OFMDWEEK2023 - Day 3: Recurrent themes/symbols - The Petrified Orange -

[ID: 1. Mary Bonnet is painting at her easel in a sunny studio while her daughter Alma crouches on the floor in front of her wearing a blouse and trousers. Alma calls, "Here, Stede!" and a fluffy light tabby cat comes trotting into her outstretched arms. Mary looks around her easel with a small smile, questioning "Stede?" 2. Alma stands up with the cat cradled in her arms and replies with a smile "I named him after Father because he's stupid and runs away if you let him outside." The cat, tongue out and green eyes pointing in opposite directions, certainly looks stupid. In the foreground, Mary's smile turns a little strained as she replies "Oh.." uncertainly. /end ID]

For the July #AsACrew Challenge Day 19: Cat

5th graders are so brutal tbh

this is how i cope with waiting on s2

✨here be memes✨

Stede + His Babies

one thing about me is that i do enjoy a good Dad Stede fic or fics where stede’s kids (and mary and doug) are important figures in his life and he has a great relationship with them, i like reading abt stede trying so hard to be a good dad

but at the same time i do not consider this to be stede’s canonical characterization. canon stede is an incredibly subpar dad to his biological children. not only does stede not know how to interact with said biological children when he’s not sharing his interests with them but also it has never once occurred to him that he should do other stuff with them. stede probably doesn’t even realize it’s possible to do anything with his kids aside from play pirates. he also does NOT have the emotional maturity necessary to handle when a toddler is throwing a tantrum, and thank fucking god he got out of there before they reached their teens. in s1 he mostly felt guilty for leaving them bc he did it in the middle of the night without saying goodbye but also because he still felt tied to the social obligations enforced on him by society. he still felt like he had a responsibility to be a Socially Acceptable Man, which includes being a husband and a dad, even tho trying to be a socially acceptable man made him fucking miserable. when he realizes at the end of the season that his kids and his wife are legitimately better off without him he leaves again without looking back.

and mark my fucking words he is never seeing those kids again. he said “two messed up kids, probably” so he’s at least somewhat aware that running out on his kids like that will most likely cause lasting psychological damage, but by god his children’s abandonment issues are not his problem. doug and mary can worry about that, he left them plenty of money to afford ye olde therapy if they need it down the line. and louis might’ve said “who are you, again?” but the truth is that stede only knew louis was his son bc he was sitting for breakfast inside stede’s house. that man could not pick his kids out of a lineup if his life depended on it. to quote @jaskierx, stede said “two messed up kids, probably” as in “my kids are messed up. and i think there were two of them”

i know a lot of people are really sad right now, so i’m gonna share some moments from the inn visit that i forgot to share.

i saw mom and stede sitting outside talking about something important. i dunno what they were saying but it looked really pretty so i drew it.

here’s wolf and stede the 16th.

sorry i stacked them. but it might make you smile.

here’s alma fighting off the ghost from our closet. that may sound bad, but sir unicorn seemed like he was actually having fun.

here’s alma cheating winning at cards. Doug was laughing.

and finally, me. the reigning champion of stede-stack.

i have more moments that i can share so feel free to ask me about them.

I hope this cheered you guys up a little,

And remember, art has always been something that keeps on growing. Even as we lose moments together, we gain a new path to make more. bouncing ideas and growing closer to ourselves, our community and our species as a human by creating and coming together. making art, no matter how much we have to sacrifice, will always be worth it.

… idk what that has to do with anything, and idk why i said all of that, but it’s true.

S01E10 - Wherever You Go, There You Are 🍊

no one ever loved stede before ed, really and fully and deeply and in a my life won't ever be the same without you kind of way and thats not a knock on alma and louis, but they're kids, they adapt, and stede was kind of absent as a dad.

but stede grew up so unloved, so uncared for, so brutally shut down on every social level, that even when he irks me and irritates me and i demand that he do the work of self-improvement i understand that he is coming from such a lonely, hurt place. stede's spent his whole life sans the kind of love that comes from acceptance and understanding and being wanted not in spite of yourself but because of yourself, and it's why he finds it so easy to take himself out of people's lives - because he is convinced, deep down, that he is so inherently wrong and unwanted and ruinous that surely he can't be missed.

alma being furious with him was probably a shock, because he never imagined anyone would miss him. mary and louis' reactions were what he expected but they still cut to the quick.

ed's reaction? stede isn't going to be anything close to ready. no one's ever loved him enough to be destroyed by his absence.

new headcanon: in episode 10 alma ripped that petrified orange in half with her bare hands

Ofmd as text posts (part 2)

- Part 1

Ok so ao3 has fully convinced me Izzy is not dead at this point. Why you may ask. Let me enumerate.

1) Ed in the gravy basket. If Ed can survive a cannon ball to the head, Izzy can survive a shot to the gut. Izzy is a indestructible little fucker and he will dig himself out of that shallow ass dirt grave and scare the bejeezus out of Stede

2) Buttons sitting on his grave in seagull form. Buttons will screech his head off until someone comes and checks that shit out.

3) if Izzy does not emerge from this grave, he will show up as a fucking ghost giving wise advice and telling ppl to fuck off in stride

4) someone wrote a fic where the crew digs Izzy up and replaced him with a corpse (because yeah they’ve got those on hand) and bring Iz back to the ship to heal him and just yeah. Break that connection between Izzy and Ed, give Izzy a new start.

5) I also saw a fic where Izzy in ghost form talk to Al (trans masc Alma Bonnet) and did not know I would be so down for that but fuck yeah.

6) also at this point I am down to clown with Stede x Ed x Izzy. And man ppl are so talented at writing fanfic.

Thank you for listening to my Ted talk.

Thinking about Stede building the Revenge for him and his family. How he knew he was unhappy and so was Mary and probably so were the kids, but his first thought/plan A was for them all to go live at sea together instead of running away himself. A stupid plan based on a self-centered idea of what might make things better? Absolutely, he clearly had a monkey playing symbols in his brain listening to Mary talk about her hatred of the ocean. But he built the Revenge as a home for his family, with a room for the kids (Jim and Olu's room?) and a library which contained children's stories and secret passageways for fun, for playing games.

Having listened to a lot of true crime podcasts with shitty-father villains, it strikes me how the idea that Stede could have just taken the kids is literally never touched on. Yeah, he probably knew he couldn't take care of them on his own, maybe didn't want to (we only really see him interacting with them by playing pirates), but Alma and Louis remain the only people Stede has canonically said the words "I love you" to (yes yes he loves Ed he was about to say it to him in s2e4 and switched tactics, but putting them in a similar category with Ed is pretty telling imo). Like...it probably never once occurred to Stede that another man might have taken the kids with him to spite his ex or to live their happy life of playing pirates on the high seas. Mary said I don't want a boat, I don't hate our lives, and Stede went welp, guess I'm on my own then.

There's a lot that can be said about Stede as a distant father who abandoned his family. I'm not saying he's the bastion of perfect fatherhood. But he's so clearly torn up about leaving them because he knows, morally, that was wrong, and even after he sets things right, he still talks about them ("two messed up kids probably/ didn't fit in with Mary and the kids") which tbh, I thought we were never gonna mention the Bonnet family again after s1e10.

Idk. I think Stede loves his kids as best he can for someone who probably never wanted them, and ultimately helped them out in the long run by not having them have to grow up in a miserable household with unhappy parents and an emotionally distant father who simply couldn't do better than playing games with them.

Also, thinking about how a lot of OFMD is thematic rather than verbally explicit...I think it's incredibly telling how upset Alma was when Stede came back, and that she wanted split the orange so they would still be connected no matter how far apart they were. That in a show with pretty heavy-handed symbolism of physically/emotionally abusive fathers and cycles, the kids are never, ever shown to be afraid of Stede, that when they play together they're all happy, that Stede says he loves them even though they were asleep and didn't hear it, and that the one time they physically touch, it's Alma reaching out to tug Stede's hair in a playful way, and he responds in kind. That Stede breaks the cycle of emotionally distant and abusive fathers by A. Not belittling them ever and B. Leaving when he realized his presence was making things worse.

Tl;dr Stede Bonnet is objectively a bad dad, but he still loves his kids.

y’all i’m in both david and mark motherbaugh’s walls for this one.

i was going through bits of footage for gifs as i do, and realized that the little note progression in the alma+stede scene sounded very familiar. sure enough...

it’s the same little progression as the pre-kiss confession, just in another key. it’s the lead-in to the love theme.

something something the handling of stede’s heart in both scenes. something something love but in different ways, hence the same song but in different keys. something something love towards stede finally progressing to the intended point.

...tldr, this show is insane for its symbolism and motifs and it’s wild that we keep discovering things over a year after the first season dropped.

Izzy taking Stede's kids under his wing is a hill I will die on.

[id: a digital sketch of Izzy Hands and Alma Bonnet from OFMD. Izzy has kneeled down to tie Alma's shoelace. She has her hand on top of his hand for balance and is smiling. /end id]