confusedraven1

[confusedraven1]

the first time i watched ofmd, it really stood out to me when Ed said that Calico Jack and Stede had a lot in common, because at first glance they absolutely do not. but then thinking about it i realized: they're both the only people we really see actually having fun of their own volition in piracy.

for pretty much everyone else, the culture of piracy is a chore. no one wants to be there. and that makes sense! it's reasonable! expected, even! it kind of unambigiously sucks! in the first episode we're told very clearly that most people are pirates because they have no other choice. from Ed to the rest of the crew, they might feel trapped in piracy but no one else is just in it for the love of the game.

and that makes it stand out all the more clearly how much fun both Jack and Stede are having. sure Stede has some growing pains but he is delighted by everything about piracy, including the violence. and could you imagine Jack doing literally anything else with his life? Jack is emotionally immature and it does feel that his life isn't fulfilling beyond the superficial, but you can't deny that he's having a great time.

i think that tells us something about what Ed likes about both of them, too. misery is boring. he wants someone he can have fun with.

[confusedraven1]

fibercrafts are SO maddening cuz wdym I have to go to work tomorrow, I'm like a third of a way through making a whole ass fucking cape, don't you think I should be allowed to focus on what matters (my fucking cape)

[confusedraven1]

It is simply not fulfilling to enjoy media in the height of its popularity. You need to show up so late to the party that everybody else is gone and the hosts are asleep so you can rummage through their trash for chip dip and stale hors d’oeurves to eat alone in the dark like a dirty little raccoon secret

[confusedraven1]

hmmm

[confusedraven1]

Edward Teach or My Cat? (no. 2883)

hops into bed, immediately starts licking hole

[confusedraven1]

Starting pride 2025 with a bang

[confusedraven1]

forever laughing at ed asking fang if he’s a dick, then immediately getting offended when fang says yes

[confusedraven1]

me, delusional: ed’s red silk will come back in s3 cause, even tho he and stede are in a stable place at the end of s2, ed’s heart isn’t necessarily fully healed and he needs time before he will be able to completely love himself and—

[confusedraven1]

you bottle Miette??

[confusedraven1]

Mt. St. Helens

I’ll have limited copies of this in print at VanCAF17 this weekend, come see me at table D-11! 

[confusedraven1]

aioli is such a fabulous word it's not every day you see vowels doing so much legwork

[confusedraven1]

ed gets the spider tattoo on his hand to attempt exposure therapy, but it doesn’t work. he hates it so much.

anne sees it and LOVES it, saying they should get matching spiders as a bff thing!

ed, on the verge of tears and terror in his heart: y-yeah okay

[confusedraven1]

words cannot describe how much i love showering. my wet contemplative box

[confusedraven1]

i tend to be pretty cynical whenever actors start talking about how their onscreen chemistry comes from their offscreen relationship and honestly when i hear that sort of thing 90% of the time i assume it is just marketing. and in fact i did assume that was the deal with rhys & taika at first, like, i got into the show and heard people talking about how they've been besties for twenty years and my immediate reflexive assumption was "ok, so they've known each other for a long time but the idea that they're actually especially close is probably bullshit."

i do not think that anymore, because in this one case you can pretty easily look up video of the two of them interacting years before ofmd existed in contexts where they have no particular incentive to be playing up their friendship for the camera and no they are actually just like that.

so it IS interesting how this plays into the show, right? all the talk about whether rhys and taika have sexual chemistry is weird to me not only because i think they do have it but also because frankly sexual chemistry is cheap, you can get that anywhere. i can think of a LOT of tv/movie romances where the actors do a fine job conveying a sense of sexual passion but absolutely comprehensively fail at convincing me that these people actually like each other very much, which for me usually kills any chance i'll actually get very invested in it as a relationship. ed & stede i think we can agree do not have that problem.

i don't believe in love at first sight and honestly i don't even tend to find it a compelling idea in a fictional context. best friends at first sight is a real thing though, it's happened to me, sometimes you meet a new person who is so immediately on your wavelength that you're acting like you've been friends for twenty years when you've actually known each other for two hours. it turns out you can convincingly simulate this by casting actors who've actually been best friends for twenty years and telling them to pretend they just met.

anyway though the thing i wonder about sometimes is how much this is rhys & taika's irl friendship helping bring out something that was already there in the story vs how much it's the scripts being written to bring out something i suspect rhys & taika wouldn't really be able to NOT do if they tried.

david jenkins and the ofmd writers' room do seem to let the actors influence how they write characters a lot - you can see this especially with izzy and jim in s2, after they knew con and vico better than in s1. and writing ed & stede's first meeting as the two of them deciding to swap clothes and do an incomprehensible improv bit that's extremely fun for the two of them but baffles and infuriates everyone else around them when they have known each other less than an hour is a really weird choice even by contrived romcom meet-cute standards. but then you read about rhys & taika during the filming of ofmd s1 deciding to walk around set sipping nonalcoholic whiskey pretending to be drunk in order to freak out everyone else there and you have to consider that maybe it felt natural to write ed & stede that way because that is just what rhys & taika are like

[confusedraven1]

me in the pentagon national security team group chat (again)

[confusedraven1]

me in the pentagon national security team group chat

[confusedraven1]

thinking about nigel saying, “it’s terribly boring being at sea” and what that implies lol

sorry not sorry no one wants to shag him and he has to sit in his quarters and listen to everyone else barely trying to be discreet with each other