Our Flag Means Death: Thread 3. It's still utterly brilliant. We are still obsessed.

[TriceratopsRocks]

Ahoy again mateys! Set sail aboard thread 3 where we still wax lyrical about our favourite show, its cast, its music, fan edits, fan fiction and more 😁(there may also be just a little obsessing over our fabulous leads - pictures extremely welcome)!

If you haven’t yet seen Our Flag Means Death, what are you waiting for? Go watch it (on BBC iPlayer), then come back here and join us. But be warned, some of you may find yourself as hooked as we are 🎣.

You may have heard that this is a comedy about pirates and think it's not for you. But it’s actually a show about self-discovery, healing and found-family with a love story at its heart. The joint leads are both damaged by abusive backgrounds and want what the other has. The show is about their healing and their respective journeys. It’s tender, romantic, funny, emotionally intelligent and utterly refreshing. It subverts genre expectations. There is comedy, absurdity and a good amount of heartbreak and despair - sometimes in the same scene! The acting is outstanding (Taika Waititi and Rhys Darby especially). But the writing, music, costumes, sets, the sheer attention to detail – for a show with only 18 half-hour episodes it is still keeping us talking, two full threads and many re-watches later.

If you think this might appeal, do watch it and come back and talk to us. It would be lovely if more were to join our crew. But it's a show that needs time. The 2nd lead arrives in episode 3, so you need to give it at least 4 episodes as that’s when the tone changes and the main story starts. It still took me several more episodes to fully appreciate what I was watching, but by then I was hooked and had to immediately watch it all over again. If you like Good Omens, What We Do in the Shadows, Ghosts or even Bridgerton, this might be the show for you.

(I’ve kept this spoiler free, but if you scroll down you will no doubt find many, so beware!)

Thread 1: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/telly_addicts/5008593-our-flag-means-death-its-utterly-brilliant-and-i-am-obsessed?reply=135294204
Thread 2 : https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/telly_addicts/5076581-our-flag-means-death-thread-2-still-utterly-brilliant-and-we-are-still-obsessed?reply=136060611

The blanket! Of course!

The first half is brilliant. But once they're SPOILER 😀 together the sex gets very samey (& not a little OTT) pretty quickly.
I'm so glad someone else likes the vampires, I thought that was brilliant 😀

Three chapters in, no sex yet and I'd be dead drunk on the floor if I was actually playing my own drinking game. The knee has made its first appearance!

One of them miscommunicates. Angst ensues.

That sounds exactly what I like too. Instant connection but slow burn while they work things out. Minimal angst between them. Any conflict comes from outside sources. Nice, loving sex scene once they've got together (nothing extreme). It's nice if the crew and Mary/Doug are around too. But I want the characters to feel like the ones we know, and I want to feel the love - not just the lust. If you haven't tried Fox Fires yet, that's quite a nice one. Stede goes to see the Northern Lights and Ed is a tour guide. Many of my favourites we've talked about here already.

archiveofourown.org/works/43523685/chapters/109425645

Stede gets a warm feeling in his tummy and doesn’t understand why.

Stede bites Ed's jaw or vice versa... a thing that I'm fairly sure I've never done to another human being

I feel I should counterbalance this general mockery by admitting that I'm still totally obsessed with the fanfic

I liked the fire watch one. What an idea, flirting with someone over 5 months by walkie talkie. Good thing they did find each other attractive when they met though! Imagine...yeah, no, not what I thought 😂

I could do without quite so many hickeys in the fic tbh.

Oh god yes, all that 'marking to show you're mine'. I think that's definitely down to the age of many of the writers.

I think 'oblivious Stede' or a Stede who thinks he's not good enough for Ed is like 90% of all the fan fics where they are meeting for the first time.

Not sure I actually remember coming across that one!

I'm not sure how often I've seen it but definitely often enough to wonder if it's a Thing

Oh christ, avoid the Fox Fires author unless you like soap operas. She starts off well every time, good characters, interesting premise. Then it's just drama and pointless misunderstandings and stupid gendery shit - Ed is always wearing a dress or a skirt to show how he's found himself - and it just gets utterly tedious.
And every story is like that, from what I've seen.

I appreciate this content warning

Stede lives in an infeasibly expensive, exquisitely decorated apartment filled with fine things (extra points if cashmere blankets are mentioned) and he spends his weekends doing yoga and baking and hanging out in coffee shops

Ed rides a motorbike but is endearingly oblivious to how hot he looks in his leathers

Oh, that's a surprise. I haven't read anything else by them yet, but I did enjoy Fox Fires (except for a couple of bits of the inbuilt fan art). I don't remember any dresses/gendery stuff either, although I'd have to re-read to check. I did like the premise, the characters and the way the story ran.

I think Fox Fires was the first and she just bought into her own hype with fans telling her how good a writer she was. And she is! I just got so bored of the contrived angst.

I really appreciate your recommendations. I have started the forest fire watch one and already feel much happier with that style.

That's a really beautiful one. When you have finished that I'd go with the campsite (also lovely - loads of family stuff and a real favourite of mine) and then, bizzarely, vampires which I linked later. It's not at all 'horror movie'. When they need human blood, Stede encourages his vampires to just take a pint or so and make sure their victims get safely home afterwards, buying them an orange juice on the way to help them feel better 😆. It's not graphic and surprisingly wholesome.

That sounds adorable.

So, before I leave S1 behind, there was something else I wanted to talk about - mirrors. I looked back at the last thread and realised my memory of our mirror discussion wasn't quite accurate. I mentioned about 1.10, the mirror behind Ed in the 'namby pamby' scene and that we see mirrors when BB/Kraken is around. But I didn't realise until now just how far Ed and mirrors actually goes. It occurred to me that in all the scenes where Stede is in/near the bed nook, we don't see that mirror. And it got me wondering. So I went back and flicked through every indoor scene in S1 looking for mirrors (yes, really!). And I've listed below every mirror we see in the whole first season.

In Ed and Stede's first meeting, after introducing himself as Ed and saying he works for Blackbeard, he is sits on the bed with Stede looking at himself and making faces in the little hand mirror. This establishes both the link between Ed and mirrors and also the secondary use of mirrors I found - deception. After that, we see Ed's reflection in a mirror whenever he acts as BB/Kraken. The most obvious times are:

1. after the French captain insults him and Ed orders him skinned and thrown overboard, his face is reflected in the silver plate.
2. in the bath tub when telling Stede how he is the Kraken, there are several shots of Ed reflected in the mirror
3. he looks at his reflection in the knife when putting on his Kraken make up.

But it goes further than that, and this is what I've only just realised. There are mirrors around Ed at other times in a way we don't see with most other characters. And again it's when we see glimpses of BB, rather than Ed:

1. Ed stands in front of a mirror in the auxiliary wardrobe the first time they go in. He's looking through Stede's clothes before then telling Stede he is BB. Stede does walk past the mirror but it's Ed who remains in shot with it for the rest of that scene.
2. when Ed and Izzy are rifling through Stedes corner cupboard (where he is telling Izzy he's so bored and "haven't died yet, have I?") the scene begins with a mirror right at the front of the shot
3. In 1.5 he is seated in front of mirrors twice - first when he mentions "I killed a man once" and again at the dinner table with Antionette (also significant) when we have the beard and the fork incidents. These are the times at the party where he forgets himself and shows a glimpse of his BB persona.
4. standing in front of the mirror in 1.10 namby pamby scene when he says to Izzy, "I am still Blackbeard". I've tried to work out if this mirror is also behind Ed in 1.6 when he's trying and failing to stab Stede. It's the right place, but only the frame may occasionally be visible. It's really unclear.

Lastly, the only other times we see a mirror is when there is deception:

1. when Gabriel and Antoinette are revealed to be (and deny) being brother and sister they are sitting right in front of a mirror.
2. there's a small mirror in the background in 1.4 when Izzy is moaning at Ed telling him all he does because he's proud to serve BB. Things we already know are't true.
3. the lighthouse fuckery - this is just one big deception, with Ed at it's heart.

And these are the only shots I found with a mirror anywhere visible, in the entirety of S1. So every single one is used to show either the two sides to Ed, or where there is a deception occuring. If anyone has noticed any that I've missed, please let me know! Especially if you find one that might derial this idea :) I just want to give so many cheers to the set designers who clearly put so much thought into the tiniest of details.

There are too many mirrors there for me to include pics of all of them, so I'll just add a few

Well, one can only hope @TriceratopsRocks was talking to us, in which case WOW!

Seriously. This post has sent my hyperfixation into hyperdrive. Thank you so much for this. I need to take a gander… several… 🪞

Oh, and you just stole my crown for which of us here is most insane 😄👑