#ofmd s2 discussion

[bug-buzzz]

Talking abt Stedes bottle in s2 and how they're gonna read it:

OK so we know Stede wrote his little love letter and all but my question is, who's gonna read it? The only person we know who is confirmed to be able to read is Lucius but he's uh, out if commission at the moment. I'll come back to Lucius later. First of all, its almost certain that Ed cant read. Hes gone his whole life without it and when he signs the Act of Grace, he signs with an "X" - a symbol which means he is illiterate. Theres two possibilities that could mean he can read though, one is that he only signed the X so he wouldn't be bound to the document, or that Stede taught him how to read at some point after this. (Maybe in the military?) But for the sake of this post im assuming Ed cannot read. We don't know if Izzy can read, we see him holding a book but he may just be looking at the picture, but if he can, I don't see him realistically telling Ed about the note unless he lies about it or maybe tells him in hopes it will make him mad? It doesn't make sense for Izzy to read it for Ed. It is possible that Jim can read however. They grew up raised by a nun where reading the Bible was probably important, and we may not know their literacy because they didn't speak for a good chunk of time. We know Lucius can read, so if Lucius is a stowaway like some theories suspect, he could read it. Maybe Jim or Izzy is hiding Lucius and has him read it for them? Another possibility is that nobody on the ship can read and that they take the bottle to someone who can, maybe someone recognizes Stedes style or handwriting, maybe that is why we see Ed with Spanish Jackie (Jackie has signs in her bar so I assume she can read) but Ed seems to have recovered from being The Kraken in this scene so I'm not sure. And just for shits and giggles, maybe they take it to Stede for him to read it just for him to say "uh I wrote that." Anyways those are my ramblings abt the note in the bottle.

[thats-entirely-too-much-tuna]

these frames are 37 seconds apart. for eighteen months we’ve been reading and writing and theorizing about their eventual reconciliation, and stede bartholomew bonnet managed to speedrun it in THIRTY-SEVEN SECONDS.

[saltpepperbeard]

thinking about these 21 frames btw. if you even care.

[bizarrelittlemew]

this has to be a shout-out to the fandom for speculating about the sleeping arrangements aboard the Revenge for over a year

[iamadequate1]

I have an important question: suppose Buttons is infected with sex pollen in a fanfic! I don't think the sea would be up the fuck-or-die task, so who would save Buttons?!

[chuplayswithfire]

ngl i have always found it fascinating where people draw the line with violence. i've seen multiple people now object to the implied sexual violence of the 'human puppet' game Lucius talks about, because sexual violence is somehow uniquely dark and taboo... but the show has always dealt in comedy related to violence, even violence targeted at specific groups - antiblack slurs, references to the genocide of indigenous communities, and the presence of racism in general, and often mixed in with the comedy. those topics are just as serious as sexual violence, and just as dark. why wouldn't the show be willing to delve into the one, if they're willing to go to the others?

[izzysillyhandsy]

Rewatching OFMD (again) with a friend who's never even heard of the show is an eye-opening experience.

At S1 episode 4 she said something like: "I think Edward offloads all the heavy stuff onto Izzy - he wants to be liked and admired and Izzy has to keep everyone and everything in line. And everyone including Ed hates him for it? No wonder he seems exhausted."

She was really upset by how little respect Izzy got from everyone around him and "how badly the crew treated Izzy" in Ep 5.

We're at episode 6 now and she's horrified - "The uszh meant that Izzy would've had to kill all the people on this ship, didn't it? Probably even including Stede?"

Sometimes, with all the discourse about who's to blame and why is it Izzy, I forgot how tough Izzy's deal was as Blackbeard's first mate.

Of course he gladly put up with it for Ed and their special bond (and she also saw that immediately), but as soon as Stede waltzed in and it all fell apart poor Iz was in hell...

And yeah, of course it's more complex than that (I can't wait for us to get to the last 2 episodes and S2), and this is obviously not a remotely new or original take.

It's just so nice to see my friend discovering my favourite character (and character dynamics, namely Ed and Izzy) and immediately latching onto him/them ❤

[leonsgotit]

OFMD S2 SPOILERS ‼️

in season 1, stede was constantly putting his feelings ahead of other people’s—he put his own feelings ahead of mary’s and his kids’ when he ran away in the middle of the night to become a pirate and when he left ed at the dock to return to his family (and yeah, stede thought he was protecting ed from him when he did it and he was in distress after having been kidnapped and then witnessing his childhood bully accidentally shoot himself in the head and i’m not discounting that at all!! but he also ran because he was afraid of how fast things were moving with ed), and he does it in other little ways all throughout the season but i think these two examples are the most important ones.

he puts his own feelings in front of other people’s up until mary tries to kill him and he realizes how he’s sort of messed everything up for her by returning, as well as realizing his feelings for ed. then, stede fakes his own death and gives up everything he has to return to ed.

now, in season 2, we see stede constantly putting the feelings of others before his own. he sets aside his own feelings about izzy to rescue him and the rest of his crew so they can take back the revenge. he doesn’t like izzy, but stede can tell that he’s important to frenchie and jim and archie and fang, and he knows izzy was important to ed, so he sets aside how he feels and saves izzy, too.

stede does everything in his power to protect ed when he wakes up (comes back from death), but when the crew speaks their mind, stede again sets aside his own feelings for them. they aren’t comfortable with ed being on the ship anymore, and even though stede has spent months and months searching for him, and even though stede cried and begged for ed to come back, he doesn’t try to fight the crew when they’ve made their decision. even though watching ed leave the revenge must break his heart.

stede tries to give ed the space he wants from him, he doesn’t push to make ed understand why he left the dock that night, and when ed gets angry upon learning that stede “left him for mary,” stede doesn’t try to explain what happened in full. he lets ed be angry, he respects ed’s need for space.

when he tries to tell ed he loves him, and ed pushes stede away, stede respects that boundary that ed has set. he tells him instead that he loves everything about him, being near him, and breathing the same air—and stede tells ed he doesn’t have to say it back.

when stede finds that “cursed” red suit that he loves so much, he puts himself first for a little while—but when it becomes apparent that the crew won’t be comfortable until the suit is gone, stede puts them first. he gets rid of the suit and validates their feelings about it. even though he really loved that suit.

and we love character development—we love to see stede growing as a person and learning to put other people’s needs and feelings before his own—but it’s like from zero to one hundred right now. stede is putting other’s (particularly ed’s) feelings before his own, because he feels guilty about what happened in season 1. and because, i believe, he’s still thinking about what chauncy badminton said to him—that he ruins beautiful things and that he ruined ed. so he’s over-correcting in order to fix what he thinks he is responsible for breaking.

it almost seems like stede doesn’t think his feelings are important anymore, that he has to completely ignore how he feels in order to make amends with everyone, especially ed.

he needs to find a healthy balance of acknowledging and validating his own feelings while also being able to put other people’s feelings in front of his own when appropriate!!

which is why i think he and ed need to actually TALK about what happened that night at the dock. they need to sit down and lay it all out, cards on the table, no stone left unturned.

stede needs to tell ed that chauncy kidnapped him from his bunk at gunpoint, he needs to tell ed exactly what chauncy said to him about how he ruins beautiful things, and how he brought blackbeard to ruin. likewise, ed needs to tell stede why he immediately thought stede had just ditched him—he needs to tell stede why he didn’t think to go looking for him that night and jumped to the conclusion that stede had changed his mind.

THEY NEED TO BE HONEST WITH EACH OTHER!!!

[spooksicl-e]

place your bets as to which character is actually the healthier one in s2.

[lizluzz]

I can't believe that after all the speculations about who should be the sugar baby: Ed or Stede, it's actually the Swede.

[soapbubbles511]

Not to be Stede-coded, but most of my thoughts after the sneak peek clip amount to "Sorry about your toes Iggy*, but sounds like Ed's having a hard time🥺" And "Sounds like Ed could also use a hug from Fang"

Like, we already knew all that but baby is deep in his "fuck it" spiral.

Ed was already burnt out and miserable and feeling trapped when we met him. And for a minute there after he met Stede, he had hope that things could be different. That he could retire. That he could have friends. That he could explore things he actually liked and let himself enjoy softer things. Then Stede left. And Izzy made it explicitly clear that he wouldn't tolerate Ed changing.

So he went fuck it. You want me to be Blackbeard? I'll be Blackbeard. The only retirement pirates get is death anyway. Captains rule through fear and intimidation. This is how piracy has always worked. Lots of maiming and assorted violence. Lots of drinking and lets throw in some drugs. Fuck it.

None of this is really new information, but it's making me sad for Ed. Extra sad when I think about him crying with his cake topper dolls when he's alone.

*not actually that sorry about his toes

[zo1nkss]

I think it's worth examining that when Izzy decides someone is beneath him, they're no longer human in his eyes.

[who-the-fuck-knows-blog]

holy christ. this fandom is fucking exhausting about mental health and mental illness and abuse. i dont want to directly engage with people saying this stuff because i am pretty sure they wont change their minds or really listen to me, but Ed can be mentally ill and abusive/toxic (<-those aren’t necessarily interchangable but I’m going to be using both in this case).

Ed’s actions can be a result of his trauma, he can hate that he does it, it can be within his own justification a result of previous threats or negativity from others, and they can still be not okay or justified.

The majority of people who have been abusive in my life have been struggling with something. Mental illness, addiction, trauma, all of the above. Trauma and trauma reactions can lead to further abusive behavior.

When you have personality disorders or mental health issues that come with extreme cognitive distortions (everyone has cognitive distortions, but mental illnesses and trauma tend to lead to more extreme examples or more cognitive distortions than you would have otherwise), it can lead to you continuing with dangerous/manipulative behavior in a more unaware manner. Many are aware it is manipulative, though. and I suppose that’s where the distinction can be made between whether or not this is a toxic or abusive relationship. One comes with more of an intent to control, the other is more about mutually lashing out/having disproportionate emotional reactions to situations.

This post, to me, isn’t about determining whether Ed was Abusive or Toxic, but moreso about conversations around abusive behavior. The way it has been described, Ed’s behavior towards Izzy in S2 has been deliberately controlling and manipulative, as Ed has been towards the entire crew in that season. Does it matter if he’s doing it because he is spiralling and wants to push everyone to their breaking point to kill himself vs just to be a dick? Yes, to a degree. It means he likely just needs help and is capable of changing. On the other hand, no. The behavior is terrible and not justifiable, and having mental illnesses that caused it doesn’t make it suddenly not his responsibility.

I guess I’m more annoyed at the overjustification and removing Ed from his own autonomy and responsibility for his behavior than anything. There can be reasons behind why someone does something, and those reasons can be very sympathetic and understandable and make a lot of sense, it just gets to a point where people seem to be using that to excuse the behavior and remove Ed’s agency in the harm he himself has caused deliberately (even if the intention wasn’t to make people miserable but to kill himself, the goal and method through which he did it was to cause emotional and physical damage and torture to ensure this would happen, with little to no care for the wellbeing of the others.)

If people are upset about Ed’s behavior and lack of actual personal accountability for what he’s done, that’s fine. The same way that it’s fine for people to be upset about the emotional harm Izzy has done to Ed.

I know a lot of posts are not super nuanced when it comes to Ed and abusive behavior, I’m not gonna say hes iredeemable, and in fact he’s already ahead of other people who display this behavior in that he realizes he needs to change and puts in an effort to do so. He’s still sympathetic to most folks, and I personally still love him.

I also acknowledge I, like everyone else, am not immune to personal biases and lack of insight and emotional reasoning. Many folks have been having trauma reactions based on the events in the show or have had their trauma triggered or have fallen back on (understandably) emotional responses that are due to trauma. Some people have been applying their personal experiences with people that behave similarly to characters on the show to their analysis and impressions of the characters. I’m not gonna say that’s morally good or bad. It just exists and is unavoidable when you have a ton of people with trauma discussing things. But it can skew perceptions, as trauma does. so it’s just something to be aware of, because it doesn’t feel like you’re being skewed it feels either like you’re being attacked or you are more aware of/closer to/have a better understanding of the emotions and responses of the characters you are projecting onto.

I dunno. maybe I’m full of shit! Who knows! I just wanted to ramble more about this stuff bc it’s very upsetting to me (<-could be a trauma response I am not adequately handling or aware of or acknowledging) to see the way ppl have been defensive of Ed via “he’s not doing it because he wants to do it/live like this, he’s traumatized, he’s mentally ill, and Izzy pushed him into it” because those can be explanations of his actions but not justifications of his actions.

[anodesu]

I Like How They use Colour in Our Flag Means Death.

Hello, I should be working, but today I just want to take a moment to gush about something that I haven't really seen anyone really talk about yet, but would love to discuss. Our Flag Means Death is a series about love and identity in so many ways, and one of the ways they 'subtly' depict where a character stands with their identity is with the use of colour. The most obvious one that can be addressed is, naturally, Blackbeard. Everything about his character in the show to start encompasses the colour black, including those around him.

Everyone on Blackbeard's crew conforms to Blackbeard, all in black, all in leather, and to an even deeper extreme in the second season as Ed spirals. It's all dark makeup, face paint. Crudely dyed hair. Not even Izzy, whose entire attire has remained unchanged, is not left unscathed when Ed is at his lowest.

(you know, besides the whole... toe... leg... thing) The times that we see Ed in anything but his leathers in the first season are times where he is slowly breaking away from the persona he had built up. We see it a few times when Stede and Ed wear each other's clothes, but that is when they are working on the mutual goal of becoming more like the other. The other notable time this happens in season 1 is when the two are imprisoned, and the clothing that defines each of them is gone, leaving only two men with growing feelings to face one another as equals.

However, Ed's not really the one who I want to focus on here. Instead, I'd actually like to talk about Stede. See, I feel the whole thing with Ed was made very abundantly ham-fisted for a reason. It stresses the idea of colour and theme to us in a simple way, before adding in places beyond Blackbeard. The thing about Stede Bonnet is that, up until the most recent episodes aired (Season 2, episode 7), Stede always had a splash of white incorporated into his attire; be it a cravat or a loose shirt, Stede's attire always has a brightness to it to make his noble ass stand out from the more neutral tones of his (admittedly commoner) crew.

But even when Stede is wearing tones that blend in, there's always that smattering of white somewhere. Or sometimes everywhere.

This is naturally supposed to be in contrast to Ed at all times, as no matter what, Ed's attire is always a little or a lot darker than Stede's, even when Ed was at his most Stede-like.

Things start to truly change mid season 2 with the discovery of a beautiful deep crimson (cursed) suit, which, if you remember, Stede secretly swipes the shirt from to keep wearing. It is this episode where we start to see a shift in Stede's colour scheme from whites and brights to something far darker than he's ever willingly worn before.

This here is the start of Stede's true descent into embracing his pirate persona in a way that did not really fit with his original ideals. By keeping a piece of the suit, Stede lies to his crew that the curse is fully, truly gone from their lives, which frankly, is quite a pirate-like thing to do, and from that moment on, his progression to being seen as a "real pirate" truly takes off. He is wearing that same shirt when he offs Ned Low, and so far, we haven't really seen him wear white since.

It all culminates into the midpoint in episode 7. Stede is basking in the fame, his ego's gotten the better of him. He's casually set a man on fire moments earlier. Ed, on the other hand, is fancying himself a career change. He had thrown his infamous black leather garb into the sea at the beginning of the episode, instead donning something much more soft and neutral; a mid-grey shirt and pants. To add to this, in the scene with Stede, Ed says the following: "I don't even know who I am! I don't wan't to be a pirate... and you- look at you! You're blowing up. You're the toast of the town!" Ed, in his neutral greys of uncertainty, and Stede in deep blues. Not in each other's clothes, but garb they had willingly chosen for themselves, and so the colour shift, where Stede is in darker colours than Ed, is a significant turning point for them both.

I personally don't see it as being White = Good or Black = Bad. I think you could see it in a lot of ways: Society vs Piracy, Gentleman vs Pirate. It could be perceived as the loss of innocence, or maybe just two strict ideals of toxic masculinity on opposite ends of the spectrum. Either way, I think it's a beautiful touch in a show about the exploration of identity of one's self. Thank you for listening to my Ed talk.

[queer-reader-07]

queer characters are allowed to die in media. and it isn’t inherently A Problem or homophobic when they do.

i understand that it hurts seeing queer people die in shows and books and movies, especially if you’re queer and you saw yourself in those characters.

but the thing is, if you want better queer rep in media you have to be ok with queer characters being treated the same way cishet characters are treated. and that means letting them die sometimes.

Bury Your Gays is a problem, I’m not going to pretend like it’s not. but Bury Your Gays isn’t synonymous with every death of a queer character that happens. you’re allowed to be hurt and devastated by a character death, but i don’t think it’s fair to act like that character death is part of some wider issue just because that character is part of a minority group.

not every queer story is sunshine and rainbows with a happily ever after. some queer stories are violent, some are devastating, and people die in some of them. and that is OK.

if we act like queer people can’t die in media we’re contributing to the othering of our community. it’s saying “queer people are this special group you can’t ever do a bad thing to in media because if you do it’s homophobic.” which is not a true statement.

we can’t act like every death of a queer character is homophobic or has capital I Implications about the writer’s opinions on queer people. if we keep pushing that specific narrative queer stories are going to be stifled. writers need to be able to tell the stories they want, even if that includes a queer person dying. and acting like they can’t is doing more harm than good.

you can dislike a writer’s decision, you can stop watching a show because of that decision. that is OK. but you don’t get to go around saying the writer is homophobic because they did something you didn’t like to a character you loved.