i have spent the last month trawling the pages of ao3 for you, dear reader, to find the best ofmd fics. all the works on this list:
are longer-form (generally 40k+)
have no steddyhands (simply not my thing)
are generally, all around brilliant (well-written, had me kicking my feet and giggling, laughing, or crying)
are complete!
part 2 and part 3
A Heart Unsated by roughwinds
48k, explicit
"Stede Bonnet has just moved into Orange Crescent. There’s a house on the corner, opposite Stede’s own, with a garden full of flowers and a gleaming motorbike on the driveway. He’s forgotten to buy sugar.
Edward Teach has his morning disturbed by his new neighbour. Enamoured at first sight, he invites Stede round for a chat, and then another, and then another.
This is the story of them."
man i normally avoid fics with lots of alma and louis in them because its just not for me, but literally every second of the family bonding in this was so wholesome i was forced to change my entire mind.
all you left me was a pearl by @sightofsea
88k, mature
"1717. The Golden Age of Piracy. Stede Bonnet sets about wooing the love of his life through any means necessary.
Things do not go as planned."
every day i wish for a precise memory erasing potion to be invented so i can read this again for the first time. i would devour like 2000k more words of this if it was offered to me. brilliant.
forgive & forget by @fool-for-luv
44k, mature
"It hits him then, like a wave breaking on sand, loud as thunder when it crashes, then trickling away into little rivulets flowing back home, murmuring one word over and over and over. Ed.
The problem is, Stede doesn’t recall ever having met anyone named Ed."
so sweet and wonderful, and i wish there was more.
#gentlebeard is trending! by regional_catastrophe
41k, teen
"In which Stede accidentally convinces the pirating world that Gentlebeard (or Blackbonnet or Stedward; there's a poll) is canon, reunites his crew, and gets his boyfriend back."
hilarious & silly & great, but also the most compelling notes of any fic i've ever read. a proper learning experience.
if music be the food of love (then darling, you're a feast) by @fool-for-luv
107k, unrated
"“Hey, so, those two, right, they get together in the end?” Ed asks.
“I would protest spoiling it, but I think it's rather obvious, isn't it?” Stede says. His nose wrinkles as he smiles. “The tension is certainly there from the beginning. It just takes them a while to get there.”
“Good. Would have been a shit story otherwise.""
i love sassy stede and i love ed who is a grump and i love that they share one single braincell at any given time.
If You Were Mine to Keep by @mysterybees
162k, explicit
"Caught between the gallows and the end of an English sword, Ed accepts the Act of Grace: marry into the aristocracy, leave the English ships alone, and live to sail another day. But who in their right mind would ever agree to marry the mad devil pirate Blackbeard?"
Worth every second of tiredness I felt after pulling an all nighter to finish reading.
It's Only Right by hexuponye
53k, explicit
"A modern AU based on Imagine Me & You, in which Edward is a florist who does the flowers for Stede's wedding."
mary gets to be a little silly sometimes too as a treat.
pliocene by unfortunatelyobsessed
75k, mature
""man, it's just ocean for miles.” Ed motions out to the waves, where there is no sign of any sort of ship, their small dinghy pulled far up on the sand. “I told you when the clouds look like seagulls you take fuckin' cover. Goddamn ocean mutinied me.”"
william golding wishes he did something this brilliant and significant when he wrote Lord of the Flies. the best deserted island story.
quite a career shift by @stedesparasol
157k, explicit
"Stede's been posting book reviews on Youtube for two months now. It's taken him that long to finally get a comment, and the person it comes from is rather unexpected."
rip stede you would've LOVED booktube. furious i can never really watch his content.
Semaphore by komodobits
124k, explicit
"Talking things through as a crew is easier said than done, and honest communication has never really been Stede’s strong suit. When it comes to Ed, he is willing to try."
so good that i was properly and truly laughing and gasping and 'oh no-ing' out loud while i read it.
Such Joie de Vivre by @louciferish
94k, explicit
"Professional thief Edward Teach is tired of hole in the wall apartments, shitty pub food, and skipping town every few months to keep the cops off their tail. He’s well past the age he meant to flee the country and retire, and all he needs is One Last Job to set him up for life. When he hears that some rich bastard outside of town has just the sort of treasure he’d trade his good knee for, Ed sets out in disguise to get the lay of the land."
i (so so foolishly) avoided reading this for a while because i simply didn't think i was one for nanny aus. i was so, terribly wrong. don't make the same mistakes i did. showstopping. incredible stuff.
The Chains of Flowers are Fragile Things by @grandmastattoo
62k, explicit
"Stede can't see the shop he's inherited from his late father as anything other than a burden, another insult added to a life that's going nowhere fast. Then he meets the charismatic man who owns the tattoo studio next door, and Stede finds himself forced to consider the idea of home."
maybe i love tattoo shop owner ed fics, sue me. i love this stede and i love his embarrassing mistake tattoo.
The Love Experiment by karawrites
65k, mature
a married at first sight (aus) au. i didn't know i needed it until i read it.
Water/line by @the-gentleman-mermaid
60k, teen
"During a raid on a smuggler ship, Ed finds a merman named Stede locked in the hold."
So good that I would actually pay the author real person money to do a similar story but where Ed is the mermaid.
Where the Daylight Begins by @xoxoemynn
116k words, explicit
"Modern day AU slow burn featuring a pining Ed, a clueless Stede, found family, roughly a million animals, and a very magical house."
This one sort of gave me House on the Cerulean Sea vibes; it was so much fun and genuinely necessitates a proper use of the word whimsical.
it's been said before and i'll say it again: image descriptions are not meant to be added later by other people. they are meant to be written by op and included within the op.
She said in a low voice, "He was right. There can be no forgiveness."
"Then let us not seek out forgiveness, but forgetfulness," he said. "Bury me next to you in that unmarked grave, Joy. We knew that was the only hope we ever had—that we would live to see it through...and pray for our own cessation. Oh, we'll still hate each other, my dear, we have hated each other too long and too passionately to stop...but my bones will rest easy next to your bones."
hi. im here to kamukoma ramble. ok so i reeaaly hate how all kamumeshi Fan Content (which is basically all kamukoma content) waters down izuru to being the dominant one and servant to being his cute little dog like i feel like its so much more complex then that.
izuru was created to be subservient, to be smart enough to see through manipulation tactics and yet not care enough about himself to do anything to stop them, always doing something to serve someone else’s interests - and even when he does do one thing in his own interest (the killing game), it was largely because of his obsession with junko, so we see her still pulling the strings on him from beyond the grave (emphasized by his convo with her in his udg cameo). he doesn’t have power and he’s been designed not to want it. he’s been robbed of his humanity over and over again and been taught to accept it. he even explicitly states all of this in talent dev plan with taka
komaeda, on the other hand, is always framed with such heavy control over the narrative - he heavily influences dr2’s ending and takes that same puppeteering role in udg too. although he has that inferiority complex, he still holds so much power over everyone else, manipulating them like chess pieces. he is just as dangerous as izuru is, considering he has not only the intelligence but the motivation to act out like this, something izuru lacks.
and so this creates a really cool complexity where servant believes he’s meant to be subservient to izuru but this may not be wholly reflected in the way he acts, and izuru most definitely does not care for/about controlling servant. and, if izuru does take a domineering role, it’s because that’s what servant wants (especially after junko’s death, when he has no one left to place himself beneath), and so izuru’s still letting himself go with whoever the people surrounding him want him to be. he’s not with servant for the power trip, that goes completely against everything he’s ever been - because, in reality, IZURU is the one who exists to serve. to serve his creators, and then junko afterwards, even after her death. his purpose has always been assigned to him, not created by him.
both characters are fucked up and morally grey. both characters are the man, both characters are the god.
this is what i wish people would focus more on when writing their general character development and the development of their relationship. because they barely get any screen time you get lots of creative freedom and you can take this concept in either a “they are going to heal and get better together” route or a “they are doomed to always hurt each other in their codependency” route or some weird thing in between; again, personal preference, and if you want to keep izuru and hajime separate postgame this opens a whole new plethora of dynamics and development to write about after komaeda becomes himself again. the flexibility of their dynamic is whats so intriguing to me - kamukoma is a very complex and fluid idea that i wish more people would mess around with like this join me and we can play with them like putty
harrowhark nonagesimus when "i get mean when i'm nervous like a bad dog" and "i don't think about the past it's always there anyways" and "i will never die i will never die i will never die"
I present a very unnecessary analysis of the scaralumi talk before the big fight
First of all I love the way they both can see through each other. I think often times we overlook how good Lumi is at understanding the feelings of others - mostly because Paimon does most of the talking - but here we can see just how good she is at reading him since (I believe) this is the most she has ever talked in a quest. Scara believes he knows what he wants, but Lumi knows what he needs.
I like how he says this because it is true. We have been proven time and time again how Lumi cares about others, which is why despite her being enemies with Scara she can’t help but empathize with his situation.
But she’s not stupid, there’s where it comes the “almost” part. She is saying that as a way to try and stop his plans, not simply because she is worried about him and he knows that, but he still tries to convince her about him being, even though for a moment it almost sounds like he’s trying to convince himself.
Scara then moves on to say how his life has been meaningless up to this point, as if becoming a god is his only purpose and without it he is nothing. So he tried to understand why would Lumi bother going through such “futile errands” of protecting everyone.
But once again Lumi sees through him asking why then would he keep the connection with Haypasia (and consequently with Lumi herself). Even with his answer she is not convinced so he just deflects with his arrogance.
Not to mention how everything he says about Haypasia can also be applied to Lumine, since they both share a connection with him and saw his past. I find it interesting how he was able to sense Lumi and immediately entered her consciousness to observe her
Once again Lumi is able to figure him out and say what she needed to tick him off. He says how bad she is at sewing discord, but he still goes ahead and attacks the fatui calling it an “expression of affection”like he did for Haypasia, putting the two girls on the same wavelength
I often wonder about the quote-unquote logistics of Corvo the Black/Emily the Butcher endings. Emily makes more sense to me, in a way, carving her way through the empire only to come back with blood caked under her fingernails and realising that she did everything her father refused to do 15 years ago. but why did Corvo have a similar choice?
what happens to the statues later? does Emily keep her father trapped in stone? does Corvo look at his daughter, frozen in the moment and considers freeing her? is he at his deathbed when he finally reaches out and cups Emily's cheek, freeing her into a carcass of an empire that he gutted for her, in her name, in the name of her mother?
when I first heard of the endings I thought that if you reach very high chaos, you are locked into this choice - Corvo or Emily tries to free the other and the stone just doesn't budge. they are trapped. the quest is over but the world knows that the bloodshed was extreme and this is the punishment they have to face