it's not D/s vibes, it's anti-establishment vibes. the sir yes sir is full of sarcasm and okay bootlicker ridicule because if nothing else, Buck has no care or concern for authority or chain of command. he never has.
comparing Eddie's paramilitary organization comment to the mob? his history of disobeying direct orders? of stealing LAFD equipment for on-the-clock hook-ups? dropping out of SEAL training because he couldn't and wouldn't fall in line? standing up to Gerrard knowing the consequences?
Buck only (usually) listened to bobby because he loved him, not because he was his superior officer
some things are accountable because he's a little shit
hi!! i just came across your post about the possible child acquisition storyline (that im trying so hard to manifest is only temporary lol) and i just wanted to say its very relieving that at least a handful of people aren’t very excited at the prospect of buddie starting all over with a new kid that’d probably be the focus of a lot of their season 10 screentime/storylines not to mention how utterly ridiculous it’d be to have buck randomly be able to acquire a kid at this point in his life (single, dangerous job with shifts sometimes spanning multiple days, fresh off a drug dependency and a suspension from work for almost committing a felony) like dont get me wrong i love the buckley-diaz family but i feel as chris has started getting older we’ve started to be given more opportunities to explore buddie as a dynamic without chris being used as a proxy (which is very exciting to me as someone who’s never really been interested in the parenting angle of 911) and the idea of that already going away is bumming me out a bit ngl. i agreed with every point you made and have been saying the same things to my friends the past couple days; buck needs to acknowledge the kid he’s been coparenting the past 8 years instead of tim just throwing a random kid at him not to mention the show already has so many child characters they fail to utilize and im struggling to understand why this one in particular would be one the general audience cares about when we’ve barely seen denny and mara since the opening emergency jee only shows up every couple episodes and they’ve done nothing with the baby they gave madney (gavin is a main so he’s centered more in the show obviously). idk :/ im sure it’s the fact i don’t particularly enjoy the child acquisition tropes in fic but i really was looking forward to buddie breaking that nuclear family mold of “married with 2.5 kids” this show seems to love (im also kinda confused why people think coparenting this one would lead to buddie canon when coparenting chris for the past decade hasn’t) like i have no doubt if buck felt he was allowed to love and think of chris as his kid he’d be perfectly happily never having kids “of his own” and it would’ve been such a good way to reiterate the nontraditional found family message of the show to have buck be truly happy as “only” a step-parent. i also have become so attached to the buckley-diaz family as it is and don’t want anything to change it (im one of the few who don’t think buddie would have/would feel the need to have more kids after getting together which i realize is apparently a borderline criminal opinion in this fandom) like i said i do have a strong feeling it’ll only be temporary but if not i honestly don’t think id be able to make myself keep watching :/ anyway sorry for the super long ask i just wanted to commiserate with someone else who isn’t really into this possible storyline cause i thought i was going crazy seeing everyone so excited for it lol
get over here at let me kiss you on the mouth 💜
you're definitely not alone, although the 911 fandom absolutely suffers from groupthink, and people who do have against-the-tide opinions feeling like they can't make posts for fear of getting shut out of the conversation. or ostracized. it's very isolating when the trope du jour is not your thing, or is even your ick, and blocking tags can only do so much.
i will say that the current round of spec/meta is coming from so little actual data that I really don't need to think about it again until the episodes air. also spoiler culture is ruining the viewing experience and I stand by that
remember how there was a "leaked" script page from season 8 about Bobby being buried alive that was complete bullshit but people took very, very seriously? yeah. which is also why I generally don't fuck with 911 spec. 🤷♀️
but your points above are my points and I'm glad someone else shares them.
the Buckley-Diaz family unit is delightful as is and there is PLENTY of story to unpack and explore right there with Buck and Eddie becoming a romantic partnership without throwing in another kid
also if Christopher was the key to Buddie they'd be on their fifth wedding anniversary I said what I said
another kid won't make them a better, more real family – they have the opportunity to be a solid pair in their late 30s into their 40s with a kid going into college and NO OTHER RESPONSIBILITIES outside their jobs how fucking awesome would that be
Buck literally cannot handle the responsibility of a kid right now
not every family includes children jfc
when I want magical baby acquisition stories I go to AO3
ANYSHIT thanks for the message I really did appreciate it 🥰✌️
I wanna to get something off my chest and I'm doing it now before I talk myself out of it, which I have done approximately four times already this week.
I love 911. I have loved 911 since the pilot. I have Opinions with a capital O about these characters that I will take to my grave. This is not a "the show is bad actually" post. This is not an anti-angst post. I am not anti-drama. I am not anti-action. I watch this damn show week by week and I am very much here for a ridiculous emergency, a collapsing building, a man trapped in a pipe because he made poor choices at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. That is the show. That is the sauce.
But at a certain point, "almost dying" stops being compelling and starts becoming repetitive. And I think I have officially hit my limit with near-death experiences as the presumed gold standard for Buck and Eddie storytelling.
Buck has had roughly eight major near-death experiences across nine seasons. The tracheotomy. The ladder truck explosion. The blood clots. The tsunami. The lightning strike — his heart actually stopped, he was clinically dead. The bridge collapse. The kidnapping. Eddie has had six, lest we forget about our beloved sniper shooting. They share five moments of overlapping mortal peril. That's not counting "serious danger," borderline episodes, or the two of them casually walking into a live grenade situation in season 2 like it was a completely normal Wednesday.
That is not a show with stakes. That is a conveyor belt with a dramatic score. And Buck and Eddie have both almost died so many times that it does not feel like stakes anymore. It feels like a performance of stakes.
And here is the thing Tim Minear said out loud, in an actual interview, about why he killed Bobby Nash in season 8: that after eight years, if the show had any hope of creating stories with actual stakes, someone had to die.
The showrunner of 911 confirmed, in print, that the near-death machine had so thoroughly hollowed out the dramatic tension that he had to kill a main character just to remind the audience that mortality is real. Which is a fascinating thing to admit while continuing to run the remaining cast through the NDE rotation on a biweekly basis. But here we are.
And the trauma doesn't stick. It doesn't land. It doesn't leave marks.
Buck gets struck by lightning. He dies for 3 minutes and 17 seconds. Then he has one metaphysical coma episode and he's fine. He survives a serious car accident, gets kidnapped, develops an opioid dependency — and by the penultimate episode of the very same season he's meeting his biological son and back at work. Eddie gets shot by a sniper in broad daylight, his blood on Buck's face — and by the following season the shooting is barely backstory. No lingering injury. No physical therapy. No PTSD arc that doesn't get neatly folded up and shelved before the next disaster needs the emotional real estate.
Where's the PT? Where are the scars? Where's the part where Buck's body remembers the lightning? Where's the part where Eddie's body remembers being shot in Afghanistan, buried under 40 feet of mud, shot again, threatened again? The show likes the spectacle of trauma more than the aftermath of trauma. It keeps happening to these characters without actually changing them, and then asks us to feel the full weight of the next crisis like we haven't already watched this exact shape of thing a dozen times.
So when fandom starts circling the next possible NDE like "okay but THIS will be the thing that makes Buddie happen," I just — why?
I'm not even asking that sarcastically. What is the actual theory of the case here? Aren't you bored?
Because they have already had the big dramatic near-death moments. They have already had the blood. The screaming. The hospital beds. The impossible choices. The "I thought I lost you" framing. The will. The co-parenting. The grief. The panic. The trauma. Eddie was shot in front of Buck and put Buck in his will, which remains one of the most romantically insane things this show has ever done, and even that did not move them into canon. Somehow.
So why are we acting like Near-Death Experience Number Twelve is suddenly going to unlock the secret relationship door?
At some point it starts to feel less like storytelling and more like fandom chasing the same emotional high over and over because someone decided this is the only kind of moment that counts. And I hate that. I hate the idea that Buddie needs to be powered by catastrophe. I hate the idea that one of them has to be bleeding out, flatlining, trapped, missing, shot, crushed, or unconscious for the other one to finally understand what he means to him. I hate the idea that the only acceptable engine for romance is trauma.
Because that is not actually what makes Buck and Eddie interesting. At least to me.
What makes them interesting (to me!) is the life they have built in the in-between. The kitchen scenes. The couch conversations. The Christopher of it all. The trust. The ease. The way they parent and argue and show up and forgive. The way Buck is already woven into Eddie's life so thoroughly that the show had to write a legal document about it. The way Eddie has trusted Buck with the most important person in his world. The way Buck keeps choosing Eddie and Christopher even when nobody says the quiet part out loud.
That is the story. Not "what if one of them almost dies again?" Wouldn't that be exciting! (Not for me.)
I don't want Buck and Eddie to get together because one of them almost dies. I want them to get together because they finally look at the life they have already built and realize what it is. I want the emotional breakthrough to come from honesty, not a heart monitor. I want choice, not crisis. I want intimacy, not injury.
And I want to be clear before I go here: I am not talking about specific people, I'm not coming for anyone's joy, and I am genuinely aware that I am part of this fandom and not immune to its habits. I have been in fandom spaces for far too long. I know how groupthink forms and I know how isolating it is to be on the outside of the thing everyone else is excited about. I'm not throwing stones.
I also maintain a blacklist. I filter my tags. I have curated my fandom experience to the best of my ability, because I believe in practicing what I preach and because it's not anyone else's job to manage my dashboard for me. I do the work. And even with all of that — even with the filters and the blocked tags and the careful curation — this is still the water I'm swimming in.
Which means it's pretty much everywhere.
Once a particular trope becomes The Trope of the Moment, everyone is expected to clap along. NDEs. Alobby. Theo. Whatever the current sacred cow is. God forbid you say "I'm tired of this." God forbid you say "I don't want this in canon." God forbid you say "this is a perfectly good fic trope and bless the fantastic writers who are creating millions of words of it, but I do not need the show to do it." Suddenly you feel like you're about to be accused of hating fun, hating Buddie, hating the show, hating joy, hating romance, hating whatever everyone decided this week was the one true path of fandom.
That is exhausting.
And sometimes a trope is better in fic. That is what fic is for. Fic can sit in the hospital bed confession, the grief spiral, the "I almost lost you and now I know" devastation. Fic can actually let the characters be wrecked and changed by it. Fic can give us the months of recovery and the impossible conversations and the mess. The show almost never does. So I do not need the show to keep reaching for the thing fic does better, especially when the show won't do the work of the aftermath anyway. And fic can do it over and over and over again.
And frankly I miss when the emergencies on 911 were allowed to be weird and fun and thematically relevant without always turning into which member of the 118 is getting hurt this week. Give me the silly calls. Give me the bizarre disasters. Give me the guy glued to something he absolutely should not be glued to. Give me the emergencies that reflect the episode's emotional theme without needing to put Buck or Eddie in mortal peril for the hundredth time. The show used to be so good at finding meaning in the ridiculous. That is 911 at its best. (To me!)
Danger can be fun. Angst can be great. Trauma can be meaningful.
But repetition is not the same thing as stakes. And Buck and Eddie do not need another brush with death to prove they love each other.
At this point, I would much rather see them survive an honest conversation.
But this is about me. It doesn't have to be about you.
Whether or not the spec/leaks/spoilers are true, I don't want Buck to magically acquire a child. Not now. Not ever. And I'm not going to apologize for that.
Because I ship Buddie, not Buddie + kid. It's been 8 seasons and I want to see the delicious moments of realization and the early dating and awkwardness of learning how to be together in a new ways and falling in love and 48 hours of nonstop fucking and I want that without the burden and intrusion of a kid. I can go to AO3 when I want kid!fic. I don't want it in the show. How are they going to have a honeymoon fuckfest with a random toddler in the way?
Because I want Buck and Eddie to be together for each other, not for the McGuffin of a kid. And not because one of them is dying but that's another rant.
Because not every adult wants kids and we deserve that representation too. There's something deeply conservative and regressive about the end storyline of every adult on 911 being marriage and kids. Buck can love kids and be great with them and not "have" one of his own. He has nieces and nephews and his friends' kids and Christopher. You cannot look me in the eye and tell me Buck doesn't consider himself something more than "your dad's friend" to Chris.
Because this show has enough kids. Damn. The unnamed idea that they'll all only be truly fulfilled and complete as people when they have kids is deeply unsettling. I know it's too much to ask for aroace characters on network TV, but let's see a few people living life as happily childfree. Yes, I know I already consider Buck as Chris' sort of dad. He doesn't need another kid.
Because we've already had adopting/fostering storylines with Hen and Karen that showed how difficult and traumatizing the show experience can be and you think single dude Buck Buckley with his history of drug addiction and zero in-home child care will just be handed a kid? Sure. Fine. Whatever.
Because I want to see some silly goofy fun emergency calls, like someone getting stuck on a cacti, and not yet another life altering trauma happening to same 5 first responders every 3 episodes.
