#whoops thats like another whole paragraph in the tags

[gilligans-islands]

i think its interesting that throughout all of ep 6 we can see stede and ed like sharing a connection but they are taking it slow. they are just having small moments together where they are together and enjoying each others company.

then of course Ned Low shows up and ruins everything by capturing and torturing the crew and he says many things to rile up both stede and ed who still havent like fully reformed their relationship and trust for eachother and it probably alights all their insecurities about their relationship plus they had to watch each other get tortured and almost die and after he chooses to kill ned stede is obviously shaken up both from killing a man and all of the shit he just went through and hes vulnerable and scared and lightly traumatized probably and ed goes to check on him and stede is just is a horrible headspace and he falls back on his old ways and acts on a whim by grabbing ed and pushing him up against the wall

and ed didnt have any better of a night than stede did, getting tortured and watching your lover get tortured fucking sucks and hes just as in a horrible headspace as stede and so he also acts on a whim and lets stede escalate and they kiss and then they have sex

and everything seems great between them the next morning but suddenly ed is throwing away his leathers—okay pretty sudden but maybe he was already planning to—and then ed is sharing how stede was kinda the one who saved his life when he almost died—okay kinda intense conversation over breakfast but maybe he was already planning on telling him and decided it was a good opportunity—and then later stede shares how he wrote ed letters expressing his love and threw them into the sea—and okay maybe they just felt like really sharing this morning—and then later at jackies ed is telling jackie about how it might not be a phase that he just wants to be a regular guy—and wow okay thats cool maybe hes just been thinking about it for a while—and then stede lights a man on fire who wants to kill him—and woah stede um kinda harsh you didnt even hear the man out—and then stede and ed meet up and stede got his ear pierced—thats cool unplanned but cool—and then ed tells stede that he took a job as a fisherman and is leaving—

and then suddenly you realize theyve fallen back into their old patterns of acting on whims again

suddenly they aren't taking things slow, suddenly they are sharing intimate things with each other with 0 apprehension

they are right back where they were in season 1 right down to ed wanting to get away from pirating like his life depends on it and stede wanting nothing more but to be a pirate and live out his fantasy

and this time they fight and ed outright says that things are going too fast and part of it is that he just wants to leave and he is scared but he feels like this because yeah

they are taking it too fast

they suddenly—on a whim—decided to deepen their relationship way faster than they should have entirely on accident just by—on a whim—deciding to have sex when they were both in a vulnerable state and needed comfort

i really dont think it was an accident that episode 4 decided to spell out for us that Ed and Stede are whim prone people. it wasnt just an explanation for why last season ended the way it did with them splitting up. it was an omen for what was eventually going to happen with them in these episodes. the inevitability that they were eventually going to succumb to their true natures if not given the proper space and time to work out the shit between them, if insecurities and expectations got piled onto them again.