Youdelight-itolerate - Steena Longstocking

My new neighbors watching me hang my laundry on the line

i'm so tired of ed and violence discourse in this fandom holy shit

like ed is violent. OBVIOUSLY. he is a pirate. they are all violent professionally and often recreationally. this is largely COMEDIC on the show.

but ed is also one of the ONLY pirates on the show to have an entire fucking plot arc and character backstory specifically about HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH VIOLENCE and his hangups about what violence he personally enacts.

a plot arc about how traumatized he is by defensive violence he committed when he was an abused child! a plot arc about how he has never been able to get himself to do that same kind of violence again and has to distance himself from it by degrees to be able to sit with it when it's shown to be something that would not bother almost any other pirate! and certainly not one of his level!

canonically, he is careful about the violence he perpetrates and what he delegates for this exact explicit reason! canonically, we only see him actually do any violence onscreen when directly provoked, canonically, it is often extremely calculated and emotionless because he is performing it for a specific purpose and he still requires distance!

yet people look at that and go, "actually ed is a uniquely violent berserker sadist who routinely lashes out at everyone!!!"

and it's not only racist as hell but it so clearly the result of a specific agenda!!

the issue isn't that ed does violence. that is empirical fact. it's that some of y'all want to portray him as an uncontrollable monster because that's what you need him to be for whatever bullshit narrative you're trying to build. and then when anyone doesn't buy into said bullshit narrative, you disingenuously suggest that people who attempt to approach his relationship with violence with the same degree of nuance as the actual fucking show are trying to act like he's never violent at all. so clearly you are the reasonable one to suggest that the horrific boogeyman that is explicitly an exaggerated image he feels trapped by is his True Self.

it's nonsense!! grow up!

You can't tell me that Hannibal wouldn't let Will have this one... as a little treat. And then everyone would stand up and clap.

(Ifkyk. If you don't, prepare yourself if you look it up.)

We’re communicating so much better now, no?

Ok it’s late so bear with me as I try to articulate this.

Every day I am thinking about the way Ed says, “Oh shut up” in response to Stede saying, “I’ve only got stupid ideas.”

It’s something about his exasperated tone, his furrowed brows, the way he looks at the ground instead of Stede, how he’s one second away from rolling his eyes. In this moment he is simply a man with his best friend who he is trying to make feel better and the best friend is ruining his attempt. Real “no one is allowed to talk shit about you, not even you” energy.

And obviously Ed is in love with him there but there’s just something very special to me about how even without taking romantic feelings into account, there’s affection and camaraderie there, so much that he feels real annoyance when Stede gets too down on himself. That special type of annoyance, the type that doesn’t spell out abandonment, but rather the type where he wants to shake Stede and say, “see what I see for once, you wonderful idiot.”

To paraphrase a quote from Parks and Rec: he loves him and he likes him.

It is so important to me that he just. Genuinely fucking likes him.

Portraits Commissioned from The Widow Bonnet