One of the (many) things I really like about OFMD is the casual use of words like love and adore — from Izzy of all people. None of the others outright state whats going on between Ed and Stede - Lucius comes the closest when he tells Ed “that bizarre little man likes you very much,” but thats as close as anyone comes to outright saying what they’re all seeing– except for Izzy.
Izzy, who you would imagine would be the LAST one to put a name to what’s happening, straight up tells Stede “and [Blackbeard] adores you.” And later when he’s bitching to Spanish Jackie, its “Stede comes along like oh I love, I love the way you wear your hair,” or whatever it is he says.
The other characters all watch the developments with wide eyes but don’t ever describe it, and meanwhile Izzy is wandering around saying “Yeah Blackbeard absolutely adores that little shit of a man and I hate it” and “yeah that little shit of a man loves my fearsome captain and I want to slaughter him for it.”
He hates what he’s seeing, but he calls it what it is, and idk, i really like that they a) straight up use the word “adore” to describe Ed’s feelings for Stede but also b) that its Izzy, in all his furious indignation and disgust, that says it.
jesus this got long. okay. so. lets talk about the silk. sorry to stede that i physically can’t stop writing this ain’t about you metas i promise your tits are still magnificent. so:
the way we are introduced to the red silk is through ed’s mother. the flashbacks to that moment make up 2/3rds of the flashbacks we get of ed’s life and they contextualize him immediately within class and race dynamics, but they also call back to one of the few close relationships ed is shown to have. we have two links to ed’s past: the origin of his self-shame, and the origin of his love of and desire for softness- for safety, even, if we think about the violence of race and class structures and how they inherently destabilize the ones they oppress.
obviously, with the little information we have there’s not much more I can put into those scenes and ed’s thoughts about them without veering into headcanon territory. but in addition to the race and class dynamics, those scenes do also make me think about queer, gnc men and our mothers. about what it’s like to hold the legacy of femininity without being a daughter. about the things mothers have learned from their own oppression that they pass on as immutable fact because they think it’s protective. what makes ed think of her now? he takes the silk out before the party, when he’s just met this man who has welcomed him into his own rich, white world of exquisite cashmere and melon spoons with open arms, the world his mother thought was unavailable to them on a cosmic scale. does he wish he could bring her with him too, show her what they can have, what he’s gotten? he takes it out again after the party, when he feels like he’s failed at that world, remembering her words and thinking she was right after all. maybe even seeing the protective edge to telling your child something like that, seeing that she wanted to protect him from thinking he could have more than the world would allow him to have and being all the more hurt for its rejection.
but. if she just wanted to protect him by telling him that this world was off limits, why would she give him a piece of it? she tells him that they are not the sort of people who get to have nice things in the same breath as she gives him one of those things. a tiny corner of it, sure, one probably gotten at a personal risk and without that world’s permission. isn’t that its own tiny expression of hope, hidden behind the words of warning? we are not the kind of people who get nice things, she says, and then gives him one anyway. isn’t there implied a hope that, maybe, they don’t have to be that kind of person to get nice things after all? that, maybe, rather than beating the rules of the race and class game on the game’s own terms, there is another way entirely? and doesn’t ed follow through on that in his own way– what is a pirate, after all?
the red silk is ed’s heart, no question, but his heart is not just about stede. it’s about his past, his context, and the fears and hopes of a person he loved enough to kill for, even when the act is so abhorrent to him that he never does it again, even when taking on a profession where murder should be part of the job description. it’s frankly a little presumptuous of stede to take ed’s heart out of his hands, reshape it and put it back in his chest- but I think you have to be a little presumptuous to love. you have to take it on faith that the other person will let you, and you have to trust yourself enough to touch them in those sacred places gently. (this is, of course, the hurdle that trips stede later.)
we don’t see the red silk again until after stede has left ed, after izzy has made it clear to ed that it is impermissible for ed to step out of his role. the silk that was a taste of happiness, safety, and security, that he trusted a man from another world to take and hold and return to him, that was a reminder of a person who loved him enough to give him a fine thing to hold onto even as she tried to shield him from the world it came from, a world she knew would reject him. ed lets this symbol of his past slip away, while fully taking on the mantle of the other symbol: the kraken, his shame and fear and self-loathing. he goes back further than the bored, tired blackbeard we met at the beginning of the season, the one who carried the red silk from years ago around in his pocket. he nails the outside world’s caricatured construction of him to the wall as inspiration and he becomes it. he paints his face out of the picture, throws his heart into the sea, and retreats to a conception of himself that, while he hates it, he cannot deny it has protected him. and he has reached his limit: he needs to be protected now more than he needs to be happy or loved. I’ve talked before about how this reversal is not all about stede, about how it’s also about ed’s self-rejection, and this symbol exemplifies that well.
what makes me really sad about that scene is not that ed threw away something stede alone had touched, something that was a symbol of stede’s love. he does plenty of that later. what makes me really sad is that ed throws away this symbol of his hope for himself, his mother’s hope for him, the hope that maybe, against all odds, he could someday be the kind of person who escapes the cycle of poverty and trauma. the hope that she gave him, in the only way she could. and all that’s left behind is the kraken. all that’s left behind is the ultimate expression of that cycle on ed, of what happens ahen the only way left to protect yourself and the ones you love is to do more violence to them before they can do it to you. without a thread left of the hope for another way.
and where I hope ed can get eventually is an understanding that him committing that original violence was not unforgivable. its unforgivable that the world put him in the position where he had to do that violence, but doing it was just as much an expression of love as what his mother gave him. he was doing the only thing available to him to make the world a little better for someone. his story is already a potent rebuttal of the lie that if you do violence against someone to stop them doing it to someone else, you become no better than them. killing his father hurt ed deeply, but he didn’t let it consume him, and he fought to occupy a position where he could be safe without ever doing it again. that’s what I hope he gets to see by the end of his story. he doesn’t need to be afraid of the kraken, because the driving force was always love, always the fact that he was a good person in an impossible situation, all the way down.
The thing that makes Izzy and Ed so fun to analyze–and what I think makes their relationship the subject of such wildly different interpretations across the fandom–is that, like many things in OFMD, they are running on multiple layers of text and subtext, symbolism and metaphor at once. So textually they are first mate and captain which suggests one possible range of power dynamics, and certainly to hear Izzy tell it he is the long-suffering assistant to an increasingly erratic and distracted boss. But they are also (metaphorically) agent/manager and aging rockstar, which is a different power dynamic. AND Izzy is the metaphorical spouse that Ed is uncomfortable in a married state with and the metaphorical toxic ex that he goes back to after Stede breaks his heart. AND they are a white man and a Māori man with (probably?) similar class experiences but distinctly different racial experiences. Izzy calls Ed bossandBlackbeardandEdward and even Ed. He stands at almost-military attention in front of Ed’s desk and lies to his face about whether Stede knows who Ed is, and he seeks Ed out in private and offers to kill Stede for him, as an act of service and an offer to protect Ed’s reputation, because he knows Ed doesn’t kill people, and he flat-out ignores Ed’s no and tries to kill Stede later anyway and is completely confident that Ed won’t stop him even though by their official power dynamic Ed should be able to halt his sword hand with a word. They have a scene together that ends with Ed’s hand around Izzy’s throat and Izzy is in control of that scene the entire time. And it’s all happening at once! And I think which layer you focus on and which lens you see them through changes how you read their dynamic a lot! It’s just really rich and complex and layered writing and acting aaaaaaaaaaaaa!
It came to my shock-a lot of white fans of OFMD seem to have not caught up on the fact we’re explicitly shown Edward Teach is a man of color from biracial origins in Our Flag Means Death. And that identity, goes so much into how his character is written and reacts to situations. I would argue Episode 4 and 5 are extremely deliberate in their showcasing of how his identity has informed his choices and the way he behaves around others. I want to highlight just a few moments, that stood out to me as a someone who is also biracial and light skinned-that I don’t think some people have picked up have a deeper meaning.
From the get-go we’re introduced to two sides of Blackbeard. Either as ‘the terror of the seas’ or an extremely clever-but at times irritatingly eccentric man. There’s an element of duality, multiple faces, and most aptly code-switching to him the moment he is introduced. This post really wonderfully goes into all the elements of performance and multiple identities Ed seems to juggle. Code switching is something many POC learn though-which is learning to behave one way with white people-and another with people of your own race-or other races, and so on.
We see from flashbacks Ed is biracial, with a white Father and Maori mother (the same biracial make up with genders swapped, of Taika himself). The framing of this shot above is so significant. He and his mother cowering from his white Father (patriarchy, colonialism against indigenous peoples like himself and his mother), and Ed is positioned slightly closer to his mother in the middle of them-another demonstration he is closer to his indigenous/POC side than his white side.
It’s wildly significant the first murder he has to commit is his Father, very much showing that attempt to resist colonialism-as an institution and the side of him descended from it. And it leads to those fracturing identities.
Being biracial puts one in a position-you are not as excluded as darker skinned people of color who have very limited access to white spaces in this time period-but nor are you ever seen as belonging in those white spaces either. We know he grew up in proximity to whiteness hence having access to even see things like the red silk in the first place-but he never felt allowed to be part of it. It puts Edward in a place where he is both an outsider with other POC and in white spaces. So how do you cope with that? Do you soften yourself as much as possible to be non-threatening enough to pass in a white space? Or do you lean into white perceptions of your ‘otherness’ and play it so you can’t be further mocked or excluded-you are choosing your own isolation and denying them the chance to do it to you. Hence Edward’s need to make himself a larger than life fearful ‘monster like’ figure like the Kraken.
Which doesn’t mean he enjoys that image at all. Becoming “The Kraken” began as an attempt to fight off white violence and has continued so long into life. Especially where we meet Edward in the series-he’s grown weary of being so stereotyped as the ‘beastly POC’.
When Edwards’ shown this image-he gets especially upset. It’s worth noting he’s referred to as a “Devil” in the image too. And while yes it is a scene of him exhausted of the weight of reputation of “Blackbeard” it’s also an image of a man of color being shown a racial stereotype of himself.
The fact he calls himself a ‘vampire clown’ and is frustrated at the amount of guns he’s shown to carry-he’s showing outrage over how he is stereotyped as an othered monstrous and hyper-violent caricature- something men of color are often forced to deal with. The fact he is a man of color-is probably what has allowed his reputation to become so fearsome. White people will automatically assume he is more violent because he is brown. All the more significant his bathtub confession that he personally dislikes the act of murder-and rarely personally ends a person’s life. It’s only because of this racial stereotype that rumor has been able to grow so large that he is killed HUNDREDs like Black Pete says in episode 2.
It makes all the more sense in the next episode he is very anxious for an attempt to join a white upper-class party. Especially after being called a “donkey” when attempting to learn about dinner party etiquette. Another example of white people excluding him due to his mixed race status.
The fact he is mixed is part of the reason he’s even able to get into the room with the rich aristocrats rather than be confined to the servant’s quarters-or immediately othered like Frenchie and Olu are ('you’re so much better than my african servant!’)
However it’s extremely significant he only becomes popular and gains the attention of the white aristocrats (and he is the only person of color in the entire party) when he makes a joke about violence. From the get-go they’re laughing and amused because he is again (Not realizing it this time) playing into their stereotype of him. A violent man of color-but presenting it in playful manner they feel un-threatened, much like white people watching minstrelsy shows in the 1800s-but still being so afraid of black men they had numerous laws to keep them separate.
And immediately, when Edward catches on they’re not amused by him as a person-but by the caricature they see of him he’s humiliated and leaves the party. It’s an example of a lesson he learned long ago. He has to be either extremely non-threatening-a joker-if he wants to be tolerated in a white space, or he can be extremely threatening, play into their stereotype-and use their fear to avoid being further hurt. We see a touch of that in episode 4 when he dodges Izzy’s questions by being especially eccentric and difficult to read-making jokes and random statements than give sincere straightforward answers that can be mocked. It’s very deliberate he takes out his knife when answering Izzy’s threat/demand he needs to make choice-it’s a refusal to be openly intimate-and a reminder not to tread too closely.
Edward’s not stupid/or socially inept for not realizing he was being mocked from the start-he had really believed Stede’s lessons and clothes had given him practice to blend into a white space. So the first thing he does when realizing he’s being mocked is code switch back into violence-pull out his pistol. Stede talks him down-but it only works because he knows he’s outnumbered in this scene. If he showcases any violence or anger as a man of color he would be jumped upon immediately and thrown in that ships holding cell.
It’s all the more significant Stede is a white man too-when he leaves Edward in the end of episode 9. It’s not just a break up, it’s an example of Ed once again feeling not good enough-and excluded from the society Stede chose to return to. Part of the reason Ed fell in love with Stede is Stede was willing to see Ed as a whole person-he admired his anger AND sensitivity-and as a person who has also been an outsider due to his very overt queerness-Stede can form a kinship with Ed due to their mutual ostracizes from society.
While there’s been multiple good readings about Izzy pining for Ed, and Izzy’s frustration against Stede being driven because he is a rich person invading a working class space-as this post pointed out, Izzy is still a white man asking Ed to behave as that hyper-violent caricature that has been carved out for him. That is where he sees Edward’s worth. The fact Izzy immediately begins mocking him for missing Stede-it reminds Ed so clearly, he can not drop his act around white people. Or he will be harassed, mocked, and threatened.
Edward has to become the Kraken to survive in his mind. Hence why he uses a caricature image of himself as inspiration. To survive heartbreak, to survive the white people who would rip him apart if he isn’t threatening, to maintain control of his life. There’s a reason he has to kill Lucius-who he revealed too much of his heart to, vulnerability is not an option for him. When you’re biracial-the closer you are to whiteness, the more acutely you will be held up for failing at it. It is much easier for him to be guarded, threatening, and give into the perception of him-rather than have his heart broken over and over-told how he is not good enough-too sensitive,
Which is why this Kraken image-Blackbeard-it’s all a tragedy. Edward knows-as much as being Blackbeard makes him safe-it makes him painfully lonely. And it’s an identity he has only fallen into because it was assigned to him-and because he feels convinced at the end of this season there is no space for him, as a queer man of color to have life full of love, softness, and emotional availability.
I certainly hope this reading is enlightening for folks who never read Edward or the show this way! I think it may cause people to rethink how they characterize Edward in their own writings or artwork, since the amount of people who seem to love leaning into an element of making him monstrous, well that’s exactly why he is suffering in the show. He doesn’t think a man of his identities has any other choice.
