#abc objects

[treasuregamble]

mostly letters

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

this blog takes requests!!

[andreacsenge]

BUCK & HEN & BOBBY 1.05 "Point of Origin"

[eddie-sluttywaist-diaz]

"eddie diaz is ugly"

part 1/7

[maygrcnt]

“but you’ve never seen an ending like this” mind you last season bobby died for 14 minutes at the end of an episode. like bb we absolutely have seen an ending like this it JUST HAPPENED

[roystartt]

I would love to do an experiment where we have a give a group of people who have never seen anything to do with 911 and then split them into three groups.

The first group has to watch one of the many Buddie edits out there that has tricked many people into thinking Buddie is canon and then have them marathon 911.

The second group has to watch an edit which is a supercut of the buck Eddie friendship made by someone who is critical of the ship and then have them marathon 911.

The third group would then be the control group with no edits beforehand just straight into marathonning 911.

I would love then to get the statistics on how many people ship Buddie from each group after they've finished the show because I think the results would be interesting™️.

My reasoning is that I feel a huge proportion of fandom based viewers of 911 (I am not talking general audience here) had seen something Buddie related before they started watching and I do think that gave them certain expectations whilst watching- Buddie-tinted glasses if you will. So, I'd love to kind of see how it adds up without that frame of reference beforehand.

BIG DISCLAIMER: I am in no way shitting on the fanedits or the ship with this post. Ship and let Ship, make fanedits of whatever ship you want to besties!

[v88sy]

I absolutely understand Buck not being able to mention his boyfriend in front of Gerasshat, and we've hardly seen him outside of work anyways, but now that Bobby's back, can that man please talk about his boyfriend every 6 seconds like we know he's itching to?

[pretty-fishy]

The narrative issue with killing Bobby is now Athena is isolated from the rest of the group

Obviously they all love Athena, and she's Hen's bestie, But Hen has a wife and another bestie as well

But now she doesn't work in the firehouse and she isn't in one of the family units, making her outside the group

[dubiousculturalartifact]

I keep seeing arguments that it’d be ‘unrealistic’ for Buddie to be together and work in the same firehouse because of ‘protocol’

in this episode Hen is using her WIFE to perform a field transfusion on her OWN SON, and Bobby is just like 👍

so yeah that theory is dead

[buckley-diaztruther]

met a real life 911 fan this week who told me they HATED my beloved Henrietta Wilson and frankly it was so distressing what do you MEAN

[eddiebuckley-diaz]

Most crazily inaccurate thing that has happened this season so far is Buck not noticing Eddie sliding down the fire pole with his absolute dump truck ass on full display

[hjaopanses]

M is for mephone4's debut appearance

*smiles at you as i blow up your oven*

[universescreaming]

Also y’all i love Eddie so much and I do think his crash out tonight was justified but I NEED him to stop going to the same “you make everything about you” place to Buck every single time he’s angry when Buck is simply feeling normal human emotions???? Like I really hope they let Buck bring up how that effects him and have Eddie apologize because once was one thing, twice another but THREE TIMES NOW??? I really hope the show addresses this and lets them both grow, Eddie needs to learn how to stop attacking others when he’s feeling down (not even just Buck, but going back to his “you got a 100 something body count and you’re saying I’m unfit for duty?”) and Buck needs to learn how to stand up for himself even against those he loves the most and actually set boundaries!! This needs to be a conversation they have or they’re just going to keep having this same fight over and over and over again

[ethicaltreatmentofcowplants]

Yup, it's go time in our "too saucy for Simblr" PJs.

meet the bub below

Introducing Benicio Smit-Reyes! We were hoping for a spellcaster as a firstborn but alas, he came with a regular base game crib. Still, I don't think Ayla would mind giving Ethren another go...

[spotsandsocks]

I’ve written over 100 fic at least 90% them have Buck and Eddie kiss at least once and every one different… I have a good imagination I do but driving home it hit me that they are going to kiss for really real and my brain short circuited flat out couldn’t even imagine it for real.

We’re going get this and I just can’t process it

[lost-inanotherlife]

some thoughts about addictions in LOST

there will be spoilers and, obvi, I'll talk about addiction as a narrative theme/motif in this post, so be warned if this is triggering to you.

In this post I've said that, on rewatch, I didn't particularly like Charlie and I've also added that, perhaps, one of the reasons for this change of heart (I used to love Charlie back in 2004) is the show (not particularly brilliant, imho) handling of his addiction/recovery storyline. This post, though, won't be specifically about Charlie but it will be about the way the show portrayed addictions mainly as signifiers of 1. the possibility of being "saved" and 2. clinical depression.

To be honest with you, I don't agree with the people that say that LOST is a character-driven show. But I don't agree with the people who say it's plot-driven either. To me in LOST characters and plot go hand in hand. So how can i describe LOST? Well, I would say that LOST is theme-driven: both plot and characters must adhere to the show's main themes. And it makes sense, right? I mean, never believe TV writers when they say they have everything planned out in advance, you know that it's a lie. 99% of the time they just have a half-baked story and, perhaps, some more or less well thought-out characters. The rest is "just" some very general and very big Themes and they rely on those to write their story like water in a desert.

One of LOST's big themes is, of course, destiny. Like all the tales about destiny the more the characters struggle against it, the more they end up enacting it. In LOST the struggle takes the shape of a rejection of the past: in one way or another all the characters are compelled by their past or by one event that happened in their past/childhood that has molded the direction of their lives and the way in which they experience the world. In other words, as you all well know, these characters can't let go, they can't move on.

One of the ways in which this compulsion is portrayed is substance addiction. Charlie and Jack are the two main characters who struggle against it but they do it very diffrently. Or, better, the writers portray their respective addictions very differently.

In Charlie's case, his heroin addiction is a very prominent feature of this storyline: you take it away from him, his story loses most of its pathos and meaning. Charlie's addiction and his recovery from it are an integral part of his character that you can't substitute with anything else.

On the other hand, Jack's addictions are treated as a motif to basically telegraph the audience that The Character Is Not Doing Well. If you take away Jack's alcohol abuse, for instance, from his story, you won't end up changing it that much. Like, with or without his alcohol abuse, Jack's still pretty much a depressed man with a difficult relationship with his father and a general lack of belief in the value of his life per se.

However, in both cases, the ways in which these addictions are written are never realistic, they only serve a narrative purpose, aka to signify something else: in Charlie's case his addiction stands for his possibility (or lack thereof) to be "saved" while in Jack's case his addictions signal his clinical depression.

When LOST writers write Jack sitting in a sea of empty bottles, popping pills like there's no tomorrow, they want to show without telling that "Jack Is Not Doing Fine!". Theirs is a narrative device to say something without saying it, it's not active interest in exploring what it really means to have substance abuse-related problems. In other words, it's NOT a way of telling the audience "Look, there's a quite big and deep element of substance abuse in this character's story that actually plays a big role in the decisions the character makes because hey! he's not okay, so we'd like to portray this in a realistic way and explore it in depth". They dont' say that because they aren't interested in that. And they're not interested in that because LOST is not EXCLUSIVELY a character-driven show. Characters and plot must go hand in hand and the plot is fast-paced, chop! chop! let's go! we don't have time to go THAT deep into character analysis.

Case in point, when Jack's on the island his addictions seem to disappear. He's not only Suddenly Fine but even characters who are close to him and know about his issues conveniently seem to forget about them. In S5 Kate and Jack go back to the 70S to live in Dharmaville and they literally PRETEND that nothing has happened in the previous three years between them, like nothing at all. Jack's addictions are not treated as something that the show really wants us to pay attention to because, if we do, we are bound to realize that, even if, when he's on the island, Jack doesn't experience any withdrawal symptoms, he's still NOT in a healthy place, mentally speaking. And not like, "I'm sad because I've ruined my chance with Kate", but more like "My mind is a minefield, I can only think about one thing and I need it to feel better, to make myself feel better again or I'll kms". This is what "We have to go back" really means: symbolically, it's Jack's compulsion wrt his past trauma, in much realer terms, it's Jack's being an addict and thinking that the island is his last dose, his ultimate chance at HappinessTM.

Something very similar happens to Charlie as well and I think it's no coincidence that both characters end the way they do and both deaths have scarred an entire generation of people watching TV in their teens, lol.

Charlie's perhaps the first character that introduces the theme of destiny when he writes "fate" on those thingies he has on his fingers (I'm aware that "destiny" and "fate" are not necessarily the same concept but let's use them as interchangeable terms bc, come on, we only have 5 fingers per hand and the word "destiny" doesn't fit, lol, okay?). He's also the only character whose story is decidedly connected to drug abuse. And, I think, this wasn't necessarily a good move on the part of the writers team because I personally think that you can't write a character who's struggling with addiction and then write said addiction solely as a way to talk about something else. You gotta factor in what it really means to be an addict and what it means to be an addict on a fucking island with tons of free heroin on it. The reason why I think that the writers didn't really think it through is because nobody on the island shows an ounce of compassion, or just plain sympathy towards Charlie. Like, Charlie's addiction is written like The Bad Thing and everybody around him treats him like The Bad Man Who Snorts Heroin and it's just so... moralistic!!!

Not only that, S2 is a season where almost every character starts having some sort of hallucinations. Mental health is a whole sub-theme in S2, the season where we have episodes like "Dave" where Hugo/Hurley's past history in a mental health facility is revelead. So people are, beliavably I'd say, starting to get a bit weird on the island and they all begin to See Stuff and the people around them seem to understand this, they're sympathetic and they all go like "you have to rest" or something. Not with Charlie. Charlie has visions and nightmares because he's a Drug Addict. No other explanation. Not even one person who was like: "PERHAPS if it's hard for us who don't have to struggle against a fucking heroin addiction, maybe, MAYBE, it's even HARDER for Charlie so, not saying we have to justify the shit he does, but at least let's all try to understand him". Nope. Charlie's bad and does bad thing because, CLEARLY, he was using drugs and he was using because he's bad person and an addict. Like, no, don't write stuff like this, please.

If you add the fact that his recovery story is LITERALLY compared to being baptized, aka "be saved from the Original Sin", I'm sorry but I can't shake the feeling that there's some veiled, surely unconscious, Christian propaganda at play here.

Aside from that, Charlie's whole "Heroin Arc" ends in S2. Like, it's done, it's over, he throws all the heroin into the sea, Charlie Pace Is Saved. That's good, right? Weeeeeeell. To me no, it's not good because then S3 starts and we have the "Charlie Is Supposed to Die" arc and I asky myself why? Like, I can feel that the writers didn't know what else to do with Charlie besides Charlie having drug problems. So when the drug problems are over, they "redeem" him with a storyline of self-sacrifice that feels a bit forced, to me at least. Not only that, it also reduces Charlie to his former drug abuse storyline and this reinforces the feeling that Charlie is an addict, can only be an addict and, once he's not an addict anymore, he must die because he can ONLY be an addict since the writers hadn't figured out anything else for him. What I'm trying to say is that I don't think the writers understood and/or cared about the consequences of the things they had written and the other possible takeaways people might have inferred from the way they wrote addiction stories.

I'll say one good thing the writers did and it was what I consider the actual Big Reveal of S3 finale. Des' flashes weren't about Charlie dying, they were about him not allowing Charlie to die because Charlie was the one who was SUPPOSED (not to die) but to go the The Looking Glass station and stop the jamming signal because he's the only rock musician on the island (which means that, surely, he'd know "Good Vibrations"). So, to me, Charlie was not "supposed to die", he was "supposed to be there" which is a whole other thing. And Charlie can "be there" because he accepts that he will die. This was a very interesting thing but, I mean, S3 is a fucking mess, we all know that, so for one good thing there are at least three more that aren't so good (let's all remember that S3 is the "Stranger in a Strange Land" and "Further Instructions" season, and many more laughable episodes written just because they had to write the show and the network wouldn't "free" the writers from LOST, lol).

I'm reaching rambling territory so I'll stop now but, basically, I personally don't like the way LOST handles addictions. I understand that this is a story, a narrative where things means something else as well, I understand that both Jack and Charlie's addictions are strongly connected to the issues they have with their respective family members and, therefore, the reason why they were on that plane in the first place. So I understand that addictions mean many different things in LOST. And, ngl, it'd be fine by me if both characters didn't end up self-sacrificing themselves thinking that THAT was their redemption. But they do, both Charlie and Jack die in order to save other people and this is great and noble but I simply can't forget that these were two characters struggling with addictions who ended badly. The nobility of their acts doesn't make them less sad and, frankly, wrong.