#and at the same time there are other queer people saying ofmd isn’t queer enough!!!

[lumiilys]

Hmm some thoughts…

Something that makes me sad after ofmd s2 is the fact that I feel scared to show it to my friends and family. More scared than after s1. Not because I think it’s bad but because of how queer and sincere it is.

In s1 the queerness could be somewhat brushed aside by cishet audiences. But now with s2 it’s so explicit! The queerness is so constantly present!! Stede and Ed yearning for each other, wee John in drag, izzy wearing makeup for the first time, Ed imagining Stede as a beautiful merman coming to save him, the poly characters, I could keep going…

And all of that makes me feel so happy and it’s so wonderful to see a show so unapologetically queer. But it also makes me nervous to show it to people at the same time cause it feels like they’re seeing too much of me. I’m scared they’ll see the slightly silly but super sincere queerness as too much or as cringe and so I just don’t want to let them see at all. I wanna hold ofmd close to my heart and not let anyone touch it cause I feel like if they call ofmd cringe they’re saying the same to me…

Anyway… I love ofmd so much. It’s so sweet it’s so silly it’s so sincere and romantic and it’s so dear to me!!!! Goodnight!!!!!

#and at the same time there are other queer people saying ofmd isn’t queer enough!!! #saying it’s made for cishet people… #calling it cringe for completely different reasons #it’s a nightmare out here!!!! #am I making sense? #I just dumped all my thoughts into this post #I know I need to get over my fear of showing my friends my interests #but it feels even more scary with ofmd… #ollie rambles #ofmd #our flag means death

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

I want to write a meta on Stede Bonnet of Our Flag Means Death and internalized homophobia. A lot of this is going to be a rehash of something I said to an anon back in october of 2022 but I feel like it deserves to be put out without rancid anon takes attached.

Our Flag Means Death as a show is trying to do a deconstruction of toxic masculinity. I feel very comfortable in saying that seeing as David Jenkins had "A lot of what we're taught about what it means to be a man is wrong" and a show about gay men with a thesis like that is necessarily also deconstructing homophobia, even if it doesn't center homophobia, which ofmd does not, it keeps it in just out of frame at all times, because it prefers to center queer joy. However that doesn't mean it's not there and I want to talk about the one place where it exists that I feel like people don't really touch on.

Stede is a character that comes from a background of wealth, of rigid adherence to social norms that he was never able to fully fit into. There are rules for what men do and what women do and those rules must be obeyed and Stede learns this the hard way, by getting tied in a boat and having things thrown at him for picking flowers. By being bullied relentlessly for being soft and weak. Under such conditions you can’t not internalize those rules.

Stede also is very insecure, in episode 2 it's established that he struggles with feelings of inadequacy. A lot of Stede’s guilt comes from his inability to preform the roles of husband and father, roles which were thrust upon him without his consent and stand in opposition to his identity as a gay man, at least in the 1700s. Stede considers himself a coward for his inability to preform these rolls. Stede is unable to forgive himself for being unable to fit into the heterosexual expectations that society as placed on him.

Blackbeard is also a hypermasculine figure. A role that Ed finds himself unable to fit into. That’s why Ed and Stede seem to be in the same place when they first meet. They’re both trying to break out of these rigid boxes that have been forced upon them. Blackbeard is less heterosexual, more specific, but it’s still a distinctly male expectation which is tied up in cultural ideals about masculinity, especially non-white masculinity. And the whole show Izzy, a gender conforming character who seems to go out of his way to talk down to any man he perceives as even a little bit soft, is trying to force Ed into it, and when he tries to imply that Ed isn’t Blackbeard enough he does it by emasculating him

Ed is open, at least when he's made to feel like he's in a safe environment, about not wanting to be blackbeard anymore. Stede suggests retirement and provides him space to experiment with reinventing himself, but at the end of the day Stede doesn't believe him because Stede venerates Blackbeard as one of the most fearsome pirates of all time (something I expect to be a large point of contention between them in the next season). When Ed finally shakes off his captaincy and tries to leave Blackbeard behind for good Stede ends up blaming himself for it, because he perceives Ed's desire to leave a role that is hurting him behind as him being ruined, the same way Stede perceives his own failure as a husband and father as an inherently corrosive thing.

Unpacking Chauncey's speech in season 1 episode 10 and why Stede agrees with it is fundamental here. Gay people have been for centuries been portrayed as corrupting influences trying to convert people to our lifestyle. We've been portrayed as horror villains. Our sex is portrayed as defilement. We're accused of being groomers who want to corrupt others to our way of life, we're accused of recruiting. This is one of the more classic homophobic tropes. So when Chauncy says you're a monster who defiles beautiful things there is venom and oppression behind it. And Stede agrees to it because he does believe himself to have corrupted Ed away from being Blackbeard into being kind of a pansy like Stede. And that he defiled his family by leaving despite it being what he needed to do.

And so his reaction to this is to shove himself back into the closet and try to be Mary's husband again.

I'm not passing moral judgement on Stede, it's just difficult to interpret the show without seeing the subtextual journey of overcoming internalized homophobia that Stede goes on.

#ofmd #our flag means death #ofmd meta #stede bonnet #internalized homophobia

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

saw a post a while ago that was like “the donkey comment towards ed was mean and classist, but it wasn’t racist bc donkey isn’t a slur/insult against Māori people” and then it went into more detail abt what kind of slurs colonizers have used and invented for different racial and ethnic groups which was kind of cool as a history lesson and i do get what they were saying abt how not all racial/ethnic groups have had the same experiences and whatnot

but like. i’ll be the first to say that i know next to nothing abt the history of persecution that Māori people have faced, and as a white person i’m not gonna tell anyone which insults they should take more seriously. but i WILL say that my people are not smart enough to use slurs accurately. yes white people have come up with some very specific slurs for all the cultures they’ve encountered while colonizing the entire world, but your average white american (bc this IS an american show, even tho the actors are from all over the place) are not gonna think “wait that’s the wrong insult for this person’s ethnicity” they’re just gonna make demeaning and derogatory comments with little thought aside from “this person is inferior to me.” like calling pretty much any BIPOC a donkey is bad. calling someone a donkey is another way of calling them stupid/uneducated and while that might not be an insult developed specifically as a way to demean BIPOC, it takes a different edge when used on BIPOC that’s not there when it’s used on a white person.

and on a somewhat related note, i know there’s been discussion abt how ofmd uses extremely old-fashioned insults for gay people to soften the blow of homophobia for modern audiences. because there IS homophobia in ofmd, but it’s not done in the same heavy-handed style that pretty much every show that has homophobia does it. nobody’s being called a fag, there’s never a “coming out” scene where people respond with shock/surprise/disgust. and the result is that when the show came out, queer viewers were all gushing about how great it was to not have to wince though any scenes of explicit and potentially triggering homophobia.

but racism in ofmd is not done so subtly. when the british guy yells “enough, slave!” to frenchie in episode 1, i grimaced. the guy calling roach “darkie" or "dog” (i cant tell which he's saying but either way it's bad) in episode 9 also made me very uncomfortable (shoutout to roach for slapping him across the face right after, legend behavior). part of this makes sense bc of the time period when ofmd takes place; making the racism subtle might accidentally come across as downplaying the atrocities going on at the time (and ofmd has done an Excellent job at taking a very firm anti-colonialism stance). but whenever i hear people say “it’s so great that queer people can finally watch a show where they don’t have to wince through triggering insults!” im like. well. the WHITE queer people don’t, maybe.

so the donkey comment makes sense as an insult that’s very clearly reacially-coded, but it’s not super specific to ed’s culture because like… why would we want that. why do we need to hear ed or any of the other BIPOC in this show get called slurs that are extremely specific to their race/ethnicity to know that the insults being hurled at them are motivated by racism. just like how chauncey doesn’t have to call stede a faggot for us to understand that the “monster, plague, defile beautiful things” speech is motivated by homophobia, we shouldn’t need the british to start calling people the n word to know they’re being racist

#ofmd #our flag means death #ofmd meta #no char #og #mine #meta #txt #ofmd crit #<- not rlly idk #ofmd fandom crit #if i’m out of my lane in any way lmk #i do feel qualified to at least say ‘white ppl calling BIPOC donkeys is racist’ but idk abt the rest #but like i’m not trying to say that BIPOC should or should not be uncomfortable by the racism in ofmd #i’m just commenting on how the racism in ofmd presents more strongly than the homophobia #like that’s just a fact. how ppl should feel abt that fact is not my call to make