Eobard Thawne was not born hating Flash: he was born adoring him. In DC canon, Thawne is a man from the future obsessed with the Scarlet Speedster to the point of fanaticism —he memorizes every feat, replicates his powers, reorganizes his entire life around an idol—. His dream is to become him. But when he travels to the past to get closer to his hero, history hands him back an unbearable verdict: in the records, he does not appear as an ally or a successor, but as the Reverse-Flash, the archenemy, the man destined to ruin his life. That is the instant that defines him. He does not respond by fleeing the label or denying it: he accepts it. If history says I am your enemy, I will be the worst enemy you have ever had. The theory of primary and secondary deviance has a name for that leap: the moment when an act or a designation stops being something that happens to you and becomes who you are.
// The theoryFrom the isolated offence to the deviant identity
The sociologist Edwin Lemert, in Social Pathology (1951), gave one of criminology’s decisive turns: to stop asking only why someone breaks a rule for the first time, and to ask what happens afterwards. He distinguished two moments. Primary deviance is the initial act —isolated, sometimes trivial— that does not alter the image the person has of themselves: they still see themselves as a normal person who did something bad once. Secondary deviance is what arises when the environment reacts —labels, punishes, treats that person as «a deviant»— until they reorganize their identity around that role and turn the role into a way of life. You can read the theory in detail in our file on primary and secondary deviance. The turn is radical: for Lemert, the stable deviant identity is not the cause of the social reaction, but its product. Society, in reacting, does not always discover a deviant: sometimes it manufactures one. Thawne is the most literal version imaginable of that idea, because in his case the «social reaction» is not a rumour or a criminal record: it is History with a capital H, a future record that names him a villain before he has done anything.
The label that fulfils itself
The heart of the theory is the step from an act to an identity: in primary deviance the wrong is something the person does; in secondary deviance, something the person is. Thawne carries that transition to the perfect absurdity of the self-fulfilling prophecy. He discovers the label —«Flash’s enemy»— before having committed the crime that justifies it. And instead of resisting it, he adopts it as his life’s mission: he replicates his idol’s powers, inverts his colours, rechristens himself in his mirror image, and turns every act of his existence into an attack on the hero he loved. The social reaction —here, a historical fact— does not describe Thawne: it builds him. He volunteers to embody the role the world had already assigned him, and in doing so guarantees the role is fulfilled. The label, repeated and accepted, becomes destiny: not because there was no alternative, but because Thawne chose that there be none.
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// The subjectThe admirer who remade himself into a nemesis
What is disturbing about Thawne is that his villainous identity is entirely borrowed: it has no form of its own, it is the photographic negative of another. Everything about him —his speed, his suit, his name, his iconography— is an inverted copy of Flash. There the mechanism of secondary deviance is seen clearly: when a person reorganizes their self around a label, that label comes to define every corner of their life, until it empties it of everything else. Thawne has no projects, no affections, no future apart from Flash; his entire biography contracts until it fits into a single word: nemesis. The fan who wanted to be his hero ends up existing only to destroy him, and the two obsessions are the same —the inability to conceive of himself outside the other’s orbit—. Admiration and hatred, in him, are not opposites: they are the same identity-dependence seen from two sides. And, faithful to the logic of the self-fulfilling prophecy, the more he strives to be the destined enemy, the more real he makes that destiny: he becomes, retroactively, the cause of the tragedies he thought he was merely inheriting.
Flash Reverso
// The crackThe label pushes, but Thawne chooses
Here is the most dangerous crack in applying the theory to Thawne: determinism. It would be easy to say «history condemned him, he had no choice; the record said villain and he could be nothing else». But Lemert does not say that, and the character himself belies it. Social reaction pushes towards secondary deviance; it does not impose it. Many characters discover a dark destiny and fight it; many labelled people resist the label and do not build a career out of it. Thawne, by contrast, chooses —actively, repeatedly, gleefully— to fulfil the role. He could have accepted not being Flash and gone on with his life; instead he decides that, if he cannot be the hero, he will be his ruin. That the label existed before the crime does not strip him of the agency to turn it into an act. That is why the honest reading insists: to explain is not to exculpate. Understanding that Thawne built himself as a reaction to a label illuminates the mechanism of his hatred, but it does not dilute by a single gram his responsibility for every life he destroys to wound a single man.
The opposite crack also lurks: to deny that the label matters, to believe that Thawne «was already a monster» and that his discovery of his destiny is irrelevant. That too impoverishes the case. The theory of secondary deviance captures something true and chilling about this villain: that much of his evil did not come ready-made, but was forged in the process of accepting a name. The truth lies in the interaction —neither a history that manufactures automatons, nor a harmless label—. Thawne is at once the product of a prophecy and the willing author of its fulfilment. And memory, as always, is not for him: it is for all those he erased from the timeline to punish a hero for the crime of being loved.
When accepting the role is a decision
Thawne matters because he takes secondary deviance to its purest and, for that very reason, most revealing form. In most cases, the label is imposed little by little —a record, rejection, exclusion— and the person slides towards the deviant identity almost without noticing. Thawne compresses that whole process into a conscious decision: he sees the label written down, reads it in full, and says yes. In doing so he lays bare what usually stays hidden in the theory: that between the designation and the identity there is always a margin, a point at which the person can still accept or resist the role offered to them. That margin is the difference between explaining and exculpating. To recognize that social reaction —a label, a stigma, even a prophecy— pushes towards the deviant role does not oblige us to forgive the one who chooses to embody it; rather, it obliges us not to take part lightly in the designating, knowing what a repeated name can end up building in whoever hears it.
Three key takeaways
- Reverse-Flash (Eobard Thawne) embodies secondary deviance (Lemert, 1951): an obsessive Flash fan who, upon discovering himself labelled by history as his archenemy, reorganizes his whole identity around that role. The label stops being something that happens to him and becomes who he is.
- It is the self-fulfilling prophecy made villain: he discovers the role of nemesis before committing the crime that justifies it, and fulfils it willingly. His identity is entirely borrowed —the inverted negative of his idol—, proof of how the label, once accepted, empties everything else.
- To explain is not to exculpate. The label pushes, it does not impose: Thawne chooses, actively and repeatedly, to embody the role. Understanding his mechanism illuminates his hatred but does not dilute his responsibility. Memory is for his victims, not for the destined enemy.
Sources · further reading
- Lemert, E. M. (1951). Social Pathology. McGraw-Hill.
- Lemert, E. M. (1967). Human Deviance, Social Problems and Social Control. Prentice Hall.
- Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders. Free Press.
- Merton, R. K. (1948). «The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy». The Antioch Review, 8(2).
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Flash Reverso?
Flash Reverso («Eobard Thawne») es un villano de DC Comics, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. He idolized Flash to the point of madness.
¿Por qué Flash Reverso (Eobard Thawne) se convierte en villano?
Reverse-Flash and the theory of primary and secondary deviance: how an obsessive admirer, upon discovering he was destined to be the villain, took the label on as identity and rebuilt himself entirely around hatred.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Flash Reverso?
El caso de Flash Reverso se analiza desde la Desviación Primaria y Secundaria. The theory of primary and secondary deviance (Lemert) distinguishes the isolated act from the deviant identity that social reaction ends up manufacturing. Reverse-Flash —Eobard Thawne, of DC Comics— is an extreme case of the second moment: an obsessive Flash fan who travels to the past to venerate his hero and discovers that history itself has him on record as its worst enemy. Instead of resisting that label, he internalizes it completely: if the world says I am the villain, I will be the villain. Thawne rebuilds himself entirely around the role of nemesis and turns the destruction of Flash into the axis of his existence. The self-fulfilling prophecy made man.
