"you only deserve food and shelter if you contribute to society" says people living in countries where nobody's labor actually feeds or benefits their neighbors anymore but exclusively benefits the companies keeping the food and shelter behind the artificial paywalls
You're not nomads relying on each other to hunt and gather anymore, you're talking about stocking shelves for fucking wal marts
And even the oldest societies on earth all took care of the elderly or sick anyway
dudes will be like "if you don't Contribute To Society you don't get to live, that's the simple facts" meanwhile their job is like Marketing and Brand Development Specialist
buck really was going to die in that house if it meant eddie lived. he was going to live the rest of his life trapped and broken and isolated pretending to be someone else. to be someone else’s son after living his entire life trying and failing to be the son his actual parents wanted. he was going to do that for eddie. and only escaped because he thought eddie had been shot.
My boyfriend @aborigonalguppyrabits and I were discussing cosmere reading order and decided that it was best expressed as a flow chart. The project got a little out of hand. Obviously there’s no right way to read the books, but we thought we’d offer our solution.
bobby really did everything in that moment to protect buck. let him explicitly know he loved him. sent him away so he wouldn't have to witness his death. told him the others would need him to give him a purpose, a lifeline so he wouldn't drown in his grief.
chimney once watched his own brother die doing a job that he followed him into. now he has to grapple with the fact that one of his closest friends is dead from the same virus that he was cured from. buck once told bobby that he couldn’t handle seeing the people he loved hurt and he hated to be the guy standing there doing nothing about it. and he had to watch from the other end of a sealed glass door as bobby said goodbye, knowing in his heart that this time there was nothing he could do. hen became a paramedic to help people, to save people. but this time, she didn’t even know that bobby needed saving. eddie wasn’t even there. he joined the fire department because he missed the camaraderie of the army. that team became his family. but in the end, he wasn’t even there. no one’s beating them in the survivor’s guilt department. the only man who probably could is dead so…
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
