thinking about how ofmd s2 ended up being different from the enormous piles of reunion fic written over the hiatus. when people talk about this with respect to the ed/stede reunion itself they frame it usually as ed being less angry at stede than we expected him to be. i don't think that's really true though! he is very very angry for a good while. but even at his angriest he is expressing his anger differently than we all expected.
this is the difference imo: in nearly all reunion fic the reunion starts out with ed being blackbeard at stede. the narrative tension is around stede getting through to him enough that he's willing to put the blackbeard persona aside and just talk to him as ed, because it's only after that happens that it's possible for them to begin patching things up. and that never happens in s2! ed is never in any version of the blackbeard persona when he's interacting with stede, not even when he's angriest, not for a moment.
we all talk about how ed hides under a blanket whenever he's upset. but - he doesn't. ed was obviously very upset during the entire kraken era; do you think he ever let anyone on that ship see him hiding under a blanket during all that time? hiding under a blanket to cope with being upset is something he does when stede's around. there is one obvious counterexample - the depression robe era - but i've always read that as ed experimenting with trying to be emotionally open with other people the way he'd been with stede, specifically as a reaction to his time with stede, and he drops it as soon as the experiment goes badly. blackbeard doesn't hide under blankets; ed does. the fact that ed gets upset and goes and hides under a blanket, clearly expecting that stede will come and find him there, is an expression of how upset he is but it's also at the same time an expression of trust. even now stede still gets to see the part of him that hides under blankets when he's upset.
the impression i got from s2 honestly is that ed cannot perform blackbeard at stede, because stede has already seen too much of him. stede knows blackbeard is pretend, in a way nobody else really does, and ed knows he knows, and if ed tried to put on the pretense for him i honestly think he'd just feel ridiculous. neither of them would be fooled for an instant. stede would be like "ed. c'mon," and he'd crumble.
a thing that makes this really wild btw - i don't want this to turn into izcourse but. ed has known izzy way longer than he's known stede, for multiple years at least. and yet ed is perfectly capable of performing blackbeard at izzy, because despite the fact that izzy considers himself an indispensable part of blackbeard, izzy wants blackbeard to be real and won't admit to himself the degree to which it's a pretense. there's an eddie persona, who izzy and jack and anne and mary get to see, fellow pirates he considers roughly his peers: eddie's a really cool guy, and kind of a douchebag, and he doesn't ever hide under blankets. eddie's not the same as the full-on distant scary blackbeard persona. but eddie's also not ed. stede knows ed, and nobody else really does, and that's what ed meant when he talked about not having any friends.
ed is just kind of incapable of not feeling safe around stede, i think, and that's crazy because stede did in fact literally just ghost him traumatically and hurt him very badly the last time ed made himself emotionally vulnerable! and ed is perfectly conscious of that of course, that's what he means by "i was just a plaything to you" and that's why he wants to take it slow and that's what the fisherman breakup is about, he's terrified because he has no reason to trust that stede won't leave him again. but on a certain level despite that he does trust stede with his heart, right away, because he honestly can't help it.
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