#and imagine if in the search for that validation you'd driven away someone very close to you?

[yergink]

honestly it feels ridiculous to say this, but stede giving up being a pirate is a good thing. i don't know how anyone could watch ofmd 2x07 "man on fire" and come away from it thinking that what stede really needed was to continue a life beset by danger for the sake of gaining infamy, and that him giving it up to stay with ed by s2's end was bad, somehow.

we all watched stede sitting at a bar declaring a bunch of strangers singing his praises his "friends" all the while his lover and found family were leaving him. infamy in the pirate world is cold and lonely and dangerous and it does not spare room for love or true acceptance. we learned this with ed and the persona of blackbeard. it is conditional, in the same way acceptance in traditional society is.

stede, briefly, performs well enough to gain that acceptance, but it is unsustainable, and in the end, it is hollow. and it's not too hard to infer that stede comes to this conclusion by the episode's end and into 2x08, in between getting his ass kicked by zheng in a self-destructive spiral. ed leaves, his crew starts leaving, and then everything goes to shit, and the infamy stops fucking mattering. all it's done is bring danger and drive the people he really cares about away.

him giving up piracy is not him giving up his lifelong dream purely for ed's sake, or anything like that. it is equally for himself.