#and immediately jumping into a gay relationship won't fix things either

[ofmdsalt]

Hey, I really liked your take about how Ed could have gone on a self discovery journey instead of ending up with Stede so I'm curious, how do you view Ed and Stede's relationships? TBH my interpretation is that lots of people in the fandom need to like...stop putting romantic love on this pedestal and understand that self and platonic love is equally important and media always skews our perception and the importance of romantic love in negative ways (I mean, there are literally academic articles written about stuff like this). And sure! a big part of fandom is the shipping! and a big part of the show is their eventual relationship! but idk like sure its nice to see and read but in irl I know lots of friends who fell into toxic and dangerous relationships because they were unhealthy and needed some growth and I've even lost a few friends to relationships that me, and our other friends, disapproved of. Some of those friends have even come back years later to apologize while others just unfortunately lost their entire support networks (friends, colleagues, and family) and still are in those relationships. Which like yeah in fandom i love the "us against the world" mentally but irl doesn't work that way. idk sorry for rambling, but would love to hear your thoughts.

sorry i left you on read for so long, anon! had to think this one through a bit.

so for those who don't know, they're talking about this post that i made. that was immediately screenshotted and taken out of context by implying that i said Ed needs to be 100% perfectly healed before going into a relationship. which is. a take. i won't go much into it, but this is a perfect opportunity for me to expand on that!

what i love in fandoms are long winded character studies. so a fic focused more on an individual person where the relationship (if there is one at all) is secondary. i've written such stories before because sometimes i like exploring an individual character and getting to know what makes them tick. what i wanted to get into with the post linked above is why do we immediately assume that a relationship between Ed and Stede is going to 'fix' them? both of them are in a period of flux within their lives. Stede has lived in a hetero marriage that was, as far as we can tell, fairly miserable and detached for both parties.

he then leaves them (lbr, abandons is a better word for it) to play pirate and put himself and others lives at risk because he does not know anything about the world he's gotten himself into

then we have Ed. a man who's reputation precedes him but who is also strangled and suffocated by this image that he's in. he's Blackbeard first and Ed second.

i can really resonate with both these characters and their struggles to understand who they are and need to be seen as who they want to be. it's a tale as old as time in terms of identity. and then when you add the complexities of a relationship into the mix of Stede realizing he's gay and Ed seeing that he doesn't need to be Blackbeard (but who is he really without Blackbeard?) it makes i all the more interesting

and then season 2 happens and packs in a whole lot of unearned character development due to budget cuts and a slashed screentime.

their relationship was never going to be perfect. no relationship is. but if that's how Ed reacted when Stede abandoned him, Ed should honestly be given the time to reflect on who he is now beyond Blackbeard. beyond being Ed&Stede, a romantic relationship. because the constant hammering home of 'it's the Ed and Stede show' reduces the complexities of these characters to a point where they no longer exist outside of each other. and i think that's really disheartening

why not give Ed a chance to discover himself? why not have him assert that he scared himself during his bender at the beginning of season 2? if he reacted that poorly to Stede's rejection, what will happen if they do break up? i think it's perfectly fine to ask and wonder if Ed should be by himself for a bit.

realizing you're not ready for a relationship can be a big moment of growth for people. knowing how to be alone, how to comfort yourself, how to be by yourself is good and healthy. and it's totally up to all of us to decide when we are ready to be in a relationship again.

i just wish this fandom didn't hit so many over the head with the assertion that Ed and Stede must be together no matter the cost. because sometimes that's not the best way forward and there's nothing wrong in taking more time to find yourself

[mynameisnowwyrm]

I genuinely need to know if this is an actual thing or if I'm just talking out of my ass so if you have something to add please do.

Hypothesis, thesis statement, whatever you call it: mainstream shows approach sexuality as if it is fixed in place with no fluidity.

Either a main character is gay from the beginning and out and proud, or a main character is gay from the beginning and in the closet and they're gonna do a whole self acceptance coming out storyline. Either way, the audience knows the characters sexuality.

Specifically (I'm thinking of 2010s shows) when a show starts off telling you all the sexualities of the main characters. Straight character, straight character, gay character, straight character. A lot of the times there will be a significant queer ship among the fans between the straight characters (bc people don't usually write good relationships for their queer characters but that's another story) but you get the feeling this is never going to be a thing bc the unspoken logic of the world regarding sexuality of the main characters is that the audience always knows. They already had this one queer character from the jump who everyone knows is queer so they aren't going to ever do a storyline where one of the other characters has believed they were straight their whole life and the whole time has been shown to the audience to be straight but is going to discover that's not the case, bc the sexualities of the characters are fixed in place.

I'm thinking specifically of 2010s shows here bc it's an interesting point in time. 2000s shows, if they had any gay characters at all, you get the feeling that "there's already one gay side character, quota filled" from the writers so you don't expect more. Coming into the 2020s were seeing a diversifying of queer characters in TV, with different sexualities and gender identities being represented. Im not saying there's a a hard line of linear progression in representation and we are far far away from perfect representation but its better than in previous years.

The main one that comes to mind for me is teen wolf. The show is set up so that homophobia is not a thing, therefore all of the queer characters are out and stated to be queer on screen, leading you to the conclusion that if one of the main characters was queer, it would have been brought up. I know they made jackson queer in I think the last season where he cameos for two episodes but that happened entirely off screen after the character had been gone for five years, none of that development had been done where we could see or with a character that was still a main character.

Quick aside, a lot of the time I see the question "is this queerbait or is this just a slow burn romance between two people of the same gender?" And the answer is usually queerbait. I have never seen a mainstream show do a queer slow burn romance because of the fixed sexuality thing. No matter how strong the character's bond is, how much relationship coding there is, unless writers start diversifyingtheir view of queerness, both characters in the ship need to already be explicitly queer for it to be a possibility. So 1. you need two established queer characters, 2. they need to both be in the show at the same time 3. they need to both be significant to the story, so main character x side character we see only occasionally doesn't count. Name one mainstream show that has all three to begin with, let alone a will they won't they style slow burn romance instead of immediately putting the characters in a relationship. That's why I feel like if a show ever does do this it will be incredibly ground breaking, they will literally be breaking the mould.

I feel like I've tapped into a whole branch of queer theory regarding how queerness is seen in society that I'm not equipped to adequately explain.