#legion!len

(Evil Barry is a dick but I’m assuming his time in the speedforce helped make him a little unstable)

(In Ollie’s defense, he was faking it)

(Drugged, not her fault)

(Brainwashing...)

(More brainwashing...)

(Legends really likes brainwashing, okay?)

I do think there was some discussion about that (specifically this post?) but my 2x17 tag is so full of bitterness and salt it’s best not to wade through it haha. And either way, I haven’t said anything that would fully address your point.

I think that a parallel can be drawn, especially in terms of timing, shock, and visuals (shot through the back), but I don’t think the situations are comparable. Well, they are but... okay I’ll go into it.

So Savitar is a different version of Barry, one who is has been hurting team Flash all season in various ways, but specifically has been fixing to kill Iris. She kills him when he’s about to kill Barry, about to destroy all of them, maybe? Iris shoots him in the back. And he’s about to die/disintegrate anyway, right? His entire motive, in the end, was about securing his own existence, however terrible that is.

So... Doomworld!Mick is a different version of Mick. One running up against the Legion of Doom, sure. Len kills Doomworld!Mick when he’s about to take down Darhk, about to gain the upper hand on the Legion in general, maybe? Len shoots him in the back. Because if Len (the Legion) doesn’t win, Len dies, right? His main motive for being on the Legion seems to be securing his own continued survival. 

So... yeah, okay, parallels for sure. I see it, and I think you’re sort of brilliant for noticing that.

But their situations aren’t really that comparable to me despite that. Savitar has been specifically threatening Iris’s life for months and is aiming to kill the love of her life. And she tried to show him compassion before that, tried to find some way to save him. Tried to come to terms with this. And he was going after Barry specifically out of spite? Iris killed Savitar to save Barry.

Conversely, Len killed Mick out of spite, and to save himself. Mick didn’t pick him, and picked the other side, and Len was willing to shoot him in the back and kill him over it. You can’t tell me Len cared at all about Darhk. Sure, Darhk was on his side, an ally, but Mick was an ally for 30+ years so...

And Mick wasn’t a direct threat against Len’s life. Mick wasn’t aiming to hurt Len or anyone Len cared about, not then. So killing Mick wasn’t in any way an act of protection or self-defense. I mean, Len was trying to survive and make sure he changes his own path, but killing Mick wasn’t necessary to that in any way. Not specifically so.

And the psychology of Savitar being not-Barry and Doomworld!Mick being not-Mick is different too, though... yeah we can draw some parallels here as well. 

Savitar expressly says he’s not Barry. He has different motives than Barry and acts in a way totally contrary to how Barry does. Savitar does pretty much exactly what Barry would never ever do. They’re diametrically opposed and that’s not lost on Iris, it can’t be. I mean, he’s “still” Barry, has much of the same past, but he’s become someone mostly unrecognizable, inside and out. 

That’s not so much the case with Mick (though I’ll say it partly could be). Mick looks the same and talks the same still. Acts similar, except that he’s less hostile and cares about the team and admits it, has a new type of loyalty. And I think Len sees all these versions of Mick (Doomworld!Mick and WW1!Mick) as “not his” because Mick is his partner and would never stand alongside a team that isn’t Len’s. He recognizes that Mick has changed and has different motives. 

And the temporal displacement fits for both Savitar and Mick, too. While Savitar is from the future and Len is from the past, the end result is sort of the same. Savitar has memories of the future, and Mick has memories of the future, “future” being relative to the present state of Iris and the present state of Len (it’s just that the “present” state of Len is “past” to the viewer).

It was really more of a joke post, anon? Definitely wasn’t trying to start any debates ^^;

If you do want a serious analysis of Len’s motives though, I’ve talked a bit about them here and here and here. 

Broadly, I think it’s totally fair to headcanon he was manipulated if that’s how you see it and what makes sense to you, but I personally don’t headcanon that. Based on canon, what I assume/headcanon happened is that the Legion told him that he joins this team, “goes soft” (aka decides he wants to be a hero), and dies. That Mick is on the seemingly same course (going soft, caring about the team, etc). And they offer him a chance to change that fate. 

Because Len didn’t need to “turn to the villainous side”. This is Len from around or just after The Flash 1x04, we can presume from hints in Legends. This Len was a villain, and uninterested in changing that at this point. He’s also a survivor, and would be motivated to make sure he doesn’t end up dead because he catches feelings. That and, like you said, they didn’t show us anything, which implies that there was nothing to show - no manipulation or coercion involved. At least in terms of a canon-reading.

I’ve literally rewatched all of Doomworld to make sense of Len’s characterization and honestly, I don’t think it’s as far off as I originally thought it was, or that it’s irreconcilable with the Len we know. After I calmed down, I could make sense of so much of his behavior by reading between the lines.

So I’m sharing that with you, a sort of quick look into his scenes in the episode. 

Long post, no gifs, but here we go.

I assume what you mean here is post-Oculus Len somehow returning from the dead.

Basically, what would “current” Len think of “past” Len’s actions and choices?

I think Len would be pissed but unsurprised. Legion!Len is, in many ways, a former version of himself. He knows how cold he was, and what he was (is?) capable of. That was him just a few years ago.

But I do think he’d be startled a bit, too. Ever go back and read your old livejournal posts from when you were a teenager, and go “oh wow you were so ~~edgy~~ weren’t you, younger-self” and cringe at the shit you used to say and do?

That’s oculus-Len to Legion-Len, except with more fatal consequences. He’s developed into a genuinely more emotionally stable and healthy person with an updated worldview. Being confronted with the choices of Legion-Len, who wanted to rule the city in Doomworld and teamed up with the Legion, would be wince-inducing and off-putting.

“My younger self is an idiot, don’t anyone confuse me with that jackass.”

But him killing Mick would likely be a sore spot. That’s the spot at which I think he’d want to physically fight his former-self. Because Oculus-Len has been through hell and back with Mick and died largely for him. Was willing to die for him. But Legion!Len (past!Len) isn’t in that emotional space, for whatever reason. He’s too cold and closed off.

So... I think he’d be angry. At himself, mostly, because that’s still him, but definitely directed outward at Legion!Len, assuming they were occupying the same physical space. A little ashamed, maybe, not that he’d admit it to anyone, and probably trying to make amends but just so subtly no one really notices.

In 2x16, I jumped through every mental hoop possible to make sense of Leonard Snart’s characterization with the Legion and in Doomworld. I gave the writers the benefit of the doubt. I had a faint shred of optimism about him.

But Leonard’s characterization stopped being any sort of plausible to me the moment he killed Mick. At least, he stopped being the same character we’d seen to date. If they’d never given us any context or history for him and Mick, it could work. But they did. They gave us a lot. And there is zero way to reconcile it. The only explanation is shock value and terrible writing.

Even Doomworld Len wouldn’t do that. In 2x16, Len tried to placate and look after Mick, kept him safe from the rest of the Legion. Len in The Flash 1x10 told his partner to “take the painting and go” if he wanted out, despite evidence that Len consistently kills people who want out of jobs and their job wasn’t over. That was before The Flash inspired him to be a better person, let alone the Legends trip.

The friendship established canonically time and again by the DC CWTV universe precludes the possibility of Len killing Mick in cold blood. Len either cared about Mick before the Flash and Legends entered his life, or he never cared about him at all. 

To say that the Legends trip had such an impact on him in just a few months that he went from not caring about Mick to being willing to lay down his life for him to make him happy / set him free is honestly ludicrous. If the writers expect me to believe and accept that Len only started caring about Mick during season 1 of Legends, or after meeting the Flash, and went from being so completely cold that he’s willing to kill this person he’s known for so long to being so willing to die for him just like that…

Ohhhh. I like it.

I can totally get behind the theory. that flashpoint changed Len’s life slightly and made him crueller. If it can change Caitlin’s literal DNA (which it did, because she didn’t have the metahuman gene in season 2 and then became a meta post-Flashpoint), then it having an effect on Len’s life is just as reasonable.

I’m... not sure I agree, anon. I don’t have the time/energy tonight to do a full analysis, but I promise I will try to check out more of his body language when I get time to see if I can find any evidence that. 

For now, here’s some of my thoughts:

A huge thing (for me) to note though was that Len wasn’t wearing gloves all episode. I’ve talked before both about gloves and about Len’s hands and how important they are for communicating and expressing himself, among other things.

The hallucination!Len was wearing gloves, so was the hologram!Len and the speedforce!Len. He almost always wears gloves when he’s in Captain Cold regalia and on the job. To see him without them is both an indication that this is the ‘real’ Len, and, I think, an indication that he’s really himself.

I don’t think Len was coerced. I think he was told he dies and why, and that the Spear of Destiny could let him rewrite time without causing an aberration so that he could survive. That’s all it took, because he’s a survivor, and without having gone through all that, it’s hard for him to fathom why he would want to, and he’s going to emotionally/mentally rebel against the notion and against the people who apparently turned him ‘soft’ as a defense mechanism now.

I don’t think he’s keeping any major secrets because we often see Len with his hands in his pockets when he’s keeping a secret or has a dual agenda, and I didn’t notice him doing that here. I can think of three scenes off the top of my head where he’s done it before when he’s keeping a secret, the hands in pockets thing. Not that that’s gonna be a perfect indicator, but if he is keeping a secret, I think it’s more of the “I want to steal the spear from these assholes and keep it for myself” variety?

As for being unhappy having to manipulate Mick... while I’d agree, I again don’t think that’s down to coercion. I think he’s pissed that Mick is with the team because Mick is his partner. Seeing him on the side of the ‘white hats’ is almost personally offensive to him, since he hasn’t been through all that alongside Mick and he knows he dies for it (again, that defensive push back). He’s feeling betrayed and angry and he’s communicating with Mick through violence and vicious words because they’re on opposing sides and he and Mick have never hesitated to pull their weapons on each other, but this is more personal now. 

He said how he respected the man that Mick was, the Mick he knows. This is a Mick he’s... not even sure how to take. And it’s getting under his skin. It’s proof that Mick changed and that he can change, did change. This Len doesn’t think that’s a good thing. Doesn’t want Mick to be living evidence. He wants his Mick back.