In CotBP, where the criticism that James is boring is most likely to come up, we can see in his introductory scene that James is head over heels for this woman by Regency standards. I mean, the unflappable, highest ranking Naval officer in Port Royal is reduced to a stammering, awkward mess around Elizabeth. If this were an Austen novel, y’all would be fucking swooning.

And what of the deleted scenes? (Don’t even get me started on this, I will rant for hours about how salty I am that they cut them.) We see James agonizing over the fact that he believes Elizabeth has only accepted his proposal as a means to an end. His stony veneer cracks, and we get to see him vulnerable!

‘Is it so wrong that I should want it given unconditionally?’ is such a fucking incredible line, and in a period drama, would be seen as a declaration!

But James isn’t in a period drama. He’s in a Disney movie based on a theme park ride. The film is an unapologetic mishmash of genres, and he has committed a cardinal sin by falling in love with Elizabeth, a modern character. She practically rolls her eyes at his heartfelt confessions! She wants nothing to do with his subtle emotional advances!

While, in a Austen novel, James Norrington would have been the clear hero and most obvious choice for Elizabeth to make, she is completely uninterested because he’s made the mistake of being period appropriate and not a product of the early 2000s like the rest of the main cast.

And the worst part is…once James changes so that he fits into their world…he is killed.

But that’s a discussion for another time.

COTBP is a film written by men that thinks it’s a story about a girl being forced to choose between reality and romantic fantasy, and it’s very clear that Elizabeth knows that Norrington is an appropriate match for her.  Even though she does, in the story, accept his proposal as a means to an end, her acceptance is still fully serious.  (And for all I might joke about her dumping him or whatever - the proposal doesn’t get a big, dramatic rejection.  He sees her standing beside Will and asks if this “where [her] heart truly lies”, and she confirms it.  The breakup is implicit, but he instigates it, seeing this is what she wants.)  Elizabeth’s heart might belong to another man, but there’s no sulking or anger or even too much reluctance when she accepts James; she might even know they could be happy together.

When Will reminds her that her fiancé will want to know she’s safe after the climactic battle, as much as it hurts her, Elizabeth leaves.

tl;dr Elizabeth isn’t so much of a Spunky Modern Heroine Rejects All Trappings Of Period Drama stereotype that she doesn’t compromise on what she wants as society, her family and her fiancé dictate.  She accepts James’ proposal and is prepared to marry him; she never tries to run off with Will; it is James who breaks their engagement for her happiness.  There is no indication that Elizabeth particularly dislikes him; he just isn’t Will.

Then I just really really love their relationship dynamic in DMC and AWE because it’s not founded on expectation or obligation anymore and it isn’t hindered by propriety.  As soon as those things go away, they actually relate to each other like two people who have known each other for ages.  Elizabeth isn’t an unfriendly sort of person, but she doesn’t just go around relating to the other characters she doesn’t know very well.  The bits of conversation she has with James Norrington in Dead Men’s Chest are more real conversation than she and Will ever have in the entire film trilogy.  Will and Elizabeth get these pining, lovelorn speeches and bits of drama, but James and Elizabeth just talk like old friends.  You already know about the deleted scene where they casually strike up conversation on Isla Cruces; I love the moment where he makes a comment suggesting his dark mental state, and she gives him a look I can only describe as Suddenly Interested.

And she holds his gaze for a couple of frames!

So, not like, romantic interested. But like. Realizing this guy she’s known since forever has depth, and she wants to see it.

They’re interrupted by Jack, who is in this film particularly (a lot more than I realized, actually, but on the writers’ commentary Ted and Terry cannot stop bringing it up) is hoping to get Elizabeth to himself, and clearly picks up on this moment as infringing on that hope.

Curse of the Black Pearl was consciously written to frame Elizabeth as the protagonist, and when she chooses Will at the end, it’s because he and he alone among her potential love interests embodies her romantic dream.  Torn between the reality of Norrington, a man she’s always known might propose to her, a lawful man, a good and honest man, but embodying the smothering sense of obligation that comes with her class and gender role - and the reality of Jack Sparrow, a pirate she’s read about with eagerness who shows her that pirates genuinely are pretty scummy people, dirty and disloyal to everyone - Will appears to offer her a third option: someone who breaks the law, but only for the right reasons; someone who defies social convention, but only to better society. 

Except Ted and Terry are men and what seems obvious to me is that the third option Elizabeth really needs is to graduate from the damsel role life appears to have slotted her into and become the romantic hero she dreams of.  Sure, I buy that she loves Will, with a sort of infatuated and light-hearted love that could develop into something more but could just as easily not - but most importantly, what Will represents to her is a projection of the life she wants for herself.

And acquires, in the next two films.

Elizabeth’s narrative arc, if it weren’t tucked underneath or behind everybody else’s, is the most well-developed narrative arc in the trilogy, well beyond the first installment which is the only one that they actually wrote to particularly revolve around her.  Jane Austen heroine?  Maybe.  Probably not.  But the protagonist we deserved, most definitely.

And as much as I do like Will as a character - I actually think his storyline would have gotten the resolution and impact it deserved if he hadn’t been treated as the protagonist, as much as I think hers would have been, but this post isn’t an excuse for me to air my grievances lol - the character whose storyline most follows hers is Norrington.  

Her arc is about finding her place in the world, rejecting the specific oppressive reality she believes is inevitable as a well-bred 18th century female and embracing the heroine swashbuckler she’s wanted to be all her life but projected onto male love interests.  And this arc is a microcosm of the larger plot in a way no one else’s is - Beckett’s threat to end the age of piracy and keep the entire ocean under his thumb threatens her specific character growth and reflects the world she’s trying to escape in a way that is not half so resonant for anybody else.

Will’s story is, excepting turns of the plot in which he’s trying to save Elizabeth, entirely about his relationship with his father, and how that affects his identity.  It has nothing to do with society beyond the tensions in the first film where he wants to be respectable but has learned his father really was a pirate all along - after that film, there is no thematic or actual connection to society in Will’s plot, which is why it gets so exclusively connected to the supernatural storyline.  But Norrington’s arc is also about his place in the world.  After the first film, in which he and Jack and Will  operate as foils to one another, each of them demonstrating one of the paths Elizabeth may follow as she grows increasingly experienced and consequently disillusioned, Norrington has his fall from grace and subsequent identity crisis.  His maintaining the wig and coat while a drunken, miserable wreck on Tortuga, and his willingness to throw everything away to regain his former standing, implies that the role of Naval Officer was the whole extent of his identity.   So, yes, the man lacks a viable personality in COTBP - it works out to seem intentional by the sequel, because it becomes clear the role he was inhabiting was the only person he knew how to be, and without it he discovered how little of a person he was.  This is a grim inversion of Elizabeth’s storyline.  Elizabeth becomes more and more her true self, including symbolically casting off and manipulating her wedding gown, while Norrington symbolically clings to the relics of his former life and wallows in existential despair.

By the time of AWE, Norrington has discovered that his is not, in fact, nothing, without his social role - as evidenced by his willingness to betray all that he must stand for when that role has been resumed, to “choose a side”, and to choose Elizabeth’s.  But yes… then he dies.  

But with this idea I also need there to be a “stark industries households” youtube channel that is, technically, an official SI channel. But it’s not in the slightest used for marketing or anything of the sort. Tony is the only one with the password and every video uploaded is tony going through how to use that machine.

Someone can’t figure out how to empty their damn fancy vacuum and they look up the model on youtube to figure it out, and are greeted by the CEO of the company doing a WILDLY informal tutorial on how to use it and common issues and such.

The videos are often shot by DUM-E or U. Tony often looks very disheveled, and sometimes there’s unrevealed projects just sitting out in the background. Tony acts like he’s talking to an audience of five people and usually there’s five or six videos uploaded back to back, CLEARLY shot in one sitting.

And whewwww it’s so true.

Right and my mind lately has been like, Catherine is absolutely the person who gets Lamb to see the good in people.

She looks at the world differently to him. Where he’s instinctively suspicious, jaded, already assuming the worst, she still has this capacity to care. She likes people. She wants to believe in them. And more than that — she wants to help them. It isn’t naïvety; it comes from damage. Catherine knows what it is to be broken, to fall apart, to claw your way back from something destructive. Her alcoholism, her recovery, the shame and rebuilding — all of that means she recognises pain in other people. She has empathy for it. Including his.

Lamb, by contrast, has spent decades armouring himself against disappointment. He expects betrayal because he’s lived it. He trusts almost no one because trust cost him everything once. So when Catherine insists someone is worth the risk, worth the effort, worth believing in — that matters. She becomes the counterweight to his cynicism.

They’re both broken, really. Just in opposite directions. Two sides of the same coin.

Lamb runs through Catherine’s life like a thread. But it’s true the other way too. Catherine is this strange constant in his world — someone who has seen him at his worst and stayed anyway. In a way, she functions like an external version of his own morality. He might ignore his conscience internally, but he can’t quite ignore her standing there.

They catalyse each other.

Their lives have been intertwined for decades, and at the centre of that knot is Charles Partner — the same man placed on completely different pedestals. For Catherine, he was kindness, stability, someone who saved her. For Lamb, he was betrayal so profound it reshaped his entire existence. That shared history binds them in a way no one else can really understand.

They’ve known each other across roles — boss and subordinate, agent and PA, companions in grief. They’ve seen every version: competent, damaged, heroic, petty, cruel, loyal. There’s very little illusion left between them.

And for a long time, they had no one else. Before the Slow Horses became a kind of family, it was just the two of them orbiting the same gravitational pull.

Even small details underline it, like Taverner knowing exactly where Lamb would go in s1. The immediate cut to Catherine in bed. Lamb knocking on her door. And then the books having implication she’s part of his flight fund. They’re embedded in each other’s lives at a structural level.

They know everything about one another — the good and the ugly alike — and neither has walked away.

So, I honestly see them as two halves of the same whole. Like someone took one person and split them down the middle, and those two halves have spent the rest of their lives circling each other.

It brings to mind the theory of how the Earth’s moon was formed from the Earth’s own mantle after a catastrophic collision with another Mars-sized planet a few billion years ago— something violent that created two bodies forever linked by gravity.

I'm thinking of this in terms of TMM Universe but like just any Baelor x reader.

Like, when you and Baelor are together, having deep discussions in your rooms, and you ask him a question that really makes him think, he closes his eyes as he speaks and you just absolutely love it. It makes you shiver with happiness because he cares so much about the questions you ask that he wants to truly think about how he responds. It just makes him even more intelligent (and thus even more sexy...)

And one night you just can't help yourself. He does it, smiling a little as he thinks back to some memory to relate it to the question, and all of a sudden you are kissing him, arms wrapped over his shoulders, mouth against his with a little 'mmph'.

He smiles into the kiss and returns it quickly, wrapping you up in his arms and hauling you against his chest. When you pull away, you smile up at him, kissing his lips softly between words as he says "I was thinking, you know."

"Mm, I know. My apologies for interrupting, but I just could not resist."

And he just smiles brightly and kisses you againnnn.