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Do you see me now

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Wait, wait, so you’re saying Blackbeard’s head… is made of smoke?

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Blackbeard and Stede in Our Flag Means Death 1x10

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–Caitlyn Siehl, Start Here

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OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH | favourite romance tropes

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the lighthouse/kraken motif/imagery is driving me up the wall guys… because ed thinks they’re a warning, and stede thought at first they guide people home, when in reality it’s both, and they both think they’re the monster… there’s this quote by ocean vuong that makes me screaming

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im punching my desk at work i fucking love characters whose entire personality is consumed by symbology

stede’s a FUCKING LIGHTHOUSE and we’re told this all season. not just the good elements, but ALL elements of a lighthouse. his family was torn up on the rocks. he guides, but he hurts the incautious. hes blind to everything he isnt directly looking at, but even then, his perspective is always skewed by his own light that he brings into any situation. even ed isnt prepared and nearly destroys himself trying to get close to stede. the last frame of the entire season is his arm raised to mimic a fucking lighthouse. he has always been some level of lonely and misunderstood. im punching my fucking desk

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People stuck listening to me talk about my blorbos

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emily’s 1k followers celebration ➥ @his-name-is-ed asked: 💖 FAVORITE OFMD EPISODE

EPISODE 7: This Is Happening #this episode has it all: scurvy, badass nuns, treasure hunting, cooked snake, PINING, family trauma, and a petrified orange

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Another little detail about OFMD that makes me go feral: The song the Swede sings in 1x06, immediately after Ed put the dagger away, is called Voi che sapete. It’s a Mozart aria about a young man who experiences love for the very first time and is dazzled by it. Cut to Stede who says “Oh, this is my cue.”

And then, THEN he says: “The siren song has awoken a beast”, meaning the kraken, and if that isn’t fucking brilliant foreshadowing about Ed’s love for Stede being what ultimately leads him to unleash the kraken again.

*insert ‘I connected the dots’ gif here*

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(x)

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Guys & Dudes

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a bit more time

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I fucking love how Our Flag Means death has explicit, unabashed queer romance and character but ALSO has wall-to-wall metaphors and symbolism. We can have the kiss but we can ALSO read into the colors of wardrobes and whether a character wears gloves or not. We can read into the metaphor of Stede’s secret closet and letting Ed in, and ALSO have a fully fleshed-out storyline about a gay man in a loveless marriage telling his wife “his name is Ed.” We have the red silk scene in the moonlight, of gently handling a bit of cloth to represent a heart, and we have “what makes Ed happy is…you.”

We get all the subtle details of brief touches and meaningful glances, but not instead of explicit queerness—it’s that the unabashedly queer characters and story deserve that level of build-up and poetry.

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While we like to joke about Izzy being in the wrong genre, I would argue that there are in fact at least five distinct genre universes in the world of Our Flag Means Death, and all of them have different rules.

Stede Bonnet, and his crew when they’re around him, live in a Muppet movie. I didn’t come up with this analogy but it’s so accurate. Insane physical comedy and comedy-action where no one really gets hurt. Mild peril but you know everything is gonna work out. Terrible puns and sight gags, but room for sweet, genuine emotional moments too. The rules of time, space, probability and logic will bend for a good joke.

Izzy Hands is in a grimdark action/drama where if someone gets stabbed in the gut they will behave normally and fucking die. (Probably slowly and painfully, of sepsis.) Crucially I think Izzy also lives in a genre where you can only be subtextually queer, and violence (done for or with or to each other) is the only acceptable form of intimacy between men. This is why being forcibly dragged into Stede’s world, where everyone is busy having silly low-stakes misadventures and being gay and emotionally available all over the main text–and seeing his Subtextual Boyfriend go into this world and love it–sends him round the twist.

The British, Spanish and other imperialist militaries are in a Master and Commander-style naval adventure where they’re the heroes. This is why they all take it completely seriously when Stede (unintentionally) kills Badminton and takes hostages, even though we can see that he bumbled his way into it ass-backwards. This is also why Stede is so shocked to get actually for real stabbed aboard the Spanish ship. (“Did you mean to do that?”) He didn’t realize until that moment that he’d stepped into a different genre. The stabbing is one of the first Surprise Genre Switch moments we get and in retrospect it’s very important for setting up that in this world, the threat of getting hurt or killed is very real–which we need to understand to know that there are real stakes much later, when Stede almost gets executed by the British.

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