peppercat

Try that again, and I won’t make it stop. Ever.
peppersandcats:
I am just going to say that really, Hartley’s constantly expecting people to be better than they actually are and constantly being surprised by their failure to be that is probably one of the reasons I really do love the character.
cliches-and-coffee:
This is sort of random, but I wonder if he’d ever have actually followed through with that threat? If Hartley tried to escape again? I want to say no, but then, I think it shocked us all that he’d do this in the first place…
peppersandcats:
I think he would absolutely not decide to follow through. Cisco, much as I adore him, is absolutely terrible about thinking about consequences beyond “I can build something to fix this!” He built the cold gun to stop a possibly evil speedster and then didn’t take into account what might happen if it wasn’t under his control. He built the heat gun and threw it into a storage locker that other people had access too. He was going to give Belle Sans Souci a boomerang while testing her powers.
(I bring that one up a bit.)
I cannot for the life of me see him getting Hartley back in the Pipeline after a generic fight with the Flash, calmly saying “I told you this would happen,” and turning on the torture.
I can, in the worst case, see him being furious about Caitlin or Barry being badly hurt in a way that Hartley was in some way responsible for, getting into an argument that ended with something angry along the lines of “You’re not listening, you just don’t want to hear what I’m telling you, Cisco”/“Yeah, hear this”, and then turning on a screaming device and storming off and not thinking about turning it off.
(And then Caitlin or Joe would rip him a new one.)
cliches-and-coffee:
He wouldn’t do it when he was thinking rationally. Hartley does seem to bring out a bad side of him, but not like that. Anyone can go out of character when they get mad enough, though.
Yes, and he’d regret not thinking later. The damage would already be done- I don’t think there would be much of a chance of them getting along after that, no matter how sorry Cisco is. Hartley doesn’t like Cisco, but he’d have trusted that he wouldn’t do something like that. It would completely shatter everything he thought he knew about him, and since he has a hard time trusting people anyway, there’s no way they’d be anything more than civil to each other. Even that would take time.
luvtheheaven:
Yikes @peppersandcats - both of you really. This is intense to think about. (I love it.)
peppersandcats:
Cisco always makes me think of a line from Stephen King’s short story, “The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands”. There’s a bunch of guys sitting around playing cards, and one of them has made it clear that he never touches other people by earlier refusing a handshake and explaining why. And he beats one of the other guys at cards–quite badly, actually–and the guy shakes his hand. The narrator isn’t sure why:
I would give a great deal to know Davidson’s motivation for what came next. He knew of Brewer’s extreme aversion to being touched; the man had showed it in a hundred different ways that night. It may have been that Davidson simply forgot it in his desire to show Brower (and all of us) that he could cut his losses and take even such a grave reversal in a sportsmanlike way. I’ve told you that he was something of a puppy, and such a gesture would probably have been in his character. But puppies can also nip when they are provoked. They aren’t killers – a puppy won’t go for the throat; but many a man has had his fingers stitched to pay for teasing a little dog too long with a slipper or a rubber bone. That would also be a part of Davidson’s character, as I remember him.
I don’t think Cisco’s cruel, in the sense that I don’t think he ever plans something with an end goal of hurting people. I mean, we’ve seen what the cold gun can do, and I’m guessing none of us imagined he was there going “oh man, this is going to fuck that speedster up so bad if he’s evil, it’s gonna be awesome” when he was building it.
But I do think he occasionally gets wrapped up in himself and forgets to consider things from other people’s point of view (and then Caitlin reminds him she knows how to perform lobotomies), especially when he is entranced by the awesome of getting to build new things and fight bad guys and defeat really kind of frightening people, and…
And he gets thoughtless. And when the guy getting thoughtless is the guy who builds that kind of tech… being thoughtless for a minute can be a hell of a lot scarier than being thoughtless for a minute when the worst thing you can do is TV-punch someone.
Contrast this with Reverb; he shows almost (almost! one exception! very brief!) no sign of ever getting carried away, he talks at perhaps two-thirds Cisco’s speed, he’s smug, he’s pretty up on what other people think and how they’re going to react (to the point of being amused by it when Killer Frost is approaching them)… and he’s a pretty horrible person. Deliberately. And by choice. He’s Cisco’s opposite in every way except the “isn’t what I can do cool” factor (and there’s probably something to be said there about the exclusivity of meta powers versus the shareability of technology, actually, but I think I hear the person whose houseguest I am calling me for dinner).
cliches-and-coffee:
This is a very accurate description.
Being the person who creates these things- he could be dangerous if he wanted to. He could do a lot of damage- not only with his tech, but his powers.
I think, at this point, he must try to be very careful when creating things, because of what’s gone wrong in the past. He doesn’t want repeats of things such as the cold+heat guns getting stolen, doesn’t want to miss mistakes like the one that cause the Particle Accelerator to explode. There’s no room to be thoughtless, not in his line of work, and I’m sure he’s smart enough to realize it by now. So anytime it happens again? It gets added to the guilt he has over previous mistakes. Cisco doesn’t want to hurt people, but he will if he has to. He wants to be prepared for the worst-case scenario. He avoids it, hopes for better outcomes, but he’s not naïve.

It is also worth noting that Cisco’s idea of being prepared for the worst-case scenario regularly involves escalating over his opponent (or, if he can’t do that, making them think he has - let us all pause to remember the STAR Labs vacuum cleaner and its LEDs, precursor to him and Caitlin playing dress-up as their doppelgangers).

You can go fast? He will break your speed! You can hear things? He will overwhelm your hearing! You can control weather? He can control it better! You are too tough to punch? He will figure out how fast Barry needs to go to punch you!

(The closest thing to a high-powered tranq rifle he ever invented was the BOOT - and then he gave it away.)

He certainly *can* think defensively about a conflict, especially if prompted - the BOOT and the shields he made the cops are proof of that. But his reflex tendencies seem to run along the lines of “you might hurt someone OH NO YOU DON’T IMMA SMACK THAT DOWN.”

And I think this is not a bad motivation! I’m not saying Cisco is childish, and I think you’re right that he’s not naive, but I do think he’s portrayed as having a very innocent joy in many things. He thinks things are cool, are awesome, are wonderful, he builds the TOYS and let him tell you how awesome this is and now they can be HEROES and there are BAD GUYS and everyone has a cool name and…

Look, there’s a reason Cisco sees possibilities. Sees timelines that aren’t, sees worlds that are almost, sees things that are not yet. He’s always seen possibilities.

And I think this same awareness is what leads to him making such definitive, potentially devastating solutions to a threat. He’s not naive (although he’s hopeful); he doesn’t want people to be hurt. He will shut that down REAL fast.

…wow, that was a lot of talking to say I agree with you. ❤