And Strangely, Some Twine

bye-bye blackbeard

Calico Jack is absolutely as bad as Izzy—violent, homophobic, and hateful—and yes I will die on this hill.

He’s just apparently funnier.

Oh Calico Jack is WAY worse than Izzy. He's just in the show a lot less.

Big shout out to every member of the "watched Our Flag Means Death more times than I can count" club

👆 This is gonna be our secret handshake btw

This bizarre little man is going to accidentally murder his childhood bully, take English officers hostage, outsmart 'the great Israel Hands', get gut stabbed, outsmart the Spanish navy, incite a bunch of posh knobs into burning down their own ship, outsmart Izzy Hands again, escape an English privateering academy, fake his own death, give up every penny to his name, steal back his ship from the Queen of Pirates, pull his one true love back from the brink of death, and then slam The Dread Pyrate Blackbeard up against the wall and make him see God.

If you even care.

The Salt Path, illustration by Angela Harding

Watching US Politics as a non-American is like watching a horror movie where you're begging the protagonists to save themselves, except if the killer gets them then you get poisoned in real life.

Also there's a safehouse the protagonists can lock themselves in to escape the killer but instead of all heading inside asap some are debating over whether it's a bit too old and crooked so maybe they should keep searching the woods for something more to their liking

^^^this.

Like, yes, this structure is not up to code and poses its own risks. Certainly not a perfect structure.

However the other option is a maniac with a machete chasing you and screaming about how you won't survive the night. He's got a creepy little nursery rhyme about playing with your guts. If you don't hide he will kill you slowly and painfully. That's a guarantee.

And then everyone is like "both options are unsafe which means they are the exact same and I see no difference between the refuge of this somewhat sketchy shed and leaving ourselves at the hands of a shrieking serial killer."

Never mind that this the sequel and we already watched the same machete waving serial killer massacre the first group of college kids in the first movie. They refused to hide in a similar shed, because the shed sent some sus emails.

people who let me wake up to this get a special place in heaven. firefly_fox how does it feel to hold my life in ur hands....

my favorite thing about this post is that a handful of people have gone "oh wait! this is tangible proof that i don't need to be embarrassed about leaving a lot of comments!! i'll stop being so ashamed!" YES!! ao3 authors basically universally will die for people who comment spam. we love to see it and we do not find you weird or annoying At All.

think about it this way: we ourselves are weird enough to have spent several hours, days, or Months writing down this story. we are weird enough about the content to do that! why on Earth would we be mean and judgmental toward people who care enough to get excited about reading it?? we shared it Specifically For You To Get Excited About!

WE WILL WRITE FOR YOU WHEN YOU DO THIS, TOO.

truly the wildest thing about all the Bridgerton discourse about "is Nicola Coughlan too FAT to be a convincing love interest???" is that in many ways she actually looks better in the period costumes than her thinner counterparts because she has the figure to really fill them out. those dresses are incredibly flattering on larger bodies because they emphasise the bust and cleavage whilst creating a very elegant silhouette. there's something unintentionally hilarious about hearing pearl-clutching in the distance over "idk is this FAT WOMAN sexy enough to be believable as an object of lust??" whilst Penelope Featherington's majestic heaving bosoms are almost spilling out of her dress in a category 5 titty event. if anything she's too sexy. they had to spend the first two seasons putting her in ugly dresses in a desperate attempt to conceal the fact that she's serving more cunt than the entire itty bitty titty committee combined

they had to dress her like shit for two seasons because they were trying to hide that she is easily the hottest thing on this entire show.

operative word here being "trying." they sure did not fucking succeed

He is such a gentleman

The Devil's Chord / The Legend of Ruby Sunday

"Why can't the freaks on AO3 just go and make a site for all the gross stuff and leave AO3 alone."

Because AO3 is that site. Because AO3 was that site long before you decided AO3 was better than the sites you bullied us off of before, and I can promise you if someone somehow comes up with a fanfic site you like better specifically for the 'gross stuff' you'll try to bully us off that too so you can benefit from it.

AO3's specific core purpose is to preserve fanfiction, yes, but it was also instigated as a host site for the fanfiction that kept getting yeeted off other platforms like Wattpad. Its designed to preserve all fanfiction, not just the fanfiction you, personally, think is 'allowed' to be written.

AO3 is the site for all the gross stuff the freaks make. We've been there just as long as you. We've been funding it just as long as you have. AO3 has specifically said you have a place here. The timeline was literally:

Wattpad/FF.net/LiveJournal purge fanfics > AO3 is born > The people who's fics got purged moved over to AO3 > AO3 gains popularity as the best functioning site > The people who pushed for the fics to be purged off Wattpad move to AO3 > The same people try to push for AO3 to purge fics.

AO3's source coding is open-access. You go make a polished, strict, rigid site where nothing 'icky' is allowed. You go make a site where you can control what is hosted. We already have our space.

AO3 was specifically made for the stuff likely to be purged from other sites.

It was built around "we need to own the servers" so we wouldn't have to deal with anyone else's judgment calls about what was acceptable in fanfic: Not corporate sponsors, not evangelical religious groups, not "save the children" activists... and not other fans who think that The Gross Stuff should be banned from public view, only shared via private email after you've sent in a request heavily laden with special keywords.

Some of the founders remembered when slash fanfic was kept under the table at the dealer's room, distributed with brown paper wrappers only to people who knew to ask for it specifically.

And they said: Fuck that. Our art is not a crime and we're not going to be ashamed of it. If you are ashamed to have your art next to it - there's a whole wide internet that's ready to host your G-rated genfic.

AO3 was built for the stuff that was unwelcome elsewhere.

Who, precisely, do you think the “our” in “Archive of OUR Own” is, children?

I've been thinking this morning about the connection between Ed still having the Blackbeard beard in Stede's dream that opens s2 and Stede's main fear in this episode being that Ed's life is better off without him.

When Ed shaved his beard in s1e9, he and Stede obviously understood that in very different ways. For Ed, it was a chance to shed the weight of being Blackbeard, to for the first time fully commit to literally seeing who he is under the famous beard and reputation. Stede misses that - for him, shaving was a violation that was done to Ed ("what've they done to your face," he asks, not "what did you do?"), a violation that was Stede's fault. I honestly think it's pretty well-implied that no one even cared about the beard not being "regulation," Ed's long hair certainly wasn't standard, either, and that's just the easiest explanation for Ed to give when he's not even sure himself what he's feeling. He just genuinely wanted to shave his beard, but Stede takes it as a punishment, a sign that Ed has been hurt by him. When he thinks of "Blackbeard brought to ruin," he thinks of Ed's sweet, vulnerable, beardless face looking up at him, and he worries that Ed has been hurt and violated because of him.

Stede's dream is very much a wish fulfillment. He dreams of killing Izzy, getting the cool pirate-y dialogue, running across a beach to Ed in romantic lighting. He dreams, essentially, of things going back to the way they had been, with Ed easily forgiving him and the only real difference from their s1 dynamic being that they now both know they're in love. He dreams of an Ed with the beard because he's scared the real Ed with no beard has been hurt by him in a way that might be impossible to move on from. He's scared Ed with no beard, with that tangible reminder right on his face of what he gave up for Stede, is better off without him.

He's seen the Time Knife, too.