I have more thoughts on how and why the sex was a mistake. I will be thinking about this all week. All year.

Let's start with: the sex was consensual, they both wanted it, and that does not change that it was the wrong decision for their relationship in that moment. They should not have had sex! Ed is 100% correct and he is not running away when he says that! He is not just avoiding his feelings or getting cold feet, he is genuinely correct, and here's why:

They continue to be on different pages. They have not had a chance to talk it through. It's been like 2-3 max since Ed woke up from the Gravy Basket, and emotions are still running high. Even ignoring that they were just tortured in front of each other and that Stede killed a man right after Ed asked him not to, they were not in the same space emotionally regarding their relationship.

Fir one thing: Stede did *not* get his heartbroken (prior to this). He got his romantic affirmation. Season 1 was an entire arc leading to Stede realizing he is gay, that he is in love, that he is loved in return. For him, for HIM, sex is a natural next step, and we already knew he wanted it from how he deepened their kiss in episode 5. Their relationship itself is not a source of trauma for Stede; he loves Ed and he walked away from his old life to be with him, and now he found him again, and they've agreed to do it together, figure things out, his romantic hopes are realized.

And in that moment, adding to that background informations, is that Stede also wanted to avoid all his messy feelings by being physical. He was tortured and he watched Ed and his crew be tortured, he was insulted and had to listen to Ed be insulted, and he wanted to regain control and power by killing Ned Low, and removing the threat. That's where Stede's head is.

Ed, on the other hand, did get his heart broken and while the majority of what he's working through is about his self-hatred, his dissatisfaction with his career, and his desire to find a life that feels worth living, he is also dealing with a significant amount of trust issues with his relationship with Stede, because Stede left him. He has heard from Stede that he loves him, but Ed's deepest fear is that he's unlovable, and he hasn't gotten over that, or his hurt from how things went, in the like two days it's been.

But he loves Stede, and he's attracted to him, and he wants him, so when Stede initiates and manhandles him a bit and things get hot and heavy, he consents. He's all in, carried away by the moment.

And he regrets it.

He especially wasn't ready because Ed is a planner. I know we were all joking about how they definitely weren't going to take it slow and they were going to rush through, but I do genuinely think he meant it. Ed's natural state is as a planner and tactician, everything has an angle for him and even when he wants to just be simple, he always has a bajillion factors in mind that he's juggling, so we can be sure that Ed probably did very much have thoughts about how he wanted their first time to go, and what he wanted them to do and grow into as a relationship before they had sex, and instead they got tortured, Stede killed a man, and then they fucked in the aftermath.

Not bloody optimal indeed.

Now back to Stede: he is utterly unprepared for the idea that the sex could be a mistake because to and for him it was the natural next step in their relationship. This is his romantic fantasy is the thing; he was a cool brave pirate captain who made an enemy walk the plank in defense of his crew and his boyfriend, and then Ed came to him and Stede got to sweep him off his feet and shove him against the wall, kiss him, bring him to the bed, and pointedly shut the curtains on an audience that doesn't exist, followed by a lazy morning after with breakfast in bed.

So it probably hurts extra that Ed is like that was a mistake. This is literally him living his fantasy from episode 1, Ned Low even has facial hair and is mean to him like Izzy used to be. He could ignore all the realities of that situation, because he was living his fantasy, and Ed dragged them both out of fantasyland, back to the real world, where their relationship isn't fixed 100% and sex didn't change that.

They weren't on the same page. They still aren't, because they need to talk.

Oh boy... OH BOY... I was reading through comments and tags under that Flint vs. Stede post (and before that in Silver vs. Oluwande post) and OH BOY RANT INCOMING

Feel free to ignore. No, I'm prickly about this.

I LOVE how people are like "Black Sails fans are so mean why are they like that T.T ?" in the tags and comments.

LET ME TELL YOU.

So we have this show that has been marginalized and has been pushed to the side for years. A show that has excellent plot, wonderful intrigue, magnificent representation and well-written, 3D characters that are complex and relatable. You get your edgy queer men (whether you want to characterize Flint as gay or bi, doesn't change the fact that he likes dick whichever way), you get your edgy queer girls (Anne), you get your flamboyant whatever-the-fuck-Jack-Rackham-is (<3), you get sweet gays (Thomas), you get confused bisexuals (Eleanor, Silver), you get straight sweets (Miranda) and straight angery dicks (Woodes Rogers), and competent, edgy straights (Vane). Oh! A competent, master-of-the-house lesbian? Check (Max). You even have asexuals, or that is what I shall forever classify Billy as. You have a f/f sex scene in the first damn episode, ffs. You get threesomes (sexual, romantic), you get couples, you even have Silver in a brothel orgy.

But sexual representation is not ALL! You get goofy pirates (Jack Rackham), you get serious pirates (Blackbeard), you get balls of rage (Flint), you get chill, laid-back sea dogs (Gates), you get competent little weasels (Silver), you get incompetent rats (Dufrense). You also have marvelous extras and side characters (Beauclerc the marksman, Captain Fruit-Fruit, Idelle... OHMYGOD IDELLE <3333).

There's the political plot that's historically accurate, the story's plot that's Flint's big gay rage, there's the sociological context of being painted as a monster, there's the gold hunt, there are ships correctly operated by crews of more than five fucking people, there are guns, blood and realistic injuries. You get quotations and allusions to Shakespeare, Cervantes, Julius Caesar, Marcus Fucking Aurelius, a metric ton of other classical writers. You get so many tropes done right it's astonishing and too effing long to list them all here.

On top of that, there is the picturesque landscape, absolutely gorgeous ships and very accurate portrayal of how life looked back then.

We had to defend that show when it first came out, the actors had to fucking fight homophobic assholes upon the airing of season two (IMAGINE THAT), people who loved it had a hard time going around, although admittedly it's a "fandom" hard time, not a "real life" hard time. We persisted, we persevered, and now we're here, clinging to what's left of our fandom, because we are admittedly all over the place and we don't have "troops" on any one social media, which makes our numbers small in comparison to other fandoms, and makes fandom interactions very limited.

Now imagine that there aired a show... a pirate show promising a lot. And then the show turned out to be an office-type comedy with no lesbian/bi women representation (I may be wrong, but I did watch it out of curiosity, didn't see any, just guys). A show that the whole plot of is just a rendition of the Beauty and the Beast for pirate times with so many historical inaccuracies (couching your crew like a bunch of office workers? Plz. The way they speak and the concepts they talk of that weren't there? It's like they were sitting around a fire, holding hands and singing kumbaya). And don't get me wrong, there's place for those shows as well, and maybe it works for you (and great for you too!).

We tried to ignore it, really we did. We basically gave it the eyebrow-raise-huff-ignore thing that you do on the internet when you want someone to enjoy their stuff and are not interested in it yourself.

But you know what happened? Suddenly there were people on twitter tagging everyone and their dog from Black Sails with renditions of Flint/Izzy (Izzy who comes across as an extreme asshole at best and a homophobic shit at worst and you can't fault people for reading it like this). Let that sink in - our fandom babe Flint, who had his whole life ruined due to homophobia and homophobic assholes is suddenly being shipped with a guy who suspiciously fits the description a bit too much for our tastes. Wouldn't you get angry? Of course you would, we're all very protective of our babes. We are, you are, everyone is. We asked you not to do this, and while I admit that hurling curses your way might not have been the most polite way of asking you to stop, the message was clear enough. What does OFMD fandom do? They all double down. Double fucking down on fanfiction and tagging everything in BS again, pairing Flint and Izzy together, writing things way out of the realm of any possibilities because most of the writers didn't watch BS (I did read their comments on that. They weren't even sorry). If you take such character and throw him into a work of art that can and will be seen as controversial, you should at least have the decency to do your homework on the original work he comes from. Otherwise, to our eyes, you're taking the most wronged man from our beloved show, wronged due to his sexuality, and throw him together with a literal asshole just to see them fuck because they would look pretty (and that's an actual comment from one of the artists, I shit you not). Wouldn't you feel a bit angry about that? I bet you would.

What's worse, people loving Black Sails and not liking OFMD usually point out how narrow the representation is, how improbable the show is and how they're not remotely invested in the plot. It's a cheesy show for your average Sunday afternoon, don't make it into something it's not. It's not a political statement any more than Guess The Tune is.

What's more, when I've seen attempts at people pointing out the obvious flaws in plot, in logic (how many people crew that ship exactly? How is he not dead after being stabbed clean through with a sword?), all we've gotten was "Oh it's not that type of show, OBVIOUSLY", "it's just a comedy, duh" and my personal favorite "you just DON'T UNDERSTAND IT BOOMER". (I'm a late Millennial, thx). Every attempt was chucked out the window. What got me most, tho, was the high praise of OFMD IS THE FIRST SHOW TO [insert whatever queer thing it did supposedly]. No, it's not. There was even a post on twitter that debunked all those claims one by one. I get it, you're happy that you got your gay pirates, good for you. But give credit where credit's due, otherwise you're gonna piss off a lot of people. People who watched our show struggle and crawl so that your show can run today and be fine and accepted widely.

And personally, I felt disappointed watching it because of the lack of representation. Disappointed that Ed turned out to be just as rainbowy as Stede. Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against rainbowy, ultra-sweet characters that are big softies. I love them. But not everyone in the lgbtq community is like that. Actually, it's the minority. There are your sweets, there are your glittery rainbows, but the majority is on the more... inconspicuous part of the scale. And there are edgy people (like myself) who don't like glitter, pink, feathers, fluff and a shitton of other things this show had in abundance. You know what made me wince while watching? When I realized that the only person who I could remotely like for the way they weren't so glittery-rainbowy-sweet was Izzy, and I hated him because he was an asshole. Even Jim got the fluffy af oranges arch. So not my (and others') cup of tea.

So yeah, our recent anger and rabidity is not based solely on one post about an insignificant poll (that you're winning only because our fandom is significantly smaller and most people are dispersed between different sites). It's all those things combined and it's the result of them.

And no, I'm not going to finish it with a "please forgive us if we seem a bit angery, we're coping". Flint wouldn't.

Thinking about the conversation between Jack and Stede while they pee and how it's the closest thing the show has to an explicit conversation about queerness and homophobia.

Kinda wanna do a whole analysis of that scene at some point but for now some basic thoughts:

1. What's Jack's thought process when he asks Stede if he and Ed are having sex?

If it was just about wanting to know (out of curiosity or jealousy) surely he would have asked Ed?

Of course it's entirely possible he already did ask Ed and simply didn't believe him when he said they aren't (which tbh I would not blame him for considering the intense couple energy Ed and Stede give off the entire time he's with them)

But personally I feel like him asking Stede is as much about gauging Stede's reaction as it is about finding out the answer (which he doesn't seem overly invested anyway given he doesn't push it when Stede dodges the question)

So let's talk about Stede's reaction.

He says "I don't know what you're talking about"

2. What's Stede's thought process here?

The way that Stede's answer reads (at least to me) is essentially "there's no reason for you to think that".

And I'm a little curious why he does this instead of just... Denying it.

Because despite saying he doesn't know what Jack is talking about, Stede knows exactly why Jack might assume his relationship with Ed is less than platonic.

Firstly, Stede has been bullied his whole life for being effeminate and strange. There's no way this is the first time someone has accused him of being queer (although it's probably the first time someone's put it so bluntly).

He also knows that cohabiting (and "co-captaining") with a close male friend the way he does is unusual even by pirate standards.

But if Stede had said "no" it likely would have encouraged further questioning that Stede presumably wants to avoid. "Why co-captains then?", "What's with the fancy breakfast dates every morning?" etc.

His non-committal choice of answer saves Stede from having to justify their relationship or way of doing things to someone he already feels defensive toward.

It also might have something to do with Stede's background and the necessity of talking around sensitive or controversial subjects like this in high society settings.

In saying "I don't know what you're talking about" he's rejecting the idea that he's done anything wrong or unusual while implying that actually Jack is the weird one for thinking it. It's a form of passive aggression that Stede will be all too familiar with.

The thing I'm least sure about (and that I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on!) is

3. How does Stede feel about his queerness?

From the beginning, queerness is very normalised aboard the Revenge. Lucius and Pete are openly in a relationship and no one (except Izzy) seems to have a problem with it. Up until this scene with Jack, it would be reasonable to assume this is a world in which homophobia simply doesn't exist.

But then we have this conversation where Jack says "Nothing to be ashamed of. Anything goes at sea."

This recontextualizes this very openly queer environment as something specific to piracy. And that makes sense! Pirate ships are insular spaces of typically all men, living outside of the laws that govern most of society.

But the show is ambiguous about how aware Stede is of his own queerness before becoming a pirate.

Before meeting Mary, Stede expresses a desire to "marry for love" which indicates that at that point in time he feels he has at least the potential to fall in love with a woman.

This could mean that Stede is bi/pan or that he's gay and just doesn't know it yet. There's no way of knowing for certain from the info we currently have. What we do know is that Stede is not in love with Mary (and imo doesn't seem to be attracted to her either).

Like I touched on earlier, I personally think Stede must have experienced people questioning his heterosexuality prior to becoming a pirate. So when did Stede start questioning it?

I think this scene is the first time he openly acknowledges the possibility of any kind of attraction between him and Ed and (despite what he says) he really doesn't look very surprised at the implication.

He clearly doesn't realise he's in love with Ed until the conversation with Mary about it in episode 10 but he must know there's some kind of attraction there, right? - especially after the kiss.

Idk, what do y'all think?