#but there's a reason fiona apple wrote about being good at being uncomfortable so she can't stop changing all the time

[knowlesian]

i already wrote here about karl and buttons (and why i don’t think karl’s a pet/birds as a fairly universal metaphor for freedom) but since i had More Thoughts in a connected if you’re in my brain but barely related outside of it vein i wanted to yes-and myself.

so, first off: i love the bitter irony of the difference between a bird guy and the pet rule, because the pet rule assumes both ownership and dominion over life and death whereas a bird guy is a guy who is friends with a bird and does not own the bird; the bird chooses to come hang out or leave as he so pleases.

also: the bird’s name is karl. KARL. if that’s not a reference to karl marx on a show THIS concerned with class and the rot at the heart of capitalism, i’ll eat my fuckin hat.

stuff like that is why i really think trying to leave the implications at the door when it comes to stede’s wealth and where and how generational wealth like that accumulates misses the ballgame; this show is capable of handling nuance like a fuckin champ. look at the plant! it is both a metaphor for growth and stede’s own blossoming as well as one for his privilege and need to change. he made it grow stronger and it was in better shape when we see it in e9; he stole it from poor fishermen and never considered if that was perhaps a wee bit fucked up and punching down to do so. it’s a symbol of triumph and growth AND blind spots and growth still left to do. both these things are true, and both inform who stede is. 

sitting in the discomfort of untangling something complex like ‘stede’s love of fancy things is not bad; all that ill-gotten money he had to buy those clothes, though...’ is what this show is for, honestly. it’s not bad he had them or loved them, and i can’t wait for him to obtain more (because stede’s journey to self-expression involves embracing his own version of masculinity vs the traditional version, so ...kind of literally in order to keep thematic coherence stede has to obtain more of the pretty things that made him so happy, only this time through his own merits) but it’s simultaneously pretty fuckin’ Not Great how the money he was born into got where it’s at.

i think writing stede off as just a rich guy is clearly not the point— the show itself puts nearly those words in his father’s mouth, so we are clearly not meant to see it as true.

but he can be a rich guy, without being just a rich guy; it’s not a binary, and part of stede’s arc is getting to throw off the thematic weight of generational wealth and go full class traitor by giving it all away because it came from a rotten system (which... clearly, is not a viable 1:1 in our real world but that’s how theatre logic works) so the nuance where the money gave him the means to do things he needed to do/the money was poison fruit from a poison tree is all over stede’s arc. 

similarly piracy as a metaphor on the show absolutely has positive angles and aspects, but i think it’s a mistake to only ever look at things the ‘piracy as refuge/safe place for queerness’ angle. ed’s ship is that, in some ways, but it’s also perpetuating toxic learned cycles in an easy to spot way. stede and the revenge is the same, only those toxic cycles are harder to spot because they’re implicit, not overt, and they don’t involve physical violence. so it’s both, depending on which angle you study or talk about at any given moment; they don’t negate each other and hold equal importance to the show! 

it’s like the lighthouse; if you look at it from the angle of stede being a lighthouse alone, it stands in for the stifling and unfair expectations put on his performance of masculinity and the weird fuckin ideals and damages of patriarchy. stede and ed becoming a lighthouse together is this whole other side of the metaphor that’s beautiful and about solidarity and seeing things a new way via considering someone else’s perspective and then melding it with your own to create something even better! it can always be both.

which is one reason why i love the idea of the revenge as a liminal space: it’s not an endpoint, it’s a doorway. at the beginning of the season, stede has thoroughly identified the toxic bits of pirate culture, but not his own. by the end, he’s checked off that second box and whenever and however ed and stede reunite and share space, they get to build a new pirate culture that learns from the mistakes of both their old ones.