reallyafairy

[reallyafairy]

Reblog daily for health and prosperity

[reallyafairy]

One of the many many takes I've seen going around since the Season 2 finale is that Stede and Ed's ending "didn't make sense" and just. Guys.

At the core of Season 1, there's Stede. Ed enjoys doing the fuckery with Stede. Ed enjoys teaching Stede how to spar, but not really. He's having fun with it. He's flirting. He's finding joy in piracy again through Stede.

Stede is almost executed by firing squad. Ed gives up piracy, something he has been bored with for a long time. He saves Stede's life and he gets to "retire" without dying. He wants to give up piracy and he wants to be with Stede and he wants to keep Stede safe. It's a win-win. You see how it's all about Stede but also about Ed wanting to leave piracy? Ed knowing a pirate's life can only end one way (death) but not wanting that for either of them?

And Stede? Stede runs away from home, falls in love, gives up his whole life to be with the man he loves (twice), gets his fifteen minutes of fame, and retires to be with the man who saved his life. The man who took him back despite everything, who stood between him and a firing squad, who tried to put himself between Stede and Ned Low, who tried to save Stede the potential trauma of killing Ned Low, who came to comfort Stede after it happened despite Izzy telling him not to, who has never physically hurt him or asked him to be anything more than who he is, who watched over his bedside when he was injured, who came back after leaving twice.

To borrow a quote from Fleabag: This is a love story. And once you understand Our Flag Means Death as a love story, the ending of Season 2 starts clicking into place. This entire story has been about Ed and Stede finding each other, being with each other, living with each other. And it's also been about other characters having relationships with each other. It was never a show just about piracy or just a workplace comedy. It was always about relationships, romantic and platonic and familial.

[reallyafairy]

Ed is hanging up this sign in the inn

[Davids storytime thread]

[reallyafairy]

Ed is hanging up this sign in the inn

[Davids storytime thread]

[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.