The last of earth left to discover

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Mar 9

suffersinfandom:

Hey.

OFMD fans? Thank you.

Thank you for making art and writing fic. Thank you for typing out meta and analyzing overlooked details and arguing about interpretation and intention. Thank you for making gifs and recoloring stills. Thank you for cosplaying. Thank you for collecting news, memes, and behind-the-scenes from other platforms and bringing them to Tumblr. Thank you for sharing your favorite fanworks so the rest of us can see them.

Thank you for being good to others. Thank you for donating to fundraisers and mutual aid. Thank you for uplifting other voices and creating a safe space ship where even timid people who have never participated in an intense fandom before feel welcome.

Thank you to the folks who are kind to the people who disagree with them. Thank you to people who are truly willing to talk it through, who block instead of engaging negatively, and who ignore opinions that make them mad.

Thank you to everyone who likes and comments and reblogs. Thank you to the lurkers and the cheerleaders. Thank you to creators who are still afraid to share their creations but create anyway.

I love Our Flag Means Death and I love this fandom. I love you, and I hope you’ll stick around. No matter how much or little you participate, you’re part of the crew; whether we’ve spoken or not, you’re my friend.

Thank you.

queerly-autistic:

I keep seeing posts on social media thanking the OFMD cast and crew for their work and not mentioning Taika, and it’s driving me to distraction because Taika is absolutely fundamental to the existence of this show.

There’s a huge chance the show wouldn’t have been picked up at all if Taika hadn’t attached his name to it. And he didn’t just attach his name and walk away - he played a key role in developing the show. David has said that he was looking at the history with Taika and they both went ‘omg Stede and Blackbeard were fucking’ and decided to centre the show around that. Taika pushed for Rhys to play Stede. Taika saw Nathan’s comedy on instagram and went 'yep that’s Lucius’. Taika was desperate to play Ed, and fought to play him. Taika has spoken about how much he loves playing Ed, how it made him fall in love with acting again, to the point where he wears some of Ed’s jewellery and has gotten some of Ed’s tattoos actually inked on him. He poured everything he has as an actor into Ed (some of the stuff he had to perform, particularly at the beginning of S2, is difficult) and the show simply wouldn’t work without it. Taika directed the pilot. He loved the show enough to juggle filming S1 with post-production on Thor: Love and Thunder. When the show’s budget was slashed by 40%, and could no longer afford to film in LA, Taika would have been key to moving production to New Zealand - and if that hadn’t happened, S2 wouldn’t have happened. When a director went off sick with Covid during S2, Taika jumped in to direct half an episode and then didn’t take a director’s credit on it.

You do not have to like Taika. You do not have to agree with everything he does/says. But what we are not going to do is erase the absolutely key fundamental role that Taika has played in OFMD. This show simply would not exist, probably not in any form, but certainly not in the form we see and love, if not for Taika’s continuing and multi-level contribution.

I think Taika deserves every honour for his dedication, his enthusiasm, his humour, and his imagination. Without his Blackbeard, Our Flag Means Death would not be our Our Flag Means Death, but something unrecognizable.

rhysdarbinizedarby:

Rhys Darby shares what it means to him to have so many people resonate with the work and story on #OurFlagMeansDeath . 😎 #75thEmmys #Emmys

Source: televisionacad on tiktok

Haiku for renewal

Our Flag Means Death. Sweet 

Moonglow to show us diverse 

Ways to love and heal.



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Jan 7

amuseoffyre:

author-a-holmes:

lady-averie:

This might be unpopular but I’m not going to use simpler vocabulary in my writing if it’s out of character for the narrator. If my POV character is a botanist, he’s going to call a plant by its name. If you don’t know what it is you can either Google it or move on just knowing it’s a plant of some sort.

I don’t like this trend of readers being angry that not everything is 100% understandable for them. I want my characters to be believable as people and sometimes people use words people outside of their field will not understand. That’s not a bad thing.

You don’t have to understand every word to get the gist of what’s happening. I’m not going to slow down an action scene to describe every weapon because someone might not know them by name. They can just assume it’s a weapon because that makes sense in the context of the scene.

I just had a debate with myself over using the word mezzanine, wondering if I should describe it instead. Ultimately I decided the character would call it a mezzanine, and therefore readers could look up a new word if they didn’t know.

It’s how I learned words like myriad as a seven year old reading Lord of the Rings for the first time, why would I steal that experiance from someone else by simplifying language?

If Beatrix Potter can use the word ‘soporific’ (and create a whole new fascination with words in a 5 year old) in her kiddie books, don’t let readers’ demands stop you :D

Jan 7

hansoeii:

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The Doctor!

iamdexter123:

A good writer, like a good reader, has a mind’s ear. We mostly read prose in silence, but many readers have a keen inner ear that hears it. Dull, choppy, droning, jerky, feeble: these common criticisms of narrative are all faults in the sound of it. Lively, well-paced, flowing, strong, beautiful: these are all qualities of the sound of prose, and we rejoice in them as we read. Narrative writers need to train their mind’s ear to listen to their own prose, to hear as they write.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A 21st Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

celluloidbroomcloset:

teeny-tiny-revenge:

celluloidbroomcloset:

I’ve been thinking about this exchange between Izzy and Ed in “Discomfort in a Married State”:

“For years I’ve followed your every whim, I’ve managed your increasingly erratic moods, I’ve massaged this crew when they were worried about your judgment—”

“Mm, sounds stressful, Izzy.”

“It is.”

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Izzy has assigned himself the role of “managing” Blackbeard, but it’s quite obvious, both in Ed’s response and in the way he says it, that Ed has never wanted or expected him to. And he continues to try to manage Ed, even when Ed clearly tells him not to.

Both Ed and Stede have that word “whim” thrown at them by people who don’t really understand them - Izzy and Mary - and both at first resist the word (Stede even says “I object to the word whim”), then internalize it. It seems what are being called whims by outsiders are actually expressions of deep desires that neither Ed nor Stede have the verbal or emotional language to describe.

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It’s not a whim that has Stede running off to a be a pirate - it’s all the frustration and loneliness and repression - and it’s not a whim to go back to Mary - it’s a result of guilt and self-loathing. It’s not a whim that has Ed following the Revenge to meet Stede - it’s wanting to find someone who might be a kindred spirit. But neither of them can openly articulate those feelings, either to the people who are calling them whims or fully to themselves. Stede goes further than Ed does because so many of his desires are located in his repressed homosexuality, and once he’s able to articulate that - with Mary’s help - he understands his feelings. He still believes that he’s “whim-prone” in other ways, but not when it comes to Ed.

Ed is especially leery about his own desires, which have been managed by other people for so long, and about Stede’s. His idea to “run off to China” is a whim in a certain sense, but it’s expressing a desire to leave behind their old identities and form something new together. His desire to “take it slow” is about his own healing independent of Stede, but it’s also built on a fear that Stede is going to disappear again. After they have sex, Ed again falls into the fear that it was a whim, but it’s not his whim - it’s Stede’s. He’s scared that what meant so much to him doesn’t mean as much to Stede, or not enough for Stede to be able to let go of piracy and fame. He’s worried that piracy wasn’t a whim, but he was.

Both of them have been managed most of their lives, in different ways and by people and structures that they never wanted to manage them in the first place. It was all about keeping them in settled, socially acceptable places where they can’t escape, and casting doubt on the legitimacy of their desires. (I don’t think Izzy, and certainly not Mary, consciously think of it in these terms, and Mary especially has had to subsume her own needs as much as Stede has.)

In the scene with Izzy, Ed’s evidently pushing back at the management, and he probably has been for a while. But this is likely the first time where his desires are getting more articulated, after his conversation with Stede, and are the same moment when Izzy starts trying to exert even more control over him.

His finding the letter is a mirror to Stede’s conversation with Mary - the realization of who he is and who the man he loves is, and that the feelings he’s experienced not just for but from Stede are not whims but bone-deep love.

I feel like there might have been many small whims the both of them were accused of before they even meet, furthering this internalisation of being whim-prone. They’re both very curious people. They are easily enthusiastic about new and interesting things. They love knick knacks. They enjoy trying new hobbies. They have weird interests, often in things their environment doesn’t approve of. Ed’s Queen Anne’s cabin is full of stuff. And both Ed and Stede try to share their interests and enthusiasms with people around them. Ed wants Izzy to be interested in the clouds, because the clouds are important. He also wants Izzy to see the little model of the Revenge, because Ed is absolutely delighted by it, and he wants Izzy to also be delighted (Izzy is decidedly not delighted). Stede does arts and crafts with his crew, he opens up his library for their use (a little misguided since they can’t read, but he means well). When the lending books from the library is a bust, Stede shares his hobby of reading by reading the books to the crew. Both Ed and Stede are trying to connect and to share their interests with other people.

But before Stede ran away to sea, and even in the beginnings of his captaincy of the Revenge, nobody ever wanted part of his hobbies and interests. Mary hates the ocean. Playing pirates gives the kids nightmares. Picking flowers gets him ridiculed and thrown stones at. The crew doesn’t like the people positive management style.

And it’s hard to imagine Izzy’s reactions to Ed’s interests outside of Blackbeard stuff were ever any different than what we see on screen. Also his old shipmate Jack seems to only be interested in a very narrow and carefully managed side of Ed’s personality. It’s not the same as Izzy’s, but it’s still not a relationship where Ed will find most of his interests outside a very narrow acceptable scope tolerated, let alone encouraged.

But both Stede and Ed are desperate for approval. They want the people around them to approve of them. They bend themselves out of shape all the time to be accepted and palatable. They let others manage them. And I strongly assume that means they have squashed down a many new interests before they could fully bloom when faced with the disappointment and disapproval of their peers. How many hobbies have they taken up, enjoyed, but then immediately put down again when they earned disdain for them? How many interests have they dropped right after developing them because they got discouraged because everyone around them hated them? And what does dropping a new interest or hobby all the time feel like? If you live like this? Perhaps like you are prone to pick up weird random interests and then never sticking with them? Like you’re whim-prone?

They aren’t whim-prone. Neither of them is. They are excitable and curious and distractible, they are impulsive at times, but they aren’t actually prone to act out of random whims. All the “whims” we see, also in relation to each other/their relationship, are actually actions taken out of deeply felt, long standing desires, feelings and needs. As you said, Stede doesn’t run away to be a pirate on a whim. He has a whole ship built! Ed doesn’t decide to give up his career on a whim. He’s been wanting to escape it for a long time, falling in love with Stede just have him the final incentive. Stede running back to Mary isn’t a whim, the guilt’s for leaving the way he did has been there all the time, repeatedly felt and expressed several times when he was on his own (“my family is at sea now” and the whole bit with Nigel’s ghost not actually being about feeling bad about his death, for example). Stede coming back to sea is as far from a whim as it gets. It takes him months to catch up to Ed. Even Ed’s fishing isn’t much of a whim. Ed, after the run-in with Ned Lowe, is painfully reminded of all the reasons he didn’t want to be a pirate anymore, plus he just got Stede back, they slept together, it was clearly good, he’s feeling A Lot, but he knows piracy isn’t it for him anymore. He’s know for a long time, and yes he seems to pick a career very quickly, but it’s something he knows (or he thinks he knows), not something new and random he’s never done before, and technically he brings a lot of skills that should be useful to a fisherman (he’s a very accomplished sailor, and fishing is done at sea).

Whim-prone is a lie. They’ve been gaslit into believing that about themselves. But in reality they are two men who feel deeply and intensely and are so unused to acting out their complex emotions (not just those about each other, it’s all sorts of things outside of their love, although that’s of course a big and important thing) that they feel like they’re following a random whim whenever they do something they genuinely want to do, because they spent their lives mostly doing things they didn’t want to do because others told them to do them, while being discouraged and called moody whenever they did try to do something they felt enthusiastic about.

Yes, all of this, and very well put! That’s exactly what I was trying to say - what look like whims are products of deep and natural desires that they almost don’t have words for. Like when Ed kisses Stede for the first time - that’s not a whim, and it’s not a whim that he wants to go someplace where they can completely leave behind their old lives. He’s saying exactly what he wants, again: to be with Stede, in a place where they can be safe. That’s really all he ever wants.

rhysdarbinizedarby:

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Got to work on this wild and hilarious show and make some lifelong friends along the way. Go and watch @ourflagonmax season 2 now!!

Source: rachel.snaps on instagram

soup-fairy:

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Poison into positivity!

intsa: soupfairy_art

iamadequate1717:

piratecaptainscaptainpirates:

Given all the really excellent and interesting talk about this recently, I wanted to write up a quick list of ways we see Izzy being consistently abusive to Ed in season 1, just so I have a handy post to link to the next time someone asks me “wait, how is Izzy abusive?”

(Again, I genuinely like Izzy. I think he’s a great character, but dismissing how he behaves in s1 defangs him as a character, cheapens his s2 arc, and decontextualizes a lot of Ed’s behavior.)

Izzy is shown as being emotionally abusive to Ed throughout season 1, because he:

  • Controls the information Ed has access to. In s1e3, we see Izzy tell Ed his own version of events, twisting them to suit his purposes. He does this so easily and cleanly it’s clear he’s probably been lying to Ed to manipulate his perception of events for a long time.
  • Isolates Ed from others. We do not see Ed talk to any crew members before s1e4, and even then, Izzy cuts the conversation short. He also prevents anyone from seeing Ed in s1e10 until Ed makes him ask for Lucius. In s2 Ed tells us that he knew very little about Fang despite having worked with him for 20 years - Izzy seems to make a habit of making Ed unapproachable.
  • On that note, Izzy insults and demeans Ed to other crew members, creating his own narrative around Ed’s actions. He says he “massages” the crew when they’re worried about Ed’s judgment, but what he actually does is tell them Ed’s “half-insane.” He is creating a situation where Ed is reliant on Izzy for information and the crew feel like they need Izzy to interpret what he presents as the irrational demands of an insane man, even though we as the audience know Ed’s behavior is never as erratic or irrational as Izzy makes it out to be.
  • Insults and demeans Ed to his face. Izzy is not shy about calling Ed insane and unpleasant to his face, and Ed doesn’t seem surprised to hear it. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Ed admits while he’s in the gravy basket in s2 that he’s scared he’s insane - that’s one of Izzy’s favorite insults to apply to him and he’s clearly internalized it.
  • Ignores Ed’s feelings and wants when he’s not acting the way Izzy believes is appropriate. We see Ed constantly reaching out to Izzy in s1e4 to share his thoughts and excitement, and Izzy shuts him down every time. Izzy’s created a situation where Ed can only really talk to Izzy, and Ed is clearly desperate for human connection.
  • Pushes Ed to harm someone Ed loves, even when Izzy knows that Ed “adores” Stede and Stede makes him genuinely happy. Izzy is very insistant about getting Ed to kill Stede, even once it’s obvious Ed has already deeply bonded with Stede.
  • Literally “buys” Ed in return for selling Stede out. This is just gross and unacceptable, not to mention wildly racist. Frankly I think Ed showed remarkable restraint for only punching him once.
  • Tries to get Stede killed in front of Ed, multiple times.
  • Obviously, threatens and mocks Ed when Ed isn’t behaving “appropriately.” When Ed is starting to feel better in s1e10, and is reaching out to the crew and connecting with them, and is painting his nails and singing and generally behaving in a much more feminine and emotionally available way than Izzy would prefer, Izzy threatens him to force him back into the hyper-masculine Blackbeard persona he knows Ed hates and Ed has said he wants to move past.
  • Goads Ed into violent behavior and is delighted when Ed is visibly upset. When Ed chokes Izzy, Izzy is laughing and grinning and generally having a very nice time while Ed’s standing there with tears in his eyes and visibly terrified. He’s very happy to have gotten the reaction he was trying to provoke and doesn’t care about Ed’s feelings.

So, take it all together, and we can see that Izzy has created an atmosphere where he has put himself in control of Ed and has further manipulated the crew so they look to Izzy as a filter for Ed’s behavior so Izzy can completely control the narrative. When he thinks he’s losing control of Ed, that’s when Izzy tries to get Stede killed, without regard for Ed’s emotions. Izzy consistently insults Ed, ignores his desires and feelings, and prioritizes his control over Ed’s feelings.

Have I missed anything?

The one that gets me is how his actions are brushed aside because he’s “protecting” Ed. The English (and Calico Jack) only showed up in S1 because Izzy sent them, and Ed, Stede, and the crew of The Revenge would have just gone on an easy life of scaring the Dutch and having silly adventures otherwise and likely would have easily fallen out of piracy on their own when the Golden Age started to fall.

If someone does abusive crap to you (disparaging your feelings, calling you insane, forcing you to do extreme things against your judgment, isolating your social net and information network, etc) and calls it “protection” since they “have love for you”, I hope you have a support system to get out of that. Yikes.

sherlockig:

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meep-meep-richie:

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#babygirlprincess

wavesonhighwater:

frodo-of-the-nine-fingers:

the fact that the tonal shift in ofmd happens when Stede decides to walk away from the story is driving me insane. Like we see him have an insane amount of plot armor during the season and we are being told the story (until about episode 9 or 10) through his (and by extension Lucius’ eyes) and then he walks away from it and loses control and the story grows darker and darker until it’s almost unrecognizable

Stede is the fairy tale focal point. Without his perspective, we lose sight of the sillyness, the lightness and overall magic of the story. The Revenge was his magic castle, his tree house for the lost boys, his safe haven for the found family. And by walking away he gave it over to the harsh reality of high sea piracy. This reality will wrack his ship in more than one ways. And he needs to reastablish this feeling of safety and comfort for the people he grew to care about or they will be lost, sooner or later, bc they don’t fit anywhere else.

Ed has to find his own stability first. He can’t get swept up in Stede’s magic tale again, it would destroy them both.

It’s the story about maturing into someone you want to be. Ed has to get his shit together and stop playing everything off as unimportant {aka being cool}, embrace fragility, find out what he wants and grow stronger with it. Stede has to tap into resources he never needed before, leading people, learning real skills and finally fully being the f*cking lighthouse he only has been in the most disastrous way hence.

lottiematthewsceo-deactivated20:

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y’all…

(i’m starting to see it🫢)