#meta stuff

seeing sqx suffer makes him feel upset because he loves sqx but then the guilt over being upset stops him from doing anything but then more guilt for not doing anything to help him

contemplating sqx dying makes hx severely panic because it would be losing ANOTHER loved one but he can't even bring himself to think about it because sqx dying was meant to be his plan all along and sqx's mortality is HIS OWN DOING

doing anything to ease sqx's pain fills him with grief because it's something he didn't get to do for his own family, it's something he didn't have when he was suffering himself, and also reminds him that all the pain that sqx now suffers is his own fault

spending peaceful or happy times with sqx fills him with guilt for forgetting about his revenge and his family, and for reminding him of the centuries of peacetime that he spent accepting sqx's friendship under the guise of his plan that inevitably led to him loving sqx, and then reminding him why a life full of this was taken away from sqx

not seeing sqx fills him with anxiety because what if sqx dies or gets hurt and he loses another person and once again it'll be all his fault. his fault doubled tripled quadrupled for this person in particular.

No matter how many times I watch this episode, THIS. MOMENT. just gets me every time. Regardless of how I feel about Henry and his "parenting" skills, this is such a good moment between these two.

Because Shawn has just been through a horrifically traumatic day. In which, among other horrors, he found out that yet another psychopathic serial killer is obsessed with him, meaning everyone he loves is once again in danger. And he has to face his childhood stalker again for the first time since she tried to murder his mother in front of him. And almost lost two people who are very important to him, knowing he'll blame himself for whatever happens to them since they were only targeted to get to him. But, in typical Shawn fashion, he's going to play it all off as no big deal. In another minute, he'll be back to cracking jokes and snarking at Lassie and pretending that he isn't going to have nightmares for the foreseeable future because of this. He's just fine(TM). Like always.

But for this one moment — when everyone is busy elsewhere and he's still reeling from the relief of everyone being okay — the mask slips and he's absolutely not fine. Cue Henry, who's been struggling this whole time between his desire to protect Shawn, and the fact that he can't offer much actual comfort because their dynamic doesn't work that way (mostly through his own fault but anyway). But here's his son, sitting alone on the dock, soaking wet, shivering, and looking absolutely wrecked. Their guards go down and Henry pulls him into a fiercely protective hug. And Shawn, who so badly needs someone to reassure him that everything is going to be okay (even though it's not, since Yin is still out there and will definitely be back for more and they both know it), just melts into that hug. He clings to his dad's reassuring presence and Henry holds onto his son like he'll disappear if he lets go. And you can see how desperately they hold onto each other for just that one brief, heartbreaking moment.

It's been a while since I've been fully immersed in our traditional power exchange, but I've been enjoying our excursion into new things. That being said, I wanted to share the mantras that I use to self-coach my traditional submission throughout the day and week:

Protect His Property

Serve Your Family

Maintain Your Sexual Health

Protect His Property This includes taking care of my body and my mental health. Drinking water, eating healthy, exercise, taking vitamins, attending therapy, practicing mindfulness, and maintaining my appearance are all ways to show that I respect his property. A subcategory of this is preserving my body for future childbearing or caring for myself while pregnant.

Serve Your Family All the household chores and childcare tasks that sometimes require additional motivation fall into this category. I rarely derive joy from cleaning, doing laundry, etc. but repeating this mantra can at least help me feel satisfaction from completing each task. Sometimes it can take alignment and encouragement for me to show up authentically and eagerly as a wife and mother during tough times, so this mantra can perk me up in that way as well.

Thinking back on Tony, Maud and the camera story with his father, it's been interesting seeing how that's been interpreted. I'd read online that some people took Tony's twisting of the story, from it originally being one where it sounded like he was the one being bullied/abused by his father, to the opposite being true, where he's the violent, 'crazy' one.

I thought Tony telling the story initially was him being vulnerable, and that us, as an audience, making the inference that his father was abusive, by taking the camera and pulling the film out of it and it being thrown out the window, was correct.

When Maud gave him the camera as a gift and inferred his dad being abusive, I don't think Tony properly realised what he'd communicated, let alone had anyone respond kindly to being vulnerable like that before. He's very much a guy who puts up airs to appear tough and strong (like a peacock lol, and as bullied folk tend to do), so it made him tremendously uncomfortable, being properly seen like that, as he's not used to exposing himself, and perhaps doesn't quite trust Maud yet. So Tony walked his story back and lied that he was the one who threw the camera out the window as a proxy to "smashing his (his father's) face in", to appear the tough, strong one again. Although that was evidently his desire with his father. In a way he was testing Maud out further, to see how she'd respond to him being more forthright about his darker feelings, and to find that she'd not baulked from him, or looked at him with disdain, afforded him solace. Enough for him to laugh, and her along with him. Which is to say that Maud's original interpretation of it was the right one, and his father was actually abusive to him as a kid, fact.

I have so many thoughts on the friendship between Flynn and Cassandra, I could write a million essays on it. But something that has really jumped out to me during my current rewatch is the way these two just easily understand each other without even trying.

They talk without having to verbally communicate most of what they're saying. They don't even seem to be aware of the fact everyone else in the room is looking at them in confusion because they can't hear the unspoken parts of the conversation.

They bounce ideas off each other so easily, instantly pick up on each other's trains of thought, and practically finish the other's sentences or ideas.

These two neurodivergent geeks, who never had anyone in their life truly grasp what goes on inside their head, suddenly found someone who knows and it's like they instantly latched onto that connection.

Cassandra also has her very close friendship with the other LITs, and Flynn has his relationship with Eve, but it's their friendship with each other that lets them both explore and indulge the parts of themself that other people just don't understand.

Cassandra is definitely the one out of the LITs that is most like Flynn, both in her skills as a Librarian and also in her personality and how her lightning speed thoughts tend to get translated into her words and interactions with others. (Which is a whole other topic I'd love to dive into another day.) But, yeah, it makes so much sense why they have no trouble at all understanding each other.

(Edit: Nope, that was supposed to be the end of the post but I have too many thoughts that need to be shouted into the void. Their friendship is very important to me. So...)

Jumping back to the very beginning - During the first two episodes, Flynn is perpetually annoyed by Ezekiel and just kinda ignores Stone. But Cassandra… He's absolutely fascinated by her from the moment they first meet. He takes a minute out of their incredibly urgent life-and-death mission to discuss her being a synesthete and geek out a little over the fact she has an eidetic memory like him. And Cassandra's immediate reaction of "Yes, wow" is like she can't believe someone is capable of immediately understanding what's going on inside her head and is 100% okay with that and not at all bothered by her being "different".

And then they get to Stonehenge:

And I think this is the moment Flynn really starts to appreciate how brilliant Cassandra is, and how very much like him she is. Flynn is a fairly competitive person with a genius brain like no other, but he doesn't get upset or offended when she takes over the calculations, and even carries them out faster than he could have. If anything, he looks genuinely impressed. He instantly understands what information she needs and readily gives it to her so they can continue solving the puzzle. They immediately settle into this easy back and forth, this rapid exchange of information and clues as they work at putting together the pieces. He's able to talk to her in a way he can't talk to anyone else. It's probably been a long time (if ever) since he's interacted with someone who can keep up with him.

Even after Cassandra has betrayed Flynn -- causing him to lose his home, the only family he had left, his best friend, and potentially his life -- he instantly accepts her back on the team and even sticks up for her when the others object. At this point, she hasn't apologized, shown any indication of remorse, or had a chance to make amends. And it doesn't matter to him. "She had her reasons" - and that's enough for him. He lets her out of the cell and immediately wants to hear her plan for stopping the Brotherhood.

And I think this is the moment when Cassandra -- similar to Flynn's realization at Stonehenge -- suddenly realizes that someone else can grasp her thought process. That someone understands the way her brain works. That someone is capable of following her trains of thought and not getting lost in the ordered chaos of her mind.

Just look at her smile!! She is trying to get across what she wants to say, and she's so used to having to break things down for others and still not being understood, and here's someone who instantly picks up what she's trying to convey. Look how utterly happy and excited she is when he gets it.

I love how much they appreciate each other's genius. I love how they can communicate on a different level. I love how much they genuinely care about each other.

And I absolutely love that it's through Flynn that Cassandra manages to have her moment for redemption, because he's already clearly demonstrated that he's the one member of the group she doesn't have to prove herself to.

I just... 😭😭😭

I love that Flynn has zero people skills and a very weak grasp on the concept of friendship and yet he meets this brilliant, weird, amazing young person and pretty much instantly connects with her. Because, like her, he also spent most of his life invisible and now someone actually understands him and is already so important to him, even if it's a while yet before he'll really fully understand the concept of friendship.

I love that Cassandra has spent most of her life feeling unseen and never truly accepted by the people around her. And then she meets someone who immediately sees her and understands how her mind works and appreciates and trusts her, and who introduces her to this life of mystery and magic where she can use her talents to save the world… and she already knows that he's important to her even if she doesn't realize just how much her life is going to change because of him.

There's SO MUCH more I could say about their friendship, but I should probably channel some of it into an actual blog post at some point. For now, here's some cute moments I grabbed while getting the screenshots for this post:

Huge disclaimer: I am not Tim Minear's secret BFF, so I'm talking out my ass with the spec about writers' motivations and thought processes. Season 8 could air and prove me wrong on every single point.

As someone who started watching 911 in season 3, I latched on to the potential of Buck/Eddie as a ship right away. I was never somebody who necessarily expected or believed that it would become canon, but I loved the characters, and I loved the pairing. I was content to enjoy it as a well-fed fanon ship, but I’ll admit I did have moments where I thought they could have gone there: the shooting, Eddie’s breakdown, the lightning strike/couch theory era, etc. The season 6 finale poured cold water on the small hope of it ever going canon for me, and I think season 7 has put the nail in that coffin (which is fucking wild for me to say, considering one half of the pairing is now canonically bisexual).  

Here’s the thing: I had a moment before 7x04 when the press was clearly hinting at a bisexual Buck arc and we suspected a Buck/Tommy kiss was going to happen where I thought, Oh, man, they could do it! They could have Buck come out and discover he has feelings for Eddie. My assumption was that if they did, Eddie would return or at least acknowledge his feelings for Buck an episode or two later, because the idea of two totally separate coming-out arcs has never made sense to me in the context of the business of television.  

Although the fandom itself leans young and queer, 911’s general audience is heterosexual, middle-aged, and unfortunately has limits about how much queerness it believes is ‘realistic’ in a procedural genre television show (see: all the backlash on social media after 7x04 about how 911 is “woke” because they “turned Buck gay” despite the show always featuring queer characters; see also: all the het women whining on Facebook and Instagram about how Buck is now unattractive because he’s “gay” and thus unavailable to them, despite him being bi and not a real person, lol.) Like it or not, the show’s survival depends on this middle-of-the-road audience of casual viewers, not a few thousand passionate fans on the internet, and the network is always going to prioritize keeping its biggest demographic happy. 

I think it’s clear that the writers had a hell of a time fighting for queer Buck, and we now know that they were flat-out unable to manage it on Fox. ABC was willing to take the risk, although I do find it very interesting that they greenlit two more queer male characters, Buck and Tommy (one main, one guest/recurring) after the show had already lost two queer male characters, Michael and David (one main, one guest/recurring.) It was a lateral move. Just food for thought. 

In any case, getting two queer mains -- both Buck and Eddie -- would be much harder to pitch to a money-focused executive suit. Given Oliver Stark’s comments on a queer Buck storyline being considered in season 4, the (dubious) Twitter leaker’s supposed knowledge of queer Eddie being pitched in season 5, and Lou Ferrigno Jr.’s comment about Tommy being floated as a love interest for both Eddie and Buck at various points in the planning process, I think that paints a pretty solid picture of what might have happened: Fox shut down the possibility of making either Buck or Eddie queer, and ABC okayed it for one of them, not both. And the writers sat down, thought about both characters’ storylines and queer-coding, and decided that Buck made the most sense for the story they wanted to tell with Tommy. 

Let’s consider the other option, though -- that ABC was convinced in season 7 to greenlight Buck and Eddie coming out, with the understanding that it would lead to a relationship. The fandom would be thrilled, of course. But how would you, as writers and producers, sell this to the very important general audience? 

If the show was really going to go there with their two most popular “hot guy” male leads and they wanted to get the general audience’s buy-in that they would badly need, they would probably want to frame the arc from the beginning as a story about two friends who discover that they love each other. (As a queer person, I don’t love the tired old trope of “I thought I was straight but maybe this person is my exception and/or I don’t know what my sexuality is but I love you,” but I could definitely see them thinking that would be more palatable to an audience that had never considered Buck and Eddie to be anything more than platonic friends. In fact, they actually did kind of use this method with Buck/Tommy, in that Buck’s arc is focused on one person and he hasn’t yet explicitly called himself ‘bisexual’, but I’m somewhat optimistic that they’ll remedy this in season 8.)  All that’s to say, if they wanted to make Buddie work for an audience that wasn’t already primed to scour the material for subtext, they would need to make Buck and Eddie’s realizations explicitly about each other. They would need the audience to accept the idea of them being romantically linked to each other early on even if they didn’t immediately have the two of them get together. 

The show didn’t do that. They linked Buck’s bisexual arc to another character. And not just a new, throwaway character that could be easily discarded  – a character who already fit into the 911 universe, a fellow firefighter who would be easy to integrate into future storylines, and a character with a distinct and established personality (love him or hate him, you can’t deny people feel strongly about his character).  

So now Buck has come out, and he’s in a relationship with Tommy. This arc was thankfully received well – or at least wasn’t controversial enough to have an effect on the ratings, which is what ABC cares about – and for the general audience and new viewers, this facet of Buck’s journey is associated with Tommy. In real life, of course, it’s reductive (if not offensive) to say that somebody’s sexuality is about one person; if he were a real person, Buck would be bi whether or not he met Tommy and whether or not he ever dated a man. But because Buck is fictional, and this storyline was written specifically in the context of Buck discovering his feelings for a particular person, that person is now linked to Buck’s bisexuality in the minds of the general audience.  

That choice alone gave me pause. If you wanted to convince a skeptical audience that Buck and Eddie were meant for each other, why would you introduce such a solid rival? Still, a love triangle could work. After 7x05, there was speculation in the fandom about setting up a jealousy arc, in which Eddie would realize his feelings after seeing Buck and Tommy together. Theoretically, this could be a way to ease the audience into the idea of Buddie, if you did it early enough in the story. But there are two big things the writers did in the ensuing episodes that pivoted the characters in the opposite direction:  

The writers doubled down on Eddie being in-your-face heterosexual in a way that he wasn’t in his oddly chaste relationship with Ana. They used valuable screentime on postcoital scenes demonstrating that he’s happily down to pound town onscreen with Marisol; it's the nun thing that throws him off, not her being a woman. He very much seemed to enjoy having sex with her before that and is sexually frustrated when his religious guilt prevents him from continuing to have sex with her. More significantly, the arc with Kim at least implied, if not outright confirmed, that Eddie is still in love with Shannon – his feelings are strong enough to blow up his entire life for the chance to recapture even a pale imitation of what he believed they had together. The writers made an effort in season 6 to reframe Shannon as the great love of Eddie’s life, where it was sort of messier and less rose-tinted in previous seasons. The fact that they doubled-down on this in season 7 makes it extremely unlikely that the general audience would believe that Eddie could go from pining for his wife years after her death to secretly in love with Buck the whole time. Not only did seeing Buck with Tommy not trigger any latent feelings for his friend in Eddie, but he spent the entire second half of the season stewing in his unresolved feelings for Shannon instead.  

The writers portrayed Buck as being fully “in” with his budding relationship with Tommy. He is explicitly attracted both sexually and romantically to Tommy. He doesn’t express any doubts or reservations about his choice after 7x05 and in fact is the one to pursue it as something serious. They didn’t have Buck choose time with Eddie over Tommy, even when the blow-up with Chris would have provided them with a perfect narrative reason to do so. They didn’t have Tommy express any jealousy about Eddie or even seem slightly concerned about his friendship with Buck, even though there were opportunities to do so. The writing went out of its way to frame Buck’s friendship and his relationship as two separate parts of his life that aren’t in conflict with each other. Eddie has been openly and enthusiastically supportive of Buck's new relationship. Eddie likes Tommy. Christopher likes Tommy. Tommy likes both Eddie and Christopher. Buck loves them all. There’s no drama there, and if this was supposed to lead into a love triangle ending in Buddie, I really believe they would have made that clear to the audience with blatant foreshadowing.  

All that’s to say, this show isn’t subtle. If they were intending to convince the general audience to buy into the idea of Buddie, they would be working hard to muddy the waters surrounding the Buck/Tommy/Eddie of it all from the beginning; they would want the audience to have doubts about Tommy as soon as the relationship began and establish Eddie's jealousy right away. Why on earth would they take the trouble of getting their viewers (many of them new to the show after the network switch) attached to Tommy as a character and get them invested in Buck and Tommy as a couple in a happy little romcom if they were going to turn around and jettison it all and say Surprise! It was Buck/Eddie the whole time!? From a writing perspective, that’s a bad twist. If you want that reversal to work, you need to build it up beforehand and plant seeds of conflict from the start. And for that casual, general audience, there are no seeds; they aren’t scrutinizing every word and glance for proof that Buck and Eddie have feelings for each other. They’re not pulling from past episodes to draw parallels in the narrative. The vast majority of them probably don’t even have an inkling that Buck/Eddie is a thing that people ship. They’re not reading Tommy’s every action in bad faith and looking for hints that he’s actually terrible for Buck. They sit down to watch an episode, take it at face value, and then don't think about the show again until the next episode. For them, a Buddie twist would be unsatisfying if not outright unbelievable, because it would come out of absolutely nowhere. 

911’s writers have been known to make baffling and offensive choices, but they are capable of creating a careful story, and I don’t think they would fumble this so badly when so much is at stake for the future of their creative choices. ABC took a risk with bi Buck, and if the writers and Tim have any sense at all, they wouldn’t want to invite backlash from the audience or from their bosses.

I feel a deep sense of dread as I embark on a rewatch of this episode. While the previous episode is one of my top-5 favorites, this one is all the way on the other end of the spectrum. There are parts about DMP that I love, truly. The quiet moment we spend with Giles after Buffy returns is touching, SMG's big, wet eyes are at their biggest and wettest, and Buffy's sense of isolation even while surrounded by people almost feels like foreshadowing for season 6; these are some great highlights, along with a few really fun lines.

Unfortunately, most of the episode feels like a dirge. The constant barbs tossed at Buffy feel overbearing and by the end it feels as though nothing was resolved so much as left out in the August sun to fester for hours before being quietly swept it into the garbage.

I signed up for two fics - 10k words each. Some people think I’m crazy but I am a very, very dense writer. I’m used to writing single chapters in a multi chapter fic that go beyond 10k words. When I’m truly inspired, as I am for these, 10k is a one night endeavour lol.