#his name is ed
OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH HEADCANON #1
Shared custody
Imagine this: Stede and Mary agree that the children shall still spend time with their father. They send letters back and forth, gifts and stories get exchanged and they spend their summer holidays and maybe some smaller with him on the boat. So after a lot of letters the first pirate vacation is about to start. The last letter to Mary contains this: “For obvious reasons I can’t be seen in town will therefore not be able to collect the children myself. Instead, I’ll send my most loyal and trustworthy crew mates to you. I promise, they will bring them to me safe and sound and return them to you just as well.”
When Mary opens the door, she is confronted with a large black man and a mad witch with a bird on his head.
She is probably close to fainting and might reconsider the arrangements made. But then Olu speaks in his well mannered tone, introducing himself and the first mate of the ship, and all is well.
That is until the next day the rumour mill tells her that the infamous Blackbeard has been seen sightseeing with a few guards/crew members. “Yes, Edward Teach himself! Strolling around town like he knew where to go and what to look at!” This is when Mary yells into face of the poor shocked blabbermouth “His name is Ed??!!”
Somehow Stede failed to mention that he was in love with Blackbeard and the kids are staying with That Man on the same ship.
As the kids return full of joy, new skills (for better or worse), wonderous stories and a fondness for a certain captain, Mary decides that maybe he’s not so bad and that she really likes to meet him. When they eventually do, they’re fast friends (after some awkwardness but then the kids run in and hug him, tease him and they all have a good laugh).
I think we need to be very careful about agreeing with Ed when he says he’s the kraken. Because I don’t think it’s true, and I don’t think the show WANTS us to think that it’s true. Yes, Ed THINKS the kraken is him, but the kraken is actually a bunch of invisible arms that maneuvered everything into place so that Ed was forced to make an impossible decision that would be deeply damaging to him no matter what, when he was too young to understand all the forces at work on him. The kraken is the institutionalized violence that allows white men to believe they’re owed something and therefore deserve to take it, that pushes marginalized people into poverty and holds them there, that turns a blind eye on white men who abuse their families, and that gives those families no recourse but to stay. The kraken is the greed of the men in that system which upholds their actions as a part of the natural order of things while condemning a child for doing what he had to do to save someone he loved.
There’s a reason we were shown Ed helplessly watching as the kraken killed his dad before we ever saw the truth of what happened. There’s a reason why he doesn’t use this incident to curry favor with the pirates despite it being the only death he actually caused with his own hands. It’s not like they would have blamed him after finding out his father was a total piece of shit. He doesn’t want to tell the story because telling the story as it really happened would expose how little agency he actually had in the situation. And even then, he sees it as a personal failing, and sees himself as a perpetrator rather than a victim of the system.
But we are shown that it’s not really true. The violence didn’t start with him; it’s not coming from him. Divorced from the circumstances he inhabited beyond his control, we see that he’s not a naturally violent person, and is in fact less deadly than a lot of other people in the same situation. Because following that incident, he immediately removed himself from the society that forced his hand, and put himself in a place where he actually DOES have agency. And he doesn’t kill. The people he comes across when he captures merchant ships play just as much a part in upholding the system as his father did, likely even more of one due to their class and wealth, and at least some of them must have been as personally despicable, but now that he’s in a position where he CAN choose not to kill, he chooses not to. Even with Lucius, it’s like he said after Jack was bragging to Stede about the men Ed killed setting fire to their ship: technically, the fire killed them. If Lucius is dead, then technically the water killed him.
It’s no coincidence that the one pressuring Ed to kill is a white man, and that this white man is telling him a killer is what he’s meant to be. It’s all just white men using people of color to cement themselves in or maneuver themselves into positions of power. Izzy sees this perceived monstrosity of Ed’s as a positive thing to be used against the institutions he hates, because he has believed the lie that Ed and people like him are the true danger to society and its people. Even from the outside, he still can’t see it. This is how the system works: it maneuvers people like Ed—specifically, people of color, and in particular queer people of color—into untenable situations, and when they react to those circumstances the only way they can, the system holds them up and says look. Look at what these people are. Look at what they do. And so in this way the system reinforces itself. It reinforces itself by getting the majority of people within the system—and even outside it, because its power doesn’t exist in a vacuum—to see things this way. Society needs its monsters. It fools its (often unwitting—that’s what makes it so insidious) agents into thinking Ed is the danger to their safety, and not the system itself. And the worst part is that it convinces Ed of this too.
Now, we have to see things for what they are and stop letting it convince US.
