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#also shoutout to people who tag me in stuff about salad it truly makes my day
clusterbuck · 2 years
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emma i HAVE to know more about salad theory from last night's ep. what does it MEAN??
listen i have been thinking about this all day (rip to my job) and essentially what i have landed on is
originally, i posited that salad is linked to tension between ana/eddie/christopher/buck, but i think the appearances of salad since then show that we can narrow this theory down to the fact that the salad really does represent specifically the buddie of it all.
so the previous observations about 4x08 and 5x02 still hold true, the significance is just altered a little. the salad bowl is broken out of not general wrongness but specifically the fact that it's not buddie. the blackout salads are still extremely questionable choices, but they're also questionable specifically because the wrong person brings them.
(and as a quick refresher, in 5x03 we see eddieana break up over fruit salad, more specifically canned fruit salad, which is very easy to read as a metaphor for repressed queerness)
(5x04, to the best of my memory, contains no salad)
so with this slightly altered theory in mind, in 5x05 we see salad twice:
once during the dinner table scene, where
eddie reaches for the salad and moves it from the center of the table to his side when buck starts talking
so this entire conversation is happening, you know, right in front of his salad
wait i'm going to lose my mind actually
the salad is only ever in frame when the camera is facing eddie
except when he says he told chimney that going after maddie is the right thing to do, and the shot cuts off just above the salad (compare below)
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effectively, the salad is only in frame when the conversation is actually about buck.
also when eddie says "you're stuck with us" he grabs the table and basically brackets the salad with his hands so... make of that what you will
what i am getting at here is that the salad in this scene is a visual representation of honestly, buck, did you really think you were going to just transfer right on out of there? this man has a legal document tying you to his family. he's not about to let you out of his sight.
there was also absolutely no reason for eddie to do any of this. could have easily done this whole conversation without eddie first positioning the salad directly in front of him. and yet that is a choice that somebody made.
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the second time is... let's be honest it's practically a direct parallel to the fruit salad of the eddieana breakup. like idk about you but that sure looks like a pre-packaged fruit salad to me, with the plastic bowl and everything.
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and so if we're sticking with the fruit metaphor, there's all kinds of things the plastic packaging and the ready-made assembly-line nature of the fruit salad could represent
artificiality, for one
the dichotomy of the mass-produced/cookie-cutter vs individual/custom-made etc, which is an allegory for suitability
suffocation
you could think of being packaged in plastic as being akin to doing something for show and for the display of it all
you know, like you might do if you were dating someone because you're in denial and/or not aware that you're in love with someone else
that's all i've got on salad this week, tune in after next episode for *checks notes* haunted salad?? can't fucken wait
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