Rewatching OFMD (as One Does, Obviously) And I Realized Why Ed Identifies So Quickly With Frenchie, And

Rewatching OFMD (as one does, obviously) and I realized why Ed identifies so quickly with Frenchie, and it's not just at the party.

At the very beginning of the episode when he's hanging out with Stede, after trying to feel fancy and feeling like he'll never really get to (ie, why he was remembering his mother telling him that fine things just aren't for people like them), Frenchie walks in.

And when Frenchie walks in, he's wearing one of the fancy Frenchmen's suits, and he says," What do you think? A couple of the suits from the fancy ship didn’t have blood on them and weren’t burned up, so I nabbed ‘em."

He saw a black man walk in, and just decide to put on finery. He didn't listen to the people who would've told him that he didn't get to have it, he didn't listen to the people who would've told him that stealing posh clothes was a waste. He instead saw Frenchie step into the room, doing what he wanted and taking some finery for himself, and ask the two of them what they thought of his outfit like it was just the most casual thing. Even though he wasn't even apart of Stede's aristocratic lessons, he just chose to without fear of judgement.

Then he continues," And I found this. It’s an invitation to some kind of fancy party for hoity-toity people."

He's asking them if they want to do anything with this knowledge.

If they wanted to attend, for no reason really.

Ed got to see, for the first time in his whole life, someone like him give themselves a taste of the fine life, just because they wanted to try it, for a bit of fun. And he offered a ticket for Ed to try a bit of it himself, without any care to the whole world that told him that he didn't deserve it.

And then afterwards, Frenchie was there for him when he ran out of the dinner party, asking if he was okay, understanding the sort of thing he was feeling in a different way than Stede could, and in that finale playing a song with him so he can let his feelings out.

All that was important, too. But I think it was that first second, when he walked in the door clothed in fine fabrics with a smile on his face, that Ed really identified and attached to Frenchie.

More OFMD

Stede and the Thanatos Drive *

I wrote this reply off the cuff and thought I was done with it:

On the Queen Anne's Revenge

On the Queen Anne's Revenge

OK - like, Stede's complete lack of response to Ed's confession about having meant to kill him has been ON MY MIND for a while now. Like, ye

but it turns out I have more to say. Because, yes, Stede kind of has a death wish. It’s not the Thanatos Drive as proposed by Freud, exactly (mostly because freudian bullshit is bullshit), whereby the instinct toward and desire for death are the subconscious motivation driving destructive and aggressive behavior. In Stede’s case, it’s more of a crushing dearth of self-esteem and nearly complete lack of ability to set appropriate boundaries borne from a lifetime of relentless verbal, emotional, and physical abuse at the hands of his parents and peers that sees him passively accepting of further abuse and disrespect, even to the point of death. Stede assumes that people wanting him dead is just the default mode for all humanity upon making his acquaintance. And because he has been shown and told all his life just how worthless he is, and how wrong about everything he values, he assumes they’re right, actually, and he is utterly undeserving of respect, and death is more or less what he deserves.

In the pilot, Stede lets Badminton humiliate him in front of his friends and in private without much more pushback than the suggestion that he had thought of himself as a slender child rather than “a porker”. When things go down, and Olu asks Stede if he wants to live, his reply is “That’s a tough question”, and when Olu asks again, his answer is “I think so! Probably!” Which is… not much better. He doesn’t even flinch or try to argue when Olu tells him “Everyone up there wants you dead”, and Lucius confirms, “It’s true.” He may have been “caring, supportive, and responsive to their needs” and provided the crew with luxury amenities and financial stability, but it comes as no surprise to him all that wasn’t enough to override the innate deficiencies of his character that lead people to wanting him to die.

When the Spanish captain stabs him in episode 3, Stede’s not angry or indignant. He just asks:

They have, after all, just barely been introduced to one another. The stabbing isn’t a surprise, merely how quickly after first acquaintance it took place. Then, to add insult to injury, just as he bleeding from a gut wound and about to be hanged, Jim remonstrates him for being “the worst fuckin’ pirate captain in history.” His reply?

Because of course those are going to be his final words. It’s been the mantra on an endless fucking loop in his head his whole life through.

In episode 9, when the English sentence him to death by firing squad for the death of Nigel Badminton, he denies Ed’s earnest insistence that they’ll find a way out of it.

This seems, at first glance, like a backslide in his character development. Did we not see him coming to terms with his part in Nigel’s death, even admitting he didn’t actually feel all that bad that Nigel is dead? Why would he think he deserves death for having killed Nigel? But Nigel is incidental. He deserves this the way he deserved Jim’s condemnation of his captaining skills. He deserves this because death is all he really deserves, isn’t it?

He’s not even mad at Mary when she tries to murder him in his sleep. He’s much more upset by the means by which she attempted to accomplish her goal.

But for all of this, there’s a great big asterisk to Stede’s passive resignation to being treated like absolute shit. And that asterisk is named Izzy Hands.

Their first encounter goes off well enough, given the circumstances. Stede is, after all, trying to steal the hostages that he lost when he himself was captured by the native villagers. Izzy is defending his purchased hostages, and as far as we and Stede can see, Izzy is calm and responsive to Stede’s sallies instead of the cursing, feral chihuahua we will all come to know and love. Even when he shreds Stede’s shirt with his saber and says “This is how you die,” it’s not so much a threat as a warning; an acknowledgement of his superior prowess with the blade and Stede’s foolishness if he insists on persevering in his intended theft. Izzy remains calm and receptive even when the distraction works and Stede gets the upper hand, agreeing to Stede’s terms of splitting the hostages, and letting them go even though he and Fang, and even poor Ivan with his broken nose, could probably have overtaken and made light work of them quite easily. All in all, as agreeable an introduction as one might hope for when one person is robbing another. (and also Izzy was almost certainly ACHINGLY turned on by having another man best him and hold him at knife point and WILL die mad about it, actually, because he will be DAMNED if he will even admit that is his kink, thankyouverymuch. Oh no. Have I talked myself into a new ship? Behold! A tiny, filthy garbage scow hoves into my fandom harbor and docks in the shadow of the battleship Blackbonnet).

So what’s astonishing to me is that, every time after this initial encounter, Stede is notably aggro toward Izzy. He greets Izzy in Jackie’s pub with an aggrieved sigh and a derisive “You again!” He then proceeds to get Izzy’s name wrong, and when corrected, doubles the fuck down on his dismissiveness, accuse Izzy of stealing (though that was clearly what he was doing TO Izzy at their last encounter, and Izzy agreed to Stede’s terms without reserve), and insult him by saying his boss “has terrible taste in flunkies”. I mean to say, really?!?! All this from the same man who, mere minutes later is resigned to Jackie cutting off his nose because he accidentally knocked over the nose jar, even though he was in the process of picking noses off the dirt floor with his bare hands WHILE WEARING HEAD-TO-TOE WHITE, and would certainly have gotten her any new receptacle her heart could possibly desire.

And through the whole exchange, Izzy is fairly pleasant - or at least as pleasant as a deeply unpleasant little gremlin of a man (affectionate) gets. He insults the bar, sure, but Stede himself uses profanity, so it’s not like he’s some wilting lily who would get bent out of shape over someone else cursing in his vicinity. The only time Izzy gets the least bit out-of-line with Stede is when he gets in his face and growls the correct pronunciation of his name, and he immediately reigns himself back in even while Stede continues to escalate the situation. The viewers know that Izzy has been shit-talking behind Stede’s back (“Pirates, my ass” was said under his breath while Stede and his crew ran away giggling like schoolkids & “Stupid fucking Stede Bonnet” was said on a whole other ship in the privacy of the captain’s quarters), but Stede would have no way of knowing, and therefore no reason to be treating Izzy with such outright contempt and disrespect.

The next time Stede sees Izzy, after he has (mostly) recovered from his gut wound in episode 4, he greets him with another sneer.

Izzy is rough and abrupt with Stede this time, but, frankly, can you blame him? It is literally zero hour if they’re going to defend themselves and/or run from the Spaniards, and this bitch has given him nothing but sass. And THEN, Stede calls him out as an asshole TO HIS BOSS.

They don’t interact directly again until episode 6, at which point there’s a curious shift in their dynamic. Izzy yells at and insults Stede (“His name is Blackbeard, dog!”), at which point, Stede backs down and fucks off witha huffy little passive-aggressive remark about “trouble in paradise”. Later, when Stede is floating the idea of performing a fuckery for the Dutch merchant vessel, Izzy comes in with a back-handed compliment, “As much as I hate to admit it, Captain Bonnet’s theatrical instincts are finely honed. He’s more than up to the challenge.” Stede replies with the most warmth and cordiality we have ever seen him offer Izzy - even going so far as to suggest he may have misjudged him. It’s like Stede can only afford Izzy any respect when Izzy DISrespects him. You know, like all right-thinking people SHOULD.

We see a shift back to the old dynamic when Izzy makes the mistake of admiring Stede’s library and complimenting the construction of the captain’s quarters, even in a back-handed sort of way. Stede feels no compunction about venting his frustrations about his stymied hopes for the fuckery on an ameliorating Izzy. But Izzy has built his career on managing Ed’s mercurial moods, and is well versed in how to turn the tides once more. He calls Stede a “little shit” and tells him Ed adores him, but in a frankly insulting way: “Why, I’ll never know, but… he does.” (le sigh)  And now Stede is properly primed. A disapproving god is in His heaven, and all is right with the world. Of COURSE Stede will abide Izzy’s wishes and recommit himself to the fuckery! I mean, just look at “The Soul’s Awakening” of this poor sucker’s face.

So is it any wonder that he agrees to the post-fuckery duel, even knowing how skilled Izzy is? Even with Stede’s whole Dunning-Kruger effect approach to all aspects of piracy, surely he can’t think he has a real chance, right? Izzy comes in with more invective and ire than we’ve ever before seen him direct at Stede, and kicks Stede’s Thanatos drive into overdrive. This is how he dies, after all, right? But then he doesn’t. He holds his own more or less. It turns kind of playful (to him, at least). And finally, he can sass Izzy about draws and how his mast is so very big and hard  - much bigger and harder than Izzy’s pathetic little broken blade.

And I’m just stuck wondering why Izzy is the only person for whom Stede will not lay down and die. It’s not the defference. There are plenty of people who are polite to Stede, and he doesn’t go all aggro on them. As much as it would amuse me, it isn’t even a “get your hands off my man” reaction, because some of Stede’s worst unprovoked sniping comes before Stede has even met Ed or knows in what way Izzy is connected with him. Also, we see Stede take all manner of shit from Calico Jack without ever pushing back (until he hurts a member of Stede’s crew. Insult him all you like, but screw with his crew at your own peril!), even when Jack figuratively (and then literally) marks his territory by referencing his former intimacy with Ed.

If I had to guess, I would say that it’s a matter of like repelling like. Izzy may not have the same deficiencies as Stede, or even to the same level, but Stede knows another self-hating repressed closet-case when he sees one. And he knows that, because the whole world has shown him so, that kind is not worthy of respect.

wwdits make me go like this

i hate this fufkcing show

The Massive Aggression of Calico Jack

I’ve been trying for a while to put my finger on exactly what it is about Calico Jack that makes me want to crawl out of my skin and smother him to death with my own abandoned ecdysis.

I mean, I normally love me a spurned admirer/cock-blocking ex. Romantic comedies have their beats, and there’s obviously no serious danger the love interest will end up with anyone other than their intended, so I may as well sit back and enjoy the machinations. After all, the course of true love never did run smooth, and these bitches are here to rough some shit up for sure. I also love Will Arnett. Hands down favorite recurring character on 30 Rock. The second best Batman after TAS (fight me). I can even cheerfully bear his Reese’s commercials if I must bear commercials at all.

Real-life Calico Jack? One of my v. favorite pirates. He wore floral-printed cotton from India as a fuck you to the British tax man. He had an affair with Anne Bonny and offered to purchase her divorce when her husband found out. The two ran away together into piracy when Bonny’s husband refused to quit her and had her whipped for her infidelity. Mary Read was part of Jack and Anne’s crew, and possibly their lover. We love a hopeless romantic, possibly polyamorous king. 

So what is it about OFMD Calico Jack that makes him so acutely punchable?

I’ve rewatched the episode several times (oh my v. dears, I really hope this write-up is worth it. I am SO BRAVE to subject myself to this), and I think I’ve finally got it. It’s not just that he’s a loud, vulgar, hectoring, drunken jackass of a bird-murderer. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I have as little patience for his brand of mindless destruction and violence-for-violence-sake as Stede does, but that’s not all.  It’s that he’s also a master of passive aggression.

Jack does the little whisper-y “Sorry! Sorry!” when Stede wants to know what’s with all the cannon fire, but immediately starts grinning like an unrepentant varlet as soon as he drops his hands.

And then accepts Stede’s introductory handshake with clear derision.

When Stede says he wasn’t expecting guests and there’s only two settings at brekkie, Jack doesn’t wait for Stede to sort things out, and he’s already lowering himself into Stede’s chair by the time Stede invites him to take his spot. He then purposefully keeps steering the conversation to topics that exclude Stede from participating, and cuts Stede short when he tries to reign the conversation back.

He insinuates Stede is less of a pirate for being “store bought”

He refuses to get Stede’s name right, even when corrected. Twice.

And is just SO insincere when calling him back.

And, just, the whole pissing contest scene.

But so what? We’ve had other passive aggressive assholes on the show; Badminton with his cracks about Stede’s tiny dick ship, the French captain’s slurs, Gabriel simpering about Jeff the Accountant’s dining manners. I’m not shedding any tears for their respective fates, but none of them made me want to crawl through the screen and sew all their face holes shut. Because Jack isn’t just passive-aggressive (and aggressive-aggressive), he might just be the most savvy reader-of-rooms we see on the show, and purposefully and systematically leverages his passive aggression to manipulate the actions of those around him for the purpose of making Ed and Stede betray their better selves and make them do the work of driving a wedge between themselves.   That was a lot in one sentence.  Let me break it down.

Jack uses passive aggression to achieve one of four goals: to nettle, to undermine, (seemingly paradoxically) to reinforce connections, or to coerce. And, if he can manage to achieve different goals for more than one target with the same attack? So much the better. And he’s frankly just astonishingly good at doing so. Like, I’d admire him for it if it didn’t also make me want to make him swallow all of his own teeth.

The basic gameplan goes thusly (this is not a strictly chronological list, a lot of these tactics take place concurrently and recurrently): Stede is the primary target, so Jack nettles him with passive aggressive comments, which puts him on the back foot and undermines his self-confidence. He reinforces his relationship with Ed in ways that excludes Stede and undermines Stede’s relationship with Ed and Ed’s relationship with Stede. Jack uses coercive tactics with Ed and the crew, which undermines Stede’s relationships with them, isolating and othering Stede, which further tanks his mood, which leads him to self-isolate. When Stede eventually lashes out at Ed for falling for Jack’s bullshit, Ed has no idea what’s got Stede so out-of-sorts; Jack has so carefully lead Ed to making the choices that have alienated Stede that they seem like they were Ed’s ideas in the first place. And if Ed has made the choices to do these things, then they are clearly just a reflection of who he is, which, if Stede is lashing out against them, then Stede is rejecting him. Wedge set and match.

So let’s look at the specifics.

Jack’s interactions with Ed are like a masterclass in neurolinguistic programming for evil. First, he plys Ed with booze from the very start. Just look at the bottle in this shot from right after they blow up the dresser drawer.

That bottle or rum is over half gone, and the sky in the background is the peachy-pink of sunrise. This isn’t the bottle Jack had with him in his dinghy; that one he drained and then threw in the air and tried to shoot before coming aboard the Revenge. Which means that they’ve consumed over half the bottle between just the two of them in a very short amount of time.   Alcohol, of course, is a social lubricant - the physical warmth it produces mimicking the “warm, fuzzy” feeling of true comradery, and, more importantly, decoupling the decision-making process from inhibition (that is to say, Ed isn’t necessarily doing anything he absolutely wouldn’t otherwise do, but he might otherwise think twice).

But it’s more insidious than just having a few drinks with an old friend. Jack specifically gamifies the consumption of alcohol to reinforce the coupling of the feeling of inebriation with the comradery engendered by teamwork and excitement of success in order to encourage Ed to drink more than he necessarily otherwise would. Ed confirms to Stede during his apology that the idea to use the drawers of the armoire for target practice came from Jack, and we saw that a bullseye meant that Jack had to take a drink, but Ed didn’t. Presumably, there would have been some consequence for a “miss”, and it seems likely that it would be Ed has to take a drink and not Jack. In this way, Jack is able to exert a measure of control over how much Ed is drinking (by missing on purpose) while making it look like the responsibility lies with Ed and his skill as a thrower. This pattern of sneakily controlling Ed’s actions while making it seem like Ed is the one who made or is responsible for the decision will pop up again and again during their interactions.

After the apologies for waking Stede, Jack steps into the space where Ed is gesticulating to make himself readily available to be touched, reenforcing the bond between them, but letting Ed be the one to instigate the touching.

At brekkie, he pours rum into Ed’s teacup without asking or being asked while Ed’s attention is diverted by getting food.

Jack’s collaring of the conversation does not just function as a means of making Stede feel excluded, he’s also refreshing and reinforcing the bonds he and Ed forged under adversity. Talking over Stede also demonstrates that what he has to say is more important than anything Stede might contribute.

Note that just before Jack cut him off, Stede had referred to Ed as Blackbeard (“Blackbeard and I met on a ship”). This may be innocently explained away; if you meet a person from a facet of a close friend’s life with which you do not intersect, you might refer to said friend by their given name instead of a nickname that the other person might not know, for the sake of common frame of reference. But this is the opposite of that - referring to a friend by a nickname instead of the given name that you both presumably know. That suggests to me that the seed of the Ed/Blackbeard dichotomy has already been planted in Stede’s mind by the morning’s shenanigans. And when Jack invites Stede back into participating in the conversation by talking about something he knows Stede would find upsetting (the wanton cruelty of Ed purposefully trapping people to be burned alive, couched in what sounds like sincere admiration for his friend’s piratical prowess), Jack has picked up on that distinction and is leaning into it HARD. He WANTS Stede to see Ed as a collection of behaviors he finds palatable, and Blackbeard as a collection of behaviors he finds repulsive, and then coerce Ed into performing those “Blackbeard behaviors” in order to coerce Stede to drive the wedge by rejecting him. Fucking diabolical.

When Jack is calling Stede a “big girl,” or “store-bought,” or purposefully getting his name wrong, he’s not just throwing barbs that play on Stede’s insecurities (and with such harrowing precision, too; calling on the effeminacy for which he was tormented as a child, his body image issues that we’ve also seen him struggle with under the tender mercies of Badminton - both brain-ghost and original flavor - and the authenticity of his claim to piracy, which we’ve seen him confess that he fears he’s ill-qualified to claim to Jim, Oluande, and Ed. I mean,triple bullseye for this fucking guy). He’s also using these public declarations to undermine Stede’s authority in front of his crew, and establish himself as the real authority on things like piracy and masculinity. He further reinforces this idea by withholding the story of how he saved Ed’s life under the guise of false modesty; people never want something more than when they’re told they can’t have it. And what they’re being told they can’t have is the story of how Jack was so amazing that he even managed to save the life of the coolest, most legendary pirate they know. This withholding primes the crew to think even more highly of Jack and hang on his every word.

This puts Jack into a position where he can pressure the crew into things that sound fun at first blush (like diving off the yardarm or having a snowball fight, but with coconuts), but end up hurting more than anything. Of course, within this dynamic, no one wants to admit they aren’t having a good time, or don’t want to do it; to do so would be tantamount to admitting you are less of a man or not a real pirate. So when Stede refuses to participate, or admits his discomfort or disgust with the proceedings, he’s doing Jack’s work for him, and further alienating himself, and solidifying the roles Jack had put into place where Jack is the fun, cool guy, and Stede is the killjoy that no one should listen to.

Stede unwittingly plays right into Jack’s design when he tries to stand up for himself and wrest 

back a modicum of respect before things get too far out of hand. He’s well-versed in the world of passive aggression, and sees what Jack is doing. He also knows that you can’t call it out because passive aggression comes with a built in cover of plausible deniability gaslighting. So instead, he tries to push back with a little passive aggression of his own, suggesting that a real pirate has a ship and a crew. Sadly, Stede is not nearly so adroit at wielding passive aggression as Jack is. Jack uses the story (and we know that Izzy sent him, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole mutiny thing is just a story; I could even easily read that slight hesitation after Stede asks his question as Jack deciding on what would be the most effective cover story, instead of hesitancy to admit to something shameful) of his crew’s mutiny to casually re-sow the idea of mutiny on the Revenge. It’s played for comedy when the crew starts talking about how they almost mutinied on Stede and probably will again, but you can’t tell me this hasn’t been a major concern for Stede ever since the first episode. So Jack’s not only got the crew trying to buoy his spirits by assuring him that his crew mutinying on his doesn’t mean he’s a bad person; it’s just something that happens! He’s also got them low-key committing to a future mutiny WITHIN EARSHOT OF STEDE.

Additionally, while Stede is well-steeped in the ways of passive aggression, his crew and Ed are not. They are not particularly sophisticated at identifying passive aggression on its own merits as opposed to the reaction it provokes, which can make it look like they don’t care when it’s being leveraged against Stede, undermining his ability to trust they will look out for him. Stede stoically putting up with Jack’s jibes makes them even more difficult to identify as hurtful. Jack’s (fake) emotional reaction to Stede’s sally might make him look momentarily weak, but allows Ed and the crew to unequivocally identify who is in the wrong and react accordingly. By positioning himself as a victim, he villainizes Stede, further undermining Stede’s authority, and placing him in a position where he owes Jack recompense. Thus, Jack is able to manipulate Stede into the trap of Dead Man’s Cove and make it look like it was Stede’s own idea. I mean, the Xanatos Speed Chess of it all.

What’s heartbreaking to me is how Jack’s wedge-driving and othering of Stede is working so well that at this point we start to hear it from other sources. As they approach the island and Stede suggests going for a swim or taking a nature walk, Ed is the one who tells him, “I think with this crowd, I think they want something a little more…” Not Jack would want something more exciting, this crowd. Jack’s exclusionary rhetoric out of Ed’s mouth.

Which is exactly the time Jack decides to up the ante.

I want to take a minute to look at the immediate lead up to yardies, because I think it’s an excellent illustration of how Jack looks like a lumbering boor, but his actions are actually so carefully considered and nuanced. He runs up from behind Stede and Ed and throws his arms around them shouting “Yardies!” literally insinuating himself between them, which interrupts anything that was going on between them, puts them off balance, and focuses the attention on him. Then, when he says “Who’s up for yardies?” he makes eye-contact with Ed - the implicit social expectation being “You, Ed, are up for yardies.” When he turns to Stede, it is to literally laugh in his face. I mean, the absolute cheek.

Until this point, the crew of the Revenge have been passive participants in Jack’s hooliganry. They watched him perform whippies, and got whipped at without encouraging him to do so. They listened to his and Ed’s stories. But now Jack is cashing in on his established expertise of what real pirates do to coerce the crew into taking part in a dangerous stunt. It’s more of the “Blackbeard behavior” dichotomy he started sowing in Stede’s mind at brekkie, but now he’s extending it beyond Ed to the whole crew. He wants Stede to feel like he’s all alone in a sea of idiocy, but he wants him to come to the conclusion on his own by making it seem like Ed and the crew are doing things of which he would disapprove of their own accord.

Once we get to the island, we see the activities take a turn from the careless Jackass-ery of whippies and yardies to the abject cruelty of turtle vs. crab. There’s no saying that Jack organized the fight, but we do see the crew handing him various trinkets to be used in gambling on a winner, which certainly suggests he was the central figure in how the game was established. We also see that, though he has been presenting himself as a drunkard, there’s no bottle in his hand or around him in the sand. There is, however, one in Ed’s hand, who is directly to his side. I can easily see him handing it off so he could handle the gambling stakes, the real intention being to keep Ed readily supplied with booze.

And then we have the pissing contest. Jack’s got Stede literally and metaphorically isolated, and now it’s time to really drive it all home. Every moment of their interaction is designed to drive Stede to distraction; the amount of derision he lays on the phrase “Your good, close buddy,” the insinuation that he and Ed are just alike, and then being as rude and crass as possible. And because he’s read the room - the intimate breakfast for two, Ed’s little touches and the way Stede smiles at them, the way they keep going off together for little chats - of course Jack’s just got to twist the knife and allude to his and Ed’s former sexual history. So now that he’s got Stede primed, it’s time to name the fear: “Maybe you don’t know him at all.”

At this point, Stede is left to wonder: does he? Blackbeard’s reputation preceded him, after all. And he’s been acting so differently since the appearance of one of his oldest friends. It’s not the violence qua violence, per se; Stede is by turns delighted and impressed by the violence he’s seen Ed and his crew employ in the heat of battle in the pursuit of piracy. It’s the cruel and senseless violence that Stede objects to, and that’s exactly the brand that Jack has been peddling, and which Ed has gone along with so enthusiastically. And it’s not JUST the violence; Ed apologizes for Jack when he recognizes Jack has crossed a line in a typically agro way (destroying Stede’s belongings, and insulting Stede to his face), but it never occurs to Stede that his insistence on persevering with quietly aggrieved dignity in the face of Jack’s slights would make it nigh impossible for Ed to identify that Jack has crossed all sorts of other lines, and Stede is hurting because of it. For Stede, it must be frustrating and mystifying why Ed keeps letting his friend get away with his passive aggressive bullshit. Doesn’t he care? 

Is it any wonder that one more failure to notice how Jack has riled him, and one more act of coconut-flavored Jackass-ary is enough to break the dam, and for Stede to spill all that built-up hurt on Ed?  Is it any wonder that Ed is bewildered at where all this is coming from? I’ve talked before about Ed’s tendency to fawn on people, and how, as an emotional chameleon, he would have difficulty identifying when the motivation for his actions is self-directed or externally dictated. Jack has further confounded this distinction by manipulating scenarios to make it seem like participation in all the Jackass-ary he has instigated was voluntary instead of coerced. When Stede says “I don’t like who you are around  this guy” what he means is “I don’t like how this guy is able to manipulate you into acting on your very worst impulses”, but what Ed hears is “I don’t like you”. For who is he, if not the collection of behaviors he chooses to exhibit? And were those choices not entirely his to make? With the rift clearly established, if in its infancy, of course Jack is going to do everything he can to foster its growth. So again, he interrupts Stede, again implicitly signaling that Ed should pay attention to what he says and not Stede. By lobbing the coconut at Ed at that moment, he forestalls any possible clearing of the air between Ed and Stede, and causes Ed to literally turn his back on Stede, in the way Ed feels Stede has emotionally turned his back on him just moments earlier. Jack reinforces this idea of turning his back on Stede again moments later when he says “Don’t go!” and immediately turns Ed around by the shoulders.

I know that I’ve been laying it on a bit thick and prolly sound like the written embodiment of the red string conspiracy meme, but I’m about to get a whole lot worse, and I’m going to ask you to stick with me, oh my v. dears. I think Jack killed Karl on purpose.

I know, I know. It was an accident! He was flailing drunkenly! But was he?

Have we seen him take so much as a single drink since the cannon fire at the beginning of the episode? Even though he’d been drinking earlier, did he not have devastating precision and accuracy when he first demonstrated Whippies - shattering every glass, snapping the cards from the Swede’s fingers, and ball-tapping Ed without permanently maiming him or even splitting the leather of his pants? In fact, while nearly every other crew member on the deck has a bottle in hand, just like on the beach, Jack does not.

Jack knows he has to get Ed off the ship before the British show up, but he can’t just say “Let’s ditch these losers” and expect Ed to agree, especially since he’s spent most of the day roping the crew into his schemes. The most effective way to get Ed to follow is if Jack is rejected for just being himself and doing what he does, just like Ed feels he was earlier by Stede. I think the original plan was to goad Olu into seriously hurting the Swede, the fallout of which would be recriminations that Jack made them do it, and Jack getting aggrieved that he was just trying to show this ungrateful lot how to have a good time, skulking off and leading Ed to follow him and reassure him that he’s really a good guy - how could he have known it would turn out like that? But when Buttons calls a halt to the proceedings and it looks like everyone is going to pack it in, Jack has to think fast. If HE maims a crew mate, that would be a bridge too far, painting him as the bad guy. But Karl? He’s just a bird. And if Jack can get a little revenge on the weird bird guy who made him change his plan, so much the better.

Of course the whole ship turns on him, and then here’s Stede to order him off, explicitly rejecting him the way he metaphorically rejected Ed. But when even that isn’t enough to get Ed to follow him, Jack pulls out one last, desperate manipulation - the debt of life.

Jack’s tragic flaw is that he can’t turn it off. Once he and Ed are alone, he turns his passive aggressive assault on Ed, pressuring him into drinking the morning away by sarcastically saying he didn’t know he had an audience with the pope when Ed expresses disinterest, and, ultimately, giving up the game when he mentions with casual derision how he’d heard of Ed shaking up with Stede, and then deriding Ed for his failure to spot Jack’s machinations.

Too bad Jack didn’t know that the punishment for passive-aggressive fuckery on this show is death…

listen all i’m saying is that there’s a reason ive been obsessed with mamma mia for the last 14 years. and no it has NOTHING to do with my daddy issues tyvm

Guys… guys.

As hilarious as all the “how oblivious ARE you?” jokes about Stede are, I think we’re missing the big picture. This isn’t about obliviousness, it’s about trauma.

Stede isn’t ignorant of the fact he’s in love with Ed. he’s been abused his whole life for his queerness and is having trouble conceptualizing that he’s allowed to be.

Notice how Stede immediately has the instinct to walk back his comment of Ed being “lovely”? This is the same man who didn’t even pick up that his very obviously mutinous crew was planning a mutiny, that shit was learned behavior. He’s speaking as a little boy who was tied to a boat and stoned for picking flowers, and as someone who was told mere days ago a man falling in love with him was “defiling a beautiful thing.”

Homophobia/ heteronormativity is alive and well in this world and Stede, being forced to live in the conservative circles he does, would’ve absolutely been painfully aware of it. The fact that he feels the need to ask a woman what it’s like to be in love with a man speaks volumes after he’s already been happily kissed by one and has roleplayed being married to him when lonely. He’s not just casually making conversation then has a eureka moment when he happens to notice the description applies to him and Ed too, he asked specifically to compare them.

It’s him testing the waters and thinking that maybe “they” were wrong. Maybe he’s not broken or pathetic, maybe he never deserved to be treated as such. Maybe he didn’t “seduce” Edward, or “ruin” him, or “defile” him. And maybe his feelings for Ed are just as loving and romantic as Mary’s feelings are for her boyfriend.

It’s such a beautiful moment when he slowly smiles, let’s out that little breath like a sigh of relief, and tells his wife of an arranged marriage with nothing less than wonder in his voice that what he’s found at sea is in fact love. Fuck, it gets me every time.

There’s an absolutely gorgeous through line of queer liberation in Stede’s half of episode 10 after this scene. How he refers to Ed as his “newfound love”, confidently says they’ll “all be great”. He smears the blood on his face himself, breaks his own flowers, all to reach someone who sees him as perfect and beloved exactly as he is. What a fitting ending to his days of crying himself to sleep because he cannot be what everyone’s failed to beat him into.