something queer going on

I would apologize that it's been over a month since I've posted (or, alas answered comments), except that I seem to do that so often that it's become its own routine. I've been meaning to post, really! But the stars (the desire, the time, and the energy to post) have not aligned.

( Some updates under the cut, including allergies, work, shoes, books, and podcasts. It gets a bit long. )

I've started trying to watch the BBC comedy Ghosts. (Which, yes, just ended, and it was people talking about how good the finale was that got me interested. OFMD S2 has reaffirmed my sense that I'm better off fannishly with closed canons.)

Anyway, I'm most of the way through S1, but I'm finding the repeated instances of "the ghosts cause Alison to make a fool of herself in public" pretty hard to take. Does this become less of a thing as the show goes on? I really like all the characters and I want to see what happens, but my secondhand embarrassment is literally painful. (Plus, there's so much potential in the show's premise and I'm already bored of seeing it wasted on the same joke again and again.)

Please advise!

So, HBO Max has cancelled Our Flag Means Death after 2 seasons.

I wasn't surprised by this; I started expecting it when I learned about the budget cuts to S2, and I knew a few weeks ago when showrunner David Jenkins retweeted something highly critical of (HBO Max head) David Zaslav, he of the show-cancelling and finished-movie-shelving habits.

Apparently a large portion of Twitter was surprised, though. I'm seeing a lot of lamenting along the lines of "we'll never see Ed and Stede's wedding," which frankly I never particularly wanted to see. (I have an unfinished story draft that was going to be specifically about Ed and Stede not getting married--and not getting matelotage'd either--because Stede has nothing but bad associations with marriage and he wants his relationship with Ed to be different.) I wonder if many of these folks have never participated in fandom before, because filling in those gaps is something fanfic does well. Often better, or at least more satisfyingly, than canon.

Under the spoiler cut here are more thoughts, generally inspired by the fandom reactions I've seen. Includes major spoilers for both seasons.

"But the story's not finished!": the story is finished. There's a lot I don't like about S2 (more than my initial reaction posts conveyed), but it seems clear to me that David Jenkins as showrunner did everything in his power to wrap up the story in the eight episodes he was allowed. The predictable result was rushed, poorly-paced storytelling, and handwaving of a lot of character development *coughIzzycough*, but he did try. We have Ed and Stede together, building a future that is what Ed, at least, wants (and Stede has been able, though briefly, to live his dream too). We have the show's second most beloved couple getting married. We have various other characters either moving on to new lives, or becoming better at being pirates.

It's an ending. It's not a Harry Potter-style episode that takes the characters through the next 20+ years, but we all know the HP epilogue sucked as storytelling, right? And anyway, I think Jenkins, while trying to end the story, was also trying to leave open some ways for it to continue.


"But Izzy!?": I'm in the small minority of Izzy fans* who didn't particularly mind that he died. What bothers me is that Izzy's arc was far too rushed, so absolutely enormous changes to his behavior were just dropped in without explanation. (How did Izzy start caring about the crew? How did Izzy start caring about the crew enough to override his devotion to Ed? How did Izzy come to accept both his own queerness and his love for Ed? How did he get from loathing fancy boys to doing drag?) All of Izzy's growth was exactly what I would have wanted for him, but it should have happened over the course of at least 2 more seasons.

I've definitely seen some folks on Twitter saying "Good, fuck this show, I'm glad it was cancelled because Izzy," and I can understand it but I don't agree, or at least not for the same reasons.

(*I'm an Izzy fan in the sense that I found him perhaps the most fascinating character, or at least tied with Ed for that spot. I'm not the kind of Izzy fan who believes--as a surprising number do--that he was right about everything and not in any way a homophobic bullying little shit.)


My own hot take is this: given the budgetary, and probably also content, constraints an S3 made by Max would have been under, I'm not sorry that we won't have one. S1 was brilliant, S2 was a mess, S3 would probably have been worse. We'd lost Izzy (and while his death didn't bother me that way it bothered some other folks--e.g. I don't think it was a "kill your gays" thing because there were a fuck of a lot of gays still alive and happy--I do think a show without Izzy wouldn't have been the same) and Buttons and the Swede, and introduced some new characters who felt even less developed than those latter two. The show could certainly have gone on without Buttons and the Swede, but without Izzy, something important would have been missing. I also wonder how much time Taika Waititi would have been able to devote to his role, considering everything else he's got going on. (NB some fools on Twitter are blaming Taika for the show's cancellation; David Jenkins came back to Twitter just long enough to say that that's not true.)


All this is, I guess, unfairly easy for me to say, because I fell out of love with the show after S2. I didn't start hating it; I just started not caring very much. I couldn't bring myself to rewatch S2, though I rewatched S1 multiple times with enthusiasm; the fic I was working on, that needed an S2 rewatch to finish, languishes on my hard drive.

None of which stopped me from cancelling my Max subscription today, and giving OFMD's cancellation at the reason. And I probably will rewatch the whole thing on Max one last time before my existing subscription runs out, just to make a point. But what I'm angry at is how a good show got screwed over, in part because of mergers and corporate bullshit, and in part because David Zaslav both hates art and is a MAGA dickhead who presumably hates queer and BIPOC people. I'm angry about the show that might have been, not that the show as it actually exists is over.

Anyway, we'll always have fanfic.

I've been feeling stressed, and also kind of low, for a variety of reasons: the general state of the world, the increasingly annoying state of my job, the usual holiday retail stress, and having three medical appointments in 2 weeks. The medical appointments were all routine, and they're over now and went fine, but experience has taught me that I will be humiliated and browbeaten at all medical appointments, and while this is usually not the case with my current providers, I can't seem to unlearn it. My blood pressure SHOOTS up to worrying levels every time, although when I monitor at home it's normal (thanks to meds); at the second appointment of the most recent three, they retested at the end when I was more calm and my systolic pressure had dropped more than 40 points. So at least my white coat syndrome is documented now!

Also stressful: as we reach the end of 2023, I had to try and dig out paperwork for the claims that my stupid FSA* demanded more documentation of. I've been putting it off forever and of course stressing more and more, but I finally did it today and managed to find most of what I needed.

Anyway, I've spent much of December feeling emotionally crappy, but hopefully things will swing up again now that the medical stuff is over. As soon as the last appointment was over--yesterday--I stopped feeling queasy and on the verge of tears, which is a start.

I'm taking a whole three days off for Christmas, go me! This is mostly because Christmas falls on a Monday this year and my regular days off are Tuesday and Wednesday. It's still nice; there've been a lot of years that I worked Christmas Eve and the day after Christmas. I'm looking forward to doing nothing in particular.

My gaming group had been planning to meet this Saturday, the 23rd, but our GM and host is currently ill so that's probably not happening. *sigh* It's the only thing I do socially these days, because with COVID not going away, I like being around lots of people even less than I ever did. I was looking forward to it.

Ah, well. Christmas is coming, bringing a few days off for me, and hopefully some of that peace and goodwill in the world that I keep hearing about. Also today, or maybe tomorrow, is the solstice, and the light will start coming back. On the whole I prefer winter to summer, but I wish we could have cold weather without having it be so dark. (I know why we can't. But a boy can wish.)


(*FSAs/HSAs are a medical savings plan offered by some American health insurance companies. They allow you to set aside a certain amount of money each year, tax free, that can be spent on medical expenses not covered by insurance. The advantage, besides being tax free, is that while the money is deducted from your paycheck over the course of the year, you can use the whole total from the start. The disadvantages are, however, large: (1) it's so bureaucratic that I just had to provide documentation that money I paid to a medical laboratory associated with a hospital was really a medical expense, and (2) any money that you don't spend, you lose. Where does it go? No one will say. I assume the administering company keeps it. Perhaps the executives have a party. Both these things make having an FSA stressful. I go back and forth about whether it's worth it, and in the end I decided to put a lot less money in it next year.)


Mostly I'm posting this so you know why I've been so scarce, and even worse than usual at answering comments. I always appreciate it when folks reply to my posts, and I'll try to do better about responding. And I do read everybody's posts, even when I don't comment. Please accept my virtual hugs and real gratitude, all of you.

On Monday, while taking my daily stupid walk for my stupid health, I (stupidly) tripped and fell quite hard. It was bad enough that someone driving past stopped to ask if I was okay.

Basically I am okay--I didn't hit my head, though the jarring gave me a headache, and I didn't reinjure my back. But I do seemed to have pulled a muscle on the left side of my chest while trying to catch myself.

Things it currently hurts to do: raise my arm, roll over in bed, breathe deeply, lift much of anything. Not loving this.

It's making me glad I bought $chair, because I imagine my recovery from top surgery will be like this except worse and on both sides.

In related news, $chair is being delivered any minute now. The delivery company says they will mask if requested, which I plan to as well as masking myself. And hopefully they won't need to be in my apartment that long, but there is a certain amount of set up and making sure the chair works that has to happen. (I don't like having strangers in my space, even apart from the newest COVID surge.

(A GIANT truck has just pulled up outside. I assume $chair is in it.)

1) I finally gave in and bought a bottle of Beaufort's lovely ginger/pepper/smoke perfume Coeur de Noir. I dithered about it for ages: did I love it enough to buy a whole bottle, especially when my perfume opportunities are limited (work has a no-perfume policy)? But recently I wore it again from my sample, having not worn it for a while, and I loved it even more than I remembered. Then a few days later I tried to wear it again and my vial was empty, oh noes! When I found myself opening up the vial and rubbing a cotton swab along the inside to get the last traces, I figured I wouldn't regret the bottle.

It was delivered today from Bloom Perfumery, along with the other samples I ordered and a couple of 2 ml freebies. (Freebies are Monsieur and Sucre d'Ebene, both from Pierre Guillaume; Monsieur sounds fine based on the listed notes, while Sucre sounds unsurprisingly too sweet; I mostly haven't loved other PG scents I've tried.) Despite my resolve to test scents in a more systematic way, I ended up ordering a hodgepodge of things that sounded interesting and/or have been recommended to me: Black Vetiver by Phaedon Paris, Haxan by Parfum Prissana, Oud Imperial by Perris Monte Carlo, Savitri by Parfum Prissana, Larmes du Desert by Atelier des Ors, Lentisque by Phaedon Paris, Nuits de Bakelite and Iris Cendré by Naomi Goodsir, Iron Duke and Terror and Magnificence by Beaufort, Northman by Alexander, Chypre Shot by Olfactive Studio, Garuda by Jul et Mad, and Tara Mantra by Gri Gri.

Excited to have new scents to try. Perfume testing in the fall/winter is not what's usually advised, I think, but I feel more myself in cooler weather and I seem to enjoy perfumes more then.


2) Also delivered today, the teas I ordered from Tea Source. I got the Phantom Power oolong (they describe it as "a hearty cup of fruit and bone," and I really could not resist); Clouds and Mist Supreme, which is a Chinese green tea from Sichuan, said to be floral and cucumbery; Clearwater Sencha, which is a Japanese green tea from the Saemidori cultivar and is said to have qualities of cantaloupe and snap peas (I've had what Tea Source called otsuka saemidori, which one of the heavily brothy, savory Japanese greens, and adored it, but alas Tea Source no longer has it); Root Word raw pu'er ("salted plums, citrus rind, juniper, and wilderness"); and Jasmine Dragon Pearls, which is your basic bitch of a jasmine tea but I like it a lot. As you can see, Tea Source gives their products fanciful names, which I don't love because it makes it harder to find something similar, but they do also provide lots of info about where the teas are grown, who grows them, and how they're processed. I'm too ignorant for most of it to mean much to me, but I like that Tea Source knows. And I've always found their teas to be really high quality, which I can't say for teas I've bought locally from other retailers (even specialty ones). That's why I go to the effort of ordering online. Shipping is free if you order over a certain amount.


3) And finally, today I spent the price of over a month's rent on a goddamn chair. It's a recliner, which I'm going to need when I finally manage to get top surgery; sleeping in a recliner rather than bed is recommended for a while after surgery. I probably should have bought it in a sensible way, by comparison-shopping online etc., but instead I procrastinated for ages and then finally walked into a furniture store that I've passed multiple times without going in, "just to see what they have," and ended up spending $$$. It's a powered recliner, which feels silly to me but apparently these days, the only manual recliners available also rock and swivel, which I didn't want. And when I thought about it, I figured that the ability to change positions with the push of a button might be very welcome post-surgery.

I feel (a) astonished that anyone can afford to have a whole houseful of furniture*, (b) pleased that I will finally have a comfortable chair like a goddamn adult, (c) full of longing for a nice place with nice furniture that I could enjoy living in rather than tolerate, and (d) horrified that the delivery people will contrast this expensive chair with my shitty apartment and probably laugh at me after they leave.

It's not actually being delivered until Dec. 13, the first available date on which I was neither working nor booked up with medical appointments. So I have some time to figure out where I'm going to put it.

The chair, by the way, is quite ugly but comfortable, which is the important bit. I also fell in love with a $500 rug (on sale from $900) but I did not buy it.

(*I know estate sales, thrift stores, etc. exist. I've yet to see a piece of furniture or a rug in a local thrift store that I'd pay money for**, and even if I did find a great bargain, I have no way to transport it or get it up the two flights of stairs to my apartment. Delivery is a must.)

(**Thrift stores seem to be geographically variable. I used to get great stuff, including furniture, from them when I lived in Minneapolis. Here in Santa Fe it's all junk--SF is full of rich people who resell their furniture at $$$ consignment stores. There are also, I'm told, a lot of people now who make their living combing thrift stores, snatching up all the good stuff, and reselling it online at a premium. So some it's just changing times, I guess. *sigh* I do feel like it's increasingly hard to get by if you're not rich. I'm definitely not poor anymore, but a comfortable life feels almost as financially out of reach as it always did. And I don't think that's just a matter of rising expectations.

Anyway, I have a chair! Or I will in a month, anyway.

Some reactions, with spoilers,

under the spoiler cut.

I had forgotten that this series was only going to have 8 episodes, so I was initially confused when just this episode dropped today. But it does feel like an ending, for the season and possibly for the show. (Thank you, David Jenkins et al, for not leaving us on a cliffhanger this time.) There are definitely ways to continue the plot if the show does get renewed, but this is a satisfying ending if it doesn't.

I wasn't entirely surprised when Izzy died. He's the character who would be hardest to integrate into any kind of happy ending, despite how much he's changed recently. And of course the classic villain redemption arc ends with the villain dead, although Izzy didn't quite get the heroic self-sacrificing moment he probably would have liked. (This ending goes some way towards reconciling me with the breakneck pace of his development in S02--he wasn't going to have any more development, so the show made the points it wanted to make, even at the cost of some handwaving and sketching rather than really exploring.)

It was a couple of extra-textual things that most surprised me about Izzy's death: first, that the show would write off one of its most popular characters, and second, how very much I felt it even while also finding it appropriate and, in a storytelling way, satisfying. I never thought Izzy would end up meaning so much to me. He was, as Ed said, a nightmare; he was the character of my heart, in ways I don't fully understand and slightly worry about.

I'm glad that Ed and Izzy got to say goodbye--Ed needed it even more than Izzy did. And while I didn't quite cry during the death scene, I started to cry at the end when we saw that the "inn" is close to Izzy's grave. They didn't leave him all alone.

As for Ed and Stede, I think their reunion was handled well in the sense that a lot of it was offscreen. We know where they stand, and we didn't need to see them work it out (which I like to think they did, during a lot of long conversations). We did have two big declarations of love, of course, one distanced from us via Stede's message-in-a-bottle (which finally settles the question of whether Ed can read), and one gently kept from getting too soppy by Stede's (very loving and only slightly smartass) Han Solo reaction moment. What moved me more than either of them, I think, was the way Ed glanced over at Stede during Lucius and Pete's wedding.

Also on the subject of undermining romance: while this was a happy ending for Ed and Stede, it's worth thinking about how much it's predicated on violence. Ed kills a whole lot of people, directly, when we know he didn't want to. Maybe in a weird way that's good for him, so he can start coming to terms at long last with killing his father. I don't know yet what I think, except that the show's attitude towards violence continues to be weird and contradictory. And that there's been very little unalloyed happiness this season; it's all built on loss and grief . . and what adult happiness isn't?

Back to Izzy for a moment to note that the defense of piracy could really only have come from him, hungry as we now know him to have been for love, and unconcerned--as we always knew--with moral questions. Pirates are good, says Izzy, for the only value of good that matters to him. I don't think we're meant to accept that defense at face value--all those shots of all those corpses, shitheads though most of them were, call it into question--but it's true for Izzy, and Izzy's right that someone like Prince Richard can never understand it.

I don't have much to say about the other characters; most of their arcs got a bit neglected this season. It was nice to see Buttons (??) again at the end, and I'm happy for Lucius and Pete, and sorry for Fang who is grieving Izzy yet again. I think the show could have done really interesting things with Oluwande and Jim, and the fading out of their romance (which absolutely was built up as a big romance in S1) but not of their friendship. If only there had been time.

Given the gutting of HBO by Discovery/David Zaslav, I'm betting there won't be another season. If there is, I'd like to see Stede and Ed backgrounded (but of course returned, perhaps temporarily, to the Revenge) in favor of giving the remaining characters some development. But, well. Without Izzy, I have to admit that for me it won't be the same.

Spoilery reactions are

under the spoiler cut, with an additional warning for possible harshing of squee

.

I wish someone had whispered in David Jennings' ear that a little fanservice is welcome, but there's such a thing as too much.

I've been jokingly telling myself since about episode 5 that this is all a hallucination Ed is having in his coma. I don't believe that's true, but I'm starting to wish it were. The show is choosing what's fun--like a big queer party with Izzy in sort-of drag performing Edith Piaf*, and Stede suddenly becoming a (somewhat) fabulous pirate, and Stede yanking Ed into the room and kissing him and finally taking him to bed--over what's true for these characters, and I don't like it. (*I would have loved the party scene in the proper context, like if it had been built up to over this whole season.)

I don't like that we get the funny torture, or that we get it at such length. I don't like how the show is pushing Ed and Stede from one emotional crisis to the next instead of letting their relationship develop. I don't like that, because the fans love Izzy, now we're getting yenta!Izzy congratulating Ed and Stede, with apparently sincerity, on their first night together. I don't like the weird retcon of Jim and Oluwande's relationship, where without even a conversation they're siblings instead of lovers. (It's not the end of their romance I mind; I hate how it's been handled.)

How on earth did we get from the dark, hard, truthful storytelling of the first three episodes to this nonsensical meringue, all air and sweetness? (And, okay, some torture and explosions.) I don't mean that truthful storytelling has to be dark, but the lightness and silliness have to make sense for the characters and the story. Consistency of characterization and tone can't just be thrown under the bus for the sake of an awesome party scene. The pacing has to be right, too. In the episodes since Ed came back from the dead, everything has felt rushed. Too many big events and big emotional turnarounds in too little space, with no room to breathe or think. (I could believe it as the emotional frenzy of people desperately trying to convince themselves they're happy, but I don't think that's how the show is presenting it.)

In S01, there was a pretty clear throughline about what it means to be a man, and how men can try and sometimes fail to unlearn toxic shit. That's been dropped (prematurely imo) in S02, and I couldn't tell you what story this season is trying to tell. There've been some transcendent moments, but as a whole it's an incoherent mess.

I really hope OFMD can pull itself back together in the final three episodes of this series. But, as I said at the beginning, at this point I might even welcome "It was all a dream!"

After rewatching S2E01-03, I have some more thoughts,

under the cut due to big honking spoiilers

.

1) Erratum: in my earlier reaction post, I misremembered what Lucius says about his experiences after being thrown overboard. He actually says "I passed from ship to ship" rather than "I was passed from ship to ship." I think the implications of sexual abuse are still there in what he says, but less directly so than if he had said "was passed."


2) It occurs to me that the triggering factor in the three major stages of Ed's post-Stede emotional collapse is not Stede, but Izzy.

Back in S1, after Ed returns to the Revenge without Stede, he's an absolute emotional wreck. Which he expresses by crying, moping, writing bad song lyrics, etc. And then, after Lucius's little "you can start over" pep talk, he does in fact try to start over. He comes on deck, he inflicts his song on an audience, and he is gentle and encouraging to everyone. He wants to hold a talent show! He wants everyone to call him Edward!

And then Izzy reacts with disgust. With, in fact, rejection. Blackbeard was my captain, Izzy says, and you're not Blackbeard anymore. And it's only now, with the possibility of losing Izzy as well as Stede, that Ed transforms from someone grieving into someone who's lost his fucking marbles. It's now that Ed becomes violent towards Izzy and his crew, in ways that as far as we know are unprecedented.

So, moving on to S2, we see Ed violent and cruel and still secretly grieving even as he torments everyone around him. Then he shoots Izzy, and (while I'm not convinced he believes that Izzy's really dead, because Frenchie is a bad liar for a con man) we get the next stage of his collapse: he decides to die. He cleans up, cheers up, and goes to get Izzy to kill him, since he can't quite seem to do it himself.

And Izzy refuses. Izzy laughs at him and calls him a coward. So Ed leaves him with the gun and the obvious implication of that, the unspoken almost-order, and he hears the gunshot before he's even back on deck. Izzy's dead (as far as Ed knows). Izzy killed himself because Ed wanted him to. Ed's alone now, in every real sense. There's no one left that he cares about.

And this is when he decides not only to die, but to take everyone on the Revenge with him.

It's interesting, in light of this, to see Stede given all the blame both by characters on the show (Stede himself, Lucius) and by a lot of the fandom. Ultimately, of course, Ed's behavior is his own responsibility and his own fault. But Stede leaving him isn't even the only inciting factor that brings out his rage. It takes Izzy's rejection, as well as Stede's, to break Ed entirely. (ETA: Izzy knows it. "We caused this," he says to Stede.)


3) Before S2 I had thought that my interpretation that Ed loves Izzy too, in some painful, complicated, unfulfilled way, might have been an over-reading of canon. But it looks like, if anything, I imagined less than the canon now implies. Izzy is the great might-have-been of Ed's life. That love, if it had ever become an expressed and acknowledged love, would have been bad for both of them, but it would have been powerful. It is powerful, even in its stunted, sad, can't-quite-say-it way.

I'm no longer sure that Izzy leaving would be the best thing for Ed. (Still probably would be the best thing for Izzy, in the same way the amputation was.) But I'm not sure how they're going to get out of this tangle, either.


4) There are suggestions of Izzy/Fang in these episodes, such as Fang crying for Izzy, and Fang physically supporting Izzy during the escape. I'd be happy for that to develop--I can see it more as a possibility now than in S1--but I hope it doesn't become "the solution" to the emotional mess. The history's too long and the emotions too deep and bitter for another relationship to fix everything. For either Izzy or Ed.


5) Going back to the Ed & Izzy "closure" scene for a moment, I have to mention the erotic implications of Ed's dream that Izzy kills him. "Good for you," Izzy says, and Ed responds "It was good for me." Death is the only consummation of their love that either of them can, at least at this point, imagine. A final consummation, and perhaps a first and only.

It's so sad.


7) Moving on from Ed/Izzy: rewatching made me feel even more strongly that the whole "Ed on the island" sequence is unnecessary. It doesn't tell us anything we don't already know, anything we haven't learned more compellingly in other scenes. I guess it tells Ed some things he didn't already know, but if that's what it was for I wish it had gone further, pushed harder. As it is, it feels a lot like they just needed to keep Ed in the story despite his coma, and to ease into the reunion. It does make sense that they needed to bypass Ed's conscious resistance to seeing Stede again, which would probably have been fierce, but, again, I think it could have been done better.


8) I don't object to the merman sequence. Is it silly wish-fulfillment? Yes, but it's Ed's silly wish-fulfillment, and we know that Ed deeply longs for softness and silliness and romance, and also for someone to catch him as he sinks into darkness. It also revisits Ed's death fantasy way back in S01E03 (note the symmetry), when Ed says he thought he'd die in a cool way like being massaged to death by mermaids. Of course now he'd picture sexy!merman!Stede instead. A merman who's come to save him rather than kill him, and to draw him up into the light and the air.


9) Can't wait to see what's going to happen now that Ed's conscious. Even though I think it's going to hurt.

10) This one's non-spoilery, so above the cut. One of the things I love about writing OFMD fic is how the show's storytelling choices make it possible to play with language. OFMD is, shall we say, historically unmoored, so modern expressions can coexist with period ones. (I like to make the language more archaic even than is historically justified--because I know 16th and 17th century English better than I know 18th century--but it's so fun to be able to play around without worries over accuracy.) Same with language varieties. The actors are using their own accents, improvising in their own English dialects with they improvise, so I get to use British and American and Irish and occasional little bits of New Zealand and Australian Englishes as I please! As sounds good to me! A lot of these characters have been all over the world, picked up expressions from everywhere, so why not? It's like the writing version of "Yes, and" in improv, and it's delightful.

I'm feeling better today and watched the episodes that have dropped.

Some thoughts are under the cut thing, so

beware spoilers.

I'm incredibly happy with pretty much everything, from the gleeful play with fanfic tropes (bearded Stede! the instant joyous reunion! merman Stede!) to the pitch-black darkness of a lot of the content. (I'm . . . bemused that something I put in one of my darkest stories--Ed taking out his rage on Izzy by amputating more bits whenever he's displeased--turned out to happen canonically.) Ed's been hurting not just the people on the ships he takes, and not just Izzy, but his whole crew too. And he's been full-on, relentlessly suicidal as well as abusive. (Speaking of suicidality: even though it turned out to be a fake out, the sound of that gunshot from Izzy's "suicide" truly shocked me. How do the rest of you read the later flashback where we see it? It looks to me like Izzy genuinely tried to shoot himself and failed. But also, because I have no doubt that Izzy's perfectly competent with a gun, his attempt was not whole-hearted.)

Lucius, whom most of us imagined stowed away in relative safety in the Revenge's hidden passageways, has been "passed from ship to ship." We know that some of the abuse he's suffered was sexualized (the "human puppet" thing) and the phrasing of "passed from ship to ship" can be read as implying systematic sexual assault, I think. I'd just as soon they didn't go into more detail about it, but I think it's good storytelling to have it acknowledged as a thing that happened (happens) to people.

I'm glad the show didn't delay Ed and Stede's reunion any longer, and I'm glad that it's been made extremely clear that the hard part is still in front of them. Ed has done terrible things, and both he and Stede have to learn to live with it. (The violence is considerably less muppet-y this season. At least for now, we're no longer in "a small bandage and a morning's nap will cure a gut wound" territory. Izzy has lost a leg, and Ed almost died. The massacre on board the wedding ship was . . . still muppety, but not played quite as much for laughs.)

The story direction with Oluwande and Jim is . . . interesting. The show's doing something quite grown-up here; either we're seeing a romance ending, or we're seeing one getting a bit complicated. In a way I think it parallels Ed and Stede: the fairy tale was last season, and now we've come to the hard stuff. I love that this is real, complicated, adult storytelling, and I'm also very glad that while I really like Oluwande/Jim, it was never hugely my ship.

Thinking of other ways we're seeing the characters and the story grow up: Stede rejecting the myth of the Gentleman Pirate and leaving Ricky (essentially his old self) to his well-deserved fate; Pete admitting he can't make the crossbow shot; the collapse of Ed's innkeeper fantasy. I'm sure there are others I'm not remembering.

The one thing I'm a little bit dubious about is, predictably, Izzy. He's come to a lot of self-knowledge if he can (furiously and half against his will) let himself cry in Fang's arms, or say the word "love" to Ed's face. I found the rage more plausible, like his bitter laughter when Ed tries to commit suicide-by-Izzy. On the other hand, given that Ed is the center of Izzy's life, I guess I can see Izzy having to think quite a bit about a lot of things when he sees Ed destroying himself. And Izzy's newfound concern for the crew is, I think, interpretable not so much as humanitarianism as Izzy's desire--which we've seen--for an efficient, well-run ship. He loves Ed, but he's been frustrated for years by Ed's failure at day-to-day management. Add to that his fury at seeing Ed self-destruct over Stede fucking Bonnet, and we do perhaps have a recipe for Izzy doing whatever he can to stop it in the name of protecting the crew.

Occasionally I think the show was a little too on the nose, too quick to spell things out that were perfectly clear already ("unhealthy relationship" or Ed's realization that he hates himself), but I guess you have to make sure the sort of viewers who are only half paying attention can also follow the story.

Overall: excellent stuff, can't wait for more.


ETA: Just thought of another cool thing I have to mention: the little cake toppers, which never get a single mention in the dialogue (thank you, show, for letting us do our own interpretation here). Ed making over the bride doll to look like himself will send the "Ed is trans feminine" crew wild--I'm not among them, but may they have fun. What I love, and what breaks my heart, is how the dolls first replaced Ed's red silk as representing his secret longing for a different life, and then shared the silk's fate, dropped into the sea.