the edge of the target 4. Hit the target! 5. Bullseye!

Ha, I don't think anyone's found a way of blaming the terrible flashbacks on Felicity yet! Give them time, though; I'm sure someone will think of something.

I don't know if anyone used those words in their "critiques", probably because "Felicity and Friends" has a better ring to it than "structural problem", but as I said above and as many of us have said over the last 2 seasons, the show became very imbalanced in S3 (and has only been slightly better this season), with almost all the story being about the Arrow stuff and almost none of it, other than Felicity & Ray, being outside of the lair. I think the loss of Moira had a massive detrimental effect on the show, because as long as she was around, Oliver & Thea had a non-mask anchor in the story, and the writers HAD to come up with storylines that weren't all about the Arrow stuff. She gave the story a bit of depth, and with her came parties and peripheral characters and things happening in the daytime. The half-hearted mayor storyline this year didn't go nearly far enough IMO to give the story that added dimension that Moira gave it. In the first two seasons we knew where everyone was getting their money, what work they did and what their "cover" personas were. In season 3 they didn't even seem to need cover personas (other than Felicity) because they had no presence outside the lair worth mentioning. It's like half the story just vanished, and the show was much the lesser for it. So that's what I mean by structural problem. We need to see them caring about the city in the daytime - the actual normal people they interact with, the actual places they work or have dinner at (Big Belly Burger, where are you?), the actual reasons why they'd give a damn about that horrid city and its amorphous, terminally stupid population. Having too many masks and too few non-masks to fight for makes the show a little pointless, insular and by-the-numbers.

There isn't really anything else about her to change. Felicity is still the same person she was in S1 & S2 when she wasn't being criticized by anyone - she makes the same kinds of jokes and snark, still talks too fast and puts her foot in her mouth, sticks up for herself the same way, still gives Oliver a hard time when he's doing something she disagrees with, does the same fancy computer magic, goes into the field from time to time, gets to be both a damsel and a hero on occasion (as they all do), has the same interesting grey morality, etc. Apart from being in a relationship with Oliver and having a different job description - which are character circumstances, not character traits - she's otherwise just a slightly older, slightly more jaded version of S1 Felicity. It's not Felicity herself, in any event, that people are really bleating about (even if they think it is); it's the storylines she's been given - mostly that she's Oliver's love interest, but also to a lesser degree that she got to be CEO (while he's poor) and that she's finally getting more backstory and family and friends, so that her life isn't All Oliver All the Time, like it was in S2. What I'm getting from the whole Felicity and Friends thing is that people are jealous that this upstart female character who isn't even in the comics (gasp!) is now getting treated as a proper person and not just a prop to the plot and to Oliver, and as a consequence theoretically more screentime is being devoted to things that don't involve leather costumes and ACTION. What they're forgetting is that in S1 & S2 there was a lot of storyline that wasn't costumed action - most of Thea's, Tommy's, Moira's and Laurel's storylines, as well as some of Diggle's and Oliver's storylines were the kind of storylines that Felicity is now getting (non Arrow work/friends and family interactions) - but since Moira died and Thea and Laurel became part of the costumed action, Felicity was left shouldering the bulk of the responsibility of providing some balance on the show between regular life and Arrow life. I think the argument that there is a structural problem in the show is valid; but blaming Felicity for this is bizarre, since she's the one character they're actually balancing correctly. If anything, they should blame the writers for going too far towards turning all the other characters into one-dimensional fighting-masked-stunt-people-in-the-dark interchangeable masks, and not giving them all more stories in the daytime with other characters outside their little group. But maybe that's the issue - that Felicity is perceived as actually being better written than the others, and people are annoyed on the other characters' behalves? Since all the writing is pretty iffy, though, this seems like a stretch...

That was really interesting, and sheds more light on Stephen's comment about hoping that they don't lose any of their crew to Supergirl now that they're going to be in Vancouver. That's not an idle concern, by the sounds of things. Maybe the drop in quality in Arrow's stunts and so on is simply a mathematical thing - there really just aren't enough qualified people or available spaces to go around anymore.