something queer going on

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.

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.

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.

The first three episodes of OFMD S2 have dropped.

And I've had such an awful day that I think I'd better save them for tomorrow when, hopefully, I'll be in a better mood. *sigh*

1) Health

Betterish. I started back to work this past Saturday, though I haven't yet been able to work a full shift. In an ideal world I'd still be off, but I've already burned through most of my PTO and our horrible HR person was badgering me to apply for FMLA (while not actually sending me the paperwork). So pretty much as soon as I felt well enough to do dishes AND take a shower on the same day, I started back.

I'm trying to keep in mind that it's good for sciatica to move around. But that doesn't make it less painful or exhausting. So far my pattern has been "work 4 - 5.5 hours, go home and collapse in a heap, take 3 hour nap."

I thought my physical therapy started early next month, but I checked again and my first session isn't until September 19. But at this rate I don't expect to be fully recovered by then, so it'll probably do me some good anyway.


2) Our Flag Means Death

The S2 trailer has dropped. I haven't watched it. I'm hoping to avoid watching it, because so many trailers spoil important plot developments and/or the best jokes, and I'd like to go into S2 as blithely ignorant as I was for S1.

However people are already posting details about it on Twitter, the land of no cut tags. I have #OFMDS2Spoilers blocked, but of course nobody's tagging a trailer that way. The obvious solution is to stay off Twitter, but I haven't been very successful in previous attempts. (I deeply appreciate that people over here are keeping everything behind a cut.)

S2, or at least the first few episodes, will apparently release on October 5. I'm excited and nervous, because S1 was far better than I expected and it'll hurt all the more if S2 goes horribly wrong.


3) Other viewing

I've watched a few more episodes of Taskmaster, not having the brainpower for much else. I'm on S4 now, which I'm liking better than the last season.


4) Reading

Charles Stross, Escape from Yokai Land. This is an interstitial novelette in Stross's Laundry Files series. It's good grim fun, more in keeping with the tone of the early books than the much bleaker later ones. But the book centers around a lot of Japanese pop culture stuff I'm not really into, so I had a sense throughout of really not being the intended reader.

Jonathan Strahan (ed.), The Book of Witches. An anthology of short stories about witches. It's solid, with only a few choices that left me shaking my head. But there wasn't much I really loved, either. Most of the stories seemed to be riffing off traditional ideas of witchcraft rather than trying to do anything really new.

Ellen Datlow (ed.), Supernatural Noir. This is a reissue from some years back, not a new anthology. I'm only a few stories in, and so far I'm a bit disappointed. Which is more my fault than the fault of the stories--I was wanting detective stories with a supernatural element, but the anthology is delivering horror stories with a little noir atmosphere.

Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith. I was feeling quite sulky, wanting to read but not in the mood for the available options, and realized finally that what I was in the mood for was Pratchett. The only adult Discworld novels I haven't yet read are a few of the silly-seeming ones (e.g. The Lost Continent) and the ones post-Unseen Academicals that I have no intention of ever reading. So I got these, having read the first Tiffany Aching book, The Wee Free Men, some time back and liked it well enough. Which is what I'll say for the next two--I like them well enough. They're recognizably Pratchett, recognizably Discworld, but very much YA Pratchett. It all feels a bit diluted, like how Italians supposedly give kids a spoonful of espresso in a cup of hot milk at breakfast. As the kids get older, the proportions change. But I'm used to the fully-caffeinated version, and while I don't mind the milky one, it's not my favorite thing.

Hmmmph, now I'm feeling sulky that as the years go by, my list of Sadly Lamented Dead Authors, Like Whom Nobody Writes Anymore, keeps growing.

1) Relevant to my interests and perhaps to yours is Kai Ashante Wilson's essay Whither Queer: a Genre At Midlife and a Rec-List. Wilson looks at an issue I've talked about a lot: the historical lack of queer male characters in sff, and the current glut of queer male characters . . . written by and largely for women.

I had moments of intense recognition reading this piece (Judith Tarr! making note of books with queer men and hoping to stumble into them in used book stores!), and also moments of disconnect, because I've been involved in fic fandom for 20 years and Wilson has not; he is intensely skeptical of the influence of fanfic on contemporary sff. I hate it when people use "fanfic" to mean "writing I don't like," and Wilson does a certain amount of that here. He never entirely specifies what these fanficcy tendencies in sff are, either.

And yet, I can't say I entirely think he's wrong. When I read contemporary sff by younger authors (not just the queer male stuff, either), it does feel fanficcy to me, in ways I too find hard to pin down but often don't love. I read the first few paragraphs of Gideon the Ninth in a sample somewhere and bounced hard off that fanfic voice. (One of the few specific things Wilson mentions is ironic banter.) A lot of m/m relationships in contemporary sff are written using fanfic tropes and a kind of fundamental narrative structure or assumption that, again, I can't pin down, but it feels like slash fic to me. *shrugs*

I think part of what gets my hackles up, when people use "it's like fanfic" as criticism, is that I immediately think of the kinds of fanfic I enjoy. I forget that there's a ton of fanfic I don't enjoy but that is hugely popular, and that, I fear, is what's influencing professionally published sff these days. Anyway, I'd love to hear what other folks think of Wilson's piece.

As for his recs list, there's not much on it that I didn't know about, but I'm pleased to see Melissa Scott there (twice!)--Wilson's criticism of "the female gaze" in queer-male-focused sff does not boil down to "doesn't like women writers"--and also trans male writer Billy Martin (publishing as Poppy Z. Brite). Wilson's discussions of all the books are illuminating--I may have to give Water Horse another try--even if you don't agree with his general approach.


2) Samba Schutte, the actor who plays Roach in Our Flag Means Death, has designed an awesome t-shirt to raise money for True Colors United, an organization that fights homelessness among LGBTQ youth. OFMD-inspired without quite being referential (or copyright-infringing; I doubt David Jenkins would object but HBO/Max is evil). Beware the checkout process, though--it steers you hard to sign up for Shop Pay, a Shopify-based instant payment thing. You can avoid it by checking out as a guest, but I got confused and managed to sign myself up accidentally. Must remember to de-activate it once my order has processed.

Another 5 questions, this time from delphi.

1. How did you discover Our Flag Means Death, and was there a moment when you knew this would end up being something you'd feel fannish about?

( Answer under the cut, with OFMD S1 spoilers )


2. Is there something you'd really love to see in season 2 of OFMD (or in fic if you don't want to speculate about next season)?

( Answer under the cut, with OFMD S1 spoilers )


3. What's one place - a landmark, a restaurant, a neighbourhood - that you'd recommend to anyone visiting a city or town you've been to?

( Long answer under the cut )


4. Is there a genre or trope you've wanted to try your hand at writing but haven't yet?

( Answer under the cut )


5. Do you hold any strong/contentious food opinions?

( Answer under the cut )

Well, that was long.

If you'd like 5 questions from me, just drop a comment.

By the way, I am very spoiler-averse, so if you comment about OFMD, please avoid S2 spoilers. Speculation is fine so long as it's not based on spoilers. Thanks!

1) I managed to get vaxed yesterday (bivalent COVID booster and flu) after last week's fiasco. The guy who took my information was kind of rude, and I was quietly seething about it while I waited. But then this customer (a man, 60-something, white) starts yelling and swearing at the pharmacist for not being able to fill a prescription for his wife, and I tried to have a little more sympathy for what it must be like working in a retail pharmacy these days.

This being the United States, as Angry Man was stomping out, I heard one of the other customers mutter "I hope he doesn't have a gun." I guess he didn't, as nothing further happened. Those few minutes of helpless fear were great, though!

I was expecting to feel awful today while my immune system threw a party, but I'm surprisingly okay. Tired, both arms sore (the pharmacist insisted on each vax in a different arm, "so that if you have a reaction we know which one it was"), but no noticeable fever or anything, unlike after my last booster.

ETA: I was the only person in the place masking properly. Other people were coming in unmasked for their COVID boosters. The pharmacist and one of the techs had their masks on their chins unless they were directly talking with a customer, and Rude Tech had no mask at all. *sigh*


2) I continue to be only interested in Our Flag Means Death. But also afraid to read most fanfic for it, especially after a chaptered fic I was following with some eagerness failed to stick the landing. I'm avoiding most fannish interaction, in fact, except here, because there has been Discourse. Oh, has there been Discourse. I hear about it third-hand on Twitter, and that's plenty.

But having said that . . .


2a) I'm probably going to participate in Our Flag Means Gifts, a Yuletide-ish fic exchange just for OFMD. I'm a bit nervous about the fact that it's being run out of Tumblr (that is, the info posts are there, but the actual exchange is on AO3), but, well, it seems worth a shot. I want to trying writing to a prompt, now that I'm writing again, and since I'm monofannish at the moment, Yuletide is right out. (Anyway, OFMD probably ceased to be Yuletide-eligible before S1 even ended.) More info about Our Flag Means Gifts here, in case you're interested.


2b) Since I'm finding it easier to try OFMD-adjacent things than actual OFMD fanfic, I read Rose Lerner's m/m romance Sailor's Delight, about a Jewish naval agent and the British officer he hopelessly--he thinks--loves. I wanted to love this book, but I didn't. I never thought I'd say of a romance novel that there wasn't enough romance in it, but that was the case here. The main characters had weirdly little interaction and no chemistry, and the personality of Augustus Brine (for that is the woefully Dickensian name inflicted on the love interest) in particular was sketched-in and undeveloped. The whole book felt like it didn't want to be a romance, it wanted to be the story of an extended Jewish family in Regency England--which would be awesome, I'd read that!--but, because the romance was still technically central and the book was the standard very short length of a self-pub romance, it didn't succeed in doing that either. Alas.


2c) I continue my re-read of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey & Maturin novels, which continue to be a joy. I'm just finishing The Far Side of the World, part of the delightful middle stretch of books where O'Brian had settled into his story, no longer felt the need to give us every single detail of real naval actions in each book, and just carried along improvising like Jack and Stephen playing music together.

It's odd . . . the stereotype is that people who like genre fiction like tightly plotted stories, full of action, where every scene moves the adventure along. I adore genre fiction, but often what I want from it is plotless or near-plotless wanders, full of interesting incidents and lovely character exploration that do not Serve The Plot. Refuse to serve the plot, writers! Overthrow the plot! No plots, no masters!

I have a WIP again. Which, mercifully, does not look like it's going to turn huge on me.

It's Buttons + ensemble, gen in the sense that it's not primarily a pairing fic, but a lot of it's about gender and sexuality. And witchcraft.

Buttons and Stede have a little chat, ( under the cut )