Perpetually Trying, And Doing A Mediocre Job Of It

Just love the idea of Ed giving Stede tattoos

I reworked my wood engraving a bit and like it even more now. I added more details and it feels a bit less chunky now.

Firstly, we have Stede, a repressed gay man who has probably never even entertained the idea of loving a man, being kissed by a man for the first time and (although enjoying it) clearly being a little bit stunned and nervously keeping his hands down because he has no idea what to do with them.

And then we have Stede a few months later, the very next time he gets a chance to kiss that same man, having gone on such a journey of self-discovery that he's absolutely figured out who he is, and what he wants, and this time he's ready to grab what he wants with those same hands (literally).

There's a huge chance the show wouldn't have been picked up at all if Taika hadn't attached his name to it. And he didn't just attach his name and walk away - he played a key role in developing the show. David has said that he was looking at the history with Taika and they both went 'omg Stede and Blackbeard were fucking' and decided to centre the show around that. Taika pushed for Rhys to play Stede. Taika saw Nathan's comedy on instagram and went 'yep that's Lucius'. Taika was desperate to play Ed, and fought to play him. Taika has spoken about how much he loves playing Ed, how it made him fall in love with acting again, to the point where he wears some of Ed's jewellery and has gotten some of Ed's tattoos actually inked on him. He poured everything he has as an actor into Ed (some of the stuff he had to perform, particularly at the beginning of S2, is difficult) and the show simply wouldn't work without it. Taika directed the pilot. He loved the show enough to juggle filming S1 with post-production on Thor: Love and Thunder. When the show's budget was slashed by 40%, and could no longer afford to film in LA, Taika would have been key to moving production to New Zealand - and if that hadn't happened, S2 wouldn't have happened. When a director went off sick with Covid during S2, Taika jumped in to direct half an episode and then didn't take a director's credit on it.

I’m getting increasingly bothered by the way in which people seem to be OK with actively hating him – esp. considering that the other hundreds of signers on that letter are *not* met with the same vitriol.

I wish that people had better knowledge of how these petition-letters come about in the business, because a lot of people seem to have massively misunderstood how these things work.

For instance – there’s a very real possibility that Taika never actually *read* that letter himself, but rather had the general meaning relayed to him by someone else (like an assistant) before putting his name on it – and for that matter Taika may not have been the one to ‘actively sign’ the letter either.

These things are passed around within the social circles of the business – meaning that if someone within your circle knows about it, then you’ll probably hear about it too. BUT if they’re existing outside of your circle, you may not even hear about them before they’re public.

(In that regard, if your circle only heard about the “Save the hostages”-letter and not the “Ceasefire”-letter that followed a few weeks later, then you wouldn’t have been able to sign that as well, because you literally didn’t know it existed, before it was already published without your name on it.)

The chance that Taika never saw that letter, but was just relayed the content by an assistant – and then told the assistant that it was ok to put his name on it – is huge. The man has a BONKERS schedule. He is producing, directing, writing, and acting in things all at the same time — and yet people seem to expect him to also be flawless? That’s some bananas-high expectations to have for anyone – but especially someone you don’t know. None of us knows what’s going on in each other’s lives.

Some people are acting as though he provided the Israeli army with weapons, ffs.

He signed a f*ckin’ letter.

Along with hundreds of others BTW. Hundreds of others who are in no way being met with the kind of vitriol that he is – do you see Helen Mirren, Jon Hamm, Jason Segel, Will Farrell, or Kristin Chenoweth (to name a FEW others from that list) being met with the same kind of vitriol?

The list of names on that letter is SO long that Taika’s name doesn’t even appear on the first page – and yet, the brown indigenous man (who at the time of the letter being published already had to deal with a ton of hatred on the back of ‘Love & Thunder’) is the one person people seem to hone in on.

And people need to take a seriously hard look inwardly and ask themselves why they seem to be so much more willing to sh*t on one of the only indigenous people on that list, more than any other name on there. Because it sure smells like racism (with a dash of antisemitism) …

And HEY. Let me be quite clear:

You’re absolutely allowed to not like Taika Waititi. You do not have to like everybody.

But there’s a massive difference between disliking someone and then the outright vitriol and hatred that Taika is being met with whenever he dares to breathe a single word online (including a post made for his wife’s birthday) – which is probably why he has decided (or his publicist has ordered him) to steer clear of SoMe the past few months.