crypticcrepe

[crypticcrepe]

i try to be chill but my brain writes essays about everything

[crypticcrepe]

they say you can't pour from an empty cup but i've been doing it my whole life and aside from all of these mysterious ailments it's working out great for me

[crypticcrepe]

back on the kitchen fight once again. eddie recruiting the specter of everyone else - 'can you blame us', 'nobody knows how to talk to you' - when it's like. it's just you, eddie. you're the one who doesn't know how to talk to him. earlier in hen and karen's kitchen trying half-jokingly to offload the responsibility of telling buck about the job onto hen, getting shot down. and then buck did find out from someone else, because other people can talk to him about this. but not eddie.

and back to 7x05: 'he'll love you like we all do'. safe, distancing. a peculiar choice of words, given that the context is expressly a romantic interest. but eddie's always got to express his feelings at a distance. 'do you know how much christopher misses you'. 'heard some dick was being mean to you'. how does eddie feel about buck? that's not the point. it's about christopher. it's about everyone else, anyone else.

normal bestie things, or whatever.

[crypticcrepe]

i want to stress, so much, that there's a difference between good media, and media that's well-suited to transformative fandom.

sometimes, the canon is so good on its own that you don't feel the need to add anything to it. you could, and people do (and should!) but the writers/creators really knew what they were doing and the experience of consuming said piece of media is entirely satisfying on its own.

then, there's the objectively mediocre stuff that has just enough hints at depth/character backstory potential/little plot idiosyncrasies to make it a perfect sandbox. i'm talking big movie franchises and long-running, middling procedurals that won't win any awards. there's so much potential there, and the writers either lack the skill or time to explore it all fully, and that's where fandom jumps in.

sometimes, that's the best kind of show to be in fandom for, because what else are we all going to do but be creative and fix what canon can't get right?

[crypticcrepe]

hey, I was just at "things got better" island and everyone there is talking about how excited they are to meet you

[crypticcrepe]

The real tragedy of Buck's life right now is that if he treats Eddie like a boyfriend, which is what they both want, then his ex and his sister are like "but are you in love with him? Why are you two like that?" but if he treats him like he would treat any other friend, then Eddie's like "where's my fucking husband who promised to be by my side forever" . and of course the problem is that, Eddie, Buck hasn't promised that to you. but Eddie is both so far inside the closet that he can't admit what he feels for Buck isn't platonic and so in love with Buck that he can't be normal about him. So they're both in an impossible situation, Eddie in one where he wants a life partner in buck but he can't admit that to himself, and Buck in one where, being the one out of the two of them who is out of the closet, people will ask him "hey. what the fuck is up with you two" and he can't answer, because that would require admitting that he and his "straight best friend" are basically married. And it's such great conflict

[crypticcrepe]

okay so what I think is SO interesting and honestly incredible about the writing and cinematography of the kitchen scene is the fact that it manages to turn buck and eddie's entire relationship on its head in both a meta sense and a story sense in the space of just a few minutes. because yes they have had other partners off and on until recently, but "husband" is the space that buck and eddie usually inhabit for each other. and I mean this in an in universe way but also in a meta way, like they are each other's confidantes and support system, yes, but they are also 100% written as the fourth married couple on the show and always have been even in the past when they had other partners. they have always been given equal weight as the other main couples on the show.

so in a meta sense, yes they've always been written with the tropes of a couple for storyline purposes etc because they're usually paired off together. but this is THE first time that they have ever been so explicitly written as spouses, and it's done in conflict. they are in their shared home with their shared grocery shopping and having a fight that has the energy of a married couple teetering on the brink of divorce. the scene feels like something out of Marriage Story dropped into the middle of an episode of network procedural television. it is lit and shot in a way that has only been used twice before on this show, both times for previous breakups that buck and eddie have separately had in that same set. and it is SO raw and intense and close, like you can feel them clinging to each other and pushing each other away at the same time.

and then also like. in a story sense it is twisting this idea as well because they're fighting about a lot of different things (grief, loss, miscommunication, desire, shared anger, longing) but the thing that is sparking the fight in the moment or at least tipping it over the edge is the fact that buck is trying so hard to be what everyone needs at once. he's trying to be there for EVERYONE and trying so hard not to leave anyone left out in the cold in their grief because that's what bobby told him to do (in his mind). and while buck is doing all of this and also processing his own enormous grief, he is missing the fact that what Eddie needs right now is not the same as what everyone else needs from him. everyone else has their families and their partners and their private grief, but what Eddie needs in all of this is for buck to fill the emotional role that he usually fills, which is – for all intents and purposes – his husband. and this is sort of the first tacit acknowledgement that what they are to each other and what they need from each other is something different than what they are to the other people in their lives.

[crypticcrepe]

this one liberal dude on twitter made the (correct) take that parents have overwhelming power over their kids and very often abuse it and restrict children's rights and he was ratio'd by conservatives, communists and liberals alike who made comments like "my kids will have rights when they pay the bills" to "aw are you upset mom and dad didn't you get you a lega set for christmas". way to prove his point lol! any criticism of the power dynamics adults and particularly parents have over kids and how it is often used to abuse kids or refuse to let them exist as themselves is drowned in mockery and the idea that parents have absolute authority over children and that any less than that is actually spoiling them.

i said it before: people only care about Children as an ideal. as property. as something that is Innocent and deserving protection From Evil Traffickers but also something Dumb that barely deserves the status of human with autonomy. and its fucking wild how even the staunchest communists think of this as normal, and how people refuse to understand that this dynamic is how kids are emotionally, physically and sexually abused, as well as robbed of their voices and too scared/ashamed to talk about it.

[crypticcrepe]

I don’t watch the Pitt but I have seen many gifs of it and there is this one little fella who just has the face of a man born to bleed out in the trenches after an unsuccessful turn as a poet in the first world war

[crypticcrepe]

Very Real Mushroom Anime (1997)

Wanted to try making a fake screenshot with my mushrooms in a retro anime style!

[crypticcrepe]

did u see them btw...

[crypticcrepe]

I think a lot of what makes fanfiction so magical is writers taking the time to explore tiny elements that were imagined into existence in the source material and then abandoned. It's the deep dive into that t-shirt, the forgotten gift, the nickname, the spare key, the anger they swallowed down, the trauma they supressed, the love they denied, the story that wasn't mainstream enough to make it. It's the little things getting their moment to shine and I fucking love that and I will fight for it always.

[crypticcrepe]

i am gonna say something half-baked bc i wanna know others opinions/rebuttals but i do think there’s a part of buck’s psyche that got permanently rewired by early s1 bobby’s paternalistic and sexist (in the well meaning midwestern way of him) views on sex. i’ve said it before but it is interesting how the show introduces buck as a fuck boy and immediately flips the script bc he is not the classic trope of a tv womanizer he’s a lonely guy who likes to flirt and enjoys having a lot of sex. and instead of only admonishing buck on yknow stealing a fire engine for a hook up bobby tells buck he’s disrespecting the women he has sex with for?? no apparent reason other than they’re having consensual casual sex. we don’t see buck pursue someone who is not interested. we don’t hear a bunch of objectifying language about women from him (as tho hen and memory of maddie wouldn’t skin him alive).

BUT we do see him really internalize bobby’s opinion bc for the rest of the show he is to some degree ashamed of what he’d call ‘buck 1.0’ - we see it during the hook up with taylor, where he verbalizes how he doesn’t want her to feel disrespected and in self deprecating comments he makes about himself. and obviously this is a small part of him, he’s not lamenting over it. but still, all the way up til current canon he carries this shame.

and altho the show itself will never acknowledge it, the timeline of him getting fired, his relationship with abby, and his assault from his therapist does tell a story. just as he’s trying to step away from casual sex he is put in a situation where consent cannot be given but where his personal feelings about the act are only reflected in him upset and believing that ‘sleeping w his therapist’ is another personal failing. at the same time he starts bonding with abby, who offers a totally safe connection bc they only speak on the phone at first - calming his anxieties that he’ll ‘ruin it’ with sex. so the shame of having a lot of sex + feeling out of control of his own body/sexual desire + yearning for real romantic intimacy all converge during this time and inform his first real serious relationship.

fast forward to the tommy hook up. i don’t have to have feelings for everyone i sleep with. i don’t have to sleep with everyone i have feelings for. well. fascinating that he thinks he’s staving off loneliness by hooking up w tommy when the show so clearly frames it as missing/wanting to be close to eddie specifically - but his actual period of having casual sex in s1 WAS about him feeling lonely, and using sex to try and fulfill his emotional needs. but acknowledging that opens the can of worms. so i think there is a TINY part of buck that straight up would feel like he’s disrespecting eddie by wanting to sleep with him. bc eddie is Straight and bc buck doesn’t ever want to ruin that relationship. i think this is just a small small piece of his very complex feelings, but the word choice really jumps out. there is a reading of it that’s implying his sexual desires are in conflict with his emotional desires bc one is more valued, more pure, more important than the other.

in fact if you wanna get freaky, in the way that eddie couldn’t fuck his gf after learning she was almost a nun, there is a level of idolatry buck has for The Idea of Eddie (eddie wouldn’t do something illegal. Eddie Has A Silver Star) that’s comparable.

but again i think this is a very thin thread woven into his brain and not at all what’s prominent when he’s thinking about ‘in LoVe with eDdiE’ but. it is still there. thank you midwest catholic bobby for inflicting this on buck, passing down weird sex hang ups just like a real dad <3

[crypticcrepe]

Reblog this if you are literally suprised when people find you attractive.

[crypticcrepe]

Oliver Baez Bendorf, “Everything All at Once”

[crypticcrepe]

I be like ''lord'' ''god'' ''jesus christ'' and the mfs dont even mean anything to me

[crypticcrepe]

the thing about trinity santos is that her attitude sometimes does annoys me but i also just. fucking love her. like to my core i love her. if i’m being honest she reminds me greatly of myself (not in terms of the insecurities or the bullying, but. the other things, yeah.) and honestly i recognize that annoyance is in part because every time i encounter people similar to me (loud, assertive, headstrong) and our opinions don’t match on a one-to-one basis i find myself annoyed by them on occasion but at the root i do always actually respect them. i respect backbones and assertion especially in women. also it’s normal to feel annoyed with people i respect. and what i respect the MOST about santos is that she (as proven in this episode) has very understandable reasons for acting as she does and also!!! she is KINDHEARTED at the softest centre of her. santos i will defend u 4ever………