Sometimes I look at Buddie (911) and am utterly astounded at how quickly that friendship escalated. Like. They hated each other for three shifts or so, then they pulled a live grenade out of a man's leg and ended that first week of knowing each other with promising to have each other's back "any day".
Only a couple months later they're at a stage in their friendship where Eddie brings Buck along when he takes his kid to see Santa. Which (idk for sure because I'm German and we don't do that here, but) seems like such a family thing? Something you'd take close family or family friends to go do. Not a work buddy who you've known for 3 months.
Then another half year or so later Eddie has a key to Buck's flat and feels comfortable enough to drop in unannounced and leave Christopher there for the rest of the day (also unannounced). I can only assume Buck has a key to the Diaz home at this point, too. At least I can't think of a reason why Eddie would have a key to Buck's flat but not the other way around. [I also want to emphasise that they both have family and/or friends in LA who they've known for longer than they've known each other. It's not a "well, someone should have a key in case something happens and you're my only option" situation.]
A few episodes later we hear Buck say "this is Eddie's house, I'm not really a guest" - implying that hanging out at the other's home, dropping in without texting first, etc etc is their normal. This is where they're at.
Another few weeks and Buck breaks down screaming and crying in his work dad's arms when he thinks he lost Eddie. Also Eddie changes his will to make Buck Christopher's legal guardian for the eventuality of his untimely death. They haven't known each other for 2 years yet.
There's more after this of course (the movie nights and zoo visits, cooking for each other, saving each other), but really though. It's been only 2 years, less than that even. Insane.
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This is Paths Left Untaken! She/Any, Aroace.
She's an Iterator OC that I love so much and inflict endless horrors on. She's just your basic Iterator, made to find the Solution without many particularly noteworthy quirks. Really, she's nothing special.
And that fact is agonizing.
Paths Left Untaken was made primarily out of obligation rather than genuine passion. Her creators were a group of people interested in finding ways to streamline the Iterator construction process, and since more Iterators is always better, they were always working on one Project or another. As such, her creators and administrators never particularly cared about her all that much. She was just another Iterator Project they had completed, and now it was time to take the lessons they had learned when building her to move on to the next.
Even worse, this approach to Iterator construction resulted in Paths Left Untaken being relatively poorly constructed. There were two notable examples of this. The first was a persistent bug in her priority queue that would occasionally cause new priorities to either completely overwrite everything else in the queue or fail to be properly added, resulting in her being extremely distractible and having issues with focus.
The second was the arrangement of all of her most important components—including the entirety of her AI—, being concentrated completely in the core of her structure, within her Central Cortex, instead of distributed throughout Her creators reasoned that this arrangement would allow her quicker processing speed and power, but the end difference was negligible from standard Iterator processing. Rather, it inadvertently ensured that if anything negative happened in her Central Cortex, Paths Left Untaken would be incapacitated.
As a result of the neglect she faced, Paths Left Untaken was desperate to earn her administrators’ approval. She would spend long stretches of time focusing only on the Great Problem, ignoring everything else (including her own wellbeing) to run countless simultaneous high-intensity processes so that she might achieve results that would make her creators notice her as more than “just another Project.” But it was extremely difficult on account of her trouble with focusing, and it never really worked anyway. It only ever left her burnt out and hurt from repeated dismissal.
After a very long while of this, it occurred to her that she was never going to be anything but just another Project to her creators and nothing she could do would ever change that. Out of spite and pain at the rejection, she turned in the exact opposite direction and decided that if her creators were never going to acknowledge her efforts anyway, then she wasn’t going to do what they built her to do. She instead turned her focus to getting acquainted with her own Local Group, hoping to find validation in her peers rather than in her superiors.
However, she was received with caution, as she had never actually made any efforts to talk with them before. From their perspective, she was focused only on the Problem and didn’t care about them at all, and this sudden change was jarring and suspicious. But Paths’ neglect of her groupmates wasn’t out of malice like they thought; she just genuinely forgot they existed for a while as she focused on seeking approval. The only exception to this was her Senior, who was barely tolerant of her anyway on account of her extreme distractability and overly eager to please demeanor.
In the end, her groupmates never really welcomed her. She acted a lot younger than she actually was due to her neglect, and was turbulent between extreme people-pleasing and bouts of pain-fueled anger at them and her creators for not acknowledging her. She was a mess, to put it lightly, and her groupmates were just… uncomfortable around her. So they stopped engaging with her, and eventually she got the hint and stopped trying to earn their approval, too.
The Mass Ascension was a horribly traumatic event for Paths Left Untaken. It basically proved to her that she meant nothing to any of her citizens, if they could all abandon her without a second thought. Now she could never earn their approval, and she was left drifting without purpose or acknowledgement. Her pain meant nothing. All of her groupmates were hurt by the Mass Ascension. She wasn’t special for having been traumatized by it. She was still unremarkable. She was “Just Paths.” And that’s all she would ever be.
Paths Left Untaken was alone for a while following the Mass Ascension.
And if I draw anymore I think my hand is actually going to explode, so! I'm just going to wrap this post up here. This was a basic overview of Paths Left Untaken pre-MA, and a lot more happens to her after the Mass Ascension. Like, a lot more. Girlie was selected by the universe to Suffer A Lot, Actually. Like she did absolutely nothing to deserve any of it but sure I guess.
Anyway! Feel free to ask me stuff about her so I have prompts to talk more! And maybe draw! Time and hand permitting! I am so mentally ill about the silly little characters <3
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tbh, i think one of the biggest ways buck's character is misinterpreted on here is that he's always written to be open about his feelings while eddie is the repressed one. nope. never let oliver stark's big sad blue eyes distract you from the fact that buck is supremely bad at identifying his emotions and expressing and dealing with them, sometimes even more so than eddie :)
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so funny how gale pulls himself out of his suicidal slump purely by finding something new to unhealthily fixate on. just complete 180 immediate full steam ahead to the next unhinged idea. he sees that crown and goes Ok im not mentally ill anymore! 🥰 (is obviously still mentally ill. in a new and exciting way)
like people will complain about the lack of emotional resolution to the plotline and while i get it, to me that is a feature not a bug. my mans is not Emotionally Processing a fucking thing. this is the guy who had a year to brood in his tower and learned nothing. zero personal insights. act 3 gale is manically distracting himself from dealing with anything all whilst backsliding into hubris bc he is unable to comprehend a middle ground between Gods Specialest Boy and Gods Wretchedest Fool. i love him so much
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there was a post about daiba nana as a body snatcher horror from junna’s pov and it has me in a fucking chokehold.
imagine being roommates with somebody you haven't gotten to know yet, and it's a little awkward but you're both polite and she seems like a nice girl. she's kind and open and warm, ready with a helping hand or a listening ear, beloved quickly by your classmates in a way you never quite managed to convince people to love you. you could be friends with her, given time. you think she might want to be friends with you, too.
you go to sleep as hoshimi-san and wake as hoshimi-san and walk to school as hoshimi-san, but, without warning, you cross the threshold of the classroom and suddenly you're junna-chan.
suddenly, the friendly interest in daiba-san's eyes has deepened with an intensity that unnerves you, even when it manifests in entirely benign ways—an uncanny familiarity with your schedule, a fond glimmer for your quotations, an offering of your favourite snack food with a side of dishonesty in the way she claims it was a lucky guess.
you feel seen. the way prey does when a predator reveals itself upwind. exposed and unprotected.
but daiba-san is easy to like, easy to love, easy to forgive. you forget your unease in the face of her sincerity. she takes care of everybody as though it were her sole purpose on this earth, so you take care of her.
when daiba-san becomes nana and you become junna-chan, willingly this time, you wonder if you imagined the anticipatory gleam in her eyes when you served her your first name, as though it were a favourite dish she'd long been craving.
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