I love the popular headcanon/theory of Ed hearing about Stede’s “death” in season 2 and being completely broken over it, because:
1) the angst is absolutely delicious
2) I love the implication of Ed hearing “it appears that Stede Bonnet fought with a leopard and then got run over by a carriage and then a piano fell over him” and immediately falling for it. He just hears about this absolute looney toon of a death, this absolute muppet tragedy and goes “yeah that tracks”
Izzy Hands, bastard man. I posted this yesterday, then took it down because I saw too many things I wanted to change. I want to play around with how I render more, so I’m drawing stills so I don’t have to think too hard about what to draw (also I just loved the lighting on this one).
“It ended badly in real life, but we’re not doing real life because we’ve got a Polynesian-Jewish man from New Zealand playing Blackbeard. Once you’re doing that, you’re not doing real life.“
I fucking love how Our Flag Means death has explicit, unabashed queer romance and character but ALSO has wall-to-wall metaphors and symbolism. We can have the kiss but we can ALSO read into the colors of wardrobes and whether a character wears gloves or not. We can read into the metaphor of Stede’s secret closet and letting Ed in, and ALSO have a fully fleshed-out storyline about a gay man in a loveless marriage telling his wife “his name is Ed.” We have the red silk scene in the moonlight, of gently handling a bit of cloth to represent a heart, and we have “what makes Ed happy is…you.”
We get all the subtle details of brief touches and meaningful glances, but not instead of explicit queerness—it’s that the unabashedly queer characters and story deserve that level of build-up and poetry.
like the research nerd i am, i decided to get together all the evidence (aka: all the scenes where izzy and ed talk about death, stede’s or otherwise, since you always need the whole data set on this kind of thing to sort out the answer) to try to suss out if the text tells us whether izzy knows about ed’s fine line on killing.
just to make it easy on myself, i’ll start with breaking down the scenes first, in order from e3-6.
e3 -
- izzy asks if “we” should attack/kill/feed to the sharks stede and co; this could imply ed would take part, but it could also mean the rest of the crew sans ed, so inconclusive.
e4 -
- the talking tough way ed mentions the spaniards dying seems a bit odd if izzy knows ed never kills directly/feels morally weird about the subject, but also inconclusive.
- “what’s the plan”/“the ushze” conversation about the revenge’s crew again on the ambiguous end; it doesn’t really give us much on who would be doing the executing.
- until a little later! when izzy casually orders ivan and fang to kill the crew for him. this doesn’t give us much re: ed, but it does show izzy offloads his own killing as well and isn’t the Ship Executioner as a matter of course.
- during their first conversation about stealing stede’s identity ed implies he’ll be doing the killing, and izzy doesn’t appear to assume otherwise/show any surprise or shock ed would break a decades-long rule.
(which to me is the first potentially slam dunk piece of evidence: the natural response to finding out something like that would be anything but easy acceptance, if izzy was aware this would be the severest of breaks in pattern for ed. it’s like… we all have that one friend who orders the same thing every single time they go to a restaurant, and if they ever switch it up people go OH SHIT, THO. this is more than that— this is like a lifelong vegan ordering a whole rack of ribs without warning. essentially: when you know somebody’s rock-solid established patterns and they up and break one, you don’t go yeah sure okay. i have no shock.)
e5 -
- ed tells fang to kill the french captain for him and again there’s no shock or indication this is unusual, so it’s definitely not just izzy doing ed’s killing either way.
e6-
- opens with izzy’s internal monologue that after two weeks of spending 24/7 living up each other’s assholes he’s “beginning to suspect” ed himself isn’t going to kill stede. which seems odd, if izzy has any idea ed doesn’t kill— why would he be surprised ed’s getting cold feet at all? and if it took him two weeks to be like, wait. ed’s maybe NOT gonna kill this guy??? even though he knew killing was a line for ed, that seems a weird way to say/approach this situation.
(on a formatting note: the fact that this is the single moment of internal thoughts given as voiceover/monologue on the series marks it out as important and worth thinking deeper about. the writers made sure to establish even in the privacy of his own head, izzy isn’t thinking to himself anything but ‘huh. maybe ed… isn’t going to do it????’ and that it took him literally two weeks to suss out ed’s flirting, not getting ready to do a murder.
they also juxtapose the monologue with ed being obviously flirty and enjoying himself (so obviously that Fang and Ivan can see it), so on the emotional intelligence/reading the room and seeing things he doesn’t want to see side: if izzy’s been with ed for years and it took him two weeks to notice ed was playing footsie vs plotting murder, that’s another mark against the idea that he can read ed like a book.)
- then we get a direct line into the scene where izzy tells ivan and fang ed is for sure gonna kill stede, he promised. so unless we’re meant to take away that izzy is aware this would be huge for ed and is simultaneously not running cover/setting up things to pressure ed before he ever offers to do it himself (or even thinks he’ll have to!) this feels like more evidence he has no idea. (because the use of internal monologue just told us izzy isn’t lying to ivan and fang here: he 100% expects ed to do it, and not that he’ll want or need izzy to step in.)
- which leads into izzy bringing ivan and fang in to push ed. (and being a bit of an unreliable narrator once again, as he speaks for ivan and fang despite the earlier scene where they push back on him and don’t agree with his desire move ed along.) if we read in that izzy knows ed doesn’t kill, this positions izzy as the kind of skilled manipulator that just doesn’t scan for the rest of what we see from him. the kind of sneaky/fucked up you have to be to know ed’s line here and only implicitly threaten that image while also bringing in fang to remind ed about the dog doesn’t scan for izzy’s blaring sirens/neon sign mode of persuasion. izzy sort of just says FUCKIN DO THE FUCKIN THING I WANT! FUCK!!! he’s not a sneak around corners dude. if izzy 100% thinks ed kills people then this is a scene of him getting more and more impatient about annoying foot dragging.
- then we get to: “i’ll happily end it.” / “no, it’s my mess. i’ll do it.” izzy only volunteers to kill stede for ed after two weeks of waiting and after pulling in ivan and fang and still getting nothing, and again he expresses no surprise or doubt at ed’s continued promises he doesn’t need the assist, either verbally or physically.
(this is also the only time izzy offers to kill for edward, in the entire run of the show, outside “you’re not doing this. so i must” before the duel begins. izzy says over and over he absolutely expects ed to kill and isn’t assuming it would be hard or a break from pattern, and only once in ten whole episodes offers to do it for him. these are very careful writers: i can’t imagine this is a mistake.)
- this is immediately followed in the same conversation by izzy saying “send him to doggy heaven” as a followup to the offer which… again, as ever, makes me die laughing. but also shows us: izzy still has zero real doubts ed himself is gonna do this, and has once again not acted like somebody who thinks this is hard for ed, or a change in pattern. he offered, but by the end of the conversation izzy is back to: yeah, of course ed will do it.
so, my baseline argument: just given what we see in the text, it seems far more likely izzy doesn’t know ed doesn’t kill.
it’s either that or he’s somehow aware but not in any way confused/shocked/even vaguely suspicious that ed is changing this long-held rule out of nowhere, and is comfortable using it against ed despite knowing in a way that positions him as more of a manipulator and not just a guy trying to hurry ed along and get rid of stede, already.
beyond that izzy never mentions ed’s choice not to directly kill a single time, even in his own brain or when telling ed he wishes he was dead in the finale; it seems a huge writing oversight to leave that out, if izzy is trying to provoke ed and/or prove assert with worth to ed while enforcing what he assumes is ed’s natural state. if izzy understands ed is not actually that legend and in fact uses the legend to keep people from noticing what’s behind it on a practical level, shoving the legend in his face and saying it’s all ed is doesn’t scan.
and what’s more, we know ed has put on a good pirate show. he’s cut off toes before, he’s maimed people, and he takes parts in raids just like everybody else: to be blunt, there are a hell of a lot of ways to hurt people reeeeeal bad without directly killing them. if you shoot or stab or whack somebody real hard and leave them there and they die like, twenty minutes later when you’re already gone, that suits ed’s definition of not killing just fine too. there’s a lot of hard to notice ground between ‘leaves to die’ and ‘doesn’t kill’.
which leads me into the human nature argument, and the fact that the show establishes ed is the kind of person who thinks about how to conjure and use fear to control people, and thus needs to understand people in order to accurately assess their fears. on ed’s side, if you make yourself known to be the sort of man who cuts off poor bastards’ toes for a laugh or sets ships aflame and all that, people don’t ask themselves: wait, does this guy kill people though?
it’s part of why we have the whole ‘but he seemed like such a nice/quiet/etc guy!’ trope whenever somebody does some fucked up shit. most people don’t notice a lot happening around them, because they aren’t looking for it and don’t expect to see it. people fail to notice things on the scale from infidelity to a serial murder habit in their intimate circles alllll the time.
and then on izzy’s side, we are shown a real lack of emotional intelligence and/or social observational skills over and over. it takes him two whole weeks to even begin to suspect ed doesn’t want to kill stede at all, he can’t really improvise or adapt to any sort of situation that breaks with his expectations of how things should go, he can’t manage the crew the second ed isn’t around (pre-canon and in canon) or tell a mutiny is brewing even though everyone but pete disappears to go plan it, he can’t stop said mutiny once in progress, etc etc etc.
he’s also built up an image of ed that isn’t about who ed actually is, and then built his own career and image around being Blackbeard’s First Mate. we really have to think of things from izzy’s perspective: blackbeard is a legendary pirate, izzy came into his service when he was already a legend, and izzy’s concepts of the world do not seem to include “it’s cool if you don’t like to kill people”. we are given absolutely zero evidence izzy would consider that anything but a sign of horrifying weakness, and lots of evidence he thinks ed is someone who doeskill.
given all the evidence, everything we know of izzy’s character and how he processes the world/ed, and the fact that these are very good writers who know human nature and how to craft a story, i would say with a fair amount of certainty it’s more likely izzy has no idea ed draws that line.
You know, what’s really heartbreaking for me right now?
Thanks to tumblr I’m fully invested in shipping Ed and Stede despite having watched only 1 minute of the show. I really want to watch Our Flag Means Death -
BUT
After 2 minutes on Wikipedia, checking the Blackbeard page, I know that, despite what the show will make us believe or let us witness, it can only end in tragedy. I can’t unread the sentence that tells me what happens to Blackbeard. I’ll always have that in mind no matter how sweet the final episode might end.
So yeah, haven’t watched the show, love Ed and Stede, am devastated by the knowledge of what really happened and whenever I’ll manage to watch it (care to help me out? we don’t have it yet in Germany) it will be tainted with sadness.
Just realized something about Our Flag Means Death— it’s Peter Pan.
Stede is Wendy, telling bedtime stories to his ship of lost boys (and Jim). He’s bringing romanticized English domesticity to the high seas— and Blackbeard is enraptured by him, particularly by *that* part of him: the hidden closet of outfits, the cozy library full of books Stede has actually read, the sense of wonder and newness Stede brings to Ed’s old boring swashbuckling world.
Ed wants to become part of Stede’s world— trying out thimbles and kisses, or fine clothes in this case. They gather a crew of lost boys (and Jim) and Stede’s influence changes and softens them, while Ed challenges, endangers, and inspires them; their dream of the biggest, baddest, bestest lost boy there is. He’s immature, he’s fickle, he’s utterly captivating; he never grew up and he will always be the kraken on the dock.
Captain Hook, or the British empire, chases Peter Pan across the waves— for Ed’s legend but also for the harms he’s caused them— and then they eventually recognize Stede’s importance and use him against Ed, too.
And like with Peter Pan, Stede eventually leaves both Ed and the pirate life: Stede abandons Neverland to go home and “grow up”— returning to Mary. And here’s where he breaks the pattern: unlike Wendy, he comes back.
But even that is more complicated, and in interesting conversation with the original story: there is no “real world” to go back to, really. There is no correct way to grow up.
Stede cannot “go back” and “grow up”— because that path was always a lie. Mary, in his absence, has discovered a new path for herself into her own wondrous, adventurous world; she’s up-ended the fantasy of Growing Up, being serious, or a “normal” life and adulthood. It’s wonderful! I love Mary. He could go back, but their old life and marriage was fake— that was the real game of pretend.
Mary hollows out her life and their world in Stede’s absence and says: these parts were nonsense, and this worth keeping, and this worth building. It gives Stede the bravery to go back, but also the clarity and the context to see that neither world is more real than the other— that his love for Ed is real, too, and not something to be outgrown. He refuses the moral. Wendy goes back to Neverland to find the lost boys, to find Peter.
But most importantly: this means Izzy Hands is Tinkerbell
love the way david jenkins refuses to apologize for shit just not making sense. how do they get places so quickly? doesnt matter. why is ed wearing full leather wouldnt he be sweating like hell? oh yeah it’d be awful to be a pirate in that, but it’s hot, next question. he does not hesitate to just be like. eh who gives a shit. they’re in love, who cares about how the boat got there. it’s all fake anyway. here watch taika and rhys kiss.
best moment in ofmd is “what’s her name?” “ed. his name is ed.” and mary just smiles and hugs stede so tight. there is no sadness or surprise. instead, there’s happiness, relief, and realization.
a lot of people love this moment because it’s when stede realizes he’s in love. i love this moment because for mary, everything makes sense now. from her perspective, she was trying everything she could do to make the relationship work. she was sentimental, she gave him gifts that represented their devotion, she wanted him to spend more time with his kids, and she wanted to be close to him. but stede was always distant, holding back, and wanted to uproot the life they had for something different. mary must have thought there was something wrong with her. for years, she was slowly falling apart trying to save their relationship, only for stede to withdraw even more, and eventually abandon everything she tried to build with him.
but “his name is ed” changes her perspective on all of that. everything makes sense now. stede could never love her romantically. not because there’s something wrong with her, not because she isn’t enough, not because he hates her or the children or the life they had together, but because he’s gay. she realizes that they were both trapped and unhappy. and she also realizes they can be free now, and they can love each other another way. i can’t imagine how healing that must have been for her.
