Our Flag Means Death is a breath of fresh air.
SPOILERS for the final two episodes of Our Flag Means Death, alongside general vague whole season spoilers.
I’ve watched the entirety of Our Flag Means Death in the last week and I think it’s my new favourite show. What more could you want? Pirates, nonsense, rad comedy and delightful character interactions.
Yes.
But also.
Personally, I think why I’ve been so besotted with this show is because of how thoroughly unperformative the queerness in it is?
Look, I’ve grown up in the salt mines of fandom. I’ve been a fanfiction writer for nay on fifteen years. I was there when Tumblr was besotted over a new white boy of the week. I was there when Johnlockers created a Q-Anon style conspiracy around Sherlock’s final episode, and when the site melted down post Castiel’s love confession at the end of Supernatural.
I get it.
Unlike some of you I was never a Destiel/Johnlock/Sterek shipper*, but I’ve done my time in queer fandom. There is absolutely a conversation to be had about how predominantly straight women fetishize gay men in fandom (fujoshi), but now is neither the time nor the place. I’m speaking today as a queer writer and audience member, and how Our Flag Means Death resonated within me.
Y’all, it’s just so good to see queerness appear in a work where it’s actively built into the fabric of the show without it being a ‘gay show’?
Yes, there’s tons of shows where the majority of the characters are queer, but so many of those are actively ‘gay shows’ — where the narrative is based around coming out/identity/AIDS and the like — think of things like Queer as Folk, Cucumber Banana Tofu, The Normal Heart, Milk, RENT, Falsettos, Love Simon… the list goes on.
Those shows and works absolutely have their place, but are so often dramatic sad narratives based in the real world, which ignore the fact that queerness is and always has been everywhere and not every queer narrative is sad. Queer joy comes secondary to the gritty portrayal of how the world is against us, how we are an other, how our existence is secondary, or an aberration.
Then there are works where you know queerness has just been added for the sake of adding it — where the showrunners know that if they don’t make the effort to have queer characters they won’t hit their target market, or queerness is used solely as a punchline — see things such as Sherlock, where queerness is teased to the detriment of the audience; when Disney talks about their ‘first gay character’ who is a badly-written caricature; and when queerness exists happily for a few moments before one or both of the characters are killed.
Our Flag Means Death is a genre show where queerness is just there, naturally, and not treated as second fiddle by the creators. Our identity is not just recognised and commented on, but welcomed. We are built into the fabric of the work, interwoven within the narrative, and our portrayal is honest and lovely and beautiful; the awkwardness and chaos of deep grief and loss amongst the goodness and delight of joy.
This show is one of the only works in my recent memory that exists truly within a homotopia = a narrative world where queerness takes up as much space as heterosexuality, where it is welcomed without prejudice and without homophobia, where it is not just treated as the normal, but is the norm.
From having a non-binary character never misgendered on screen despite the historical context, to showing multiple expressions of queerness in a variety of different ways — it’s acceptance to a completely different level for me. Even an effeminate gay character, Lucius, is revelatory, considering how rare characters like that show up in action/adventure works without being the butt of the joke.
The crew of the Revenge in Our Flag Means Death are the quintessential queer found family (a lot of us have been there), and exist so honestly that it nearly makes me cry. Our queer characters get to be messy, and kind of wild, and that’s fine, because they don’t have to be bastions of purity for a straight audience.
As an addendum to this, while women are not the focus of this narrative, whenever they show up on screen they’re wholeheartedly multi-dimensional and don’t exist just as narrative foils or barriers for the overarching queer narrative (Mary finding a life of her own post-Stede comes very much to mind).
When Stede and Ed kissed on Friday night I was overjoyed — not for shipping* purposes, but because it means people will get it. There were still articles coming out last week about the ‘bromance’ of this show, how it was just about close friends.
Believe me, I think there’s such a good conversation to be had about the double standards of intimate platonic relationships in fiction = femme-identified characters so often get the privilege, but masc folk don’t.
But this is a romance. it’s a queer one.
While we could talk all day about asexuality, and how love/desire can very much be portrayed and expressed honestly on screen without kissing, certain portions of the world will never see it that way. A kiss seals things up even for the naysayers in the crowd.
In that moment (and during similar moments in the show with Jim/Oluwande and Black Pete/Lucius), I felt overjoyed, because for once we weren’t queerbaited. These characters are queer, and they matter to the narrative. For once, we weren’t fucked over, and we weren’t made fun of for our desire, for our rallying, for caring about characters like us.
And whether it is allyship or something closer to home it’s wholeheartedly lovely to see the creators/performers of this show so show this across the internet, being loud and proud with the show’s content and wholly embracing it in a way that is unashamed and beautiful.
We exist, we’re being heard, and we matter.
Fuck, it’s good to see.
**shipping = “relationship-ing”, supporting/writing about/being invested in particular characters finding themselves in a relationship.
