Hot Take
BUCK IS THE BEST PERSON TO GIVE DATING ADVICE TO CHRIS, HEAR ME OUT.
Okay, I know we're all laughing about women fleeing Buck and how awful he is at relationships, but I don't feel like that's true.
First of all, just because a relationship ends, doesn't mean that it FAILED. Dating is as much about getting to know YOURSELF, what you want out of a relationship and what your own boundaries are as it is about getting to know the person you're dating. It's about growing, and learning from your mistakes, and I feel like Buck HAS done that. I'm not saying he's a perfect dater (the Taylor/Lucy thing, wtf was that?) but also, he has gotten better.
With Abby, he grew from fuckboy Firehose to someone that is considerate and thoughtful to his partner. (I don't LOVE that we credit Abby for his growth, since he was the one that made the initial boundary to not meet up right away because he didn't want to fall back into that sleep with anything that moves mindset, but she is mostly credited with it canonically, so we're going to use it.) Also, she didn't leave because Buck was a bad boyfriend or anything. She left because she needed to find herself after her mom died, and that's it.
With Ali too, she left because of his job, because she couldn't handle being with a first responder, which is a genuine concern for a LOT of people. It's hard to love someone with a dangerous job like that, and not know if they're going to come home at night. It had nothing to do with who Buck was as a boyfriend.
With Taylor, that whole relationship was a mess, IMO, them getting together when they did was a recipe for disaster. Obviously, Buck shouldn't have asked her to move in because he was scared to tell her about Lucy, but I'm not saying he's a PERFECT dater, I'm saying he's learning, and that's what's important. When he did admit to the kiss, Taylor is the one that decided that it wasn't a hard line for her, or she would have broken up with him, living together or not. It probably would have been awkward and complicated, but it was all of those things when they DID break up later in the series. From this relationship, Buck learned that it's better to be alone than it is to be with someone for the wrong reasons.
He has had a lot of growth from s1 to the end of s6, and that is clear in his dating.
Now, everyone that's saying Eddie should go to Bobby or Chim for advice, I'm going to say this: It's easy to date when you immediately find the person you're going to marry.
Let me be clear, I'm not saying that Madney & Bathena don't have their own struggles within their relationships, but Bobby and Chim got pretty luck, they found women that they clicked with and then eventually fell in love with almost as soon as they went looking.
When Bobby decided he was ready to move on from Marcy, the ONLY person we actually see him dating in the show is Athena, and they end up married.
After Tatiana leaves Chim, and he decides that he's going to be himself and look for a genuine connection, Maddie is conveniently placed in front of him.
I'm not saying that either of them are bad daters, or bad partners or anything, but we don't really SEE them date. Maybe it's because they're older and they already know what they're looking for and what they can and can't accept in a relationship, but realistically, it's wild to think that you're going to fall in love and get married to the first person that you find when you start dating. The majority of people have to date around and actually look to find the person they're meant to be with, not magically find them right out of the gate.
Especially for a FIRST first date, it's all about figuring out how dating works, what is and isn't expected and acceptable and navigating getting to know a new person, as well as yourself, and I think Buck is the clear best option when it comes to experience about women. He's had several girlfriends and also convinced only God knows how many people to sleep with him, so he's obviously charming, and pleasant to spend time within a romantic situation.
Also, God knows nobody is asking Eddie for dating advice, since the man only married his girlfriend bc she was pregnant and then had to be told (BY BUCK) that he deserved to be happy in a relationship instead of sticking it out for everyone else.
Anyway, this has been on my mind ever since that interview came out with everyone making fun of Eddie for going to Buck because he's had (based on what we're reading about Natalia's character) 4 "failed" relationships, but again, I truly believe that a relationship ending does not automatically mean it failed.
Also, Eddie goes to Buck because they're CO-PARENTS & SOULMATES but all of this other stuff too 😂
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here's my theory based on the trailer: vanessa is a bold-faced liar. because look at this. this shot right here.
abby is stood well within lunging reach of foxy. she's right there. and sure, this could just be foxy getting distracted in the moment, but look at abby. she's not backed away. her hands aren't thrown up in defense, she doesn't even look scared.
if their goal was to "make her like them", they should be attacking her, right? at the very least, abby should be scared or something, but she's not.
my guess right now is that the animatronics and the kids inside are likely trying to protect abby from becoming like them. but vanessa can't let mike know that. she has to keep him distracted from the real person who's out to get abby --
the same one who got the original five.
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I don't find ellie's motivations during tlou2 that opaque tbh. like yeah the revenge quest drags and you're exhausted at the end of it and tired of witnessing the bloodshed. I'm pretty sure that's the reaction the game is trying to draw out of you (I died during the confrontation on the beach because I didn’t want to choke abby so I stopped mashing buttons lmao). but ellie's determination to see it through is, I think, another expression of her survivor's guilt.
I think ellie is, fundamentally, someone who is living in the blank pages past the end of her story. riley gets bitten and ellie doesn't die. tess gets bitten, sam gets bitten, and ellie doesn't die. she thinks she has a chance to create a world where that won't happen anymore, to anyone, but joel saves her and she doesn't die. she's left to navigate the aftermath with no sense of purpose. she's just supposed to keep going, and she's doesn't know how.
and then joel is killed in front of her and ellie doesn't die. again. everyone I've cared for has either died or left me. everyone fucking except for you. ellie struggles with what joel did to and for her, and ellie is allowed to leave him, because she knows joel won't ever leave her. she thought she had time to come back to him. to figure out all that out. she hadn't forgiven joel yet, but she wanted to try. and then suddenly all that possibility is gone.
I think the revenge quest is partly a way for ellie to align herself with joel posthumously. now that she doesn’t have the option to heal and grow her relationship with the living joel, she engages instead with his legacy. we know the kind of man joel is (was?), and so does ellie—violent, vengeful, often selfish. the kind of man that regards the necessity of violence with equanimity. in joel's absence, ellie molds herself in his image. this is what joel would do, she thinks. if it had been me, she thinks.
and that's to say nothing of the sunk cost of killing more and more of abby's friends on her quest to find abby herself. once you've hunted down one, two, three people who pose you no threat, once you've tortured someone, once you've killed a pregnant woman, what does that make you if you stop now? what does it mean if you decide you don't need to kill abby after all? if abby's death is not absolutely necessary, then what of the violence leading up to it, and the person executing said violence? even if ellie felt early in her revenge that she wanted to stop, that it wasn't worth it, she wasn't ready to confront the reality of what she had done. framing her revenge as necessary let her pretend she was the hero a little longer.
and I think part of the reason she persists as long as she does is because of her lack of purpose, and, frankly, her desire to die. again, fundamentally, ellie lives. even when she doesn't want to. even when she doesn't believe she deserves to. she can't save riley, she can't save the world, she can't even save joel who, regardless of the tenor of their relationship at the time, is a foundational pillar of ellie's life. so what can she do? maybe this one last thing. ellie's own life, her own happiness, isn't important. it was her death that was supposed to be important, but she woke up and it had passed her by. now she's got a cosmic debt she can never repay. I don’t think she expects to come back from seattle, but she also can’t stand to let down someone she cares about again, even if it's only their ghost. what’s her life in the blank endpapers worth compared to another failure?
and ultimately she lets abby go. because she sees lev. she sees abby turn away from her entirely because her boy needs her. and because ellie remembers joel as he was after the bloodshed, the kind of man he was trying so hard to be for her. there's something there about what we leave our children. something about the kind of person you become to protect them, and about the kind of person they really need, and where those modes diverge. what kind of father is abby? what kind of father does ellie want to be? joel at the end of tlou, bloodied, lying to her? or joel standing on his porch in jackson, waiting for when she's ready to come back?
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I've been thinking about this for a WHILE now, because I keep trying to find what could be the turning point for buddie, and I'm in the Eddie had his oh moment already train and he just didn't want to bring it up for whatever reason, he didn't want to deal with it and he had stuff to work through and he was scared of messing things up and Buck died and Buck has stuff to work through, so he's just in this limbo space where he knows what he wants but doesn't know he can get it, or maybe he just got comfortable with the way things are and hasn't felt the need to change them yet, but the more I watch this show, the more i feel like Buck's oh moment is not happening without a nudge, because it's becoming painfully clear that Buck has no idea what being in love with someone in a healthy way means. Things with Abby were all sorts of complicated and Abby was never all the way in, Ali was never around enough so they never left the honeymoon phase until it became clear she was against the very thing that makes him who he is and Taylor was a dumpster fire all around with the way they just don't understand each other. And the whole "she sees me for who I am" things comes back to the way Buck hasn't felt seen in a relationship and it's clinging to this idea of what it should look like. I don't think Buck can get to the "oh, this thing I'm feeling is love" conclusion alone. Because he has this idea of what love should be like but he doesn't seem to be able to apply that idea to himself.
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