#over this

eluciferate:

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.

i talked to cupid and he thinks you’re wounded, so i think we’re ruined.

i talked to cupid and he thinks you’re wounded, so i think we’re ruined.