#Which is a big red flag that Stede cheerfully ignores and fortunately for him it works out

[dracothelizard]

Okay I have been chewing on this one and this is gonna get long and a bit disjointed.

Yes, S1 as Stede's POV and his image of piracy while S2 is Ed's POV and his image of piracy definitely fits. Ed is also deliberately presenting himself as less violent around Stede - look at how he tries to keep Jack from talking about Ed's past violence. We even get the same 'three episodes apart and then they reunite with the one coming in to save the other's life' parallel where Ed and Stede basically swap places.

In S1, Ed is actively pursuing Stede, who wants to live his pirate fantasy, and Stede is haunted by a tramatic figure from his past, and Ed saves Stede from dying. In S2, Stede is actively pursing Ed, who wants to live his pirate reality (or is it?), and Ed is haunted by a traumatic figure from his past, and Stede saves Ed from dying.

But there're more fairy tales/fantasy tropes running through the season, beyond Pinocchio and mermaids and bird transformation and cursed coats.

In Stede's side of episodes 1-3, we have an arranged marriage. We have a prince in disguise. We have a treasure that is not what it seems. We have an ally in disguise.

in Ed's side of episodes 1-3, we have Ed's grimdark pirate fantasy, which I don't think we should consider pirate reality.

Fang has been a crew member under Blackbeard for years and years. He can be our barometer for whether this is normal for Ed. It isn't.

We have an Ed who isn't dressing like he used to. We have an Ed who is dressing like the public's image of Blackbeard. He is dressing like the fairy tale/fantasy version of Blackbeard, where Blackbeard is the monster and the villain to be defeated by the brave hero.

So, this? This is not pirate reality. This is grimdark pirate fantasy.

Ah, the Hero's Journey, our beloved!

So, as per the Hero's Journey, once you leave home/your familiar situation and go on an adventure (in the broadest sense of the word), you return to your familiar situation transformed.

In S1, we can see the difference between Stede's old life and how he doesn't fit in in Bridgetown anymore.

In S2, we see that Ed, after his time with Stede, also cannot go back to his old pirate life anymore. He's been transformed.

And the same goes for Stede's crew.

Jim has gone from being a stoic revenge-focused person to choosing life. Choosing to care. Choosing kindness. And obviously that is not just Stede's influence, but also Jim's chat with Jackie and Oluwande offering to be their family, and I presume the way the crew accepted them.

Lucius has, unfortunately for him, experienced his transformation through grimdark pirate fantasy, but also cannot go back to his previous situation of being the snarky gay bestie. He's in a better place by the end of s2, but he is a changed man, and that requires chats with Izzy, Pete, Stede, and getting to shove Ed overboard.

In S1, we already felt Ed's presence in episodes 1 through 3. Pete tells stories about him, Stede mentions him in episode 3 when he discusses nicknames.

In S2, we feel Stede's presence in episodes 1 through 3 on the Revenge by the kindness that the crew shows each other. Jim tells Fang the story of Pinocchio. They choose to protect Izzy from Blackbeard and save him from death. The crew's trip in S1 has transformed them. (...And Archie is going along with that because Archie is Archie, but from her backstory it's clear she's not really used to Stede's kind of captaincy)

Izzy, meanwhile, has been rejecting change all along. He's still rejecting it at the start of s2 when he's in denial and insisting everyone goes along with Blackbeard's orders, even if they're nonsensical, because that's his familiar situation. That's normal.

Izzy's transformation to accepting change isn't kickstarted by an interaction with Stede, which is what kickstarts change in the rest of the crew and Ed. It is kickstarted by interaction with the crew.

They make him the unicorn leg, and from then on, Izzy embraces the pirate fantasy a lot more, where he's supportive to Lucius in his own way, has time to whittle a shark, and sings a song and expresses himself creatively.

So, we have three big commitments to transformation and change happening in episode 4! We have Buttons turning into a bird. We have Izzy embracing change and being the unicorn, and we have Ed deciding that he can change and doesn't have to be the monstrous villain.

And we also have a lot of fairy tale/fantasy/story tropes throughout s2, as mentioned in the initial post, but with a grimdark turn:

Buttons transforms into a bird (with the grimdark turn where Roach clearly assumes Ed killed him)

True love brings Ed back from the brink of death (with the grimdark turn that Ed was killed because he was the fairy tale's monstrous villain that he cast himself as)

The cursed coat (with the grimdark turn that the previous boat's crew has been pretty gruesomely murdered, but then, that's not even that grimdark for a fairy tale let's be real)

There is festive party (with the grimdark turn that it ends with torture and a close-range, personal death rather than the more distanced deaths from s1)

But the initial resolution to that torture party is, once again, kindness. The resolution to the cursed coat is to be kind to the crew and dump the coat elsewhere.

Season two is already an attempt at fusing the pirate fantasy from S1 with a more realistic take, however, S2 is not necessarily presenting pirate reality. Mixing in fairy tale influences has led to a pirate grimdark fantasy. The characters haven't figured out yet how to find the right balance.

And that is one reason why I find killing off Izzy like they did A Choice. Is it a consequence of Ed bringing a pirate grimdark fantasy with him? Izzy has barely completed his 'depart from familiar situation, undergo change, return transformed' arc. He was still undergoing the change and figuring out how to balance that change with his new familiar situation, and he and Ed had barely begun figuring out their new relationship to each other.

You take the character who has spent the longest time resisting change and the fairy tale influence, and when he finally accepts that change, he is killed.

(Also, as someone who has read a shitton of fantasy novels, the idea of looking at the Mentor Dies trope and deciding to play it straight is also A Choice)

Through the Looking Glass

From fairytale in Season 1 to stark reality in Season 2 of Our Flag Means Death- meta ported across from this Twitter thread by popular demand!

This thread contains spoilers for the entirety of OFMD Season 2

First OFMD S1 rewatch since S2, and holy shit, if you haven't done that yet... do that. A thing that it made instantly clear: they told us *all along* where this was going, but there was a reason we didn't see it. Because we were living in Stede's world then. Now it's Ed's.

I know that a lot of us have felt that the tone shift at the end of S2 was... jarring, compared to what's come before. This felt like a show that wouldn't go there. One where being run through was a temporary hiccup. We've travelled all the way from this to this.

But we haven't jumped there without a journey in between. And from the minute we started hearing about Blackbeard, the show never tried to hide what Ed's world and his specific life was like. Not once. In fact they told us over and over and over.

But Season 1 told us a lot of those things through song and story and fuckery. It blended reality with fiction.

Stede met the Blackbeard he knew through books and tall tales, and the real man was even more wonderful than he'd imagined.

We, along with Stede, were comfortable thinking that all those other tales were exaggerations and misrepresentations, and a lot of them very likely were.

The Ed Stede got to know was a person who was capable of whimsy and silliness and loved soft things and doing something weird. Yep, he was also capable of violence and rage, but when he was with Stede, he didn't feel it so much.

This was a vacation from that life.

To Stede he was absolutely lovely... oh, and also a bloodthirsty killer. And Stede loved (and loves) everything about him, and both of those things can be true. This is a perfect example of a spot where (in watching Season 1 without the benefit of hindsight) I assumed that everyone else in that pub was wrong, and Stede was simply trying to protect Ed's fearsome reputation by agreeing on the bloodthirsty bits. And I think from Stede's perspective that was largely true. I think that's how they wanted us to see Ed, through his eyes. Now, after watching both seasons, I think it wasn't the whole picture.

They told us, we heard it, we saw glimpses of it. But we (and Ed) were in Stede's run-away-to-sea fairytale the whole time. It wasn't until Stede left that we saw the reality- the Ed we knew had been, to a degree, a fictional character all along. I always saw this scene as Ed putting a bit of distance between himself and reality; it always felt like the Blackbeard of Stede's storybooks was the fictional one. But now it feels like the softer Ed that Stede knew was much the same- neither of them the whole story of who Ed was and is.

The one person who refused to live in Stede's fairytale was Izzy. I've seen people say it before, but he always gave off that vibe of the only human in the Muppets movie, or the guy who was in Black Sails while everyone else was in Pirates of the Caribbean. He saw the real risks clearly.

And in that light, the end of S1 has shifted an inch to the left for me, and I'm seeing it at a slightly different angle.

Izzy ripped away the healing Ed was doing, but in some respects he did it by tearing away the fairytale we'd all been living in, shoving Ed back into the Blackbeard story.

And that's where we pick up again in Season 2.

The fairytale reference came back in S2 in two notable places, those being Jim carrying that legacy forward in the darkest times, and in Izzy invoking the wooden boy against Ricky's efforts. Stede's made himself into a real boy. Ricky, nope.

Now that I've watched both seasons together, the tone shift doesn't feel so jarring at all, actually.

It feels like sliding through the looking glass, out of Stede's world, and into Ed's- a world that existed all along; we were just seeing it, la vie en rose, through Stede's eyes.

At the beginning of S2, Stede's gone, and we're seeing it unfiltered through Ed's reality.

But Stede wasn't lying when he said he loved everything about Ed. He made a promise to come back and find him- he went down into Ed's darkest place and reminded him that no matter how bad things got, there WAS someone waiting for him, ready to love him.

The contrast between S1's fantasy and S2's reality (excluding mermaids and actual bird guys and cursed coats) is stark, but it really is that.

We have the same settings, the same people, and very different ideas and outcomes at different times.

But it was always there.

Things do come back to a state of (precarious) balance once they're all together. Apologies are made, whether they're spoken out loud or through actions. Things go right, things go wrong. Healing happens. Izzy continues to have the steadiest, most real through-line in the story as he tracks toward redemption, finds acceptance, and to an extent finds himself.

Once again, I hate that they went here with the ending and I wish they hadn't. But it got a fraction easier for me looking at it not as a continuation of Stede's fairytale, but of the grounded-in-pirate-reality arc Izzy was always on, even while we lived in Stede's world.

Where does that leave us? We're not going back to the fairytale, but we're not going to be living in Black Sails for S3, either. We've hit a fusion point where S1 ended with each of them going to separate, miserable homes, but S2 ended with them in the same place, ready and willing to make a go of it.

Season 3 is going to give us their world, together.

I LOVED the moments in this season where the deep emotions were in balance with the silliness I've always adored about this show. Eps4-6 were wonderful like that. Clearly we're not done with drama, either, but like Ed and Stede, I think we'll find a middle ground.

Anyway in conclusion, a rewatch of S1 after S2 somehow made me love the first season even more, which felt impossible? It's now gained /even more/ layers of depth than it had before. No matter how you feel about S2 I think it's worth that rewatch.

Adding one more bit of clarity for myself: I think we got a bit (intentionally) seduced in S1 by the idea that the Ed of the storybooks, the Vampire Viking Clown with the nine guns, was a version of him that others saw, when Stede saw the REAL person who 'worked' for Blackbeard.

In hindsight I think it's clear the Ed Stede go to know was also not the complete version of himself- the reality is, there's a whole spectrum between the two, and they've landed in the middle of it now. Ed intentionally leaned into the unlovable Kraken image to protect himself.

It very much didn't work, just like being just... Edward hadn't worked to protect himself, either. This season has been very much about pulling those two extremes together and finding all the parts that make up Ed overall (another thread on that here on Twitter, which I'll also shift across to Tumblr soon!)

And I think one of my favourite things in S2 has been seeing the way Stede SEES that- he knows what Ed's done, everyone's told him, but he still loves Ed. sees his trauma and how it affects him, and believes he's a good man regardless. He IS lovable; he's not forever broken.

And together, they can heal.