cheers m’dears

My contribution to OFMD zine week, a love letter to Ed's little belly.

There’s so much to pull apart in this line.

Right now - Ed’s sick of the plan. ‘…we fuckin execute the plan, then we get another plan…’. Even Stede’s at it, ‘So what’s the plan?’ and Ed tells him, ‘The plan is go with the flow… see what happens…’. The curse of being history’s great tactician. Ed wants to live in the Right Now for a bit and who can blame him.

I just wanna do… I, me. Agency. Ed keeps being told who he is, by white society, by Izzy, by colonialist propaganda. Ed’s desperately seeking his internal locus of control.

what makes Ed… - The third person of it all stands out. Ed is still figuring who he is. The ‘I’ is now working for ‘Ed’, in the same way as ‘Do you work for Blackbeard?’ Ed still hasn’t mended a fragmented identity. Later he can’t own the song he dictates to Lucius; it’s about ‘someone else’. I think there’s still a caution here on the beach, a fear of being hurt (prescient), compared to the first person ‘I love you, I love you’ in Mermen. Telling Stede his feelings, Ed’s taking the biggest risk of his life, really.

happy - such a simple idea and so difficult to achieve. But then Ed has always aimed high. But he doesn’t want fame, power, notoriety, wealth. Had that: was all meaningless.

Stede is under no illusion that he has chosen to do something incredibly dangerous. He didn't become a pirate with the expectation of living a long life of noteriety. He wanted to do something exciting - something diametrically opposed to the life he was forced into, even if it killed him (and knowing it likely would).

Just... What a character. No wonder Ed was so deeply fascinated by him

Now *KISS*

PROUDLY PRESENTING:

The Unofficial OFMD AO3 Wrapped 2024

sponsored by my love of fandom community, a passion for data presentation, more hours in photoshop than I am willing to admit, and inspired by the Good Omens AO3 wrapped

images used are either official stills or screencaps from episodes and the Vanity Fair lie detector video. everything edited by me :)

a few additional stats:

79 works had more than 100k words, with an accumulated 16 million words, meaning 1% of works accounted for 21% of words

At a reading speed of 300 words per minute, it would take 174 days and nights to read all of the OFMD fic from 2024 - or, if you read for 11.5 hours every day for a year, you'd be able to get through it all!

The most tagged sex acts for explicit fics were (in order): Anal Sex, Blow Jobs, Oral Sex, Anal Fingering, and Hand Jobs

271 works were tagged "Art"

details about data collection and analysis ⤵️

Here’s the whole pages when they’re open! Please forgive the highlighters in the background

Originally wanted the “what makes Ed happy is you // you make Stede happy” quote for the kiss scene but there wasn’t enough room

+ bonus video