I Just Wanna Talk A Bit About This Moment In Ep 4

i just wanna talk a bit about this moment in ep 4

so here stede notices how mesmerized ed is by the piece of cashmere

then he asks “do you fancy a fine fabric?”

also look at ed- (ignore my sobbing)

ed then says yes and look at stede’s face 😭

before that, he was always ridiculed for liking soft things but he just met someone else that understands and he’s just so happy and immediately shows him his secret wardrobe and i’m just 🥹

Imagine Anakin absolutely losing his mind as it’s explained to him that his marriage is literally illegal because of article whatever subsection b and it’s because 400 years ago there was an entrapment scheme and that’s why Padme is being sued by the republic

Sometimes I will see a wildly strange and unrealistic trope in fiction and wonder why anyone likes it.

Then I remember some of the dumb tropes that I love with all my heart no matter how absurd or unrealistic they are, and I remember that I have zero room to judge anyone else's choices.

Putting my latest Scholomance series thoughts under a readmore. :)

Just realized one of the reasons I'm enjoying the Scholomance series so much so far. It gets pitched as this super grimdark fantasy response to Harry Potter, but it's really the opposite of that? It's so hopeful! It's honestly far more of a response to the idea of hopelessness in the face of overwhelming odds that you may not be able to ever fully overcome.

At every turn, we learn that the characters' actions come at a cost, even the heroic ones. And yet, the book says again and again that the right way to respond is not to give up, but to try harder to keep doing good. You fixed something, and it broke something else worse? Then it's your responsibility to fix that thing too! That caused yet another problem in another location? Then you work to fix that problem. You don't give up and stop trying. Maybe sometimes you lose, and maybe sometimes you have to make hard choices about how to get the most good out of limited options, but even then you still keep trying.

And sometimes it is hard! Sometimes in the process of fixing something big, you have to break something smaller! Sometimes you might not even know what the real problem is - you just see something wrong and start trying to make it better, and then you expose a much bigger flaw in the process. And the book acknowledges how easy, how tempting, how understandable it is to keep your head down and go with the flow instead of trying to solve problems that are bigger than you. But it also says, again and again, that it is better in the long run to face those issues and try to help other people, to prioritize kindness and compassion over individual survival and comfort, anyway.

The only way to truly lose in the long term is to give up, and to build your own short-term safety on the back of other people's sacrifices. When you work together though? When you do right by other people and convince them that it's worth it to build collective action focused on the common good? That's the only way to really fix things properly, to work together to make something better for everyone instead of just trying to make sure you're not the one around when and where the current system breaks.

And that's really beautiful to me.

One of the scenes that I again felt was incredibly lovely in Episode 9 is the one between Stede and Ed sitting on the beach. It's very quiet and intimate, and the kiss happens, which doesn't come out of nowhere given the mood of the scene, but almost takes both characters a little by surprise. What did you want to capture most about that moment in playing it with Taika, and was there anything that you decided to bring to it apart from what David [Jenkins] had on the page?

DARBY: I wanted to make sure that the audience knew that Stede didn't really know what love was and hadn't really expected a kiss or anything like that. He was very naive to it all but was just on this rollercoaster because he enjoyed every minute of it, and he didn't know where it was going to end. I think he expected, in some ways, for Blackbeard or Ed to take the lead — which he has, in most of the things we've done on board. He's the experienced pirate, and Stede tried to give his own 10 cents by helping out with gentlemanly things and the use of cutlery and wearing fine fabrics and things like that. But there was certainly a lack of confidence in the area of... I think that's probably the same for both of them, with love.

I really could come down to either of them probably taking that next step and just touching each other in that way. But it just so happened to be Ed, because Ed felt invigorated. He felt like he had finally let go of the persona of Blackbeard, the evil side of him. Once the beard came off and everything, he's like some dashing guy from the Mills & Boon — you probably don't know what those books are.

I do, the romance novels.

DARBY: The romance novels. Yeah. So he is sitting there, but he's certainly more at ease, you can see that. Because Stede isn't. Stede's realizing that he has possibly screwed everything up and that they're going to die, and I think he's got a lot more going on in his head, and you can see that when they do the kiss. Then Ed walks away, [and] there's just this really puzzled look on Stede's face where he's taking that in, but he's taking so many other things in at the same time, which are: Is this the end? What do I do here? Have I done the right thing? Yeah. But I think I hopefully played that right.

- Collider, 24th March 22

Fuck my man, you played that so so right.

Ed + loving Stede for all the things he was always mocked for