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[ghostfox]

Every day I grow angrier and angrier at the character assassination in s2. . .

This round of anger brought on by remembering they had Stede 'Dryocampa Rubicunda' Bonnet apparently tossing spiders off the ship. . .

[ghostfox]

every time I see a take that flattens Ed's character into this boring perfect angel who can do no wrong and has 0 agency because literally every choice he makes is determined by the actions of white men, I add another sentence to my stories where he's a sympathetic, complex and multifaceted trauma victim - but also an abuser who made terrible mistakes of his own volition, who seriously hurt people he cares about and left them traumatised, who feels crushed beneath the terrifying hypermasculine persona he built for himself (which he is still figuring out how to escape/incorporate into his new self/define himself around). A desperate, affection-starved, suicidal man who struggles hugely with his mental health, who deserves a loving support system (just not from his victims unless they want to be a part of it), who can grow and change and do better, who can work on himself and explore himself and find love and happiness.

but y'know, maybe I'm the one who 'hates his character' lmaoooo

[ghostfox]

yeah sorry, i can't hang out today, i'm too busy thinking about stede bonnet ofmd being so entirely worn down by a life of repression and bullying and suffocating expectations for so so long only to finally get a taste of joy and love and freedom, and how his own doubt and guilt almost cause him to lose everything and condemn himself to a life of unhappiness, and how the realization of his love and newfound understanding of the breadth of the life he's given up fundamentally change him, and how he kills himself and is reborn as a man who will fight with every ounce of himself to claw out room in his life for that happiness, and how that happiness has a name and his name is ed. yeah it's gonna be all day, sorry.

[ghostfox]

in the replies/reblogs of the post I made about artists swapping ed and stede's body types and how it's racist, people have also been mentioning the latent homophobia and how people Stede being femme kind of leans into the twinkifying of him. Society sees femininity as small, which, while I understand the homophobic/sexist bias there, I just have not for one second thought that making Stede smaller makes any sense. Because yeah, Stede is femme, but also BIG and LOUD and OBNOXIOUS about it. Stede takes up space!!! That's what made him so out of place at home, he took up too much space and in the wrong way. Wherever he goes, he leaves a big fucking signature that says "STEDE BONNET WAS HERE!" That's part of the reason he hates himself! He can't stop leaving his mark! Stede Bonnet is not a Small character and it's insane to me that his femininity overpowers his unabashed Bigness for some artists.

[ghostfox]

I felt really inspired by this post on Twitter so here's Stede as femme fatale

[ghostfox]

I do like characters who do not exhibit any hint of sexuality in any way because they’re too busy being tormented by the narrative. like “yea I might be gay or whatever but the labyrinth is growing so I can’t worry about that shit rn”

[ghostfox]

Throwing my hat into the "is Stede really gender-noncomforming" ring because I've seen some discussion around it recently.

I think it's true that we can see in the show that Stede's style of dress in s1 isn't that different from other men of his class. He likes to wear much brighter colors, though, and I'd argue that he wears these clothes differently. Stede likes clothes, he likes dressing up, and he's often noticably more showy and flamboyant with them than others who wear similar suits (his all-white suit is a nice example). But sure, I'll concede that his clothing style isn't especially gnc if we're just talking about the style of clothes he wears in s1.

However, I think we're still supposed to understand that Stede is gnc, and that's because other characters treat him like he is. Multiple times in s1, we get other characters pretending to mistake him for a woman to mock him. This happens first in the pilot, by someone on Nigel's ship saying he "appears to be a heavyset woman in a dressing gown," so it's not just people from outside Stede's social class saying these things.

Maybe it's because I'm also a feminine gay man, but the fact that Stede wears more "masculine" clothing in s2 doesn't stop me from seeing him as gnc, either. It's about the way he wears the clothes, in a way that's kind of difficult to explain. I don't think he stops being a gnc gay man just because he's not wearing frills anymore. I think he's a gnc gay man throughout the show because that's just who he is, and it's less about what he wears and more about how he wears it.

[ghostfox]

"Ed"

"Stede"

[ghostfox]

Ever heard of  u n d e r c o v e r?

[ghostfox]

I do like characters who do not exhibit any hint of sexuality in any way because they’re too busy being tormented by the narrative. like “yea I might be gay or whatever but the labyrinth is growing so I can’t worry about that shit rn”

[ghostfox]

2.10 // 3.17

protip: listen to daisy’s transformation score on an endless loop while looking at this. it makes everything 10000x worse better.

[ghostfox]

Top five gowns of 2023 as voted by my followers: Yanina fall 2023 couture in third place

[ghostfox]

google drive of 100 posters for a free palestine

[ghostfox]

'Towards the Sunset' tailor-made dress - 10% off code: chandelyer

[ghostfox]

Hey… I’m your friend + Start Here by Caitlyn Siehl

[ghostfox]

this is my little baby if you even care

[ghostfox]

Going back through the older seasons of Agents of SHIELD and I have to say I really hate the writing making Jiaying into “a villain all along”. She had significant reason to be distrustful of any outsiders, especially a government organization. Not to mention she approached Raina and S.H.I.E.L.D with a level of hesitation, and Cal was the one to plant seeds of doubt in her mind about whether they could be trusted.

Jiaying was tortured and vivisected by HYDRA, which at the time was within SHIELD, just so her ability could be given to an old man who deserved to die. This same group took her baby away from her for years.

She also had Cal, her husband who she cared for despite the fact that he was clearly insane telling her that the register would be the end of their people. Even if SHIELD is no longer a part of HYDRA, they’re carrying a weapon on their vessel that is foretold to be the death of their people.

And to top it off, Gonzalez went in instead of Coulson. And even Skye visibly reacted because she was expecting Coulson, and knew Gonzalez was the leader of the SHIELD faction that ordered for her to be shot and killed, rather than brought in, and might have even put the order in. And Gonzalez openly tells Jiaying that SHIELD will be stepping in and taking authority of the situation, for no reason other than they can.

To be clear, most of what she did seemed in character. I think she panicked for good reason, because she was faced with a shadowy government organization that emerged from the smoking wreckage of the same organization that cut her open and stole her baby from her. and given the resources SHIELD had, there was nothing she could do except hope to take them down. 

What I do resent is that season 2 had so many options for villains that they had been building up to. Hydra, an organization full of bonafide Nazis who don’t believe in freedom. Cal, a man who’s clearly gone insane from the loss of his daughter and wife who will do anything to keep his family together. Ward, a man who has never taken personal accountability for his own actions. Kara, a tortured woman being led by Grant into believing the only thing that will bring her peace is revenge.

Hell, in the scene where she gets her villain reveal, Jiaying isn’t even the shadiest person in the room. Gonzalez is a former SHIELD leader who was willing to tear apart the entire organization down just to prove a point. He and the rest of his faction were rambling about transparency, in a spy agency, even though the way he infiltrated Coulson’s faction was double agents and more secrecy. He had a clear bias against the Inhumans, going as far to reprimand Bobbi for Skye’s escape and injury of Calderon, when Calderon disobeyed Bobbi’s orders to use non-lethal force to apprehend Skye (that is, unless he had orders from higher up to just kill Skye outright). And then even when Coulson is cooperating, he goes out of his way to dictate every choice by arguing that Phil is too biased in favor of powered people, and puts it up to a vote to overrule Coulson. Then he waltzes into Jiaying’s home and tells her what is going to happen to her people regardless of whether or not she complies. 

But the writers decided that nope, the BBEG for the two part finale arc is going to be the traumatized woman who appeared in like seven episodes for maybe 10 minutes total, several of which were flashbacks in which she was getting tortured or was dead.