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kindkitI've now seen all of Our Flag Means Death twice, and I'm obsessed. I want S2 now, and failing that I want good fannish content, and yet I am reluctant to venture into the fandom.
Seriously, turn back now if you haven't watched/finished the show yet. It's better to be as unspoiled as you can manage.
I watched it for the first time knowing only that it was a comedy about pirates, and that it had queer content. I expected that queer content to happen among the side characters. I did not expect a romance between the male leads, so I had that really delightful, rare experience of going from "That seemed kind of flirty, but maybe I was just reading too much into it," to "Show, are you queerbaiting me?" to "This is really happening!" And there were other queer characters too! Like almost all of them! It's the kind of thing that, back in the day, I honestly didn't think we'd ever see in mainstream-ish media.
The other big thing I didn't know was that Stede Bonnet was a real historical person. (I thought "Stede Bonnet" was too ridiculous a name to be real, but it turned out to be too ridiculous to invent.) The show is actually sticking fairly closely to the things that are known about his life. Of course it's taking a lot of liberties; for instance, Izzy Hands was also real, but he was a teenager at the time of these events, Blackbeard's protegé rather than whatever the fuck show!Izzy is. (Historical!Izzy was actually called Israel, but I imagine that naming the villain Israel might come off wrong.) I hope the show continues to take liberties, because what really happened to both Stede and Blackbeard is depressing.
Anyway, why am I reluctant to go read some fic or otherwise take part in fandom?
Well, fandom has changed. Maybe because it's so much bigger now, maybe because it seems to skew younger, maybe because the venues have changed from mailing lists and LJ/DW (which were my first fandom spaces) to Tumblr, Twitter, and Discords. And all of those forums, by their very design, make extended, nuanced discussion difficult.
My experiences with Magnus Archives/Rusty Quill Gaming fandom, and before that with Hannibal fandom, really put me off. Apart from a few awesome people (often the ones who got me into the fandom in the first place), each fandom seemed mostly to consist of:
a) People who want everything to be lovely, and every character to be a lovely, sweet person or at worst a misunderstood woobie who is acting out because of their trauma, but will promptly and fully get over it if given enough love. These fans will not be lovely to you if you point out a character's flaws.
b) People who want to expel every problematic element into the void beyond the stars. Not just if the source text is, as a whole, racist or homophobic or otherwise ugly, but any aspects, characters, or relationships that don't meet stringent purity tests. Age gap relationship? Ugh, pedophilia. (This even if the characters are both adults.) Characters were friends before they started dating? Ugh, they had a sibling relationship, why are you shipping incest you pervert? Characters do bad things sometimes? Ugh, they're irredeemable, why do you like them?
And I . . . I'm just too old for this shit? Fannish attitudes a) and b) aren't really new, although I think their prevalence and vehemence is new. I've fought in those fannish wars already, and I don't want to fight them again. I do not want Discourse. I also do not want fic that turns my stomach because it's all giggles and puppies and backrubs, and that forgets that Blackbeard had a man skinned alive with an escargot fork and also murdered his own father, and while Dad sure as fuck deserved it, that is not the action of someone without a dark side. I've had fandoms ruined for me when too much of the fic was like that, and I don't want it to happen to this one. (It's also why I've read almost no Magnus Archives fic. There are fans who ship Jon/Elias as a sweet and happy pairing! I can't even ship Jon/Martin as a completely sweet and happy pairing, because they are two messed up bitches and they were even before the big supernatural stuff started.) Nor do I want the opposite extreme, where Blackbeard is just toxic (forgetting that he was abused and deeply traumatized as a child, and that he's literally been carrying around a token of his shamefaced, impossible longing for love and beauty) and Stede is nothing but an overgrown rich boy (he is exactly that, but not only that).
And so I hesitate.
Anyway, a few observations from rewatching.
1) Speaking of le problematique, there's no way that Stede Bonnet can have been a landowner in Barbados in 1717 without also having been a slaveholder. It's probably wise for the show not to touch the subject, because it's much too big and awful for the scope of a little comedy, but it nags at me.
2) Le problematic in a different way: Izzy, Izzy, Izzy. You need a big tough-but-wise dom to beat you every single day, and fuck you at least that often, and generally keep you too tired and satisfied to cause trouble. You need an improbable and possibly unholy combination of Blackbeard at his most piratical, and Lucius at his most insightful, and I doubt you'll find it.
3) The show does really interesting things with tropes. It loves to set up a trope and then take it in a completely unexpected direction. The obvious example is Jim. I rolled my eyes at the initial reveal that Jim was "really" a woman, but the show neatly sidestepped all the stereotyped and potentially really yucky stuff I thought was coming. Instead of Woman Trouble, we get a nonbinary character who's universally accepted as such, and no Love Triangle shit even if several other crew members seem to fancy Jim at least a little. Another example: when Ed initially allows Stede to believe he just "works for Blackbeard," it could have been milked for a lot of tedious angst about secrecy and lies and discovery. Instead, five minutes later Ed casually says, "I'm Blackbeard," and Stede raises his eyebrows, and that's it. Of course the whole Ed vs. Blackbeard issue is crucial, but the writing quickly takes it out of the overly literal and allows it to breathe a bit.
4) Taika Waititi is so fucking good.
5) My single favorite moment of the entire show is when Ed picks up Stede's "rather exquisite cashmere" and touches it to his face. So much longing there, so many different kinds of longing, given a moment's expression in a room where no one from the crew can see him and his back's to Stede. There is a whole hidden and suppressed emotional life in that moment.
6) I don't know how much to make of this, but: the "jungle cat" in the final episode is named Ned. Ned the "predator" who terrifies everyone, but who really just wants some chicken. Who's really a pet. "Ned" is of course a nickname for "Edward," as is "Ed." Ed the beast, Ed the pussycat. And of course the last shot of Ed in the final episode is him crying. He's been trying so hard to be bloodthirsty, and done some fucking awful things in the service of convincing Izzy and the crew and most importantly himself. I don't think it's a "fuckery" in the sense that Stede's public death is one--Ed's definitely not having any fun, and he's imprisoning himself instead of liberating himself--but it's every bit as much a performance. But while Ned just has to munch on some chicken, Ed (thinks he) has to try to really be the monster. There's no way he's coming out of that without more damage.
7) Have I mentioned how good Taika Waititi is? I need to watch everything else he's ever acted in, and then everything he's directed.
Seriously, turn back now if you haven't watched/finished the show yet. It's better to be as unspoiled as you can manage.
I watched it for the first time knowing only that it was a comedy about pirates, and that it had queer content. I expected that queer content to happen among the side characters. I did not expect a romance between the male leads, so I had that really delightful, rare experience of going from "That seemed kind of flirty, but maybe I was just reading too much into it," to "Show, are you queerbaiting me?" to "This is really happening!" And there were other queer characters too! Like almost all of them! It's the kind of thing that, back in the day, I honestly didn't think we'd ever see in mainstream-ish media.
The other big thing I didn't know was that Stede Bonnet was a real historical person. (I thought "Stede Bonnet" was too ridiculous a name to be real, but it turned out to be too ridiculous to invent.) The show is actually sticking fairly closely to the things that are known about his life. Of course it's taking a lot of liberties; for instance, Izzy Hands was also real, but he was a teenager at the time of these events, Blackbeard's protegé rather than whatever the fuck show!Izzy is. (Historical!Izzy was actually called Israel, but I imagine that naming the villain Israel might come off wrong.) I hope the show continues to take liberties, because what really happened to both Stede and Blackbeard is depressing.
Anyway, why am I reluctant to go read some fic or otherwise take part in fandom?
Well, fandom has changed. Maybe because it's so much bigger now, maybe because it seems to skew younger, maybe because the venues have changed from mailing lists and LJ/DW (which were my first fandom spaces) to Tumblr, Twitter, and Discords. And all of those forums, by their very design, make extended, nuanced discussion difficult.
My experiences with Magnus Archives/Rusty Quill Gaming fandom, and before that with Hannibal fandom, really put me off. Apart from a few awesome people (often the ones who got me into the fandom in the first place), each fandom seemed mostly to consist of:
a) People who want everything to be lovely, and every character to be a lovely, sweet person or at worst a misunderstood woobie who is acting out because of their trauma, but will promptly and fully get over it if given enough love. These fans will not be lovely to you if you point out a character's flaws.
b) People who want to expel every problematic element into the void beyond the stars. Not just if the source text is, as a whole, racist or homophobic or otherwise ugly, but any aspects, characters, or relationships that don't meet stringent purity tests. Age gap relationship? Ugh, pedophilia. (This even if the characters are both adults.) Characters were friends before they started dating? Ugh, they had a sibling relationship, why are you shipping incest you pervert? Characters do bad things sometimes? Ugh, they're irredeemable, why do you like them?
And I . . . I'm just too old for this shit? Fannish attitudes a) and b) aren't really new, although I think their prevalence and vehemence is new. I've fought in those fannish wars already, and I don't want to fight them again. I do not want Discourse. I also do not want fic that turns my stomach because it's all giggles and puppies and backrubs, and that forgets that Blackbeard had a man skinned alive with an escargot fork and also murdered his own father, and while Dad sure as fuck deserved it, that is not the action of someone without a dark side. I've had fandoms ruined for me when too much of the fic was like that, and I don't want it to happen to this one. (It's also why I've read almost no Magnus Archives fic. There are fans who ship Jon/Elias as a sweet and happy pairing! I can't even ship Jon/Martin as a completely sweet and happy pairing, because they are two messed up bitches and they were even before the big supernatural stuff started.) Nor do I want the opposite extreme, where Blackbeard is just toxic (forgetting that he was abused and deeply traumatized as a child, and that he's literally been carrying around a token of his shamefaced, impossible longing for love and beauty) and Stede is nothing but an overgrown rich boy (he is exactly that, but not only that).
And so I hesitate.
Anyway, a few observations from rewatching.
1) Speaking of le problematique, there's no way that Stede Bonnet can have been a landowner in Barbados in 1717 without also having been a slaveholder. It's probably wise for the show not to touch the subject, because it's much too big and awful for the scope of a little comedy, but it nags at me.
2) Le problematic in a different way: Izzy, Izzy, Izzy. You need a big tough-but-wise dom to beat you every single day, and fuck you at least that often, and generally keep you too tired and satisfied to cause trouble. You need an improbable and possibly unholy combination of Blackbeard at his most piratical, and Lucius at his most insightful, and I doubt you'll find it.
3) The show does really interesting things with tropes. It loves to set up a trope and then take it in a completely unexpected direction. The obvious example is Jim. I rolled my eyes at the initial reveal that Jim was "really" a woman, but the show neatly sidestepped all the stereotyped and potentially really yucky stuff I thought was coming. Instead of Woman Trouble, we get a nonbinary character who's universally accepted as such, and no Love Triangle shit even if several other crew members seem to fancy Jim at least a little. Another example: when Ed initially allows Stede to believe he just "works for Blackbeard," it could have been milked for a lot of tedious angst about secrecy and lies and discovery. Instead, five minutes later Ed casually says, "I'm Blackbeard," and Stede raises his eyebrows, and that's it. Of course the whole Ed vs. Blackbeard issue is crucial, but the writing quickly takes it out of the overly literal and allows it to breathe a bit.
4) Taika Waititi is so fucking good.
5) My single favorite moment of the entire show is when Ed picks up Stede's "rather exquisite cashmere" and touches it to his face. So much longing there, so many different kinds of longing, given a moment's expression in a room where no one from the crew can see him and his back's to Stede. There is a whole hidden and suppressed emotional life in that moment.
6) I don't know how much to make of this, but: the "jungle cat" in the final episode is named Ned. Ned the "predator" who terrifies everyone, but who really just wants some chicken. Who's really a pet. "Ned" is of course a nickname for "Edward," as is "Ed." Ed the beast, Ed the pussycat. And of course the last shot of Ed in the final episode is him crying. He's been trying so hard to be bloodthirsty, and done some fucking awful things in the service of convincing Izzy and the crew and most importantly himself. I don't think it's a "fuckery" in the sense that Stede's public death is one--Ed's definitely not having any fun, and he's imprisoning himself instead of liberating himself--but it's every bit as much a performance. But while Ned just has to munch on some chicken, Ed (thinks he) has to try to really be the monster. There's no way he's coming out of that without more damage.
7) Have I mentioned how good Taika Waititi is? I need to watch everything else he's ever acted in, and then everything he's directed.
