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watcher mention in grian’s new hc episode….. shot up from my seat like a sleeper agent and immediately went to work

still images under the cut!

our lives matter more than your fucking nostalgia.

EVERYBODY knows (or should) that you DO. NOT. STOP. in Vidor, Texas. 

It’s best to just run out of gas elsewhere. Whatever you do, black folks, DO NOT STOP IN VIDOR, TEXAS. 

There’s a good chance you’ll get lynched or just come up missing - and I’m not joking.

also do NOT stop in Harrison, Arkansas!!!! (relatively close to OK and MI) a nazi town with a BIG KKK organization.

https://sundown.tougaloo.edu/sundowntowns.php

This website has a clickable map where you can see suspected and confirmed sundown towns by state, as well as information about whether these attitudes are historical or current.

reblog for the link

Wouldn't Caitlin also need energy to MAINTAIN that constant cold energy? Barry's metabolism is easily explained because of the constant movement, lightning generation, etc, but Caitlin needing to constantly pull cold from the environment, maintain her internal temperature in a world that is almost always to warm, and expend energy to control and manipulate ice (the wall she made once, those ice....sword things, E-2 Killer Frost's staircase thing [if I recall correctly]) she creates, she would burn a lot of calories too. (I sort of had to think about that for my own fic universe, but the dichotomy between cold and energy in general is absolutely fascinating as a whole.)

it makes a really good case for why metas have to be aligned with Team Flash, the Rogues, or with some other well-funded third party. they just plain won't survive otherwise. imagine that you gain powers but you were in college with a meal plan that can't cover even a fraction of the energy you now need. what are you supposed to do? find a job? not while still going to school. and if you drop out you lose your meal plan. what kind of job is going to pay you enough to eat and make rent with no experience or a degree?

It would have added SUCH an extra layer of tension. In theory, it'd likely be a case of mutation to adapt vs what their original human bodies were capable of BEFORE the dark matter hit. I like to think Barry is SUCH an extreme case since we're not JUST dealing with the dark matter from the particle accelerator but that it opened him up the Speed Force, which is a giant load on its own. But I don't think it's all just "we get hungrier". Human bodies adapt in so many damned ways, be it to external environmental pressures (hello, evolution, with different skin tones and nose shapes depending on the region and temperature/climate, etc!) to available resources over time. Specifically, metahumans have such very different powers!

So, because my brain's been on my fix-it-ish kinda AU this whole time, I may be misrembering facts/reasons from the show, but the way I see it, there's some kind of spectrum. Barry's in the.... I forgot how many tacos Cisco originally said the equivalent of his metabolism was... because of the level of physically taxing activity running takes--and they later learn the Speed Force thing. Hartley, if we scanned him, likely has a mutated pair of ears and voice box, which would account for him originally having those... implants, if I recall right. So between the mutation and the general low-key needs of that ability, Hart's biggest issue isn't his metabolism, but a conscious effort not to put himself in loud places or to learn some kinda muffling technique (or, well, make special earphones for renovation/construction areas). The sonic screaming may not be all THAT taxing to him unless he decided to make himself FLY for giant distances, and then, he does have those gloves that lessen the physical taxing load. I headcannon he drinks tea now, rather than coffee, to keep his sensitive nervous system calm. Shawna's teleporting, Cisco's vibing/breacher abilities, and Cecile's empathy (I know she gets added powers later, but I'm sticking with what I actually know) feel like they're sort of on a scale. Cecile's pretty passive, so if we only take her empathy into account, the woman's biggest issue is headache control if she's around too many high-strung people. Oh, the painkillers!!! So, yeah, an elevated stress management thing. A scan prolly will show something mutated in the workings of her brain. Which would be similar to Bivolo's, really, but his is more elevated because he then manipulates emotional regulation in other people itself.n Shawna's molecular structure as whole would have been mutated to allow her to deconstruct and rebuild based on a location she SAW, so it's partly that she just adapted to that being normal and then it gets extra taxing if, say, she has to teleport several times in a row or do it over... a mile? More? Whatever the range of her spyglass is. Then she's really burning calories. Cisco.... hoboy. I think his caloric intake gets fucked more by the vibe blasts than the breach opening and vibing. Again, like Cecile, I think something in breachers/vibers' brains gets mutated to make them sensitive to the multiverse. Given how there were specific areas in the city where the breaches were opened because of that wormhole at the end of S1, it may be a feature of the multiverse, hence it may be harder or easier to open a breach depending on where he is/plans to go. Then there's HOLDING those breaches open for extended periods and vibe blasting. Those would be cray taxing. Mark Mardon and Caitlin influencing the physical world would have a different energy output from, say, Tony's skin-to-metal thing and Farooq Gibran's electricity. We do know Farooq ended up requiring a special energy source, electricity over food, and.... well, that's kinda along the lines of Al Rothstein too. I could go oooooooon and on with different metas. XDDD And that is not even dipping my toes into the male vs female differences in presentation/adaptation of powers because biologically male and female bodies are actually different and our collective medical data is still heavily influenced by research on biological male bodies, applied to female ones, and that is why medical advice doesn't work for women the same way or at the same level of efficacy. Nora and Jesse Quick would have quirks/added changes and issues Barry and Wally don't, as speedsters, the same way Gypsy and Cisco would have divergences and Killer Frost/Caitlin would from, say, a cold-meta version of Leonard Snart, a la New 52 comics.

After saying all that, honestly, more than "allied with Team Flash or the Rogues for changing economic situation reasons" that are skewed towards higher grocery/food needs, they CANNOT go to the doctors normally. MRIs, EEGs, even sensitivity to getting touched/blood taken... being meta changes that. They need alliances/networks of other metas or meta-comprehending people BECAUSE of their new physiologies.

And of course, this is where ARGUS/military, etc... intervention becomes a thing... The Flash and Arrow briefly touch on government cooperation/clashing and Supergirl had a whole monitoring system that could have been waaaaaay scarier if they weren't the "good guys".

also re. the point about biological sex differences.... is this a good time to dig up my posts about how i think being a speedster might affect menstruation and the reproductive cycle that i started throwing around for my flash!iris AU cos i remember having some really fun discussions of the potential options, mainly "speedster metabolism and difficulty fuelling the body leads to amenorrhea vs. sped up cycle/accelerated healing means they have extremely quick periods that last only an hour or two instead of a week, but the downside is that they happen a lot more often, vs. well, normal periods i guess, booooo"

also i was doing some googling yesterday bc i was thinking a lot about the energy conservation thing (i must confess i failed GCSE biology and struggle a LOT with scientific concepts so i was like yeahhh imma need to do some reading to help me form thoughts about this one lmao) and it's interesting because all these animals that live in cold climates have these slow metabolisms and so on in service of conserving heat, which makes caitlin/frost so much more interesting because the idea of needing to maintain a cold temperature rather than conserving and maintaining bodyheat goes against the biological requirements of basically everything else on the planet (at least all other species that came up during a cursory google while i was definitely meant to be doing something else). the closest equivalent i guess would be sweating, but she'd have to sweat to such extreme levels to maintain that level of cold that i don't think it'd be plausible

So, what if some metas (or in variable ways among all metas) aren't always providing power from their own energy reserves? Increased metabolic rates present in Barry are well explored, accounted for, and dealt with. His interactions with/access to the Speed Force are a somewhat special case when it comes to exposure to dark matter as MK was saying re:electricity exposure during the explosion. Not everyone with electricity interactions got speedy, basically.

The increased metabolic rates of other metas aren't explored and we can say that's because of Barry's main character syndrome or lazy writing or being "outside the scope of this class". BUT what IF for my OWN AMUSEMENT the energy for some metas (I'm thinking fondly of Shawna and Hartley) doesn't increase metabolic rates because the energy isn't provided by the body at all? Dark matter is a weird and mcguffin-esque substance for the most part, yeah? And it's already proven extra-dimensional access for people like Cisco and Barry. Sooooo... what if extra-dimensional energy requirements aren't necessarily fulfilled by energies from our 3D plane?

Consider a fourth or fifth dimensional being. Their energy burn isn't always going to be refueled by three dimensional food.

Maybe for some metas, upon access to their powers, they also gain a partial access to their extra-dimensional selves?

Shawna might not be deconstructing herself and reconstructing herself elsewhere. She might be, say, "stepping" into a fourth dimensional space and then back out into three dimensional space. In which case, the only real output of power is the cognition necessary to think about moving in a dimension that isn't wholly normal. Her powers may just allow her that particular cognitive ability.

Hart might not be creating sonic ripples, but rather converting an extra-dimensional energy to its 3D equivalent-- sound. His hearing sensitivity might allow him to "hear" or otherwise sense that extra-dimensional energy and his cognitive abilities allow him a similar movement style as Shawna, but only for a particular flavor and output of energy.

The concept of hot and cold with Caitlin is interesting as well because in science (hello I am a chemist) there's no such thing as cold. There is only lack of heat. Temperature is the average energy contained within a set of molecules. Dead bodies don't get cold because they're absorbing cold, they get cold because they're equilibrating to ambient temperature by giving off heat. And because they're dead, metabolic processes don't replace the heat. So, for Caitlin, rather than bringing in cold, she's expelling her metabolic heat to an extra-dimensional space (which perhaps people like Ronnie or Jax or Stein have some partial access to?) either consciously or subconsciously. Creation of ice.... eehhh... superpowers. Hand waving. Unless she's pulling ambient moisture and then expelling the heat from that. OR she's pulling 4D material from somewhere, converting it to a 3D material, and creating some kind of 4D waste which is discarded as, say, more energy/heat.

Then again I am also a huge fan of torpor-like states so now I want that to work as well. Maybe that's Cait's payment for doing so much energy conversion consciously or subconsciously. She kicks out too much body heat too often and her safety mechanism pops in to be like "woah babe slow down" and she sits in torpor until her insides warm back up, extra-dimensionally.

Maybe all metas have something like this. Hartley just gets really cold sometimes because the conversion of extra-dimensional energy to a vibration needs some kind of fuel, right? He can do it because he's smart, but the brain takes a lot of calories. Just not a 1:1 situation like Barry's. Or he needs more of a certain kind of protein or vitamin or mineral--

Speaking of, to keep Cait's blood from freezing, she needs unusually high amounts of certain vitamins because vitamins help to fold proteins (look up the physical mechanism behind scurvy).

And your saying Cait has that whole energy conversion thing on an other-plane level is actually the basis I use for my meta!Len (but I tied that in to him being attached to the Timestream like Barry's attached to the Speed Force), so my personal crux is the differentiation of his and Cait's powers (wow, why am I using Ronnie's nickname for her???).

Though you bringing up vitamins and minerals reminds me that a lovely expansion on @coldflasher's menstrual cycle for speedsters thing, further delving into women's bodies and meta stuff, is holy hell, a speedster Iris wouldn't necessarily just go "lightning gave me abs???" CW!Barry style. Because of the difference in male and female hormones and ratios thereof, Houston, we have issues. Female speedsters would probably need severely modified versions of those nutrient bars made for their male counterparts. That or they'd be popping extra pills (just coz the idea of them shooting up or having an IV on the regular is ewwww to me).

But…at the same time, if she has a lower body temperature, how does that work? Does she just have to keep her body heat in a certain range—high enough to maintain her human physiological functions, low enough to maintain her Killer Frost physiology (the ice)? Is that body temp range narrower than for humans, or wider? I imagine an excess in either direction would kill her, just differently.

Though if we take the arctic fish thing into account and apply it to her…in theory she has no lower limit, except if a lower body temperature compromises other aspects of her human physiology. If she’s canonically a heat vampire, she surely needs some reason to accumulate the heat she keeps losing, so maybe the arctic fish physiology doesn’t apply to her, or does so only mildly? That would add to a point mentioned by @notquiteinsane, about her need to consume more of certain vitamins to keep her blood from freezing (that’s interesting btw, thanks for that!). Ooh which also lends to: what if she consumes excess vitamins because her other option is killing people and sucking their heat 👀 the first option is expensive given how many she’d have to regularly have, but the second is a blatant betrayal of her oath as a doctor. Interesting interesting…

And more broadly, if we say she’s basically getting ice from another extradimensional plane…what about her physiology is different, if anything? Does being Killer Frost just lower her body temperature to allow her to hold the ice she gets from somewhere else? How does that happen?