Maybe a fic centering on the Wayward Children books?

My TBR list is already so long!

Yes, I'm also climbing Mt. TBR - both print and electronic. It does eliminate the dread of not having something to read.

[makes room for JZ on the bench, offers candy]

I want to see these two people fall for each other. That's really interesting to me. It ended badly in real life, but we're not doing real life because we've got a Polynesian-Jewish man from New Zealand playing Blackbeard.

Jenkins gets it.

Yay, candy! I'll pour us some brandy.

I keep thinking and having feels about the bathtub scene--I spent most of the series identifying with the overly earnest, overly enthusiastic goofball, but that scene... ugh. It felt horribly familiar to me as someone wrestling with chronic depression--I know Ed's is situational and trauma-related, not necessarily chemical and chronic, but it still looks and feels the same. The wretched curling up and hiding, recoiling from kindness and moaning "No" and banging his head when someone who loves him says, "Hey, I'm your friend," because in that moment, in the grip of it, even the most loving and compassionate words feel like lies because the person can't possibly be talking to *you*, only to the completely different person they imagine you to be when you know the terrible truth about yourself, and kindness becomes physically intolerable.

And Stede's quiet, patient, almost motherly persistence is the only thing that pulls him back out of it, just barely (I heard an interview with Rhys Darby in which he talked about *mothering* as one of his keys to playing the role, that every character is a little lost and needs, among all the other loves they're missing, parenting, and for whatever reason seeing it as mothering rather than fathering made the most sense to him as an active choice for Stede).

Oooh, thank you! And now I shall wave my other hand at everything you wrote and say "Yes, that".

And now I shall wave my other hand at everything you wrote and say "Yes, that".

No! You have to say things too! I don't want to be the only one flailing and babbling like an addlepated ... thing that's addlepated. I need to hear from all the other thinky meat!

Okay! You made such good points, though!

I love Stede and Ed snarking about Stede opening a restaurant ("Well, you might not get in; it'll be very popular." "You'd save me a seat, wouldn't you?" "Maybe, if you weren't being a dick.").

Someone surely wrote an AU of this 30 minutes after the episode aired.

I love how readily people take to Oluwande and wonder what his captaincy would have been like; Ed trying to get Izzy to look at the clouds ("if you'd just put some fucking imagination into it, man"), that Jim's grandma is fine with their being non-binary but absolutely furious about only one of the seven men on the vengeance list being dead. Ed going from composing wretched heartbroken songs in the blanket fort to reestablishing the chain of command with Izzy was terrifying and glorious.

I could live for a week on Stede's expression quiet glee, in the moments after the curtain bursts into flames, at the scale of the catastrophe he passive-aggressively caused at the fancy assholes' party. He's been treated so shittily by all his peers for so long, and the one time before that he lashed back at a bully before he almost had a nervous breakdown over it. This one time he allows himself to just bask in the malicious afterglow for a few seconds, and it's delicious.

And Ed is surprised by Stede's calm "No, you're in over your head, I've got this", ending with the two of them being calmly rowed away from the boat burning behind them. Which leads to "You wear fine things well" and me staring at the TV with my hands over my mouth whispering "Is this happening?"

Yes, they escalated very quickly to Meaningful Glances.