ed's youtube apology in 2x05 is extremely funny but i think a lot of fandom has the wrong takeaway from it
like yes it is a very bad apology - as lucius points out strictly speaking i'm not sure it is actually technically an apology at all - and the badness of it is most of what makes the scene funny. but it seems like a lot of people's takeaway was that ed needs to give a proper sincere apology speech instead, and it doesn't make sense for the crew to forgive him until he has said the correct words with the correct amount of sincerity.
but that's not how it works! i don't think that's how it works in real life, and it's definitely not how the show's saying it should work, and the fact that it doesn't work like that is the point of ed's plot in this episode!
we call it a "youtube apology" because we are all familiar with the discourse where a social media personality milkshake ducks themself and they have to make an apology video and we all dissect how bad the apology was on twitter. but there has ALSO been a lot of criticism about how that demand for those perfect apologies is itself pretty stupid! For instance in this tumblr post a lot of us have seen:
the thing is at the end of the day most people are not very eloquent or good at articulating their own feelings, so whether a statement happens to contain the exact words "i'm sorry" is a surprisingly bad litmus test for whether the speaker is actually contrite. lucius' desire to hear those words is a lot like his desire to push ed off the ship: it's a perfectly understandable thing to want and he is fully justified in wanting it and it probably would have made him briefly feel better in the moment, but it wouldn't have necessarily really addressed his feelings in any kind of longer-term way, or repaired his relationship with ed.
so what DOES ed need to do, according to this episode?
the best place to look for that is his conversation with fang. ed does apologize to fang and it's what twitter would describe as a Real Apology, i think - fang clearly articulates what ed did that harmed him and what the nature of the harm was and ed expresses his understanding of what fang communicated and says the exact words "i'm sorry" and verbally acknowledges that fang would be justified in being angry with him and his entire emotional affect suggests sincere regret and sorrow. and i think a lot of people saw that and said, ok, he needs to do this with the rest of the crew now.
but fang doesn't seem to think that. fang doesn't even seem to think he needed to hear it.
here's the more interesting thing though: ed himself is explicitly not happy with his apology to the crew, even after being told he has fang's forgiveness, and wants to do something more. it's very weird to me that i don't think i've ever seen anyone bring this up in all the discourse about how he didn't apologize enough. ed agrees that he didn't do enough and wants to do better, he just doesn't know what else to do instead! here's what he says about it:
"i took a man's leg, terrorized you. i wasn't a good guy. i'd like to make amends, but i just - honestly, i wouldn't even know where to start, what to say to make things better, how to even say it--"
and this is where fang interrupts him with the thing about how ed doesn't know how to sit with himself. i've seen people dispute this on grounds that we have in fact seen ed sit quietly for long periods before, but i think that's taking fang too literally here. he's not giving ed fishing advice. he is answering ed's question about what he needs to do to make amends.
it's worth noticing what he DOESN'T say. this is exactly where fang COULD say, your apology was bad and you owe everyone on the ship a real one like you gave to me. but he doesn't.
one of the problems with the demands for those perfect social justice apologies is that the desire for a perfect apology can actually be something of a selfish one on the part of the person apologizing. it's a wish for there to be some correct ritual you can perform, some set of magic words you can say, that will restore your relationship with your community and once you have done that anyone who continues to be mad at you is being unreasonable. this is an understandable desire when you know you have really fucked up, but it's not something that's possible; part of the process of reconciliation is understanding that there really aren't any magic words, that you are right to feel unsure what to do because there isn't any one right thing to do that will make it better. what you have to do is be patient, take it one day at a time, try as hard as you can to do better bit by bit, learn to sit with yourself and the knowledge of how you fucked up, and maybe people will forgive you and maybe they won't, but it's not really in your hands. you can't catch a fish if the fish doesn't want to be caught.
and i think this is a running theme through the whole season, because you know who else doesn't apologize?
--ok based on my overall ofmd tumblr oeuvre i'm guessing some of you thought i was going to say izzy and that's actually not where i was going with this. but like it's not WRONG. izzy did lots of things to hurt the crew in s1 ranging from bullying all the way up to getting them all arrested by a genocidal white supremacist military. the crew reach out to izzy without him making any attempt to apologize for any of it, and he responds to their compassion with sincere gratitude but even afterward he does not apologize or even acknowledge any of the stuff he did. he doesn't apologize to stede for repeatedly attempting to murder him either (although i think he might have been going to when he says "i just want to thank you," and although i'm not trying to be hard on izzy here it's a good example of the desire to apologize being a little selfish - stede didn't need that apology, he needed to be left alone to have a quiet moment of grief; izzy wanted to offer it for his own sake, and it's to his credit that he realizes that and doesn't try to push it when stede walks away).
izzy doesn't apologize to ed for what he did to ed in s1 either - no, really, go back to 2x08 and listen to what he says he's sorry for! he's talking about a long-term pattern of trying to keep ed trapped in the blackbeard persona, stuff he says was going on for years before ed ever met stede bonnet; there's no apology for trying to make ed kill stede or for trying to kill stede in front of ed or for making ed choose between watching stede die and taking the act of grace. he touches ed's face and says "there he is" and you can take that as an implicit apology for the scene in 1x10 where he did the same thing, but it IS implicit, it's still not an explicit verbal i'm sorry for doing that. and while i think it was meaningful to ed to finally get an apology from one of his shitty dads it doesn't seem to have been something he needed in order to forgive izzy, their relationship seems to be patched up before it happens. izzy just tries to do better, and ed and stede and the crew all recognize that and respond to it, and none of them demand apologies from him.
but the character i meant who doesn't apologize for jack shit is stede! for leaving ed at the dock! the single most dramatically important way one character hurts another in the entire show! within the central relationship! basically all of season two is constructed around repairing the ramifications of that act, we all waited a year and a half for that payoff, and stede never apologizes for it. the whole conversation with ed under the blanket does not contain the words i'm sorry at any point. the closest stede gets is "i panicked," which is an explanation of what motivated his actions and not an apology at all.
what stede does instead of saying i'm sorry is be patient and not try to push ed to forgive him and just show repeatedly, all season, through all his actions, that he loves ed and won't hurt him like that again and is willing to wait however long it takes for ed to be ready to trust him again. that's what it takes.
the crew who voted against ed returning to the ship would be within their rights to stick to their guns and never want him back. they'd be justified in making the same decision about izzy for going to the navy. izzy and ed would each be justified in never wanting to see the other again. ed would be fully justified in refusing to forgive stede. none of them have earned forgiveness. it's not something you can earn though.
i don't think ofmd is saying apologies are BAD or anything, except insofar as it can be bad to insist on giving one to someone who doesn't need it or isn't ready to hear it. izzy's apology to ed, for instance, is deeply meaningful. but it's less about ed needing to hear it to forgive izzy and more about ed needing to hear it to get closure on the toxic cycle in his life that izzy has always symbolized, as well as about the audience needing to hear it to know the narrative understood what izzy did. and if you feel like that's something you needed from ed's arc, or just that you needed a clearer moment of the crew's acceptance of ed, that might be valid. (i suspect, given we know there were extensive and very hasty rewrites to 2x06, it's very likely there was something more explicitly establishing the crew's forgiveness of ed in there.) but i do think the season has a pretty extensive focus on the concepts of redemption and reconciliation and recovery, and part of what it's saying is that the fixation on following a perfect apology template is not always a useful part of that.
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