#and to think we have a whole s8 coming from abc too..... what a time to be alive!

[jakeperalta]

literally obsessed with abc getting hold of buck and immediately going "before we do anything else let's just make it clear that man is NOT straight"

[caramelminie]

can i put my tinfoil hat back on

i know everyone is very upset with the finale right now, i am too but i don't think it's the end of buddie

he didn't say that they were wrong or that buck isn't in love with eddie he just said that buck still isn't listening to them and doesn't believe that it's true. to me it doesn't seem like it happened for nothing but rather like it was a scene to introduce that idea to the general audience

and of course it's still very possible that the writing wasn't good and it actually meant nothing but i truly hope that's not the case. they brought it up several times, that usually doesn't mean that it's nothing

also something i've been wondering this whole time is if they're trying to restart what they were doing with buddie after s5 and s6 seemed to shut it down so strongly. their progression in s7 and s8 resemble s2 and s3 so much to me. in s2 eddie had just barely been introduced, buddie was a very new concept and did honestly start out seeming like a good friendship. as it progresses we can start to see the chemistry between them and the first shift we really start to see is 2x10 where the worker tells buck that they have an adorable son and he thanks her. the overall progression of buddie in season 2 remains pretty tame though for the most part.

then in season 3 we can start to see a real shift, especially with the tsunami situation. then there's the ''super gay'' kitchen scene(oliver starks opinion!) where you can really see that they have a different friendship than the others. there's more tension when they speak and theres several flirty scenes between the two. then in ep15 we see just how much the thought of losing eddie affected buck, him sobbing in bobby's arms and digging for eddie in the pouring rain really signals that buck loves him deeply and is terrified of the possibility of his death. that's where we start to feel a huge shift in their relationship but it's still kinda up in the air.

s4 continues on that path, they keep it pretty ambiguous with the same flirty undertones we've been seeing the past two seasons. then in the finale it seems like an obvious opening to their feelings realization, especially for buck when he's in the ambulance with eddie. and it was supposed to be!! they intended on going canon with buddie after that but fox said no (😒) and after that buddie basically seemed to get buried 6 feet under. new partners get introduced for both of them afterwards and we don't make much valuable progress.

5x6 has the scene where the prisoner threatens eddie & christopher and buck shows a very angry reaction, clearly upset by the thought of somebody hurting them. but he's with taylor throughout i think all of s5 and eddie is with ana for the first three episodes before they breakup and he proceeds to not really date anybody the rest of the season.

in s6 both buck and eddie meet potential partners. we have the lightning strike scene where eddie damn near loses it thinking he's about lose buck. he was also shot off the ladder with the strike but it was less severe and once he realizes the state buck is in he basically forgets everything that just happened to him in a panic to save buck. but even in s6 with the occasional flirting there isn't a lot of obvious signs that would tell the ga that they may be a possible couple. to me it's very important to focus on what they do for the ga because that's where they make things more obvious so nobody will act like they didn't see a plot coming. s6 ends with marisol and natalia and basically no hope for buddie.

then after s6 they switch to abc. there's obviously some differences with the show but for the most part most things are the same. buck and natalia break up and later on we get buck's coming out arc where he realizes he's bisexual. honestly i have no interest in speaking about tommy but unfortunately some of his scenes are important to this so.. i have no choice 😒 from the start eddie is very prominent in their relationship, from casual mentions of him to him just showing around them he seems to just always be a part of their relationship. eddie cheats on marisol with his dead wife(wtf was that storyline) and they break up. christopher ends up going to texas because of that situation as well. this clearly affects eddie and he eventually comes to the decision in s8 to move to texas and be with christopher to rekindle their bond and hopefully regain his trust.

losing eddie takes an obvious toll on buck, the man moved into his house and called him practically every single day until he came back. buck and tommy break up(thank god 🙏) and later on they hook up(in eddies house.. the audacity) and when they talk about possibly getting back together, tommy jokes about the competition(eddie) being eliminated. buck is strangely defensive over this and tommy ends up leaving. this is where i think oliver didn't say anything incorrect in that article. buck literally is not shown exploring the possibility that he actually is in love with eddie, and that doesn't change when maddie brings it up as well. he denied it and refuses to consider it any further, repressing any possibility of those feelings being real. that doesn't mean he isn't in love with him, it could just mean he's still in denial. he keeps reminding people eddie is straight when they suggest the possibility of his feelings and i think it's that way for himself as well. he refuses to consider it because he doesn't want to get hurt and ruin the friendship they have. 8x17 was our holy grail and honestly i think molly green and james leffler should write all of s9 but i digress!!

i think we got our hopes up after that + the insane buddie promo run we got leading up to that finale and all of that resulted in a lot of disappointment and pain from how.. underwhelming the finale is. they share a few looks that i personally find suspicious but i might just be desperate idk 😭 eddie ends up saving buck & ravi from the building collapse and buck(in my opinion) looks at eddie with an overwhelming amount of love in his eyes. it's a different look than what we've seen so far, the way they watched eachother in that moment felt so intimate that to me even with the disappointing ending and lack of any real conversations between the two i feel like it's still not the end. i don't think oliver and ryan meant to queerbait with those interviews but i genuinely think they either know something we don't or the showrunners weren't truthful with them. they have never focused so heavily on buddie promotions before this, which brings me back to thinking they're trying to reintroduce it to the general audience. we're upset because we have been following along with this since s2 but the ga hasn't really been considering buddie. i think that the scenes of them accusing buck of being in love with eddie weren't for nothing but rather to make the ga consider it. they won't make them canon immediately after that, they need to build it up more now that it's more of a directly mentioned thing. i think that abc is replicating the same progression we first saw from s2-s4, if you compare s2 with s7 and s3 with s8, they honestly seem very similar in terms of buddie. i think because of that they will possibly go canon at the s9 finale like they intended with s4. it feels like abc wanted to redo the buddie storyline rather than pick up where we left off, so to us it feels like we're regressing rather than getting somewhere in their relationship but it's actually what is going to lead us to them ending up together. abc has multiple slowburn storylines and i wouldn't be surprised if this was another, they just shouldn't have done it to a ship that already had 5 previous seasons of progress.

i could be wrong about all of this and they could genuinely just be queerbaiting for viewership, but to me it just seems unlikely. however tim minear always likes to keep us guessing so idk lol he could actually just be ruining their storyline

i'm sorry that this is so long btw!! i also haven't watched some of the episodes in a while so please correct me if i'm wrong about anything

edit: i also forgot to mention that we are all upset about buck moving out but they don't actually say he's left yet. he's viewing apartments but he hasn't picked one he likes yet. i think in s9 he will still be searching for one and staying on the diaz couch for now, because he's not having luck finding any that feel ''right''. i think they might be doing a parallel to when he was helping eddie pick a place in el paso where he kept nitpicking them, he'll do the same with his place until he eventually just stays with them(and gets promoted from couch to bed 😌)

[lover-of-mine]

to be totally honest, i think a lot of 'they should get a slowburn!' stuff is from people who are nervous that they're not gonna do buddie at all and are preemptively looking for reasons why hope will not be lost if it doesn't happen in s8.

like, i get it, i'm still not 100% convinced it'll happen (i hope it will!) but sometimes you just gotta accept the possibility of disappointment, y'know?

Look, I'm no one, I'm a girl with a hyperfixation and a blog who happens to watch too many procedurals. But Buck and Eddie have been following the procedural slowburn format since season 2. It's worse now with the added context that Buck is bi. So the impression is that buddie is building up to something. There are meta elements during 704 that make me go 👀 like the blue and green and the way they had Eddie ask Buck if he's jumping ship and Buck explicitly say he's not. I think they set a plan in motion during 704. And I think that plan has an actual timeline based on the amount of episodes they had confirmed at the time the episode aired, so the rest of season 7 and season 8. Could I be wrong? Absolutely. I'm wrong most of the time if it's not about patterns on the show. But every interview we had this season makes it seem like they have been trying to tell this story but fox wasn't letting them and abc did. It took them 4 episodes to make Buck bi. They left the opening disaster and the first thing they did was make Buck bi. They didn't have to. To keep Buck and Eddie on the impossible will they/won't they if they're not planning on getting them together is smarter. Now they're actually possible. If they're actually possible, our very annoying side of the fandom is just gonna get more annoying asking for them to just get together already. Everyone involved could've given up. They were being blocked by the network. The writers could've given up. Buddie is a story about love even if they never get romantically involved because the writers made a conscious choice of writing how much those men love each other. And they spent a significant amount of a reduced season making sure we knew that will always be the case. The amount of buddie we had this season is absolutely completely insane. Both of them were in relationships with other people. I made a post about that earlier in the week, but they could've made different choices and separated them. And it's not like all their scenes were at the firehouse and where just getting coworker time. The camera panned to Eddie. Bobby's goodbye tour had them together all the time. They were explicitly put in a co-parenting position. Eddie is the only person they made a point of showing Buck come out to because he comes out to everyone else accidentally. It's a love story no matter how you look at it and not getting them together would be such a miss of a narrative that has been set up like this. Because legit, if they accidentally set up what could be one of the greatest slowburns in television, someone in that writers room needs to take a good look at their life. They want to tell this story. Why would they gamble on not being able to deliver and honest to God go down in television history by dragging it out when the pieces are already in play? During season 6 I get it, they didn't have all the pieces, they didn't have the time. Now they have most of the pieces and a whole season. Madney was set up in 12 episodes. And they had to work through a kidnapping and a murder attempt. A MURDER ATTEMPT. Why is Eddie being messy suddenly something that's gonna take seasons and seasons to resolve? Give me both of them single and I can get them together in one episode. All they need is one conversation. Just one. It's not like it's an impossible task to create an arc that's gonna use 12 to 15 episodes next season to work out the last bits and get them together in a nice way. The only thing they necessarily need to "fix" before getting them together, is Eddie not being queer. Everything else can be worked through while they're a couple. They're so close. The idea of dragging it out just to drag it out is so........... They've been a slowburn the whole time. This would just force them to stand on the fire.

Obviously, they don't have to go there. But for me we're at a 90% chance of them going canon next season. But if they don't, that's life. It's just that those men are somehow closer than they've ever been. And they are in a great position to explore what their relationship looks like because Chris was removed from the play, and it's so close I can taste it. That storyline writes itself. And I really hope they see that and that kicking Eddie back to the ground had a purpose. Because Bathena and Madney also started once Bobby and Maddie decided to drag themselves out of their trauma and stop letting it define how they live their lives. It's RIGHT THERE.

Anyway, I got carried away. Yes, all we have is hope and it might not happen, but I will continue to make noise for it to come because if there's one thing I do is live for the hope of it all.