a potentially unpopular hot take here but the thing about stede unhinged rage energy in the show is that he’s been trodden on and laughed at and kept out of the room his entire life, he’s been made fun of and disrespected, he’s experienced hate and violence against him, and it’s easy to slip past his rage in the show because it isn’t rage for the sake of rage, it’s rage for the sake of healing. he stands up for himself and his crew and for ed. he gets angry because he’s been treated this way his whole life, and he’s fucking done with it, and he’s fucking done with it happening to anyone else. when stede lashes out, he does it in this context - never against anyone who didn’t deserve it. it’s easy to slide over stede’s rage in the show because it doesn’t work to destroy or to limit stede. it works to heal him.
there’s a lot of commentary out there that wants us to turn the other cheek, to swallow down our anger, to moderate our tone when we react to our own marginalization: queerness, race, class, more. and our own histories: intergenerational traumas and social expectations. stede bonnet says fuck that. i’m a pirate now. not all anger is destructive, and i’m gonna go ape shit. sometimes allowing ourselves to feel anger - to acknowledge how fucked up something is, to not swallow ourselves down - is what we need to heal from our trauma.
the biggest point in the show where anger becomes destructive is, as many people have noticed, the burning of the french ship. but it’s important to note, i think, that stede doesn’t set the fire. stede just exposes the group to one another, and then he sits back and laughs, because he knows exactly what they are and what they’ll do to themselves. he knows that it’s their anger - based on greed and competition and infidelity and lies - that starts the fire. and it’s clear from the scene with our crew escaping and with abshir and the other servants escaping that they could escape. to the extent that anyone dies on that ship, which is not actually established by the narrative, it’s their own destruction. they could escape, but it’s their own anger that keeps them trapped.
this works because stede’s anger is portrayed alongside and in specific relation to the rejection of toxic masculinity. stede’s rage is not about becoming out of control and lashing out unnecessarily and hurting the people around him. he wields it very narrowly and pointedly. stede’s rage is about kindness and love and acceptance as a radical act, even when he’s fucking pissed, because his anger demands more - he demands respect from nigel badminton, who laughs at him and calls him a coward and rejects his stance toward non-escalation (with an unintended consequence), he demands respect from izzy, who hates him for everything he is in terms of softness and flamboyance, he demands care from calico jack, who is careless with his crew, he demands compassion from the french, who are compassionless to ed, he demands significance from doug, who has replaced him so entirely and who seeks to dismiss stede’s anger at the life he was forced into with mary. (doug is also the best example of stede losing control, and it’s noteworthy i think that stede rejects his own reaction immediately and goes to lengths to make amends.) stede’s rage is about protection, and about standing up against people who want to grind you down with bigotry and intolerance, and about choosing to be soft because you know what it’s like when the world is so fucking hard.
stede’s rage is about allowing himself everything he’s been told he can’t and asking, just like he does in the very beginning: why? and what if it weren’t like that?
