literally hooting and hollering abt con o’neill scrolling through twitter & retweeting anti-tory posts interspersed with gay tentacle porn and izzy hands fancams. what a guy
@0xjuro left and addition on the meta abt miscommunication and bullying and I just want to reply to it here since that post is already long enough as is.
They said:
But - and here’s the rub - Ed is all about avoiding conflict. There’s been loads of meta about Ed’s abusive background that were way better than anything I could manage (…) So what he’s doing is trying to deescalate Jack - and the whole situation - as much as he feels is safe, while not making himself a target at the same time.
hmm. And I would agree with that if it weren’t for this scene from ep5
Forgive him, forgive my friend here, okay.
It’s impossible to shut him up! Seriously, half the time I’m like “Oh Godfrey, will you stop fingering my dents and get back to some accounting!”
Hilarious.
What’s happening here?
People have said this before, but Ed is incredibly good at reading a room. He has people skills. He knows how to make people like him. Right before that little interaction, someone has just insulted Stede, and Ed feels the mood sway. So he makes a joke. At Stede’s expense, yes, but it’s not (I think) that he’s trying to throw Stede under the bus here. He’s getting close to him, hand on his shoulder, putting his body in front of him: this is him, signalling to Stede that they’re allies, he has his back, he’s just doing what needs to be done to keep the crowd’s favour. It’s not personal.
And Stede, of course, doesn’t say anything or do anything - he’s laughing along! - so Ed feels like he can double down.
In Ed’s world, interpersonal conflict is a physically violent thing, always. Insults and verbal aggression are just the posturing that leads up to it. If someone calls you a name, it’s either a joke or you take their fucking eye for it, and there’s no inbetween. You don’t let yourself be abused and debased, because then the next attack will be with a literal knife. An insult is a threat to your reputation; if you don’t do something about it immediately, people will think you’re weak and exploit that. In his own way, he’s diffusing a conflict here; he’s making everyone laugh, he’s preventing it from spilling over into physical violence.
For Stede, it’s fundamentally different. The subtly insulting jokes, the cutting remarks: That is the actual conflict, and you lose as soon as you let on that you’ve been hurt. It is exemplified in another scene from ep5:
It means a rich donkey is still a donkey.
And how does Ed react? Yelling. Hitting the table. Getting up, making himself bigger. He’s immediately going for physical intimidation. He’s taking respect by force; disrespecting him comes at the cost of violence, and he can’t let anyone doubt that for even a second.
Stede, however, reacts completely different. “Don’t debase yourself for a man who hasn’t got a single tureen on board!” To him, this shows a lack of self-control. Ed let the french captain know he’s hit his mark; he lost the interaction. Losing his temper like that means Ed can’t actually defend himself because Stede doesn’t expect conflicts like this to get physical. To him, Ed is just bluffing.
Except, of course, he isn’t. Ed is making a threat he has every intention of following through on.
It’s two fundamentally different approaches in dealing with bullies: Ignore them, they just want to get a rise out of you vs Break their fucking nose, see who’s laughing now. In Stede’s world, if you debase yourself (as he puts it) into using physical violence, there’s gonna be an authority who punishes you for it, and you lose. In Ed’s world, there isn’t, and you win.
So. What I’m getting at: Ed would expect to be told - immediately and in no uncertain terms - when he’s overstepped a line. But Stede would never do that. He has learned that telling someone “It hurts my feelings when you do that” (in any way at all) is the absolute worst mistake you can make. He has learned that he can’t defend himself, so the best bet he has is just ignoring every insult hurled his way. If you don’t react they’ll get bored eventually.
Another thing that plays into it: Ed isn’t used to looking for insecurities he can exploit because (contrary to Jack) Ed isn’t a bully at heart. He doesn’t get a kick out of putting people down. Yes, he’s gonna use violence to get respect, but he’s not someone who needs to abuse other people to bolster his own ego. @0xjuroo said in their reply
What I mean is that Ed might not have experienced this kind of constant ostracizing himself, but that was because the people who were around him who did experience it didn’t make it.
And I agree with that! “Most pirates I know, they’re dead. So you’re doing a hell of a lot better than them”. Stede is still around, and he wouldn’t be if let himself be constantly disrespected (that’s gotta be the subconscious assumption here, I doubt that’s Ed’s actual thought process).
The beach scene in ep8 - “I don’t like who you are around this guy” - is probably the only time we see Stede trying to articulate “You hurt my feelings, please don’t do that”. Of course that’s not what he’s actually saying (I’m not even sure he would know that’s what he’d need to tell Ed here) and he fails at getting this point across.
idk how to tie this off neatly, but yeah, basically, their respective histories & experiences mean they have very different styles of communication & that’s how you use miscommunication as a source for conflict without being lazy about it :)
I keep thinking about Blackbeard’s physicality throughout the series.
The first touch you see is in Episode 4, when he’s at Stede’s bedside.
Something small and kind as a comforting hand touch is Ed’s projected vulnerability. Mutual reciprocity, if you will. And his willingness and bravery to touch someone like Stede, without having met him officially says a lot.
In Episode 5, he flinches hard when Antoinette tries to examine the bows in his beard, causing everyone to burst into hysterics while Ed sinks further into himself.
There’s shame here. And after watching this series a few times, I started to notice something.
His father was a terrible man, who abused his mother. And I would gather he abused Ed too, from time to time. So when he was broken down physically, he had learned to put his guard up.
Fast forward to his and Stede’s relationship. The ever growing companionship. It’s in the little things; a pat on the back, the forward facing body language, the arm and shoulder grabs, etc.
Not only does Ed fall in love Stede, he trusts him. Take the scene in Episode 7, when Stede cleans his beard. He falls into Stede’s hands, figuratively. And this notion of comfort with the same sex is perpetuated by his father issues.
This man that he’s gotten close to won’t hurt him. So he capitalizes on that, unconsciously of course. He craves that stability from another man. And catches deep feelings in the meantime.
When Ed finally has a moment with Stede to himself, he bears his soul, not to try and persuade Stede, but to be as transparent as “Blackbeard” can be. He knows Stede loves him, too.
Which is why his world is obliterated when Stede doesn’t meet him at the docks. It’s a culmination of disappointment, shame, heartbreak–the first heartbreak from the broken relationship with his father. I sense it’s a trigger for him.
But at the end of the first season, you simply see a changed man. And not just physically. Stede held up a metaphorical mirror and showed Ed his own sophistication, his own beauty in ‘old things’, his own strength and his own repressed realization.
Blackbeard/Edward Teach has my heart. What a beautifully crafted character. 🤍
i don’t think i’m ever going to be able to feel normal about when stede puts his hand on eds shoulder while he’s sitting in the bathtub and then ed leans his head down to rest it on stedes hand
this is less than a second but it has stuck in my mind like a painful stone. so this is the moment when ed heard the sound of izzy stabbing stede aka when he thinks stede was just killed. and the emotion of ed’s reaction is so overwhelming, like the pain expressed in the movement of the rope, and not being able to watch, but these are paired with the acceptance on his face — the expression of “of course this happened, of course i couldn’t be happy, of course this beautiful thing in my life is gone, of course i didn’t deserve to have him in the first place.” it would be so easy for ed to have been really mad or upset in this scene, but it is so devastating that he is just quietly shoulders this pain like it’s normal
I love that taika waititi pitches his shows as these fun little quirky comedies and then loads them with minority and lgbt representation. King shit.
I’m reblogging this because not only are you wrong but you also were rude about it so here are the receipts:
Basically, since clearly you do not know, the Executive Producer helps make the show happen. Period.
He also did direct an episode for Our Flag Means Death and did write and direct episodes for What We Do In The Shadows:
No, he is not the SOLE PERSON who put effort and insight into funding, writing and creating them. I did say “his shows” as a general umbrella term and I understand that could be misleading. We can’t discount the brilliance of David Jenkins(creator of ofmd) or Jeanine Clement(creator of wwdits). They are also king shit.
But Waititi was an influential part of both shows and I respect him for it. And I’m not wrong in doing so. You can clearly see his humor and direction in the writing and style of the shows and he co-created the original film What We Do In the Shadows with Clement.
This is a great thing to get mad about. You were the rude one ftr.
