#there's a whole thing with the pirate council and it's made up of Barbossa Will Elizabeth Jack Kevin Flynn Merida Vanellope and Woody

[scjacka]

I’ve posted about Disney Heroes Battle Mode before but, as I continue to play the game, the character interactions get weirder and I’m here for it!

[obdurare-archive-blog]

♡ + Teague

headcanon meme : accepting : @evemusc

Oh, my dudes, I hope you’re strapped in for a ride, because I have feelings about Hector Barbossa, the third Brethren Court, and Captain Edward Teague.  So many feelings.

PLEASE NOTE!  If you haven’t read Price of Freedom, this is going to contain some spoilers for it.  I’m tagging it ( pof spoilers ) if you want to avoid that.  This is also probably going to get really long, so I’ll shove most of it behind a cut.  Now, lemme settle in so we can get started.

Firstly, let me say that I don’t think Hector has nearly the respect for the Court you might think he does.  And there’s good canon reasons to support this.  A long, long time ago, in a land far away, Hector Barbossa’s ship, the Cobra, was sunk by rogue pirates, and while it took him a while, he made it to the Cove with what remained of his crew to get assistance from the Court, because attacking other pirates like that is Against The Code.  He meets Jack for the first time here and they have initial impressions of each other which boil down to, ��Wow, this guy is a badass and I’m not sure where his accent comes from exactly and he really doesn’t tell the truth much does he?” and “Hey, this kid isn’t that stupid, I’ll talk to him.”

And fast forward several months later, Hector’s still in the Cove, the Court’s done nothing, and the case, as it were, has gone cold.  Hector’s on a downward slide, until one day Jack Sparrow, the one and only, spots a ship just like the one Hector described (down to the brass bow chaser) in the harbor.  And so he does what anyone else would do:  He goes looking for Hector.  Once he finally finds him, and Hector gets dressed, they head out as a dynamic duo to look at this ship and yep.  Hector’s pretty sure it’s The One.  Teague shows up, the ship gets inspected by Hector, Teague, and others (the bow chaser’s missing) and nothing can be determined.  It also turns out that said ship belongs to the Pirate Lord of the Caspian Sea (you catching on yet?), a Russian named Borya, and there’s a big todo about the whole business. After all, a Pirate Lord has been Accused Of Breaking The Code.  There’s a trial, Davy Jones is summoned to determine his guilt because he sees everything that happens on the sea, Borya passes on his Piece of Eight to Hector (though no one tells Hector what it actually is for a while) and the rogue pirates are locked up and scheduled to be executed, and Hector is set to play the actual hangman.  Doesn’t happen, because Jack is convinced his friend Christophe didn’t do anything wrong and lets him go.  And is promptly kidnapped for his troubles.

And it should be noted that during this, members of Hector’s crew are turning up dead, there’s other horrible things happening in the Cove, and it turns out the rogue pirates are behind all of it.

This isn’t the only time Hector and Teague will speak, it happens a few times of the course of Hector being Jack’s First Mate. He even gets hit on my Jack’s grandmother at one point, and it is hilarious.

Okay, so there we have the backstory.  

But Amanda, you’re asking, what does that have to do with anything?  My dudes, Hector Barbossa got fucked when it comes to getting his case resolved by the Court.  Because the Court is, if you look at it, kind of useless bloat in the pirate system.  They only meet once in a million years, they can’t get along, and they have a differing “status” to other pirates, which in a lot of ways directly contradicts the entire social structure of piracy, where every man is equal and every man’s voice should be counted.  Now, you had something similar in rl pirate history with the Admirals of the Black/Brethren of the Coast, but it didn’t function even remotely similar.

But this isn’t Amanda gives you a history lecture on her specialized time period, and it’s not Amanda puts on her historian hat time.  When Hector was a nobody in the scheme of things and sought help from the council that was supposed to be there for that purpose, especially since it was one of their own doing the harm against them, he found out quickly that there really is no justice for the little guy in the Lord system.  And when he became a Pirate Lord, it was cheap, handed to him over dinner with the man who’s sunk his ship, whose last request was to speak with him.  He was promised a ship that was stolen and he was never compensated.  Jack ended up taking care of the rogue pirates and fleeing, joining the EITC.  It was a fucking mess.

Five years Hector spends sliding further and further down that slope, damn near drinking himself to death.  The Pirate Lords did nothing.  They’ll do nothing later when it comes to Blackbeard and his reign of terror.  And in short, to wrap up what has become very long, through all of this Hector had to help himself when there was supposed to be a system in place for that, and at the time, he was a lot more trusting when it came to his fellow pirates.  It’s why he’s not now.  The reason there’s no familiarity between Teague and Hector, and why their interactions after this is stunted and formal, is because Hector Barbossa put his trust in the Pirate Lords to at least get him justice, and they failed.  Miserably.  And if you don’t think he holds Teague partially responsible for the shambles his life became after Jack was kidnapped, you’d be absolutely wrong.