Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
While we like to joke about Izzy being in the wrong genre, I would argue that there are in fact at least five distinct genre universes in the world of Our Flag Means Death, and all of them have different rules.
Stede Bonnet, and his crew when they’re around him, live in a Muppet movie. I didn’t come up with this analogy but it’s so accurate. Insane physical comedy and comedy-action where no one really gets hurt. Mild peril but you know everything is gonna work out. Terrible puns and sight gags, but room for sweet, genuine emotional moments too. The rules of time, space, probability and logic will bend for a good joke.
Izzy Hands is in a grimdark action/drama where if someone gets stabbed in the gut they will behave normally and fucking die. (Probably slowly and painfully, of sepsis.) Crucially I think Izzy also lives in a genre where you can only be subtextually queer, and violence (done for or with or to each other) is the only acceptable form of intimacy between men. This is why being forcibly dragged into Stede’s world, where everyone is busy having silly low-stakes misadventures and being gay and emotionally available all over the main text–and seeing his Subtextual Boyfriend go into this world and love it–sends him round the twist.
The British, Spanish and other imperialist militaries are in a Master and Commander-style naval adventure where they’re the heroes. This is why they all take it completely seriously when Stede (unintentionally) kills Badminton and takes hostages, even though we can see that he bumbled his way into it ass-backwards. This is also why Stede is so shocked to get actually for real stabbed aboard the Spanish ship. (“Did you mean to do that?”) He didn’t realize until that moment that he’d stepped into a different genre. The stabbing is one of the first Surprise Genre Switch moments we get and in retrospect it’s very important for setting up that in this world, the threat of getting hurt or killed is very real–which we need to understand to know that there are real stakes much later, when Stede almost gets executed by the British.
If someone saves your life, you don’t get to fucking own them?? I don’t understand this mentality.
“Oh he saved my life once, so now I have to let him act like a dick and guilt me into following him.”
Fuck that
(Yes this is about Ed and Calico Jack)
I would be willing to bet Ed got a lot of the “I gave you life, I give you food/clothing, I let you live in my house, so you owe me loyalty and perfect behavior to my arbitrary standard in return” type rhetoric from his father from a pretty early age, and experienced the consequences of it as well, so even if on some level Ed knows (or at least suspects) that rhetoric is bullshit, the survival instinct is a damn strong one. Appeasing someone who thinks you owe them is safer than the alternative. So when Jack, who’s mostly historically been a fun (if not terribly substantial) buddy to have around, makes people feel threatened and hurt and gets shunned by this whole crew, is like “come on, man, I saved your life dude”, I absolutely fucking can understand the knee-jerk reaction of feeling safer sticking with him than defying him. And even if it’s not just the knee-jerk reaction, if Ed thinks it through, and he can basically appease Jack while Jack’s upset and being kind of threatening right now and then find a way to still stay loyal to Stede in the end, that’s absolutely what he’s gonna do.
These are very good points. Thank you. I hadn’t considered the appeasement angle, but of course that’s what it is.
