#and swords that are broken hearts and a bad case of whiskey dick/nutting too early/etc

[knowlesian]

moths and muppets: aka, consider the humble metaphor.

i’ve been thinking a lot about the true power of a good metaphor, thanks to that damned silk moth, and it made me start chewing on my very favorite metaphor of all: the grand unifying call to muppet theory.

i truly love the stuff we’ve all come up with as a fandom in this vein, especially the meta about how everybody comes from their own canon. i’m going to talk more about why that’s so perfect after i knock out the practical and thus easier to line up and argue half of this and get down to my favorite part: full tilt feels.

hell, i’ve had my own fun joking about izzy being confused sepsis and linear time don’t exist anymore and i will continue to have said fun, as fun is a fucking vital element of fandom engagement too, but here's the thing: those are metaphors and jokes, not practical realities. izzy himself seems unaware of any difference in either one of those things.

to break it down by stating the obvious: metaphors aren’t the literal thing happening. they can’t be, by their very definition. they function on Vibes alone and pull themes into the mix too when they’re feeling flirty, or it sort of breaks into less-coherent pieces the more you find the ways in which it does not function literally and perfectly.

the sunrise is a painter, spreading fire across the sky: poke that metaphor with a stick, watch it crumble as logic fails to apply.

by that token there are no prior or different canons, in terms of the characters genuinely changing genres or switching worlds. they only actually exist in this canon, because... well, this is the only canon this version of these characters literally have ever existed in. we can have fun theorizing about backstories and the relationships in existence until the day izzy and co stumbled over the revenge and crashed through our metaphor wall until the cows come home, and i myself will be there with bells on. but for practical terms, the show remains the only show that exists outside the realm of metaphor.  

they show us this general coherence, even in the text itself: fang and ed and ivan and izzy aren’t actually transformed by suddenly entering a muppet movie. and more to the point for now, in terms of practical skills and general expectations of the laws of physics, as far as we know they can all do what they could do before we started following their lives. no less, no more.

ivan still has advice about and dibs on gold teeth while stripping corpses, fang steers the ship and kicks ass and has great cheekbones. it’s just now, the context in which they are being received (and isn’t received a great way to say consumed? come on in, received says. we’ll have cake) is entirely different.

the duel is a case study in how this works: we know ed has a side full of old wounds from being stabbed in exactly the way stede survived being stabbed. they made sure to show us that surviving this is not at all unprecedented in ed’s pre-stede world, and that ed just shook off his latest light case of stabbing earlier in the episode. 

so textually, izzy is baffled he lost a sword fight by unconventional means (as well as stunned by the subtextual introduction to the idea of topping from the bottom/bottoming from the top? their metaphor dick measuring/fucking will never stop amazing me) and that it was stede he lost to, not worse at dueling or actually bothered or even confused by a sudden lack of blood poisoning. and he’s not shocked ed rowed into the middle of the ocean at the narratively perfect time in the finale; he never once questions or seems disturbed by the outsized ways our rules of reality don’t matter here.

he bitches hilariously to jackie that stede sucks and likes ed’s hair too much and that he really could have beaten him if it wasn’t for those meddling kids, mark his words, but he never says: the rules of my basic reality were quite literally different yesterday. i am concerned i have tripped and fallen and now time doesn’t work. 

instead, over and over again he says through his words and the way he responds to being taken off-guard: people keep acting in ways i don’t anticipate and i reeeeeally don't like it. additionally, i refuse even once to just to roll with it and see where that goes. his constant i don’t know what the fuck is GOING ON AROUND HERE ANYMORE response to the events of canon is primarily an emotional one.

(there’s a story beat here where izzy is essentially experiencing metaphor culture shock and he can’t or won’t metaphor codeswitch his way out of it that i find very fun and cool; we could all be izzy, in the real world, simply by being shoved into a cultural context we are unfamiliar with and immediately made deeply uncomfortable by.) 

for example: he’s very bothered by dicks (and open expressing of emotion other than ‘fuck this and also maybe i will kill you’ flavored emotions) and what people are now doing with them, right in front of his salad.

in a tangent about the realities of sailing that i swear will matter here if you stick with me through it, because it relates to my argument: even his choice to make lucius scrape barnacles at sea, the best example of izzy wanting a specific ship chore performed (other than his demand to stede about munitions so they can fight the spanish) is more about humiliation than real world sailing requirements. in the real world, unless you plan to have somebody throw on diving gear to do it, ships are usually docked before this task is undertaken. 

so izzy’s going about having lucius do this chore in a way that was not going to accomplish much. that is: if what he actually wanted was significantly fewer barnacles, for practical ship reasons. if what he wanted was to prove his power and authority and fuck with lucius in ways he can technically justify in-world, then what he did makes perfect sense.

and to be very clear: in the real world, izzy asking lucius to scrape barnacles while at sea (and without some sort of vague protection for his hands, especially given the effect of the waves on steadiness!) at all would require careening the ship, and doing so in a way that would have put all their lives in active danger. there’s even a period-typical (ish) name for the technique needed when attempting to do this at sea: the parliamentary heel. it was famously dangerous, and only to be done in red alert emergency situations where a dry dock or a beach couldn’t be reached in time. 

and here’s the thing— i don’t think the show is taking that realistic approach, or that we are meant to take away izzy could have gotten them all killed, not even a little bit. 

and i’m certainly not arguing he’s incompetent, either. ed wouldn’t have brought him on in the first place if izzy was actively bad at the 101s of How To Be a Cranky Lil Boat Guy, and i doubt even ed’s fondness or his position as first mate would have saved him for years from a quick shove over the side if he was actively detrimental to the pirating process in any way but being the middle manager we all fucking hate and refuse to do our absolute best for unless we have to, because our shit is on the line. 

it’s just that apparently, in ofmd’s world of candied melon silk moths where lucius is more peeved than genuinely worried for his hands, either a bunch of barnacles exist above the ship’s waterline for... Reasons, or the waterline randomly changes without a significant change in weight by jettisoning cargo. (and it would have to change a greatly unrealistic lot for this to happen, a difference not remotely explained by four people being off the ship.)

so don’t ask how any of this works real rules of ship gravity-wise or it stops working, ofmd says. izzy is very annoyed lucius won’t quit doing masculinity wrong, and he’s being petty about it and targeting him for a non-essential job he won’t be particularly good at that could be done later in a more sensible setting. that’s the beat the story is most interested in, so it just does not care if barnacles and their removal don’t work like that in our real world.

ofmd plays fast and loose with the rules of everything from time to scurvy to distance between places and what rowboats and the arms attached to the human rowing said boat are capable of. there is a need to accept that the rules of our own reality are just guidelines on this show, or a viewer will end up deeply frustrated when none of it quite lines up as it should. ofmd’s metric is ‘what’s coolest and/or best for the story’, and they’re really not concerned if anybody doesn’t want to fuck with that need to suspend disbelief; they demand you go with them or perish. literally none of this works in a canon concerned with applying the rules of reality stringently.

i point all this out because there’s an urge floating around to fill in a lot izzy never displays to us, insist he is the only one working and/or keeping the ship afloat, we just don’t see any of it now because they changed canons: but in that case, it comes back to why aren’t fang and ed and ivan stripped of skills or traits in the same way? and if it’s just izzy, why the uneven staggering? he’s still a skilled fighter and a good pirate. 

we just know despite those facts, fang and ivan didn’t like or respect him much pre-canon, given the stories about the time he was left in charge and the utter lack of fear that he’ll be pissed off at them. ed’s still scary to them, and fang still snaps to at even the idea he’s back aboard; as far as i can tell, unless we argue that izzy’s skills and relationships are different now but he simultaneously still knows his shit when it comes to battle and swordplay (pun intended) we should conclude skills are still at the same baseline for everybody. otherwise the show made some weird and specific choices to suddenly make izzy unevenly and unfairly disadvantaged in ways that aren’t about his emotional hangups, and arguing that carries a good handful of equally weird and troubling implications.

which brings me to the emotional kicker on the logic end, because if izzy’s right to act like such an asshole, and we just can’t see the necessity anymore by the virtue of canon change— or in some ways if he was ever right and doing so was 100% ever actually necessary— then by that same logic, ed was right to demand fang kill his dog. they were in a different canon! a canon where dogs needed to be killed! even if we could just LET OTHER PEOPLE GIVE THEM A NICE HOME, E D. we can’t change our rules on this kind of thing by character, if we’re calling it logic and not metaphor, and we all seem to agree there isn’t any world where that was called for.

ed gets fang a new dog endgame or i BURN DOWN THE HBO OFFICES. FUCKING... RENEW IT!!! anyway.

everybody’s emotional literacy and ability to be open is absolutely changing, and the reception they are given by stede and the crew of the revenge clearly isn’t what they’re used to, but in terms of ‘can they do the literal practical stuff they used to do and are the laws of gravity in-world the same’, they’ve all still got it.

to poke holes in my own favorite framework more, chauncey and nigel (and even mary!) are from stede’s canon, and should thus be muppets, right? the metaphor breaks down again there, as metaphors themselves are wont to do when you stretch them too far. none of them quite work within the literal muppet read. then there’s the king: is he from ed’s canon or stede’s? both? everyone’s???? what would that even look like or mean? he seems pretty muppet-y in vibes while remaining anti-muppet in allegiance/narrative positioning, but that’s a stretch once more and only works for him. and how about spanish jackie and geraldo? they’re from izzy and ed’s world and olu and jim’s. so: muppet or not? once you try to make a metaphor a literal plot detail and make it fit everything, it falls apart faster and faster.

(not to mention: geraldo is from jim’s world twice over, given what we find out from spanish jackie. he was there the day their family died, but he’s also part of the current action in a way that bears almost no resemblance to jim’s Ported In energy.)

which is the perfect lead-in to getting away from strict textual analysis and into why i love a metaphor in general, but these sort of metaphors in specific: the quiet part loud is that none of these characters are muppets.

because this isn’t a muppet movie, in anything but structure/metaphor/vibes: these are humans. (or seagulls, i suppose, but i will tip my cap in respect to karl and olivia both and then set them aside, for the purposes of this argument.)

this means they’re all played by actual human actors, but more than that, the characters themselves are gloriously human. even when they act cartoonishly, and the rules of our reality don’t apply to them— maybe especially then.

the writers have twin wells of seemingly endless empathy and accountability sitting side by side in a meadow of knowing their shit on the weird little quirks of being a human. these are not literal muppets, they are fictional humans.

complicated, wonderful humans. capable of kindness; capable of shocking new depths of dumbfuckery.

they make bad choices, they fail to communicate, and then they whip around and exhibit good sense and use their words to express the shit other people can’t know unless told. they do this because that’s what we all do, as we cart around our own pasts and pain and bring our thoroughly un-blank slate into each interaction we have on earth.

in my real life, i’m sort of obsessed with the idea that no two people can ever read the same exact book even when it is the same exact book, and with asking people the question “when you say ( fill in the word/phrase ), what does it mean to you?” when i start to feel like maybe the issue is not primarily in the meat of any given disagreement i’m having, but instead in the packaging.

from experience: people do not like being asked that question. they hear me say that, and what they process is ‘this motherfucker didn’t listen! and i was VERY clear’ and then i ask it again because they understandably don’t feel like clarifying word choice in the heat of the moment, as they 100% know what they meant, causing even more frustration.

(i have been told more than once i am very annoying to attempt an argument with, because i keep asking that question anyway. sorry about that, people in my life!)

the problem here is when i say that, i exemplify the thing i’m talking about: i come in with the baseline assumption that we all use the same words a little differently, and that’s not always a truth universally acknowledged no matter how real and obvious it seems to me. that’s before you get to the arena of legit mishearing someone, or somebody having a slip of the tongue or not knowing what something means and just using the wrong word. i’m talking about the fact that when i say anything, i bring all my own context and knowledge and previous conversations to bear, and same goes for the people i speak to.

i say beautiful, you might see a flower or that fiery sunset from the intro or, i don’t know, taika’s eyes/arms/belly: i might see something out of left field, like the inner mechanisms of a washing machine. so already, with the same basic understanding of what beauty generally means, we are starting from very different places and are going to have to work to bridge that gap between us.

i said all that to say: this is why i love the idea that every character is from their own genre, because what a fuckin’ metaphor that is all on its own. 

we are all from our own canons, metaphorically, while from the same one literally. we star in our own movies, where we are the main character, and in the story we are telling ourselves other people know that, and react to us and our choices accordingly. 

that’s not a value judgement, because we can’t baseline exist any other way: you weren’t born in my body, i didn’t live your pain or experience your joy. we are who we are, and we can’t go back and change any of it or gain the ability to read minds. if i want to see you as a whole person or you do the same for me, we are both going to have to pause our own movie for a second and attempt to watch the other’s without applying the rules that worked for us to a different canon, where things work differently and somebody else is the main character.

we exist in the same world: we exist in very, very different worlds. we’re the same; we couldn’t be more different. these are correct, all at the same time, and in the exact same way they’re all not quite right.

the beauty of a metaphor is that it can access an emotional truth, not a literal one. they’re for identifying something so deeply held it’s hard to entirely express in plain terms, and making it as beautiful as the gears turning inside every machine, keeping them running in ways unseen from the outside and unknown to the casual observer until they tear open the casing and see what makes this old thing tick. and at their very, very best, they’re not about construction or elegance; they’re about finding a core truth.

because of that metaphors suck with linear time and gravity and coherent real world logic— and that’s fine! they’re not actually about any of that. drill down past form to function and metaphors are about finding the best way to ask: you seeing this shit, too? that way you know you’re on the road to finding your people when somebody else pipes up ohhhh baby, AM I. 

that’s communication; that’s solidarity. that’s fucking love.

moths and muppets, clouds that look like dicks and dicks that look like honesty, silk hearts and a hearth at the heart of a liminal space ship, oranges and earrings— it’s no wonder ofmd is so goddamned fond of metaphors. everything a metaphor does best, ofmd is really fucking good at too.

#our flag means death #our flag means death spoilers #my ofmd meta #this one went PLACES. #moths and metaphors and muppets! clouds that are dicks and masts that are dicks #and swords that are broken hearts and a bad case of whiskey dick/nutting too early/etc #it's A Lot #oranges and earrings! #i meant to just sort of poke at the muppet metaphor and explain why i love metaphors #3k later!!!!! #thiiiis? whatever it is. i love textual analysis so much gdi #if you read this whole thing... why? and thank you. and hello! but also: what's wrong with us buddy #pirate brainrot for life!!!! is what