So, Our Flag Means Death, which is a show that I liked, got itself canceled on Max. However, it did have a rather good ending with Stede and Ed (Blackbeard) shacking up together in what I presume will be that Inn/hotel that they've been floating as an idea they would pursue in the entirety of the last two seasons. Rumor is that Waititi may be shopping the series around, and that it "may" get picked up. But, it also is just fine with the episode count that it has. Our Flag Means Death was always just super ridiculous, which is what made it fun, and I wondered how long the writers could keep the gags coming. However, they never dropped the ball and just when I thought something was played out, they found a way to continue playing it out some more.
If you happen to be queer, there's a lot to love in Our Flag Means Death. It's the show that tried to take bloodthirsty, murderous, and thieving pirates and then inject into them the modern liberal values of respect, gender equality, reasonableness, creating safe places to express emotions, and treating each other with dignity. It was that utter contrast that got me invested in it in the first place. It was full of comedians who are very good at comedic timing. You had Leslie Jones as a murderous polygmist who runs a bar and has over a dozen husbands. She literally has a jar of noses she cuts off men that displease her, and it sits on her bar. Yet, she had this fun soft side where she got to act like a girl and just be treated to massages by her husband of the night.
There was the actor who played Stede Bonnet, a rich aristocrat from England, who was bored with his life of silver spoons and who had a lovely wife, but what he really craved was a life at sea while getting shagged by a man. But you could never take the "aristocrat" out of Stede, so he hosted tea parties on his ship, which was meticulously clean, and was the captain of a pirate crew who were free to be who they really are with no judgment. So, you had gays loving on each other, baking cakes, and others crying out their traumas in emotional support groups on deck.
Most of these people were based on real-life folks who actually lived. And I was surprised to learn that there is evidence to suggest that Blackbeard and Stede actually did have a romance together. This is where life gets stranger than fiction. But for its lovely queer moments, Our Flag Means Death was also a freakshow of violence and death, albeit carried out in over-the-top performances that managed to stay charismatic to the very end. One such moment came when Izzy Hands died. This was a character I liked a lot that had a grotesque amputation earlier in season two (due to professing love for Blackbeard and Blackbeard being in a dark place due to breaking up with Stede). In the end, Our Flag Means Death was always a bittersweet show committed to portraying the full scope of queer life and identity. As a result, it attracted a fanbase that wasn't ashamed to let its freak flag fly. This show had an enormous amount of queer expression and characters of all stripes and flavors of queer. The fanbase which is mostly made of Gen Z peeps was not happy with Izzy's death due to many people identifying with that character really hard.
Some of the comments made online that attacked this fanbase circled around the idea that LitRPG and isekai are both effectively centered around reassuring readers/viewers that their inability to cope with reality isn't a failing. Rather, you're just meant to live in the world of your favorite video game where everything is numbers, and you can control everything with your elite skills. Like seriously...these are comments from haters of Our Flag Means Death lobbed at the "modern snowflakes." It's dismissive in the sense that there are other generations of people who watched the show (I'm a Gen Xer) got invested in the characters, and many of us aren't afraid of conflict. Rather, it's just nice that there's a show about processing grief and finding community, which is at the heart of what made Our Flag Means Death a special thing. However, the first few episodes of Our Flag Means Death did not telegraph this well. It started as a black comedy similar to how The Orville got its start. Early on, people got killed, they made jokes about doing horrible crimes, and the romance side didn't really start until the last couple of episodes of the first season.
In the end, I loved Our Flag Means Death and while my favorites have always been Ed (Blackbeard) and Stede and their romantic arc, I came to appreciate the strong underlying through-line of the power of community, especially queer community, to save lives and give hope. Ed and Stede were comic protagonists in the most archetypal sense. They were flawed people who are facing a flawed world, who nevertheless will (ultimately) be able to create something better through the power of their love, because love is transformative. But Our Flag Means Death showed us so much about the transformative potential of "community" love, which the crew embraced, but which Ed and Stede weren't quite ready for. The character of Izzy (who fully embraced that transformative community love) ends up being the one that suffers. I understand why the story played out as it did, but it would have been nice if they had found a way to reconcile those powerful themes a little better than just killing off Izzy's character.
On Friday, I plan to write about All the Light We Cannot See. Until then, godspeed.
