#I don't get the impression the Diaz family is big on divorce

[lenaboskow]

gay!eddie is happening in the near future, a post brought to you by someone who spends way too much time dissecting queer media (and usually ends up being at least half right)

bear with me, it's a long one under the cut

i have a longer, more scene specific post that i will finish during the break if nothing happens tonight but i am a full believer that eddie's big arc this season (or next season, depending) is that the reason none of his past relationships worked out is because he's gay (not bi, gay)

disclaimers: i fully believe eddie loved shannon, just not the way he wanted to. you can also be gay and still enjoy heterosexual sex. sometimes sex really is just sex. this post is purely about romantic attraction.

I also tried to leave as much out about buck as possible (though that's hard, the man is obviously an integral part of his life) because gay!eddie diaz will happen no matter if buddie is endgame, and people need to realize that. their sexualities are more than just about each other.

anyways, on to the post-

it's canon that eddie will put christopher first when it comes to deciding relationships, and i think we first see that with shannon. rewatching season 2, i didn't get the impression that he wanted a romantic relationship with her, but he wanted her back in his son's life, and to eddie, those two go hand in hand.

and, if we're being honest, i think eddie's habit of putting other people first is the whole reason he got with shannon, because his family taught him that he was supposed to find a nice girl and settle down. who better to do that with than his best friend? my theory is further proven when shannon gets pregnant and eddie marries her out of a sense of duty, and then immediately ships off to afghanistan under the pretense of "providing" (and isn't it something that he picks a profession where he'll be away from his family for months at a time)

the only reason eddie returned is because of the helicopter crash, to which shannon immediately started talking about moving to california. while i believe that wanting to rest after the crash could be part of the reason he was hesitant, i think there was also a fear of what would happen when he was no longer near his family he was trying to please.

of course, eddie eventually moves to la after getting a job offer from both lafd and chicago. carla mentions that it is only thirty minutes from shannon, and while that could be because he wanted to reconcile, i think it was more to do with wanting to have his son's mother near. that, and lafd is the best in the world (according to eddie)

eddie only kisses shannon in 2x07 after she does her family interview for the school. this specific fact coupled with the absence of the eddie diaz heart eyes™️ (which, despite his closing off at the beginning of the series, we'd already seen in 2x01 when he and buck call truce) makes me believe he realized he could trust her and wanted her back in his son's life, and the way to do that was to get back together.

"but they hid their relationship for a while" eddie was still scared. comphet is a real thing, and causes people to act on things they necessarily don't want. i believe he pursued a romantic relationship with shannon because that's what she wanted, and if he kept her happy, she wouldn't leave again. this is why i wish we could've seen divorced shannon/eddie instead of her dying immediately, and i wonder if maybe it would've sped up the whole deconstruction process for him.

the next time eddie dates, it's with ana. on paper, ana is the perfect wife for him. she's a teacher, knows how to handle kids, is latina, the whole package. eddie tries so hard to make it work, that it actually does, and this causes him to panic. both carla and buck tell eddie not to take just chris into consideration, but to make sure he wants it too, and after some time, he breaks it off with her. the way ana reacted to the breakup makes me wonder if she could also sense the reason for the breakup.

marisol is where it starts to get tricky, but i feel like we've seen enough (or not enough) in these four episodes to piece some information together. chris is the one who encourages eddie to call her, and that makes me wonder if that's the reason they're still together. before the promo of the bucktommy date eddie and marisol crash, we only got two mentions of marisol, and both times was in relation to her helping with chris. at this point, eddie has spent more time with tommy than he has with marisol, as far as we're aware.

the synopsis of tonight's ep says that eddie and marisol "take a closer look at their relationship" and given that we haven't seen much of them on screen, it makes me wonder what this could be about. does it maybe have something to do with them crashing the bucktommy date?

obviously, i wouldn't be mad if eddie turned out to be bi. however, to me, all of his relationships seem be a big case of comphet. speaking from experience, as someone who's pursued relationships with men purely because that's what i was expected to do, not because i actually wanted to be with them. and just like eddie, there was a time where if my best friend (who was of the opposite gender) had asked me out, I would've said yes and married him had it come to that, because it would've made my family happy. i've gotten to a point where i don't care what my conservative family thinks or wants, and i truly believe that this season, we'll see eddie get to that place to.

if you've made it this far, thank you for listening, and here's to hoping we get gay!eddie tonight.

tag: @queeredmundo

#911 spoilers #911 #911 abc #911 on abc #eddie diaz #gay eddie diaz #911 speculation

[buckttommy]

Eddie wouldn’t even date or fuck around with anyone after Shannon left him, I don’t see him fucking around with anyone while he was still married

That's fair, and I totally respect your interpretation of his character, but Eddie is such a mixed and complicated bag, I wouldn't exclude the possibility of it.

Fair warning: this text post contains mentions of infidelity.

Go with me here.

You've got Eddie Diaz, this man who has lived and built his entire life around other people's expectations of him, spoken or unspoken, as well as around this specific sense of masculine honor. This is the same man who said he would "stick out" a loveless, unfulfilling relationship for the sake of his son, by the way, and though that's not exactly a good thing, Eddie's relationship with Ana does give insight into his interpretation of romantic relationships, as well as how he perceives his own role in his romantic relationships. Eddie views romantic relationships (at least, the ones he's been in thus far) as action based. Saying the right things, doing the right things, being the Right Thing, even if your heart isn't in it, is the totality of his role in his relationships. (This also translates to physical and sexual expression which we see more in his relationship with Ana, rather than his relationship with Shannon, see: here and my Eddie vs Consent tag).

Now, you've got this same honorable man who's spent his whole life suppressing and repressing significant parts of himself (parts, plural, because I'm not just talking about his sexuality here, but about the deep range of emotion he's learned to quell), and you take him and pluck him from this rigid existence he's molded himself around and drop him into an atmosphere that, though equally rigid, is still absent of the people and overarching mindsets that were instrumental in confining him in the first place. And when you do that, you ignite a match that leads to something of a minor... explosion.

Have you ever listened to a kid after they discover swearing? Once they drop their first F-bomb, there's no going back, and kids swear so embarrassingly badly. Every other word is a "fuck" or "shit" or "damn." But once they've tapped into that brand new freedom and allow themselves to say all the words they weren't allowed to say, they explore the reaches of that freedom, just to see what it tastes like. Eddie, in the service, was kind of like a kid who'd just learned how to swear. Absent of his father and mother, of Shannon, of Texas and their whole Guns and Jesus culture, he found himself in a brand new world of relatively attractive, attainable, and (to be completely honest), desperate men that aroused that part of him that had long been suppressed.

Note: This does not make him a bad person, by the way. It makes him human, and human beings are endlessly complicated, especially when you add trauma, upbringing, etc into the mix.

Moving on, infidelity is not brand new in the service. Men sleeping around with other men when they otherwise wouldn't is also not brand new in the service, or anywhere else. Humans are humans, and humans are pleasure seekers, even if the pleasure they're seeking isn't always in their best interests. This has nothing to do with sexuality, but simply to do with how humans function. To be completely crude but to the point: a warm mouth is still a warm mouth, regardless of who it is attached to. And Baby Eddie, having just been dropped into this new arena where he gets to poke around the edges of the box he's been confined in, celibate for months at a time? Yes, I can see him testing the limits a bit. Not having penetrative sex (even in his newfound freedom, he would've had hard limits), but a handjob/blowjob, or something else that could have easily been written off as him "letting off steam?" Absolutely.

Eddie's ability to compartmentalize is a survival tool that has kept him alive for years. Eddie's compartmentalization is the only thing that has allowed him to get this far, and though he's crumbling under the weight of that now, that does not change the fact that for years, this coping mechanism served him well. The same compartmentalization that turned him into an "acceptable" version of himself as a child, is the same compartmentalization that allowed himself to be able to pleasure-seek in the service, and allowed him to be able to go back home and slip right back into that box that he's grown used to occupying. That Box is second-nature to him; conforming to the edges and shape of that box is all Eddie knows. Does he still feel guilty for stepping out on his wife when he gets back home? Yes. Does he hate himself for violating his honor and his vows? Enormously. But his compartmentalization allows him to put those feelings away and resume that action-based role in his marriage which, to him, is the most important thing about his contribution to his marriage. The other thing is that Eddie's self-hatred is also second-nature because Eddie's self-hatred lines that Box he's lived in. Which means that after a while, it's fair to say that he long ago stopped distinguishing between which activities, behaviors, etc triggered his self-loathing because it all tasted and felt the same anyway. What's another thing to hate himself for in a long list of things to hate himself for?

It's all kind of sad when you think about it, but this is the nature of repression, specifically repression of a sexual nature. Humans are experts in self-flagellation, unfortunately. We will act outside of our best interests via multiple choices we make every day, and punish ourselves for it in the same breath. And unfortunately, when you combine abject self-loathing with pleasure-seeking, with repression, you get... well. You get what was likely a very young, very overwhelmed Eddie Diaz, sucking dick (or getting his dick sucked by a man) for the first time, drinking in that sick type of freedom that comes with an expiration date (which isn't really freedom at all, and is, instead, it's own kind of torture).

I know this was a lot but I hope this makes sense! I love Eddie so much; he's extremely complex and complicated and while I definitely think there's a strong argument for why he'd never step out on Shannon, I also think (as explained above) that there's a strong argument for why he could.

Feel free to ask more questions if you have any!

#(As an aside #I don't get the impression the Diaz family is big on divorce #which could either be good or bad #depending on the situation). #eddie (meta) #pre-canon eddie #jack answers mail #eddie vs consent #psychoanalyzing the trauma man #ana x eddie #eddie x shannon