Crying At These Descriptions Of The Ofmd Supporting Cast I Found

Crying at these descriptions of the ofmd supporting cast I found

saw The selfie on my dash and i just knew. I Had to draw it

star is so gender 💥 look at he!!!

psst. rbs make me happy :)

something about 'i know it's unlikely we'll find each other but it was unlikely for us to meet in the first place'

something about 'did you know there are birds that spend their entire lives in the air'

something about how albatrosses mate for life but spend a large proportion of the year apart and at sea before returning to aotearoa during mating season and finding their mate through recognition of the unique courtship language they created together

do you love it when parties get crowded? do you feel like you need to crotchet your mouth shut? do you love it when you wake up to silence? do you think apathy is boring and that sadness is so last year? congrats u should listen to apathy is boring by bears in trees!!!!

OFMD S2 Meta - Stede's Garbage Self-Worth with regards to Ed is still unresolved

(And I'm so hyped for this plotline)

H'ok! So of all the scenes in episodes 1-3 of OFMD S2, this is the one I've been most hyped to discuss but I've been putting it off a few days so people had at least a little time to watch the new eps.

Gifs are courtesy of @ratchet from this gifset:

Hoooo BOY this is such an interesting scene to unpack! Because to me there's at least 3 levels going on here.

What Lucius hears

What the audience "hears"

What Stede literally said

Thing is, I believe when Stede says, "I'm not ready to believe that," the tone that Lucius hears and that the audience is at least 50/50 expected to hear based on the sort of cadence of the scene is, "I'm not ready to believe that Ed's best days are behind him. I'm going to change that."

But I'm not convinced that's what Stede is saying, what Rhys Darby is portraying, or what is literally on the page.

Literally, on the page, Stede says he's not ready to believe that. And given that Stede is very neurodivergent coded, Rhys is self-confessed autistic, and I believe Rhys is bringing that to his portrayal of Stede, I think we really should look at literal words as written and not just run with they're implied to say. This could be read as a declaration that Stede refuses to accept a reality where Ed's best days are behind him or the literal reading: he still can't process that Ed Teach's time with Stede Bonnet was the best Ed's life is ever going to get.

I believe this is for multiple reasons:

Stede isn't going to throw off a lifetime of low self-esteem and bullying overnight just because he's realized he's in love. Especially when the manner of realizing it (end of S1) was hurting the person he loves pretty badly by abandoning him without a word. He's determined to fix his mistakes but each step of the journey is revealing just how big of a mistake it actually was. Not exactly the stuff of sudden self-confidence and positive self-image change.

It requires a full re-write in Stede's brain of every single assumption he had about his relationship with Ed before their separation. Stede in S1, to my eyes, very much saw himself as the junior partner in the relationship. He saw Ed as taking pity on him, to some extent. He felt blessed to have Ed there. It informed so much of their relationship and it especially informed him taking off when he thought his presence was an active burden on Ed. Basically, what Lucius is saying here attacks the very foundations of Stede's understanding of the happiest part of his life so far. To learn that Ed wasn't just the happiest part of his life, but that he, Stede Bonnet, was the happiest part of Ed's life? Whew. Fuck. Not good. Very not good.

Because it's really not good if he was the happiest part of Ed's life, that he so fundamentally misunderstood their dynamic because of his low self-esteem, that he ended the happiest period of Ed's life without warning, without a note, prematurely, and left Ed with the inescapable conclusion that Stede doesn't care about him.

I think worse, even worse, is that Stede has evidence that Lucius is right that he was the best part of Ed's life. But in S1, we're heavily in Stede's POV and Stede's POV of himself is that he's a joke, pathetic, garbage, lucky to have someone like Ed in his life. But Ed's literal actions, louder than words, are that he chose Stede. He gave up piracy for him. He stayed by him. He offered his life for Stede's. Stede wasn't ready to hear that then, he couldn't hear it over the sound of his own low self-esteem whispering poison in his ear, externalized by the Badmintons (both real and imagined). He took their words as fact, rather than Ed's actions as fact. Reexamining Ed's actions shows just how wrong they were. Just how wrong Stede was. And just how badly he hurt Ed because he didn't listen to Ed, the person he loves, over the voices of his own trauma, self-doubt, or of the Badmintons, people who literally hated Stede.

It's a lot. It's a lot for Stede to take in. He's not there yet. But I love that we've had it said aloud: this is a major plot point still. Stede's end-of-S1 glow-up didn't signal that he's self-confident now enough to realize he might be as good for Ed as Ed is for him. He's still grappling with that. It shatters him to even begin to realize this. They have to work through that still. Stede is ready to start listening but he still doesn't, can't literally can't, believe it just yet. It's just too big.

And I am absolutely salivating to see how the rest of the season deals with this thread.

Okay, coming back to this post initiated from @jellybeanium124 now that I've had some time to wake up and rewatch the scene in question of Stede walking in on the crew devouring the seagull raw.

Like I said in my original "something something" response, there is some folklore that seagulls possess the souls of deceased sailors, and the screeches they make are the sailor's mournful wails. Therefore, it was considered bad luck to harm seagulls in any way, because it would be doing injury to the soul of a sailor.

Related, there is of course The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where the mariner kills the albatross, bringing about great calamity to the crew. The mariner is then forced by the crew to wear the albatross around his neck as a sign of his guilt while they go through hell on the high seas.

I do believe the world of OFMD follows these superstitions. We see it with Karl and Olivia being able to speak with Buttons, and we see what happens to Calico Jack when he kills Karl. Yes, that was with some hexly influence from Buttons, but point stands: killing birds is Bad.

Something I keep stirring in my "is this intentional or is this DJenks handwaving to move the story along" pot is that the crew apparently didn't check if Ed was breathing. They dealt the blow, then laid his body out and did their best to forget about him.

Until Stede shows up.

I believe this scene is meant to show that the crew is literally chewing on their guilt. They just killed the greatest sailor they knew. He was their friend. This isn't what they wanted to happen, but they felt they had no choice.

And perhaps that's why they didn't check to see if he was breathing. Because they didn't want to look too closely. They didn't want to confront the horror of what happened that night. They just made sure they were out of danger, then closed the door and attempted to move on without dwelling on it. As Frenchie would say, they took the terrible things they saw, put them in a box in their minds, lock the box, and don't open it again.

But then Stede arrives, and they know they're going to have to open the box.

They don't say anything. They just keep chewing on their guilt, as if saying "yeah, we did what we had to do. Who are you to judge?"

But eventually it's all going to come out.