hello! i've been reading your joshsam fics on ao3 and as a fellow avid joshsam stan i just wanted to thank you for your service to this terribly underrated pair <3 my fav was while we are young men and i left a comment there but i just wanted to thank you on another front!!
to me, the funniest thing about “that’s rough buddy” isn’t the fact that sokka says something patently insane with zero context seemingly out of nowhere, or the fact that zuko clearly doesn’t know how to respond. it’s the completely incorrect use of the word “buddy.” zuko would obviously like to be friends with sokka, but sokka is not, in fact, his friend. this is the most time they’ve ever spent together, and it’s because zuko invited himself to tag along on sokka’s suicide mission. at this point in the episode, sokka still hates this guy, perhaps less than he did a week ago, but he still hates him enough that he didn’t bother forcing zuko to stay home, which means he still didn’t really care whether or not zuko lives or dies. which, considering that he had tried to kill zuko multiple times in the past, is not all that surprising. this entire episode is essentially just zuko forcing his friendship onto sokka while sokka is legitimately too depressed to care. so when zuko calls sokka “buddy,” there’s a spirit of dogged optimism characterizing that epithet, because in no possible realm would sokka consider zuko his buddy at this point in the episode. and that’s something we miss when noting the iconicness of this exchange, simply because, by the end of this episode, they are buddies, so in our minds looking back on these lines, the implication of friendship doesn’t feel out of place at all. and really, it isn’t out of place, but only because zuko’s tenacity and determination (in this instance, his determination to befriend sokka) has always hugely outweighed his ability to read the room.
Anyways. Y'all keep forgetting that Cuddy hired and repeatedly refused to fire malpractice Georg entirely on purpose. In order to keep her hospital on the map. In order to secure better funding and more research opportunities. She lies under oath, she threatens employees, (not just House!) she fucking. Schemes. She’s nuts! She sees a complete disaster of a guy who cannot be trusted to care for himself much less vulnerable patients, who absolutely no one else will hire, and she goes. Yeah I think I can keep him under control. I think I can harness that for my benefit. And she mostly succeeds!!! House, who’s never met an authority figure he didn’t hate. She keeps him complacent with regular doses of petty arguments so he thinks he’s fighting the man, but literally he is exactly where she wants him most of the time. Yeah House might be a feral animal, but that makes Cuddy the kind of person who keeps wild animals as pets. She’s like oh yeah this is my pet tiger. When he’s feeling grumpy I distract him with raw steak that I throw across the room. He thinks it’s a game. Sometimes he tries to bite me lol.
