Let’s be clear: this isn’t about hating on EBR. She’s only doing her job, either for Arrow or perhaps another project, or who knows, maybe she’s just fitness training for the hell of it and it has nothing to do with the show. Power to her.

This post is about why having Felicity as a character become a trained-up vigilante is just…no.

1. It runs completely counter to her character development.

Felicity has never truly shown an interest in becoming a street-fighting kind of vigilante. Her moments of fighting come in forms of self-defense, when she is being attacked. She was shown to be training with John in one episode of s1, but clearly drops it. And there’s an easily explainable reason: that training scene follows after the Dodger episode, where Felicity has a bomb collar placed around her neck. That would naturally motivate anyone out of fear to learn some basic self-defense maneuvers in the short-term, but it clearly doesn’t inspire her to start learning to fight offensively in the long-term. Which is fine, realistic even.

We next see Felicity attempt to take up boxing in a fit of jealousy over Sara’s addition to the scene. And yes, it is jealousy that motivates her, which is why she drops it too shortly after receiving validation from Oliver that her place on the team is not threatened by the mere presence of another woman. That’s right, Felicity was not trying to get in fighting shape out of a desire to fight for justice for the city, she was doing it out of jealousy for another woman and a need for validation from a man. Not one of her best moments, but hey, she’s human. And it fits the pattern of Felicity holding no interest in becoming a masked fighter.

Some people would point to the scene in s3 where we see her working out to a fitness video in her home as evidence of an interest in training up, but it is not. It is Felicity working out to stay in shape, which is an admirable goal, it’s good she’s taking care of her body and health. It is the actions of a health-conscious young adult, not a vigilante-in-training. The fact that she has spent nearly three years in the close company of several vigilantes and yet can just manage five push-ups is far more evident of a lack of interest in joining the team out in the field. She’s had plenty of time to ramp up her training or hone her technique, many occasions to motivate her, and no shortage of willing and able instructors.

If Felicity isn’t already a physical-fighting vigilante after four seasons, it’s not because she’s not finished training, it’s because she hasn’t been training. As in, hasn’t wanted to train.

2. It undermines the message her character and fans say is important to the show.

One thing people have always said about Felicity is how it’s great that a non-physical fighter has a place on a team of heroes, how it shows that there is more than one way to be strong, etc. Her fans even attacked Arrow’s stunt coordinator for a tweet highlighting a fight scene with Laurel, Sara, and Thea that he praised as “girl power” for being exclusionary of Felicity and non-physical fighters (which it really wasn’t, seeing as the subject of his post was purely the fight scene but I digress).

Point is, having Felicity train up and don a mask to go out on the streets essentially says that now she’s a “real” hero, which is a disappointing departure from what her character stood for in the first place. If those same fans praise the writers for this decision, I can really only call it as I see it: blatant hypocrisy.

3. Her character will have almost no limitations.

A mark of a good character is that they have strengths but also weaknesses, skills but also areas of in-expertise or simply things that they cannot do. Starting with s3, people were already leery of Felicity’s rapidly expanding repertoire which continues to grow with no end in sight: computer skills, hacking, wiring (s1, later contradicted due to bad continuity in s4), cards (s1, contradicted and then re-contradicted both in s4), forensic analysis, medical examinations, virtual reality programming, business company VP and then CEO, knowledge on Ancient Egypt, so on and so forth. Many people have started to wonder if there was anything she couldn’t do.

For four seasons, that for a large part has been physical fighting. However, in recent seasons we have started to see Felicity take down a League of Assassins member with a stick, a HIVE solider with some piping, and another one with Laurel’s nightstick. That is already too much and a clearly slippery slope for the writers to slide down into elevating Felicity to God Status.

Those incidents could be brushed aside as lucky shots, but to have her train up and become an expert at martial arts or boxing or some other skill (if they make her an archer I swear I will honestly quit everything in this DCTV-verse, Flash, Supergirl, whatever, doesn’t matter they’ll all be dead to me) eliminates the one skill that the other characters had but she didn’t. What will be the point of Oliver, Diggle, Thea, or this host of hastily-recruited new masks they’re adding next season (despite fan “explanations” that Laurel was killed off because there were already too many masks)?

The irony here is that Felicity’s character was introduced purely because test audiences of the show’s pilot claimed that Oliver had too many skills, that he couldn’t be both a master archer/fighter and a tech wizard. Thus Felicity on Arrow was brought in to be the official tech guru of the show…and now she will also be a fighter. The show has gone completely full circle on this problem.

4. Her training is occurring over the hiatus and thus will be another “tell not show”.

A large problem with Felicity (and let’s face it, Ol*city) is that much of her development is not a process, it is simply fed to us via lines like “she’s the best”, “I know things”, or “she’s stronger than all of us”. I’ll hardly be surprised if the season opens with her already being an expert at fighting and preparing to take to the streets.

Because that is how the character of Felicity works. She is picked up and dropped from point A to B with none of the hard work, none of the struggle, because the writers don’t want to put in any of that effort.

Her new role as a masked vigilante will be completely unearned, her skills will (to quote a certain portion of the fandom) “come out of nowhere”, and the audience will be expected to simply go along with it because the writers tell us to, repeatedly force us to make the jumps in logic and time on our own, and don’t feel like doing their job and actually writing the story. They’d rather just tell us that it happened over the summer, so there.

5. She will literally be in every scene now oh my God.

There’s really not much to add here. Outside of maybe some interactions between Mayor Queen and Laurel’s cheap and unnecessary male replacement, Felicity will be involved in everything. The tech scenes, the romance scenes, the family drama scenes, the fight scenes. And she will most certainly be at the forefront of all of those scenes. Just rename the show already.

6. All the other characters’ (heroes and villains) skills will have to be nerfed in order to showcase her.

This was already a complaint made in s4, that in order to show off the whole team Oliver’s abilities had to be considerably dumbed down (which could’ve easily been avoided by splitting the team up into groups of two or solo missions and reserving the full team-ups for major events/threats). Well get ready for so much more of that.

I can imagine maybe one, two if I’m being generous, episodes where it shows Felicity a little in over her head (you know, so we can get in even more scenes of Oliver saving her and being so romantic~). But after that, she’ll be in the thick of it, taking down thugs and major villains alike on the same par as Oliver, Digg, and Thea, who have all had far more experience than her (and before anybody complains about my inclusion of Thea, girl won trophies in multiple archery competitions during her school days, so that plus a full year of training under Malcolm and Oliver before officially becoming Speedy is still way more realistic). If you were hoping next season would show a return to Oliver being a competent, showcased hero as the Green Arrow on a show called Arrow, this development will guarantee your disappointment.

7. I can’t think of a character currently more undeserving of being considered a masked superhero.

She’s quit the team multiple times, has stated her only reason for joining was because of Oliver, and literally uttered the words “Pass. No, thank you" when it came to physically participating in a mission to stop a villain. That’s not even touching the controversial subject of Havenrock.

Her motivations for being a hero period are weak, her physical training is essentially nonexistent, and her already all-over-the-place characterization will take a left turn into completely-undeveloped so abrupt they might as well just rename the character at this point, too, because this is not the Felicity we were introduced to four years ago.