[our flag means death. 2 images. Top: Lucius tenderly kissing Black Pete after Pete presented him with a gift. Bottom: Lucius saying “I love you”. The “you” was added, to replace “it”.]
I’m slightly tempted to go back and find every instance of someone in OFMD talking about what Blackbeard/Ed was like before we meet him. The show is just littered with references like, “He’d kill you if you called him Ed,” or listing the atrocities he committed like burning a ship full of people alive or feeding people their own toes, and even casual cruelties like telling Fang to put his dog down if he wants to join the crew…
… and the thing is, Ed is so lovely that we kind of dismiss all these statements the same way Stede does? They’re treated like comedy beats or tall tales at most. We’re kind of asked to forget and ignore them as being inaccurate—despite the fact they’re often coming from people who know Ed VERY WELL, much better than Stede knows him and for much, much longer— and we’re still being told to ignore them aaaalllll the way up until Ed’s heel turn back into the Kraken (a form of Blackbeard that might arguably turn out to be a way worse version than even the hair-raising rumors we’ve heard before this point).
I want to compile them because I think they may have all been true. And not just true but actually blazing neon signposts for what we can expect to see from Ed in S2. Sure, I think he’ll be redeemed, and yes I think his actions will be tempered by his regrets and the pain he’s in and the fact that maybe he still doesn’t really want to be doing all this anymore. But I think before we can get a proper healing arc for Ed like the one we got for Stede we have to see just how bad he really was and guys, I think it was really bad and that we’ve been told this outright the whole time.
Not exactly on topic but this just makes me think about how OFMD creates tension by butting genres up against each other that have different expectations surrounding the consequences of actions and extent of harm caused by violent acts.
What I see OP talking about here is how we have two genres in conflict: the gritty pirate semi-realistic world, where harsh reality forces people into making horrible choices and everyone is deeply traumatized and violence is extremely normalized, vs. the muppet world, where slapstick rules and no one actually dies and if you cut off your finger your boyfriend will just whittle you a new one and you can take a sword through your guts as long as goes through the right spot. In the gritty pirate world, we acknowledge that the horrible things people do to each other are horrible, but everything is pretty horrible so do we really care? Plus, we can probably find a way to excuse these actions if they can be rationalized somehow. In the muppet world, the horrible things people do to each other aren’t actually horrible for…muppet reasons. The only “people” who die are the ones who deserve it, and any disability can be accommodated with a bit of creativity, and if what they did really was that horrible, then just chalk it up to them being quirky and move on.
Anyway, so we have Ed, who originates in the gritty pirate world, and Stede, who originates in a period drama, there together on the Revenge, which is the locus of the muppet world. The deaths and maimings that Ed was responsible for happened in the gritty pirate world, but for the most part, we’re talking about it in the muppet world. The best example of this is when Calico Jack is talking about Ed burning the ship with all the crew inside. Jack describes it in great detail, down to the skin melting off the victims’ faces. Stede appears pretty disturbed by the telling and Ed seems somewhat ashamed. In the pirate world, we’ll accept a good excuse, but Ed doesn’t provide rationale for these actions. Instead he tries to brush it off, saying, “Well technically, the fire killed those guys,” which is a very funny muppety line.
So here I ask the question: Am I supposed to frame Ed’s actions described here as “horrible things that are inexcusable even in the pirate world” or as “something Ed did when he was feeling quirky back in the day, and it doesn’t matter anyway because the victims are muppet-people for whom death is not necessarily the final consequence”? I’m not sure, and I love that. That Calico Jack is pretty muppety compared to the other pirates we’ve seen (Izzy particularly, and Blackbeard & Ivan & Fang in the scenes prior to them being on the Revenge) doesn’t really help me come to a solid conclusion.
Later, when the English capture the Revenge, the muppet world breaks down, at least for Stede and Ed. Stede then tries to go back to his period drama, but Mary has created her own muppet world that he’s not a part of. In a period drama, the presumed-dead husband would likely be greeted with, if not fanfare, then at least some measure of joy or drama, not your wife vomiting at the sight of you when you interrupt her gathering of happy widows. Stede is not the right kind of muppet for Mary’s muppet world, and he ends up bringing some gritty pirate drama to her art show when he nearly stabs Doug. It’s shocking, but it’s Mary’s muppet world, so after a round of attempted murder on Mary’s part, they’re even and all is forgiven.
Meanwhile, Ed is bringing the gritty pirate world to the Revenge–Izzy never entered the muppet world after all, so it makes sense that he was the catalyst for Ed to lose his footing and fail to maintain his place in the muppet world there. Luckily, it seems that the muppet world is actually a state of mind, so the crew who are marooned are rescued almost immediately. Lucius, who got too close to Blackbeard, and Frenchie and Jim, who have darker backstories (Jim definitely, and you can probably make an argument from what we know about Frenchie) are not so lucky.
Because of Mary’s arc in particular, I think endgame here is for everyone to get themselves back into the muppet world, where happiness has a sort of ease to it and all harm can heal without too much time or effort and anything bad that happens off screen wasn’t that bad, actually. How that will happen, who can say?
In the past 10 years or so, I’ve seen a lot more commentary/critique of media that involves victims of violence where death and injury is either played for laughs (hard to think of a specific example because it’s so pervasive in comedy) or not acknowledged at all (mass casualties in war/alien invasion/etc.). So there’s a greater consciousness around “hey, that guy he killed was a person!” or when Ed says, “Maiming’s different. Love a good maim,” and I think, “lol what a funny thing to say…that’s really fucked up, though, isn’t it?” And I think this consciousness is what allows the juxtaposition of these genres to add some really interesting layers to the storytelling.
