History Characters / ArrowverseBarryAllen

** The events of "Flashpoint" made Barry this to the other superheroes — specifically Cisco (who lost his brother), Diggle (whose daughter was changed to a son) and the Legends (who now have a new threat to deal with [[spoiler:including one of their own partners]]) — since he was always held up to a higher standard by being the most virtuous of them all. However his willingness to sacrifice himself to the Dominators if it meant they would leave Earth rebuilt that pedestal.

** If you don't buy into their ships, then Barry also has this with Kara and Felicity.

* PlatonicLifePartners: Barry this relationship with Caitlin; despite being close friends, both have other love interests and have no romantic feelings for each other. Aside from a few occasional ShipTease moments, they never show any intention of wanting to get together. [[spoiler: May not be the case as of season 3 onwards, as Caitlin shows a lot of resentment for Flashpoint turning her into Killer Frost, and when Killer Frost takes over completely, Barry soon learns that she joins Savitar. Needless to say, [[{{Understatement}} siding with the speedster that's going to murder his fiancee probably won't do wonders for their relationship]].]]

An assistant crime scene investigator in Central City with a habit of being late. After the murder of his mother by a "man in yellow", he develops an interest (some say obsession) in "impossible" crimes and events. He first appears in-universe in the mid-season 2 two-parter in ''Series/{{Arrow}}'' investigating a break-in by a thief who apparently has SuperStrength. After being struck by lightning, he falls into a coma and awakens as a "[[DifferentlyPoweredIndividual metahuman]]" with SuperSpeed, which he eagerly uses to fight crime, find other meta-humans, and eventually find his mother's killer.

* TheChosenOne: In [[Series/{{Arrow}} Oliver Queen]]'s own words, the force behind the lightning that struck Barry chose him for a reason. Additionally, Eobard Thawne keeps implying that there is something special about his speed. "The Runaway Dinosaur" confirms this by having the Speed Force itself state that it specifically chose Barry. [[spoiler: However due to Flashpoint, the Speed Force effectively ''uncloses'' him by making him occupy the prison he built for Savitar; otherwise the Speed Force would collapse.]]

->'''Played By:''' Creator/GrantGustin, Logan Williams (young, Seasons 1-2), Liam Hughes (young, Seasons 3-)

* AscendedToAHigherPlaneOfExistence: [[spoiler:In the Season 3 finale, Barry agrees to go to the Speedforce in order to pacify it from causing a possible apocalypse.]]

* BreakoutCharacter: He is the most popular hero of the [[Series/{{Arrowverse}} Arrowverse]] (in ''and'' out of universe) and is essentially its SeriesMascot.

* PopCulturedBadass: The fastest man alive likes "Pokerface" by Lady Gaga. He's got a blog according to Eddie and a Facebook account according to Cisco.

* WorthyOpponent: What Hunter Zolomon/Zoom came to see him as by the end of season 2, especially after learning about the similarities between the two of them.

* YoureNotMyFather: After Joe comes down hard on Barry for risking his life by fighting other metahumans and engaging in dangerous heroics, Barry fires back by saying he is not Joe's kid and that his father is still sitting in prison for a crime he didn't commit.
** Later in a CrowningMomentOfHeartwarming, Barry lists all the things Joe ''has'' done for him and says that while Joe's not his father, he is a "Dad".

* TheChosenOne: In [[Series/{{Arrow}} Oliver Queen]]'s own words, the force behind the lightning that struck Barry chose him for a reason. Additionally, Eobard Thawne keeps implying that there is something special about his speed. "The Runaway Dinosaur" confirms this by having the Speed Force itself state that it specifically chose Barry.

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* MiseryBuildsCharacter: Brutally deconstructed; all the tragedies Barry face only make him weaker as they happen in such frequency that Barry has little time to process them: due to the traumatic circumstances of Nora's death it took a long time for Barry to finally accept her death, then Henry was murdered in ''same spot as Nora was'', and barely a year after Henry's death, [[spoiler:Savitar kills Iris which in a BadFuture was the last straw as it just '''broke''' Team Flash. When it's revealed that Savitar is a future version of Barry, it implies that all these events happening in such a quick succession facilitated his transformation into a TragicVillain, desperate to ensure his own survival even if it meant forcing his past self to suffer the same tragedy of losing the love of his life]].

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** Later in a CrowningMomentOfHeartwarming, Barry lists all the things Joe ''has'' done for him and says that while Joe's not his father, he is a "Dad".

* {{Intangibility}}: Learns how to do this in "Tricksters".

* GeniusBruiser: He gets to show off the "Genius" part a bit more on Supergirl's Earth than in his own series, as his biggest contribution aside from his speed are the gadgets and software he develops for the DEO. Barry is a certified genius in his own series as well, but rarely gets to show it off because of his teammates, who usually handle these aspects for him.

** Not usually, but Barry has a blind spot when it comes to Eobard Thawne. Until he sees the headline that Mason Bridge, the reporter who's been going after Thawne is missing. Then he finally sees the painfully obvious.

* AllOfTheOtherReindeer: Henry wanted him to change his surname so people would stop giving him grief about being related to a (albeit innocent) murderer.* ArcSymbol: Different kinds of prisons are heavily associated with him, signifying how he can't move on from the fateful night his mother was murdered no matter how much he tries.

** Grodd has taken Cold's place as Barry's top non-Speedster enemy. By the time "Attack on Gorilla City" happens, Grodd has forgone all former attachments and his sole concern is getting revenge on Barry for exiling him to Earth-2 by any means necessary.* AscendedFanboy: Barry idolized superheroes like the Arrow, and was thoroughly delighted to meet the Arrow and his secret identity in person. A season later, he himself becomes a superhero.

* BigDamnHeroes: Starting to rival Oliver in these moments. Notably, he gets a pretty spectacular one each season during the crossover with ''Series/{{Arrow}}'' where Barry will come in and save Oliver and Team Arrow from a main villain.* BigDamnKiss: Finally kisses Iris before going to save Central City from a tsunami, but when he accidentally travels back in time this is erased.

* BreakTheCutie: While still trying to deal with everything that the Reverse Flash put him and those he's close to through during Season 1 and contending with all the crisis that Zoom and the Earth 2 Meta's are throwing at him currently, and that's without even touching upon the issues in his civilian life, makes Season 2 an immensely long one for him, culminating in his DespairEventHorizon at the end of the season.* BrokeYourArmPunchingOutCthulhu:

* EarlyBirdCameo: Had a two episode guest appearance on ''Series/{{Arrow}}'' before headlining his own show.* EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: In the "Pilot", when Barry first gained his speed, he didn't have any lightning trailing behind him as he ran. This continues until he first dons the Flash suit and faces off against Clyde Mardon.

** [[Recap/Supergirl2015S1E18WorldsFinest While he was on Earth-38 he created special ear plugs to counter out Silver Banshee's scream and helped the National City police devise containment cells for metahuman criminals.]]* GeekPhysique: In contrast to his muscular comic-book counterpart, Barry is a boyish-built guy and shows a fair amount of self-consciousness whenever he gets compared to more heroically built heroes such as Oliver Queen ("His arms are like, twice as big as yours...") and Hunter Zolomon's time remnant ("Your shirt looks so small on him...").

* ILetGwenStacyDie: A non-romantic variation, but the fact that he was unable to help either of his friends, Eddie or Ronnie, have him questioning whether or not he truly is TheHero Central City has made him out to be come the beginning of Season 2.** Adding to his hurt is that both men were the Fiancée and Husband of two of his best friends, Iris and Caitlin respectively, though neither of them blame him for what happened.

** So, how not well did things end? The West family and Team Flash are all screwed up. [[spoiler: Joe is a drunk who's always hung over and late for work and on the verge of being fired. Cisco made a fortune off an invention, S.T.A.R. Labs is Ramon Industries now, and he has a new girlfriend/assistant…but he's incredibly pompous, pretends not to care about people, dislikes Wally and Iris, doesn't know Barry or Caitlin, and speaking of which, Caitlin doesn't work there, she's an eye doctor. Why does Cisco dislike Wally and Iris? Wally is Kid Flash, Iris is using her reporter connections to feed him info, and they came to Cisco for help building Wally's suit before but he doesn't want to get involved. Meanwhile, Barry using his speed also accelerates his assimilation into the new timeline, meaning every time he thinks of an old memory afterwards he ends up forgetting it and blanking out. He helps Wally take down The Rival (Edward Clariss) but Wally is near-mortally wounded in the process. All the while Eobard, from the speed-dampening cell Barry put him in, keeps taunting Barry about how he screwed up everything.]] Once Barry finally sees he didn't stop [[spoiler: his loved ones' suffering]], he agrees to let Thawne go back and kill Nora again in order to "fix" things. However…** Because Barry was [[spoiler: collapsing due to his memory blanks, Eobard got to be "the hero", meaning ''the Reverse-Flash now had free reign to make subtle changes'']], ensuring that Barry's misery just keeps on going even after the timeline was [[spoiler: mostly]] restored. The end results were: [[spoiler: Joe didn't tell Iris about Francine; she found out on her own and has been pissed at him for months. Cisco's brother Dante was killed in a car accident, he's still grieving over it, and he's mad at Barry's refusing to change the timeline to save Dante. John Diggle doesn't have his baby daughter Sara, he has a son, John Jr., instead, the same one who becomes Connor Hawke by 2046 according to the Legends' visit to the Star City of that hypothetical future — a post-apocalyptic gangland dystopia. Also, a strange masked man called Dr. Alchemy is finding the Flashpoint-exclusive metahumans (first one being The Rival) and experimenting on them to give them back their powers. This ''will'' affect Wally in the future, but since the others don't want to know about their Flashpoint lives he ''doesn't'' tell them this immediately. The resulting leftover skin husks are being investigated by a new partner of Barry's at CCPD who's frosty with him because can tell he's hiding something[[note]]but doesn't know that something is him being The Flash[[/note]] and therefore doesn't trust him. And speaking of frosty, Barry doesn't learn about this for awhile, Caitlin is becoming Killer Frost]]. He also wanted to go back in time and "fix" these things too, but [[spoiler: was intercepted by Jay Garrick, his dad's doppelganger, who had to teach him from experience about moving forward responsibly instead of constantly trying for do-overs and just making everything worse]]. And then Season 2 of ''Series/LegendsOfTomorrow'' shows even more horrible consequences: [[spoiler: because Eobard Thawne never died in this new timeline, he formed an alliance with Damien Darhk and proceeded to nuke Manhattan in 1942, extending World War II by a couple of years and millions of casualties. The Legends had to go back to that time period to prevent it from happening despite the warnings of Hourman, the results of which caused Rip Hunter to go missing and nearly killed the rest of the Legends. Not to mention that Darhk and Thawne are just half of a Legion of Doom with Malcolm Merlyn and a version of Leonard Snart who never became a hero]]. Then it turns out later [[spoiler:his time travel mess-ups also resulted in a calamity on another planet whose victims considered it an act of war and responded with an ALIEN INVASION OF EARTH.]] When Barry Allen makes a mistake, he goes big.

* NoodleIncident: There was one time as a kid where he tried out for his school's football team. He and Joe have agreed [[LetUsNeverSpeakOfThisAgain never to speak of it]]. * NotSoSimilar: From Eobard Thawne. Despite their many similarities there are some key differences, Eobard is a fatalist while Barry is a firm believer in that you can ScrewDestiny.
* NowOrNeverKiss: Knowing that what he is about to do, ''(actually stop Thawne from killing his Mom)'', the entire time line will change, and the next time he sees her, things will be radically different between the two, he seizes the opportunity to finally share a real kiss with Iris, and let her know how much he loves her one last time, before he leaves.
** Later shares this with ''Flashpoint'' Iris, knowing that allowing Eobard to ''fix'' the timeline will result in her being RetGone'd, he shares one with her before leaving Flashpoint behind.

* OOCIsSeriousBusiness: To characterize how much despair Henry's death has caused him and how much he has come to hate Hunter Zolomon, Barry outright admits to Joe that he doesn't want to just kill Zoom -- he wants to make him ''suffer''. Considering that Barry is usually merciful and only resorts to killing as a last resort, this was enough to alarm the rest of the team into locking him up in the Pipeline until Barry calmed down.* OpenSecret: His SecretIdentity borders on this as the series goes on. One character (who runs a company that competes with Star Labs) casually reveals that she knows Barry is TheFlash, and when he asks how the response is "I'm not stupid". It doesn't help that Barry is pretty casual about revealing his identity to people anyway, often for reasons as trivial as boosting their morale.

* TheRunaway: After his dad was convicted, and he was given to Joe he would runaway a lot trying to see his dad.* SadClown: According to a comment from executive producer Greg Berlanti.

* SherlockScan: Particularly evident in the early episodes, especially the pilot before he became the Flash. As Barry looks over the crime scene, the clues he spot are accompanied by visual text to show Barry's observations (much like how the TropeNamer [[Series/{{Sherlock}} does so]]). He was able to discern exactly what type of car the Mardon brothers used in their getaway from a robbery from analyzing a tire track, and figure out a vague location from a piece of excrement mixed with the track; all within a minute and without the use of any equipment.* ShipperOnDeck:

* SuperheroOrigin: His is told in the ''Arrow'' episodes "The Scientist" and "Three Ghosts", and is expanded upon in the pilot episode.* SupermanStaysOutOfGotham: In his first {{Crossover}} since becoming The Flash, he and Oliver had a lot of discussion regarding their different approach in heroics. They eventually sort things out.

** Was on the giving end during the "Invasion!" crossover. [[spoiler:Every single hero except him and Oliver were brainwashed by the Dominators, forcing them to keep the others at bay until they could jam the signal. Barry quickly took out Mick, Ray, ''and'' Firestorm, and was able to match and manipulate Supergirl into destroying the signaling device]]. For all his faults, there ''is'' a reason why Barry is one of the two top heroes of the Arrowverse.* WorldsStrongestMan: Just like how Oliver Queen is the WorldsGreatestWarrior, Barry Allen is, by far, the most powerful superhero in all of Earth-1, and has the potential to be the strongest character in all of the Arrowverse. [[spoiler:This is only reinforced when Savitar, without a doubt ''the'' most powerful speedster/character ever introduced on the show, is confirmed to be a future version of Barry]].

* MaybeEverAfter: With Iris, according to Gideon, and the article from the future, and her doppelganger on Earth-2, she at one time may change her surname to West-Allen. In the episode ''Trajectory'' Iris even makes a casual mention of a possible wedding between her and Barry, showing he's not the only one open to the idea.
** As of the end of ''The Runaway Dinosaur'' the two have become the OfficialCouple.

* NiceJobBreakingItHero: Has a terrible habit of being emotionally provoked, intentionally or otherwise, into causing potential [[ApocalypseHow extinction level events]].** In the season 1 finale, Eobard Thawne proposes a plan — using Cisco's Rip Hunter-esque time machine, Barry goes back in time and saves his mom and in turn Eobard returns to his own time, the entire story between them retconned from time. Barry agrees, travels back to the past, then backs out of saving Nora at the last minute when another future Barry warns him off, returns to the present and stops Thawne from going home. This leads to a fight in which Eobard has Barry on the ropes until Eddie shoots himself to [[{{RetGone}} erase Eobard's "current" existence]]. Thawne then disappears…and [[ApocalypseHow/{{Class 6}} a black hole, a singularity forms over the city]], from the resulting paradox. Barry tries to stop it with his speed but can only slow it down at best, so Ronnie has to sacrifice himself to close it completely by defusing Firestorm within the event's center. As Nice Jobs go, this is a particular crown jewel, and let's not get into how it lead to opening Earth-1 to an even more dangerous speedster and his minions, turning the events of Season 2.

** With Oliver. Oliver was his first mentor and one of his inspirations for becoming a hero. While he isn't as close to Oliver as he is with Cisco, the rapport they share is strong enough that Barry is the only person that didn't know Oliver pre-island to call him "Ollie".* HisOwnWorstEnemy: It's been repeatedly stated that Barry himself is his own worst enemy, not who or whatever he faces. [[spoiler:This is taken to new heights with the reveal of Savitar being an evil future version of him]].

* {{Foreshadowing}}: When he messes about with the chemicals in the lab, making comments about how it's dangerous to have them so close together, Felicity responds that maybe he shouldn't be touching them. Cue a lightning strike and Barry looking out at it for a few seconds. This is a nod to the most well-known of Barry's origin stories: getting doused in chemicals after a lightning bolt knocks him into it. At the end of "Three Ghosts" in ''Arrow'', this is indeed how Barry gets his powers, with the lightning bolt being generated by Star Labs' overloaded particle accelerator. * FirstLove: It can be argued that he is both this ''and'' SecondLove to Iris; while Iris entered a relationship with Eddie Thawne first and loved him a lot, it's been confirmed that she was in love with Barry long before she had even met Eddie, and simply hadn't realized it yet.

* CharacterDevelopment: Barry has become more confident, forceful and driven than he was during his first appearance on Arrow; stammering a lot less and interacting with more ease, which he might owe to his powers. According to the creators, it won't stop there...

--> '''Andy Kreisberg''':“He really becomes an adult and that’s been really exciting for Grant, that’s been really exciting for us — it was very black and white before this, very ‘that’s good and that’s evil,’ and like most adults, Barry has to learn that people make mistakes. The question isn’t ‘Did you make a mistake or not,’ it’s ‘What are you gonna do about it?’ And if there’s nothing you can do about it, how are you gonna live with yourself?” * ChickMagnet: He's been involved, or at least had a ShipTease, with ''four'' women in the first season alone, namely; Iris, Felicity, Caitlin and Linda.

* CameBackStrong: Of the non-death version. After Barry had his powers stolen by Zoom, he later enters the speed force and while inside learns to harness it's power effectively. The trip itself not only restores his connection to the speed force but increases it drastically as before Zoom was about four times faster than him and after he came back he was faster than Zoom [[UpToEleven who has his power plus what he stole from barry before]].

* CameBackStrong: Of the non-death version. After Barry had his powers stolen by zoom, he later enters the speed force and while inside learns to harness it's power effectively. The trip itself not only restores his connection to the speed force but increases it drastically as before Zoom was about four times faster than him and after he came back he was faster than Zoom [[UpToEleven who has his power plus what he stole from barry before]].

** Happens again in ''Verses Zoom'' when the titular Zoom forces Barry to siphon off his speed and give it to him or risk having his friends and family murdered. Barry reluctantly agrees and has the speed force drained from his body.* BulletCatch: Barry is eventually fast enough to catch bullets, the first time he did so it was fired at his neck from behind and ended up grazing him.

** Despite their past animosity, Barry even sees some good in Captain Cold of all people. And the events of "Family of Rogues" prove Barry right.
*** He is genuinely saddened in "Invasion" [[spoiler: when he is told of Snart's HeroicSacrifice.]]

* TwoFirstNames: Being a Creator/DCComics based character, he has a last name that is traditionally used as a first name.* UniquenessDecay: Originally the very first speedster of his world (or at least the first one known to the public), but it didn't take long until a whole lot more appeared. His claim of being 'the fastest man alive' also usually only holds water for a short period of time.

** Much to his chagrin his life is so intertwined with Eobard Thawne's, that when he attempts to stop Thawne's villainy before it even begins it causes no end of temporal paradox because their two time lines are in reverse. ** It's something of a sick joke that he can't stop evil speedsters from killing his loved ones: Thawne killed Nora when he was 10 (and going back in time to stop him just breaks the universe), Zoom killed Henry right in front of him, but was too slow to stop it, and [[spoiler: Savitar kills Iris with Barry being powerless to rescue her]]. The poor boy's ''cursed''. It's implied that the time with Zoom was because the Speed Force felt a need to put their champion through a SecretTestOfCharacter.