#tldr im basically confirming what you already said anon

[captain-flint]

(1/2) Buck really is the best 😍 this has been my main takeaway from 911. Kinda frustrated that his team seems to think he’s stupid (Maddie wrote the essay for you; you can’t do math) and that he doesn’t really get to do any of the EMT side of the job since Eddie came along. I hope Buck Begins establishes that he actually is smart (like an old teacher/professor can come by and be like “my best student!” and the firefam can be like 😦)

(2/2) Also hope at some point the lawsuit stops being about “forgiving” Buck & starts to be something the firefam accepts responsibility for. Like Bobby treated buck unfairly compared to the others. Buck fought so hard to get back & nothing about his health changed when he was allowed back on active duty so we know it was BS. Eddie blamed Buck for his anger & stopped Chris from seeing him. Chim & hen were forgiving but still Buck didn’t get a welcome back party like Hen insisted on for Chimney. 

YOU’RE RIGHT AND YOU SHOULD SAY IT! 

the thing that hurts me the most is the firefam mocking buck whenever he doesn’t understand a pop culture reference or gives off the ‘dumb blond’ vibe. i really don’t think he’s an idiot, he’s the one who always thinks outside the box and comes up with foolproof solutions to  certain problems. his eagerness to please or simple frustration sometimes make him do or say something before he thinks, but that in no way means he’s stupid. he reads a lot when he’s on his own, even autobiographies, or goes through borderline obsessive internet researches to familiarize himself with whatever is currently going on around him. he has great memory and he wants to know more! i think him not knowing popular references has a lot to do with his upbringing, which i hope we’ll learn about more. there’s no way he wouldn’t know who rambo was if he was growing up like a normal kid. i hope the writers don’t make buck 1.0 his actual personality in ‘buck begins’, bc it felt more like a coping mechanism for whatever fucked him up as a kid/teenager, rather than who he really was, which is what we’re seeing now. buckaroo is SMART and he deserves to show it!

as for the lawsuit, i feel that too. after rewatching it a couple of times, i now firmly stand on buck’s side, even though the rest of the team didn’t really deserve to be brought into it and dragged as they were, so i understood their anger. i understood bobby’s overprotectiveness too, but i think he grossly underestimated buck’s ‘newfound’ maturity and devotion to the job. it was so frustrating watching him keep buck at arm’s length and denying him work over and over to the point it just became mean and vindictive. eddie on the other hand, yeah i think a good part of his anger stemmed from the lawsuit. buck wasn’t there when eddie needed him and he lost some of that impulse control. eddie went through a lot of pain and grief in a short period of time, so i understood his anger and frustration and why he couldn’t see that buck was struggling too. but he thought bottling up feelings was the best way to deal with problems, meaning he didn’t exactly realize that buck lived through five months without the job and his family on an almost daily basis. we don’t know if eddie was there for him all the time, or enough to make a difference. we know buck has abandonment issues, and then all of a sudden he learned that his family was seemingly moving on without him, replacing him with another firefighter who became eddie’s new friend. that must have hurt. what really messed me up is that at that point buck thought so little of himself that he didn’t even realize eddie and chris might miss him once he filed the lawsuit. he was so broken up about being left out that he convinced himself he’s not a part of the diaz family anymore. i think that’s what hurt eddie the most and why he was so upset at buck, but instead of working it out with buck he just yelled at him. i was also super bummed that buck then threw himself under the bus and stomped his own feelings and problems because he felt he owed eddie an apology for not being there. like he actually believed eddie should’ve punched him for it. i mean ???? excuse me but buck had every right to stand up and fight for himself. maybe it wasn’t the best course of action, maybe he should’ve been more patient, but that boy became desperate. he deserved to be heard and he deserved to be treated equally, if he was then none of it would’ve happened