#i hope youre right op
Okay I’m jumping in to the OFMD takes.
One of the many reasons I’m confident Lucius is fine after ep 10 is that Lucius is, in many ways, the audience insert.
In the opening episode, Stede is narrating to Lucius as a means of exposition to the audience. Lucius also reacts to Stede (and, later, Ed) in the way the audience is likely to in that moment in the story.
Stede is wandering a lawless port in pure white clothing? Lucius is cringing and certain they are about to get their asses kicked.
Ed has left Stede for his shitty ex? Lucius is the one who is ready to scold Ed over what he’s missing.
Ed is moping in a blanket fort? Lucius is worried about him. It would have been easy in that moment to have Lucius be similar to how he is in ep 8, dropping Ed’s stuff off on the beach. Instead Lucius, like the viewer, can see just how much Stede meant to Ed and is trying to comfort him.
Of course, the two best examples of this are “This is happening” and his last moments in ep 10.
In the moments before “This is happening,” a lot of shots of Ed and Stede could plausibly be from the perspective of someone on the ground across from them. You know, where Lucius is sitting. We keep cutting back to his reaction which, for a lot of us, was a similar expression to how we looked watching it (it’s also kind of funny that Lucius is then the one to confirm for the viewer that this–meaning an actual romance–is happening. It’s signalling to the viewers who clocked what was going on that yeah, they were right).
And at the end of ep 10, Lucius learns about Ed’s return to being “the kraken” at more or less the exact same moment the audience does. With about the same reaction.
