(Spins around in office chair.)
At other people's request: Continuing my monologue dissecting what makes Will Turner tick, which I started here: boop.
TLDR; scenes up to and including the forge sword fight contextualize and reveal who Will is by informing and building on the his major struggles, ambitions and desires. And then there's setting up the other stuff that's obvious: establishing the tone for Will and Jack's relationship, his skills with sharp objects, etc.
Fair warning: I'm rambling--I'm not sure there's any structure to this.
Anyway! Moving on: there's another few aspects of Will's personality that are introduced for the first time in the forge but are important to to the rest of the story: Will is demonstrated to be observant and very quick on the uptake/adaptable, but also inexperienced, somewhat impulsive, emotional, stubborn and willing to put his life on the line when he believes something. We're also introduced to a concept that helps lay the groundwork a key dynamic between Jack and Will: in spite of his wit and silver tongue, Jack is actually really bad at getting out of sticky situations on his own--like to the point it was literally a writers rule that Jack cannot escape by himself. Again, this is largely not spelled out, it's laid out before us situationally, like in the way Will refuses to let Jack leave the smithy even when Jack points his pistol at him.
Let's fast forward to after the Black Pearl has attacked and left Port Royal. Will is essentially in a panic, barging into the commodore's planning meeting and insisting that Norrington, an accomplished naval officer for almost a decade by this point, doesn't know what he's doing. This is where we see the first cracks in his shell: he tried to put up a good image in front of the Governor the day before, but 24ish hours later he's openly insubordinate and even aggressive. Because of the work done setting up his character and relationships earlier, this outburst means something--appearances are clearly not important to Will now, which helps communicate just how much more important Elizabeth is to him and helps us buy into a lot of what comes next in the storyline from him.
Now, a quick question: why is Will so desperate that he doesn't just trust COMMODORE NORRINGTON, the Navy's Golden Boy with a literal fleet of ships-of-the-line at his disposal, to take care of things? Why is he choosing to side with Jack instead, just 'cause it's faster, when hours ago he wanted to kill him? I want to re-iterate this isn't just significant because of who Norrington is literally, but because it shows Will bucking against someone we're establishing as the representation of the social conventions Will has tried to adopt. Besides what I've mentioned about him being emotional, inexperienced and impulsive there's another factor in why he does this.
Yep, this again. Remember Will experienced first hand the brutality of the Black Pearl, and it's already been made obvious that he never got over it--that traumatized aspect of his personality isn't just there to facilitate a cool swordfight, it helps provide a solid jumping off point for the whole story. He doesn't just imagine or hear through the grapevine how important it is to move quickly--he's seen it, lived it. With all the other factors we know about him, this helps make it so we're able to believe the dude is almost losing his mind from the get-go and is now ready to tear the world down with his bare hands. And this gives us a character who's going to push the plot forward in fun ways that the audience will buy... which is exactly what a character like Jack needs.
There are two more things I want to talk about before I continue with a part 3. I mentioned among Will's traits that he's observant and a fast learner--he's smart, which a lot of fandom jokes like to push aside because him being smart doesn't mean he's incapable of making errors. All of the characters in PotC are FAR from perfect, and it's part of what makes them fun.
A few ways Will's quick thinking is introduced and reinforced to us: when brokering his deal with Jack, Will picks up readily on how Jack is only interested in him because of his father. Lack of experience means he doesn't know what to do with information, so he just confronts Jack directly (I'll touch on why he's Like That in a bit), and ultimately just gets schooled.
BUT. He actually allows himself to learn something in that moment--not only from what Jack's saying but from what he's doing. So when he eavesdrops on Jack in Tortuga and learns that he is essentially a bargaining chip for Jack, his "leverage," he actually shuts up and starts to play Jack's game--to point that he manages to get the drop on Jack before Jack can get the drop on him. Not only is this exchange reinforcing things we saw in Will earlier in the movie, but this tells even more new things about him: his father's absence affected him, he has a history of going to great lengths for people loves.
This is where's I'd like to take a minute to talk about a key aspect to Will that kind of defines him for a lot of people, and you'll have to forgive me, both because I want to move backwards in the story for a bit and also because this section isn't so much based in pure readings of the character's film presentation, but also involves some headcanon while I'm at it.
I mentioned in my prior post how Will has a second driving motivation in him, which is to be Noticed. I want to peel this back for a bit, because this to me is actually key to a lot of the direction his character is taken in 2 and 3, and even explains a lot of the more bonkers behavior he has in 1. So I like to ask: why? Why's it initially so important for Will to get Society's attention, that he's even initially willing to essentially push Elizabeth away, in spite of his obvious infatuation with her?
This is the headcanon part: I've always interpreted Will's character as suffering from attachment issues, and by extension has somewhat internalized a sense that he's not worth much compared to other people. Why do I think this? Let's review his canon track record with guardians and people of authority in his life:
His father abandoned him as a child
Governor Swann--who I've always headcanoned temporarily took Will in, if only as a servant, and then sponsored his apprenticeship--is dismissive of him at best
Norrington likewise doesn't care about him
Gibbs didn't stick around even as a friendly face
Brown, while I've headcanoned was a good mentor at first, is canonically a tapped-out drunkard at least by CotBP
Will Turner's been "pushed away" or "left behind" by every person in his life who could or should have been taking care of him somewhat, since he was a child. He consistently just isn't wanted--not enough that anyone will stick around for him.
And so I feel that by the time we meet 19-year-old Will, he internalizes the idea that he doesn't actually matter in the greater scheme of things... but he desperately wants to matter. And not only matter in the, "Hey World, I'm Somebody!" type of way. Will is honestly STARVING for a meaningful bond with someone--to Really Matter to just one person in his life, enough that they'll stay with him for once.
This is how the core that drives Will Turner more fundamentally than anything else is his desire to love and be loved, even if it kills him. It's why when Jack asks how far he'd go for Elizabeth, he without hesitation declares he'd die for her, and makes good on it by immediately committing crimes that were punishable by death at the time (which in turn is why he's so cool with turning that navy vessel they stole into a bargaining chip in Tortuga--he's already got a death sentence as it is, might as well place all the chips on the table).
It's why Will does... anything and everything, and how his goals evolve across the series the way they do. Not that it's hard, with where his story goes, but remember that.
Anyway! I was talking about Will's brain before I was theorizing about his heart. So let's take a hard turn back onto that topic.
Will's response after his confrontation with Jack over his father isn't the only example of how Will adapts quickly to get out of a snags. He sucks up everything Jack and Gibbs tell him, but is obviously skeptical of the parts that sound like bullshit. He learns a lot from Jack, but doesn't copy him exactly--he applies what works for him, and keeps pushing with his own style of problem solving. Jack assembles the candidates for their crew in Tortuga, but it's Will's proposal that they offer the Interceptor as payment that actually secures the crew and Anamaria and enables the two of them to make it to Isla de Muerte.
And it's established that he often only needs to see something one time to internalize and turn it around to his advantage later. Take a look at what happens when the Black Pearl starts to chase and catch up to the Interceptor: before Will comes up from below decks, the crew is determined to try and outrun the Pearl, and it's who Elizabeth helps them establish a strategy that makes it at least temporarily feasible, by lightening the ship and taking it into shallower waters. But when Will comes above, overturns this decision and starts pushing the crew to fight with literally "anything, everything" they've got. Why does he do this, when they pretty much know they're going to lose? Just 'cause he's reckless? 'Cause he's magically turning into a capable sailor overnight?
ONE MORE TIME FOR OLD TIME'S SAKE:
But this time let's compare this to what happens to the Interceptor:
Will helps take charge in the Interceptor's escape attempt, because he already went through this the last time. He knows you can't outrun the Pearl, knows what's gonna happen when they get caught, remembers Barbossa's preferred tactics and responding to that knowledge with his own knowledge--and it's when he and Elizabeth team up on their strategies that they get a bit of a fighting chance. We see this trend repeat itself in Dead Man's Chest and BOY HOWDY!
Look, I get the jokes about Will being the Dumb One in the group, and by some measurements he is comparatively. For every situation where he busts open new paths for himself and the others, he also royally screws up and puts them into worse situations, especially when he's desperate--like the way he mistimes the revelation of his lineage to try and save Elizabeth. But to quote him, he's "not a simpleton." Textually, Will is actually pretty clever and even capable of being cunning.
What Will is, is divergent from the other leads, because he has a mechanical/practical mind, while everyone else is more... let's say "scholarly." Based their known backgrounds and their vocabularies, it's safe to infer that all the other major players--Jack, Barbossa, Elizabeth, Norrington--are educated people, who all clearly read books and think in terms of political strategy and gaming. All. Of. Them. Will alone among the leads is not like this. I actually can't recall if there's any canon indication that he's even literate--he might not be. He is a blacksmith, a craftsmen, which also involves strategy and problem-solving, but on a completely different level. He makes physical things at the expense of his body for a living, and so he has to manage his own time and energy instead of other's. Therefore his type of planning he's trained to have is, "what's the shortest, most efficient method to get things done and still produce an acceptable result, to save me time and labor." It also involves a lot of, "Welp, don't know if we don't try it, so here we go," experimentation.
It's why when Gibbs is spinning a yarn, he asks questions like this:
And this is part of why Jack calls Will "stupid": Will's approach is so out of left field compared to everyone else's that it screws EVERYONE'S plans up. He's basically bringing a sword to a chess match, and demanding they duel instead. Everyone else involved in these movies, most especially CotBP, is trying to strategize in a way that accounts for all possible outcomes, but Will starts out just caring about taking the most direct path to getting things done. This means that he doesn't often think as far ahead as the rest of the cast, but he does think up completely different solutions. Sometimes it's to their advantage, and sometimes it's very much to their detriment. It makes him simultaneously easy to manipulate but not to the extent that he's easy to predict once he's set off. People like to make out Jack to be some god of chaos--but the angry teenager holding a gun to his own head, makes him sometimes incapable of controlling the chaos, and that's part of what makes them a hilarious duo.
Anyway. Maybe I'll keep going and actually break down actual scenes, idk. We'll see how I feel about it later--I was surprised anyone was even into the first post enough to want more.
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