like i know we already know this but they’re best friends. yes they’re in love and wildly attracted to each other and are probably having weird sex (affectionate) right now but before all of that existed and after all of that is gone they are and always will be best friends who just want to talk and play together
Scene begins in the middle of an ongoing discussion of Zheng's fighting skills being similar to that of a cat
Stede: ...cat
Ed: Just a cat. She looked just like a cat.
Stede: Feline.
Ed: But not a lazy cat. (dramatic pause)
Stede: An attacker cat.
Ed (says sagely): A motivated cat.
Stede (repeats himself because he likes how it sounds): An attacker cat!
Ed (eager to spin the story to incorporate Stede's idea): Uh, eh, it was...it was a cat attack!
Stede: Ooh yeah! And we were there, too.
Ed (adamantly agreeing): And we saw it.
Stede: We were part of it.
Ed: I was part of it. We were-
Stede: We were like...
Ed: -we were also like cats!
Stede (whispers in awe imagining them as cats): Yeah!
Ed: It was like three stealthy cats.
Stede (nods in agreement with his smart bf): That's right!
Ed (loving his bf's hype): Like three humans who had skinned some cats.
Ed (ADHD mode activated): You know there are many ways to skin a cat. You can start at the head and you just peel from the nose all the way down. Or start at the ass and (gestures as if he were skinning a cat) whip it back like that!
Spanish Jackie/Leslie: Jesus wept.
Ed: It was like three cats had been skinned and we just leapt into their bodies, zipped it up...(train of thought switching tracks)...uhhhm-
Stede (trying to figure out what track they're on): It was cat skins.
Ed: -It was actually the other way around. It was like three cats killed some humans and then-
Stede (loyally agreeing with his bf): That's true. It was the opposite.
Ed: -skinned them. So like three cats had sk...caught some humans, skinned them, and then wore their skins-
Stede (quietly pushing his imagination to the limits): Yeah.
Ed: -as little suits.
Stede (proudly agreeing with his bf): Take that humans! Cats are back!
Ed (needing to emphasize the size of said cats): But they're in the big cats!
Stede (happily reiterating Ed's added detail): Yeah, big cats are back!
Ed (switching tracks again into unknown territory): Or it was like a bunch of...it was way bigger than a normal cat. It was like all of us and we are full...are filled with cats! (abruptly ends his brainstorm and silently rests his hand on his hip)
Stede (proudly standing by his bf, nodding, though he's not sure how he feels about being filled with cats): *buffering silence*
*random meow*
Swede (unsure if he's in the gravy basket because of all the poison he drank): Are you sure I'm not dead?
You know. For some reason I think the thing that made me melt the most when watching ofmd for the first time was seeing the bows in Ed's beard and flowers in his hair in ep 5. Like. Ofmd really took big bad pirate blackbeard and made him cute and put him in pretty outfits and let him have flowers and bows in his hair just cause he wants to look nice??? There's just something about it that's so sweet to me idk...
*sigh* Whole damn show is about how they don’t have to be any persona or put on any performance for the other to love them. Stede loves Ed, all the things that make him Ed, including the things that Ed himself fears. Ed loves Stede, with his confidence and his insecurities and his frilly things and without his frilly things.
So much is about performance - performing masculinity, performing status, performing your own personality to fit in with everyone else. And it all ends with neither of them needing those performances to be loved.