I don’t think we talk enough about how, despite the presence of multiple globes, PotC takes place on a flat earth, ice wall included.
I'm gonna need some elaboration here
They literally sail over the edge of it after passing through a hole in a wall of ice. They fall off. They get back to the other side by passing through the whole ocean.
But also there’s a globe on, like, everyone’s desk.
#it's like lord of the rings#it's only flat for pirates
You get it.
No, but this is actually (sort of) canon.
See, part of the conceit of the PotC trilogy is that all myths are true. Nearly every supernatural element in the franchise has a root in some real world mythology or pirate lore, although some of them are mashed together.
Another thing is that they take place at the end of the Golden Age of Piracy, and the more the map gets filled in, and the more the Royal Navy takes power, there less room there is for the mystical and supernatural in the world. This is explicitly called out in At World's End with the death of the kraken:
Barbossa: The world used to be a bigger place. Jack: The world's still the same. There's just... less in it.
The only way to access the world of the supernatural is through the supernatural itself. You can only get to the Isla de Muerta with Jack's compass that points to whatever you desire, or if you already know where its is. You need Tia Dalma's map to find the edge of the world. To access the supernatural, you need to already be immersed in it.
The pirates world isn't flat, it's round - but because the edge of the world exists in myth, it therefore exists in reality. The pirates are able to find it through supernatural means, but if, say, someone like Norrington just sailed in the same general direction, he wouldn't end up in the same place.
“Pirate” is a mage subclass fueled by word of mouth, rule of cool, The Power of Belief/Love/Friendship, and rum.
If you look at it in a particular way, the Pirates specifically function by FAIRY RULES: obscure codes of law and formality that they are irrevocably bound to abide by...except when you get the wording wrong.
When we go to Tortuga (or any pirate controlled space) we leave behind the sensibilities of the real world and enter this bizarre perpetual revel of debauchery and violence that could never sustain itself in a world bound by sense.
That makes Jack our Puck character, a trickster of tricksters who can invert your fortunes just by letting him talk to you.
It also makes Will into a changeling, born of the fairyworld, adopted by mortals, and fated to return to it in what makes for a doomed love story. Hell, one might say that the reason Will's swords are SO GOOD is because they contain an element of myth about them: they're the IDEA of swords, true to how they would be in myth.
