Hello, Slut.

Our Flag Means Death feels like a show whose creators did a thorough amount of research into what they were portraying, then decided they didn't need about 70% of what they'd learned. there are all these little details and allusions that are totally historical, peppered in with shamelessly deliberate anachronisms as they make things funnier/cooler, and the end result is a delightfully theatrical mismash that calls back to the entire history of pirate film without aping anything in particular

our flag means death is so good i wish gay people were real :(

i am not immune to propaganda 

thoughts are being thunk

really enjoyed doing these fanarts though because I used a different rendering techinque and different brushes for each one and it was a cool little experiment

i love how stede is like "i want to treat you all like human beings by paying you living wages and ensuring that you're fed and clothed, something that isn't guaranteed by piracy or even by established sailing communities during this time period" and the crew is like "fuck you"

the way ofmd deals with masculinity is so fascinating. we have stede, who’s about the least masculine a character could possibly be in the traditional sense: he gets sad instead of angry, he refuses to engage in physical violence, he encourages talking about feelings, he likes fashion and interior design and romanticizes everything. he likes picking flowers. and he has been told for his whole life that he is worthless because of all of this. he has been bullied and taunted and abused for it, but that didn’t keep him from adding a secret closet to his ship (lmao) to keep his excess fineries. he is still outwardly himself.

then we have ed. ed who is the pinnacle of the idea of masculinity, part of why he was remembered as history’s greatest pirate in the first place. he’s violent, ruthless, quick to anger, hierarchical, and his name, blackbeard, even emphasizes a symbol of masculinity. he’s revered for his masculinity. his performance is so powerful that people surrender before he even shows up in person. but it’s not him. blackbeard is a character ed has played for as long as he could remember that served to protect him from harm. you can't get hurt if you're never vulnerable in the first place.

when he meets stede, he finds someone he doesn’t have to present as blackbeard for. he can indulge in the frilly colorful clothes, the dancing, the emotional honesty that stede treats as normal. ed lets stede hold his heart in his hands and stede calls it beautiful. and stede, for the first time, has met someone who doesn’t see those things as hateful or embarrassing. everything stede has been mocked for unequivocally delights ed. in the reverse, stede sees blackbeard as the man stede never was. the ideal of a pirate that he read about and romanticized before he became one himself. to stede, blackbeard is everything he could never bring himself to be.

when ed begins to outwardly become interested in stede’s way of life, izzy serves to try to force him back into that hypermasculine presentation of Blackbeard. izzy hates stede for all the same reasons stede has been hated his whole life, and he sees stede as poisoning edward with his embarrassing foppish behavior, emasculating him. this comes to a head when ed signs the act of grace, shaves his beard (the symbol of his performance of masculinity), and kisses stede. all of those go against traditional masculine norms and by extent, the idea of Blackbeard. but ed isn’t performing anymore. he smiles more after the kiss than he ever does in the rest of the show.

then, stede is held at gunpoint by chauncey, who calls stede a monster, a plague for ruining the greatest pirate in history. ruining through emasculation, which in countless other media has been presented as horrific. think about other media that puts masculine characters in prison or the army (the similarities are staggering)—the threat of beating the character down until they’re submissive and emasculated is ever-present. losing the appearance of masculinity is by and large seen as one of the worst things that could possibly happen, and is often paired thematically with the loss of autonomy.

so stede agrees. he’s horrified with himself. he himself was already not traditionally masculine, and he spread it to blackbeard like a disease. everything he (and, interestingly, the viewer) has ever been told is that ed’s shift throughout the show is something to be terrified of. ed shaving his beard, in stede’s mind, confirmed his worst fear: stede had made ed into everything stede hated about himself and wanted to change; he killed blackbeard. but what he and chauncey and izzy can’t see is that stede actually gave ed more autonomy, more freedom and comfort to be himself and do what makes ed happy.

so stede runs. he runs back to where he once performed masculinity as a father and husband (regaining his own beard, so to speak), now sure that blackbeard would have been better off not knowing him. on some level, stede does want parts of blackbeard’s edge to stay (he’s like izzy in that way) and is scared he’s somehow excised it permanently. ed doesn’t want to leave it all behind either, but he’s terrified that stede could never accept the side of him that still exists as blackbeard. i also think this is why ed didn't try to kiss stede until he was the least like blackbeard he could be; he saw it as being less likely to get rejected for the ugliness he saw in himself.

it's interesting that ed doesn't go back to being blackbeard immediately after stede abandons him. at first, he goes all-in on the emotional vulnerability, trying to hang on to the hope he had allowed himself to experience when stede had agreed to run away with him. hanging on by a thread. the thread snaps when izzy mocks him for pining after stede, for lacking the masculinity izzy required in order to maintain his respect. in quick succession ed was rejected by stede, whom he loved, and izzy, whose respect he'd had since before the show began. so he threw his walls back up. he painted his mask back on, closed himself off, and removed every reminder of when he had allowed himself to be vulnerable.

ed's return to masculinity is not presented as a good thing. it's a trauma response, a defense mechanism, and it's toxic. the show experiments with defining a line between toxic and non-toxic masculinity; izzy, calico jack, the kraken, stede's father, the admiral twins, they all represent the ways toxic masculinity enforces a culture of violence and punishes any emotion except anger. stede and his crew represent a healthier version of masculinity: emotional honesty, encouragement and care for others, kindness, and love. it's not an accident that as ed allows himself to love and be loved, he begins to leave behind the toxic aspects of masculinity he had before. i've used the word emasculated to refer to ed's transformation throughout the show, but in truth that's not entirely accurate. it lines up with how many people would view what happened to him, but in reality he did remain a man, he just became a healthier one.

Feeling like a third wheel on the treasure hunt

stede is so lucky he decided to fuck w the one pirate crew whose captain ended up being madly in love w him. if he went up to any other master swordsman right hand man and told them their captain can suck eggs in hell he would've been dead within minutes. but no he choose the guy whose captain was sitting there twirling his hair like :) I just think the gentleman pirate is neat :) I bet he has beautiful eyes :). huge win for him I guess.

what I love about the ofmd finale is that they showed ed sobbing by the window by himself- like it physically hurt me to watch but it was so GOOD. in so many stories do we see characters regress back into a hardened shell with 100 metre high walls around them, and it’s implied that under all that is still a soft, broken heart, but we never actually see it. but we see edward, vulnerable, alone, curled into himself by the window, sobbing with every hard piece of the kraken stripped away from him, and we can feel the heartbreak. you feel it in his shaking shoulders, in the tears streaming down his face, in the way that despite being six foot tall he’s curled into as small a ball as possible. such a simple way of showing how hurt and broken someone really is and I wish it was used more in media

i love bizzare little men

“my name borat” is such a raw fucking emotional line you’d think that it’s from dante’s inferno but it’s actually from the 2006 mockumentary film borat

damn your love, damn your lies

i have seen 0 people talk about the fact that if Jim joins blackbeards new crew we might get Jim in full leather next season and i just think maybe we should be talking about it more

Fun update. Vico is talking about it now. I am not alone in this cold uncaring world.

I need everyone to know Karl the seagull was real and he’s actually named Jonathan. Samba’s Instagram is a gift

never in a million years would I have thought a PIRATE COMEDY SHOW SET IN THE 18TH CENTURY would have a scene where a gay man sits down with his wife and has a conversation without her about what it means to be in love and then he comes to out to her and tells her he's in love with a man and then she hugs him and helps him fake his fucking death so he can leave his old life behind and wholeheartedly pursue a new life with the man he loves without guilt or shame and yet our flag means death gave us that. I didn't think I'd ever get to know what the opposite of queerbaiting looks like but I saw it today

Stede Bonnet x Edward “Blackbeard” Teach | Our Flag Means Death ~ 01x09