28 & 35
WEIRDLY SPECIFIC CHARACTER BUILDING / accepting !
28. What do they tell people they want? What do they actually want?
ohoho. so, Esmeralda tells people that she wants much the same as any other pirate: freedom, and adventure, and gold, and perhaps most importantly revenge for Don Rafael. this last one tends to define many of her interactions with others, including her crew who follow her blindly through the six year long revenge quest, the men and women she pays for information, as well as the relationships she’s not building while she’s focused on the goal of killing Christophe. and this is certainly true to a certain extent : she tells herself and believes that revenge is what she wants most, and she sacrifices a great deal in order to try to achieve it, even straining her relationship with God and with those close to her, like Luis. but if Jack lent her his compass it would not lead her to Christophe. what Esmeralda really wants is to feel whole again, and to have a family that she belongs to, and this is why she feels so strongly about avenging her grandfather –– it is a family obligation that she has been unable to fulfill, and she feels that revenge will fill the hole his presence left in her. ( it won’t ) she wants to be married, and have a family, and peace, but she doesn’t feel entitled to those things until she feels she has earned them –– which comes, necessarily, with the pursuit of gold and adventure along the way, but they are means to an end. it’s very difficult to live according to those values in the pirate community, much less actively pursue that life with someone, so she is content with what she has, which is loving jack, even at a distance, and embracing the family that is her crew.
35. What is the smallest, morally questionable choice they’ve made?
her lies to Marie in her letters. she has often made up many excuses as to why she can’t visit her and her family in the colonies, despite maintaining a regular correspondence with her –– some new insight into Christophe’s whereabouts, pressure from her crew, a naval ship tailing her and not wanting to bring that danger, etc etc. sometimes they are partially based in fact, but really she cannot help but imagine how incredibly worthless she’d feel when faced with Marie’s success at happiness when she herself is still unmarried, alone, and unsuccessful even in fulfilling the goal of killing the man who murdered her grandfather and attacked Marie. Marie undoubtedly has realized that at least part of the reasons are lies, and I think she might have an idea of the reason she does it, but she always reassures her that her door is always open. which only ever makes her feel worse about lying to her.
