#they put ed and stede together in the bed nook

[bizarrelittlemew]

Our Flag Means Death 1x4 | 1x6 | 2x6 | 2x7 ⇉ if the bed nook could talk...

[areyoudoingthis]

S2 coda fic series

Wanna be with you all my life

Edstede. Rated E

Ed gets an orgasm. As a treat. - "I almost expect you to start purring any second," he jokes. The collar still sits around Ed's delicate neck, jingling softly every time he moves. The thought won't leave his head. He runs a hand slowly through Ed's hair, then smooths it down his shoulder, his bicep, repeats the gesture on his other side. "Stede, are you fucking petting me?"

The art of fishing

Edstede. Rated T

It's been a few weeks of their newfound domestic intimacy when he feels the need to say the words. He's held safely in Stede's arms, warm in their own bed, in their own room, on this ship that is their home. "You were a mermaid when I almost died." - Ed tells Stede about his near death experience. Stede comforts him.

Put the collar on, Captain

Edstede. Rated E

The collar makes an encore. - He reaches tentatively for Ed's hair, delighted to be allowed to pull it aside to reveal the expanse of his neck. He opens the clasp on the collar and reaches around Ed to slide it in place and close it securely. He doesn't miss the full body shiver that runs through Edward when the collar is resting safely against his skin once again, bell tucked neatly into the hollow of his throat. Ed turns around to look at him. He looks ethereal in the bright afternoon light, hair a halo of silver around him. His next words are like molten lava poured over Stede's head. "What would you have me do, Captain?"

Port in a storm

Edstede. Rated E

Some days he feels like he never woke up from the dream where magic was real and Stede was a mermaid. Not because this -their relationship, their life together- doesn't feel real, because it does, it feels real like the breeze on his face and the ground beneath his boots and the immensity of the sky above him, but because he never knew any of what he's experienced with Stede over the past few weeks was possible. In his wildest fantasies, maybe, he dreamed of sweet tea and fine fabrics, the warmth of good brandy sliding down his throat while the fire kept his feet cozy and Stede's voice spread like wildfire through his chest. But his imagination failed him so completely when it comes to Stede Bonnet. - Stede takes Ed dancing.

Do you want to know a secret

Edstede. Rated G

"Do you want to know a secret?" Stede whispers in his hear. "I love you, you nut. I want to spend the rest of my life with you."

Press me to your heart

Edstede. Rated E Stede draws the curtains shut, enclosing them in the dark, intimate space of the bed nook, anticipation running recklessly through his veins. He turns to Ed, looking up at him expectantly on the bed, the cascade of his hair loose around his shoulders and his eyes huge and vulnerable, bathed in the golden light of the fireworks the crew is setting off on deck. - Ed cries out, grips Stede's arm tight enough to bruise, and Stede will wear the lovely shades of purple on his skin proudly, a mark of their passion to match the ones he left on Ed's thighs earlier. "That's it, hold onto me. Let me give you what you need." He needs to take care of him so very desperately. - Picks up right after Stede closes the bed curtains. Tender, horny sex ensues.

Now I'm water

Edstede. Rated G

Ed makes his way back to Stede after watching the ships burn. - Something settles into place within him as he hacks and slashes his way back to Stede. He doesn't want to do this anymore, he's certain of that. But maybe he doesn't have to burn his bridges to get to where he's going. Maybe everything he's capable of can serve him well sometimes, maybe there's some middle ground between fisherman and pirate.

As we go hand in hand

Edstede. Rated G

The memory flashes through his mind of Ed gifting a couple of kids on the Republic a bag of gold and a pair of knives, and claiming they weren't pirates but inn owners afterwards. How long has he been thinking about this? How long has this been a dream of his?

[zstraps]

thinking about that post where someone asked what story will be read at storytime / feature symbolically in s2 and i said the little mermaid...coming back to that in light of ✨new information✨ i'm thinking about how the little mermaid starts with her saving the prince from drowning 👀 don't have coherent thoughts but the things swirling in my head are:

the arc of season 2 is "stede becomes a man" -> the little mermaid's efforts to become human

all of ariel's funky little trinkets in the disney version. thinking about her finding comfort in collecting objects that bring her joy, while longing for a world she can't be a part of and not fitting in among her peers. then finally leaving home to go make a place in that world

also thinking about all of those trinkets being things that fell from ships. perhaps thrown overboard

in the Hans Christian Andersen version the little mermaid has a statue of a "handsome youth" that she cherishes. something about stede's book with the illustration of blackbeard, something about an idealized representation of masculine beauty / an embellished and sensationalized representation of masculine violence. idk

the prince doesn't know that it was the little mermaid who saved him. i keep wondering if ed is going to remember the things stede said to him when he was unconscious, and even if he does, if he'll realize stede was really saying them or just assume it was a dream. (like he could just ASK and stede would tell him but these boys are the kings of Not Talking It Through so is that going to happen right away? unlikely)

from the wikipedia summary of the HCA version: "Most of all, he likes to see her dance, and she dances for him despite suffering excruciating pain with every step. Soon, the Little Mermaid becomes the prince's favorite companion ... but he does not fall in love with her at all." thinking about stede and ed being physically reunited but they still have to find their way back to each other emotionally. thinking about stede blaming himself for ed's spiral and about stede's tendency to self-flagellate. thinking about him maybe just being so overjoyed to have ed alive that he'll take whatever he can get from him. about ed being afraid to let stede close again, but stede being so glad to have his best friend, his closest companion, that he'll swallow the pain of that rejection. tamp down his own feelings of doubt or fear or guilt and put on a cheerful front, because his own unhappiness isn't that important, is it? (a really great fic in that vein, btw, is quick question by @darcylindbergh <3 thinking about a conversation that happens in ch 5)

buttons as the Sea Witch??

in the end, when the prince is set to marry another and the little mermaid will die when they wed, the little mermaid's sisters bring her a knife (which they got from the sea witch by trading their hair), and tell her that if she plunges the knife into the prince's heart and lets his blood drip on her feet, she will regain her tail and can return to the sea. she draws back the curtain on the sleeping prince but then: "The knife trembled in the hand of the little mermaid—then she suddenly flung it far away into the waves, which gleamed red where it fell." then she throws herself into the sea after it and dies via dissolving into sea foam as mermaids apparently do

this is the bit where my thoughts are least coherent but most !!!-feeling. first off, the bed nook, with its curtains, where a similar moment played out last season

then, thinking about how the crew's loyalty at this point is very much to stede, not ed. the crew as the little mermaid's sisters, maybe? thinking about the possibility of ed "betraying" stede in some way, and the crew coming together (/getting a magic solution from buttons? lol) to give stede a way out that requires him betraying ed in return, but he won't do it. thinking about "some people are just broken" and the rest of the crew seeing ed as a lost cause. i'm not sure how they'd build to a moment like this, narratively, given that ed's rock bottom moment where the crew was forced to turn against him has already happened, and i don't think any of us would actually believe for a second that stede is genuinely considering giving up on ed, but.

the little mermaid throwing herself off the ship -> stede leaving the revenge? some kind of forced separation at the end of the season, maybe; or maybe (the painn) leaving because ed wants him gone; or maybe (more painnn) leaving as part of a fuckery but ed doesn't know it's not real, or the inverse, ed telling him to leave as part of a fuckery. pain pain painnnn. no thank you to this one

something about the dagger being thrown aside is just really sticking with me. especially given the arc of ed longing for some peace and fuckin quiet, a life where he doesn't have to be violent, and the arc of stede longing for danger and excitement, and learning to be a better pirate, while still also wanting to avoid cruelty. throwing aside a symbol of violence has the potential to be a catharsis, or a sacrifice, or a moment of backbone.

like i said. not all coherent. but hmmmmm thinkin thoughts

[fuckyeahisawthat]

Oh boy WOULD I. Fun fact, did you know you can only put ten images in an ask answer? That is not nearly enough for analyzing any kind of visual media so I’m making this its own post.

So each one of these is a separate piece: the performance, the costuming and hairstyling, the lighting and framing and camera placement, but they all work together to make end-of-episode-10 Ed, Kraken!Ed, feel different from any of the other Eds we’ve met before now.

(I think it’s up for debate if this Ed is the same version of Ed that we very briefly see at the beginning of episode 3, when we only know him as Blackbeard, more myth and shadow than actual character at that point, or if this Ed is something new and worse.)

First, the performance. Because Taika what the fuck my dude. What the fuck.

The whole toe scene is...a lot, on a lot of levels, but his creepy-soft, calm, almost-gentle voice really makes it. (This whole scene is like a weird dark inversion of the actually soft and gentle way he behaves at Stede’s bedside when he’s recovering from being stabbed...but I digress.) We’ve seen Ed get angry, we’ve seen him intimidate and threaten people, but we’ve never seen this kind of calm, controlled menace from him and it’s super creepy!

I have watched these scenes a lot trying to clock all the ways Taika changes his physicality (aside from like, the intense eye acting going on) and I’m sure I’m missing stuff because there are a lot of subtle little changes.

Happy, relaxed Ed is pretty bouncy. He moves around a lot, he gestures, he fiddles with things with his hands, he sits and stands in very relaxed, open positions, shoulders back, often with his feet up on something or legs stretched out. Kraken!Ed is very still. There are multiple scenes where the blocking lets him lean forward or loom over someone, like in the shots above. The sort of apex-predator-in-waiting vibe gets accentuated by the costuming--the shoulder pads of the jacket add a lot of bulk, which is very noticeable when he’s leaning forward like this, and the hair (even without the beard) creates this lion’s mane effect around him that makes him look bigger on screen.

All this is enhanced by the lighting and cinematography, which change dramatically from the way most of the rest of the show is shot.

While there is some gorgeous lighting in this show, it is a television show, shot on a set, so some standard TV cinematographic norms prevail. We’ve got a lot of medium and medium-close shots and mostly fairly even lighting. So anything that deviates from that is really going to catch your attention.

I want to refer back to the couple of very short scenes we see of Ed before he meets Stede, when he’s Blackbeard, the legend, before we know him as Ed, the person:

In both of these scenes, he's lit by these very intense, stark, high-contrast beams of sunlight. His hair is down, his face is obscured, and he's illuminated in this almost spotlight-like light. (Hmm something something about putting on a performance.)

Now look at this shot:

This is before his flip back into Kraken mode, but there's the spotlight, ready for him to step into it. It’s even right in the center of the "stage" that the proscenium arch creates around the bed nook. This is the very beginning of this scene, and we don't know what's going to happen yet, but I think this is a kind of visual foreshadowing.

For reference, this is how the same room is lit when Lucius comes in to find Ed in the blanket fort:

Still high-contrast with the bright windows and deep shadows, but without those intense, slicing beams of light. They only appear in the scene where Izzy confronts Ed.

For most of the scene between Izzy and Ed, Ed is lit like this:

Half light, half dark--balanced on the knife's edge between dealing with his heartbreak in an emotionally healthy way and...not. By the way, he's still lit like this at the beginning of this scene...

...up until he throws Lucius overboard and goes to do his Evil Again makeover.

After that point he starts being lit and shot in very dramatic ways. We get shots where he's barely lit and sometimes in full darkness.

The whole toe scene is lit like a horror movie. I mean...

He also starts getting a lot more extreme camera placement: close-ups where his face fills the frame from top to bottom, but also very wide shots like this one:

And more extreme camera angles, both high and low:

This kind of dramatic high angle is not used very much in the show (although I’m sure you can think of one other memorable example right away). Whether we notice it consciously or not, all these elements of lighting and camera placement help create the feeling that something is different, unsettled, off-kilter and wrong about all this.

All of the scenes I referenced add up to something like...six minutes of screen time. But they are really using every trick in the book to make them impactful, and they end up being one of the most memorable and striking parts of the show.

[epersonae]

My god, a fast and the furious crossover would rock actually? Ed as a badass street racing driver hits the sweet spot of the AUs where he’s a rockstar while keeping that “edge of the law” angle of piracy that’s really hard to pull off in modern AUs. Plus it takes skill so it could fit the fish out of water Stede arc. 10/10 would read it if you choose to write it 💯

The Fast & the Furious series is one of my long-running obsessions; I have a box set of 1-6 that I used to watch every time I got a cold, and I have chunks of it more or less memorized. (Also I've been shipping Dom/Brian since before I had anything to do with fandom.) So at some point my brain was going to go "but what if these things together?"

(fun fact: I actually started a F&F fic for TAZ Balance aaaaaaages ago that was going to be Sloan and Hurley backstory as a straight-up retelling of F&F1. but I got sidetracked and never came back to it. maybe someday? somewhere I even have a bunch of notes...)

and YES I love Ed as a street racer and Stede as a wannabe street racer who is also a cop or whatever, but also when I asked a groupchat "the question is whether it's the F&F crew as pirates or the OFMD crew in the modern setting" the resounding answer was yes, or as @not-mom put it "Freaky Friday that shit". which if you've seen the most recent one (which I'm not sure I actually recommend?) then Roman's whole moment of genre awareness is exactly the correct vibe for such a ridiculous thing.

do I need another WIP? like I need a goddamn hole in my head. are these ideas going to rattle around in the back of my head for a while? almost certainly. am I maybe going to pull out that box set for the first time in a couple of years? yeah probably.

also pls enjoy this amazing thing that @ensrensage made (he gave it to me while I was with Ryn in the hospital; I had it up in my little bed nook along with one of my favorite photos of Ryn)(ID in alt)

[vidavalor]

Has it been discussed yet that Stede never really built the ship in such a way that his family ever would have fit in it?

By the time Stede gifts Mary the model, the ship is already being built. This means that all the plans for it are already done and while I'm sure Stede could have changed some small details at this stage-- a bookcase added here and there or something-- the actual structure of the ship was already designed... and as we see, it is designed for Stede's use, more than for his whole family to live on.

Sure, you could argue that maybe Stede's quarters are so large because he was planning on housing his family there, too, only it doesn't really hold up with how the rooms are designed. The quarters are large because Stede built secret passageways for fun, not rooms for his kids. The auxiliary wardrobe is literally a closet-- Stede's hidden secret closet in literal and metaphoric terms. The whole place is designed to house the knickknacks and books belonging to Stede. Most overt, though, is the design of the sleeping situation in the captain's quarters.

We are shown multiple scenes of Stede and Mary in bed in the past as a symbol for their passionless marriage. Theirs is a larger bed, made for two, but it barely seems big enough. They each need and want their own space from one another and Stede would hardly design a bed on the ship that gave them no option at all of room between them... but he *did* design a bed that can sleep two people. Just in a different way.

Stede put his bed in the ship in a nook with windows overlooking the sea and made it just large enough that either he could sleep in it alone comfortably or he could share it with another person-- but only one he would want to sleep snuggled up beside all night. Only one he'd want to actually make love with. Stede's bed represents Stede's whole choice of designing and building and leaving on the ship entirely-- his desire to love the way he wants to love and to be where he feels he belongs and make a home where he feels comfortable. If he never finds another person who fits in his bed, it's still his. He can still wake up on his ship, in his bed, and see the sea and be at home in his quarters on The Revenge. But if he *does* find someone like him, someone who likes his world and wants to be a part of it, well... Stede has left just enough room for that kind of hope and the room in his bed symbolizes that.

And where does Stede have his first real conversation with Ed? When he's in his bed. When Ed sits on the edge of it. Stede wakes up to this hot as fuck man who knew who The Gentleman Pirate was and has been taking care of him while he has nightmares about what he left behind and how he came to build this ship and escape his life and Ed just listens, just treats him gently. He sees Ed enraptured by Stede's things and thinks this man, he could be like me.

Stede isn't just thinking he could like the same things as I do and be a friend, though it is that, too. He is thinking he could *be like me*, he could want the secret things I want that never fit with the world I lived in. He could be the one who will fit in the kind of bed I want.

The show also shows the evolution of Ed amongst Stede's things as part of that. Ed lounges on the chaise almost immediately and he and Stede are swapping clothes four seconds after meeting but Ed sleeps above deck, at the front of the ship, for many of the nights he stays there. We see Stede bring him breakfast more than once (marmalade morning, tea morning) and Ed goes there when they part after almost kissing in the moonlight. It could be said that Ed hung out a lot in Stede's quarters but he slept elsewhere on the ship... until he comes back after Stede is gone. Then, he just moves into Stede's room and sleeps in his bed... even after The Kracken re-emerges. Even when they were briefly together in privateer camp, they had bunk beds. The last shot of Ed is him sobbing alone in Stede's bed, a real long distance run from the nights he spent looking after Stede and then offering him his hand and his more intimate name when they first met in the same spot.

It almost guarantees a scene eventually in the future of Stede and Ed waking up in the bed they just fit in, that's only really comfortable for them because they are with one another and are happy to sleep a bit snuggled up.