reallyafairy

[reallyafairy]

We're planning on sending lovely letters to Netflix just ahead of the one-year mark for cancellation. Please take some time to write a letter or postcard (or several!) and send them according to the dates above (so that we can time their arrival en masse). PLEASE SHARE so that we can get everyone in the fandom involved!!!

Please see the original posts if you have questions!

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/aproperpirate.bsky.social/post/3lce4sora2227 Twitter: https://x.com/aproperpirate/status/1863702804960788522

[reallyafairy]

"I like the feel of you. I like the noises you make. I love your faults. I love your voice. I love your truth. The world bores me to death. It bores me and irritates me when I’m away from you."

- H. G. Wells, from a letter to Rebecca West 

[reallyafairy]

Sharing here too even if it’s been awhile!

Please join me in a letter writing campaign to try and convince Netflix to adopt #OurFlagMeansDeath! Our show's creators, cast, crew, and fans deserve a season 3!

Details below!!

These graphics are free to steal and share as long as the details remain the same. You're welcome to make your own too! Share wherever you can!

[reallyafairy]

do you all ever remember how we haven't gotten to see Ed and Stede get married yet and feel like a wild dog about to shred your couch cushions, or is that just me

[reallyafairy]

Stede Bonnet and the Subversive Shirt

In season one, despite the colours, lace, and detailing, Stede’s dress is mostly conformist in cut and style. His shirts are high-buttoned, cravated, and do not show much flesh below his chin. Coupled with the pantaloon and waistcoat, Stede’s wearing the clothes of traditional masculine presentation of his era.

There are times Stede’s clothing becomes less formal. During the sword practice with Ed in 106, Stede’s shirt is open and the cravat loosened. Again, in 107 we see Stede in his open nightclothes wandering on deck. During evening story hour, his jacket is removed. Stede usually seems more relaxed during these moments too.

Stede’s style changes properly on the second leaving of Bridgetown. What Stede is wearing openly as he drags the boat to sea is a rather romantic poet-pirate look with billowing shirt and sash. The look has links with future nineteenth-century Romantic freethinkers, championing individualism, revolution and liberty - including sexual liberation.

The open-neck shirt was popularised by Byron and Shelley a hundred years later. It was a deliberate choice of styling in opposition to enforced gender presentation and monogamous heteronormativity. The fashion of the times, similar to the 1700s, was high collars and neck-wrapping in order to force the holding of the male head in a stately and erect manner. It’s all about rigidity…

For an English gentleman of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to have his shirt open and loose in public, was a sign of effeminacy. It was women who showed their décolletage in society, who were allowed a softer presentation; this new style hinted strongly at sexual and gender nonconformity. Women were viewed as more animalistic, men as cultured. Cultured people cover up. Softness, looseness - these are aspects of female sexuality, a bit bestial. And women are also a little bit insane. Why would any man, especially a man of status, want to present as feminine and lesser? And what does it say about patriarchy if some men actively choose to relinquish their privileged status by presenting more effeminately? It’s dangerous.

By today’s standards, Byron was pansexual and polyamorous. Shelley’s sexuality is less clear, but he was viewed as a subversive atheist and disinherited. Both might consider themselves nonbinary today. Shelley especially seems to have had a strong gnc presentation. Both left England for more liberal Europe.

I feel the costume department must’ve made a very deliberate and informed choice regarding Stede’s shirts post season one, but I don’t feel it’s the one some people think it is. I know part of DJenks stated aim was to ‘make Rhys Darby as sexy as possible’, but it’s not about appearing more masc. just because he’s showing more flesh. It’s about appearing more Stede. Stede is expressing a new-found confidence in his sexual identity and gender expression, by choosing a more freer, less structured, less traditionally masculine way of dressing, associated rather presciently with future Romantic liberalism. It seems poets and pirates have more in common than we realise. And both were considered dangerous for questioning the system.

However, Stede is also an individual in flux and he circles back to a part of his former self. The Red Suit is a sort of hybrid male/female costume. The cuffs, detailing and shirt itself are femme. But there are elements of traditional masculinity which are quite toxic. The epaulettes reinforce the inverted masculine triangular shape. Anyone who grew up in the 1980s will remember their mothers feeling forced to wear exaggerated shoulder-padding as they entered male-dominated workspaces. They also enforce military rank. Stede thinks he needs this imagery to ‘be the Captain’. He doesn’t. The exaggerated coattails are also absolutely synonymous with upper class male power. It’s masculinity as performance and power-play. Stede needs to let all of this cursed patriarchal nonsense go.

As so often’s the case in OFMD, external struggle, this time with the crew over the Red Suit, could also be a manifestation of Stede’s internal conflict and shifting identity. It’s a final letting go of patriarchal ideas, especially around captaincy. The crew certainly don’t want it. Stede is (more than) adequate just as he is. At the end of all the pushing and pulling, Stede keeps the most relevant bit of the outfit - the shirt. It’s the least restrictive part, the more feminine and therefore, the more subversive on a male body. It’s a sartorial representation of a changing Stede.

The three shirts worn in series two are deliberately opened-collared and low-cut, showing more and more of Stede’s chest. This is a traditional feminine aesthetic which historically on a man, at least in the anglosphere, was considered subversive and dangerous. And Stede couples his shirts with a different sort of masculinity, a leather trouser. Class-wise, this is a traditional working man’s garment. Through his new choice of clothing, Stede is rejecting entirely his previous role within patriarchal hegemony, both the imposed status and imposed gender norms.

This was in my drafts a while but inspired to try and pull it together by @celluloidbroomcloset posts here and here

[reallyafairy]

The fact that Ed feels the need to clarify this point… that he’s ‘the man’ in this story 💔

But… it does point to a psychological separation and change in self-perception.

Yet still… he’s just making sure. Saying it out loud. Checking Stede’s aware too…

I’m the man… I’m the man… (not the beast, not the Kraken)

That’s huge progress, but it should never have had to happen in the first place.

Here’s a more positive spin from when I was in a different mood

https://www.tumblr.com/crimson-and-clover-1717/762040907734368256/ed-rewrites-the-narrative-of-who-is-he-is-man?source=share

[reallyafairy]

i ran 80,000 simulations and we were soulmates in each and every one of them

[reallyafairy]

Idk I just think a third official poster would look pretty sick u kno

[reallyafairy]

Have you heard of Tiny Crew, Big Raffle? Donate to any of their 7 listed charities and be entered to win one of Auntie's tiny boats from OFMD season 2!

Check out more rules and requirements here:

[reallyafairy]

Sometimes I do get annoyed by fanon reactions to Ed, and then I remember that the OFMD writers were very careful to ward off the already-silly "Ed is abusive!!" takes by having other characters say to Stede "do you think Ed is going to murder/hurt you" and then having Stede respond every time with "wtf what is wrong with you, no??" And then, of course, Stede (who textually knows and understands Ed best) is right about that, and once he's feeling safe and supported again Ed is literally just hanging out being a little kitty. So I guess RIP to everyone who thinks Ed sucks but I actually paid attention to the show and I'm different <3

[reallyafairy]

The Gentlemen Pirate, I presume 🤨

You've heard of me? 🥺

Oh yeah, I've heard of you...I've heard all about you😏

Lives changed when Ed and Stede met so we love to see them included on this list of 15 meet-cutes we still swoon over.

[reallyafairy]

also white queer people i need us all to understand that we are NOT the highest risk folks right now. check in on ur friends of color and your community and make sure people are alright. do what you can to protect people with the privilege you have. it may not be a lot, but every little bit helps, and it's better than catastrophizing.

[reallyafairy]

Man, I did forget that Calypso's Birthday opens with 1) Ned Low torturing a dude and proclaiming that he's gonna go after Blackbeard for breaking his record, followed immediately by 2) Ed watching the horizon and knowing down to his bones that something is wrong but he's not certain what yet, which is then followed by 3) a drunk Izzy telling him to shut the fuck up and he doesn't know anything.

Like, there is a progress in that episode of Ed intuiting things while Izzy clomps around on his horsey leg telling him he's wrong, ending with Izzy explicitly saying "don't go after Stede" and Ed full-on ignoring that horrific piece of advice.

Something about Ed fully trusting his instincts and his emotions in a way he didn't in the first season, despite being told those emotions are incorrect.

[reallyafairy]

thinking about the off screen kisses we didn't see but definitely happened. sweet, tentative kisses after deciding to take it slow. feverish kisses in the space between the wall and stede's bed. slow, deep kisses after stede closes the curtain. good morning kiss after their first time. let's try not to die kiss before their escape. stede just called me babe kiss. tender kisses as they step inside their new home

[reallyafairy]

[reallyafairy]

I keep seeing I LOVE THAT HOMOPHOBIA DOESN’T EXIST IN OFMD and HOMOPHOBIA JUST ISN’T SOMETHING THE CREW HAVE TO DEAL WITH and that is [Siegfried voice] patently falsssh. And it’s extremely important to the overall themes of the show!

OFMD is fundamentally a show about masculinity and toxic masculinity, in particular. Homophobia is an inextricable part of the exploration of those themes, especially in a show that’s centered around the romance between two gay men.

The show takes care to gentle this so that the audience isn’t constantly being bombarded by it in a way that can be harmful or triggering, but it’s still undeniably there.

Stede Bonnet is a flamboyantly gay man and homophobia is the clear subtext of much of the derision he receives from representatives of toxic masculinity like his father, the Badmintons, Calico Jack, and Izzy. He’s soft, he’s weak, he’s not a “real” man. Nigel Badminton excoriates him for crying all the time and picking flowers, for fuck’s sake. He’s a “fop,” a “ponce,” a “namby-pamby.�� Derogatory terms absolutely meant to imply unacceptable homosexuality without hitting as “hard” slurs for a modern audience.

Stede makes the Revenge a place where piracy (read: masculinity) doesn’t have to be abusive and toxic, which, in turn, allows for authentic expression of emotion, including queer affection and desire and that is part of why the toxically masculine find it such a weird and/or unbearable place ("What the fuck kind of pirates [men] are these?"). Stede, for all his faults as a leader, creates a space where it’s safe for Lucius, who explicitly talks about bearding and was implicitly expelled from his previous life for being gay, to find and be openly affectionate with a boyfriend and be beloved by his peers! A space where Pete who starts off with pretensions of toxic masculinity can shed that and be in a loving gay relationship. A space where Jim can say that they’re Jim and that’s the end of it. Stede helps create a space where he can “ruin” history’s greatest pirate by making it safe for him to be flamboyant and emotional and fall in big, sweeping, first, last, once-in-a-lifetime love with another man.

And you go “oh but Jack and Ed used to fuck” and “oh the subtext is that Izzy is gay for Blackbeard” but that doesn’t magically remove the homophobia they perpetuate!

Homophobia isn’t just “MLM bad, the end.” It’s Izzy’s subtextual unrequited feelings for Blackbeard being forever unspeakable and inexpressible except through the veneer of horrific masculine violence. It’s the idea of m/m desire being purely sexual. Men just fuck and that makes it not “really” gay. Jack thinks that “anything goes at sea,” that “dalliances” are fine and to be expected, but Ed’s genuine affection for Stede is inexplicable, anathema to what he understands about being a pirate (read: being a man). Izzy hates Lucius’ open gayness and the fact that everyone else DOESN’T hate him for it, and he literally thinks that Ed being in love with Stede is brain damage. (“He done something to my boss’s brain.”) Izzy also thinks that Stede, as a flamboyant gay man, is a pathetic creature that needs to be put down, and that Ed “corrupted” by him into a similarly open and flamboyant gay would also be better off dead. This mirrors Chauncey’s diatribe about Stede not being human and needing to be wiped from the world. It's all textbook homophobia!

And you sell the show short by pretending that it isn’t engaging with these things, because it is and it’s doing an amazing job of it.

[reallyafairy]

I might be reading too much into this, but "breathing the same air" is kind of a big deal in Māori culture.

When you greet people, traditionally you hongi, which is pressing noses together and breathing in together, sharing the breath of life

This was how the first human, Hinetītama, was brought to life (at least, the version I was taught)

So I just think that being what Stede and that being the line that made Ed smile is just, kind of, you know, nice