shippiness

[kindkit]

snickfic posed the question "What's one of your favorite shippy moments for your ship? Why do you love it??

My answer is under the spoiler cut

for the sake of anyone who's somehow unspoiled for Our Flag Means Death

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I'm somewhat embarrassed that Ed/Stede is "my ship," because it's the big canon ship and everyone loves it. (And then I think about how lucky I would have considered myself, ten or even five years ago, to have a canonical romance between the male main characters of a genre show.) Anyway, it's a great ship, emotionally rich, well-written and well-performed.

Because the show establishes Ed/Stede so well, there are a lot of excellent shippy moments to choose from. I'm going to go with the "Blackbeard's Bar & Grill" conversation, because I think it gets at something really essential between them: they play together. Ed and Stede are both highly creative men who've had that creativity suppressed since childhood, occasionally for good reasons (Mary's not wrong about the ridiculousness of running away to sea, and Izzy's not wrong that Ed needs to pay attention to survival) but mostly because of toxic masculinity. Be a man, not a girly boy who picks flowers and tells stories. Be a man, not a girly boy who dreams of wearing silk. Don't be silly. And then they meet, and almost immediately start being silly together. They start to play, dress-up and pretend and play-fighting with real swords.

But the Bar & Grill conversation happens on a day when the game hasn't gone well. Ed's in a bad mood and doesn't really want to play, and Stede is fretting himself sick because his plan is all going wrong. And then, somehow, together they make a luminous moment of absurd joy out of this emotional mess, just like they make a meal out of barbecued snake. It's not quite enough to save the day--that takes Lucius's intervention--but it's a moment where we the audience, and Lucius as the in-universe audience, see how much they love each other, and why. Even if they don't see it yet themselves.

Comments

[astrogirl]

Excellent point about the whole toxic masculinity thing affecting both of them in their different ways.

And, you know, as a newly minted OFMD fan, the thing I keep coming back to about why I like this ship so dang much, and why it works for me absolutely instantly as soon as the characters properly meet, is how clearly and how much these guys just like each other. They really do enjoy each other's company very much, and it's amazing to me how often that seems to be treated as unimportant or even entirely disposable in fictional romance. And I love, love, love that Mary's answer to Stede about love, the one that makes him realize that, oh, yeah, that is what this is, isn't about big, melodramatic passionate stuff. No "you'll know you're in love because you'll get butterflies in your stomach every time you're near them, and you won't ever be able to think about anything else, and if anything happened to them you'd just die, and you'd climb every mountain just to be near them, etc, etc, etc." No, it's: being with them feels easy and right, they just get you, you think each other's annoying quirks are charming. Aka, many of the things that actually make two people genuinely compatible in the long term. At that is 100% what we see for these guys, in scenes like this one and a whole bunch of others... scenes that make it easy to look at them and see not a grand operatic romance or something, but a couple. Even if it's a couple that hasn't quite settled into consciously being one yet.

[delphi]

That's a really lovely moment. :)