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Yall notice how Ed deliberately separated the other couples on board, like if he can't be happy then no one else can

#Ofmd #our flag means death #blackbonnet #Ofmd 1.10 #Ofmd episode 10

time for me to speak on OFMD ep 9 and the Act Of Grace bit! cause oh boy oh boy i love the golden age of piracy!!

so the Act of Grace was a real thing, an act passed by the king that any pirate wishing to give themselves up *within the year* would be forgiven and pressed into privateering instead. (i believe it was september 1717-1718?) and many pirates, including those like stede bonnet and jack rackham, took the pardons and then quickly said “fuck no” and turned back to piracy.

in real life both stede bonnet and blackbeard sought out pardons and later turned to piracy. as the story goes blackbeard sent stede out to receive his pardon and then left with his ship, marooning a lot of his crew on a nearby island (starting to sound familiar?). blackbeard went into privateering but by the end of the summer was fully back to pirating. i think stede did the same? anyway they don’t see each other again, but i have no doubt that will change in the show.

the idea however of time-based pardons and the mutability of ones role in opposed societies is one that a lot of pirate media plays with. and in OFMD i think its a very real allegory for self-acceptance and brings to light the ways stede and ed operate as characters and how they change.

for ed this is partially liberating and partially suffocating. this is a choice to follow the man he loves into change side by side, leaving behind quite literally the image of blackbeard. this is about “what ed wants”. at the same time he can’t be happy here, under control, and as soon as he thinks stede reciprocates his feelings he’s all right with leaving. assimilating into society was only ever a lesser of two evils in order to stay with stede.

for stede himself, it’s like being thrust back into a nightmare. it forces him to reconcile with who he is as a person, if he has both abandoned his family and life as a society man as well as his life as a pirate captain. he has hurt people as a society man, he has hurt people as a pirate, and so he sees any happiness as unjust. for stede this doesn’t open up his options so much as tell him exactly how he has to suffer given that he doesn’t fit in Anywhere.

the pardoning it is an opportunity to be fully accepted into society, with the price of fighting it’s war of course, along with written abandonment of your former self. you sign away our name and admit that you were wrong, everything about who you are is not as it should be, and you must change to be assimilated. you leave and deplore place where gay men can live lives in partnership and a nonbinary person can interact with their gender purposefully.

piracy exists as a very real and viable life-model that creates structure around gender and sexuality that directly opposes the cisgender and heterosexual form of life in society. taking those pardons even if they eventually abandon them means a real reckoning with existence in opposition to heterosexual norms. its about what happens when ed and stede are confronted with who they are, who they have been, and what they want. and when they both are on different paths and pass each other like speeding ships in the night, its about how that breaks them.