How Our Flag Means Death Is Rebuilding The Trust Of Queer Viewers

The HBO pirate comedy tells stories of swashbuckling and love on the high seas

By Rowan O’Brien

While scrolling on Instagram in mid-February, I noticed promos for a new pirate show popping up on my timeline, mostly from my favourite director/all-around-creator Taika Waititi and Vico Ortiz, a drag performer I had been thirst-following for a few years. Though I had seen little other promotion for Our Flag Means Death (I’m looking at you, HBO Max), I knew that if these two were involved, it was bound to be a good time. Fast-forward three months, and I am just finishing my fifth rewatch, have acquired a new wardrobe of florals and frills, and redecorated my room with some of the innovative fan art pouring out of the OFMD community.

AVAST, YE MATEYS! SPOILERS FOR OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH AHEAD!

Our Flag Means Death is a historical workplace rom-com about the flamboyant nobleman turned incompetent pirate captain Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby) and his crew of delightful misfits. At the end of the third episode, the infamous Blackbeard (Taika Waititi) finally catches up with Stede, and a tender bond is soon established between these two quirky captains. This meet-cute spirals into wild adventures, heart-warming moments and belly laughs as the relationship between Stede and Blackbeard (or Ed, as he prefers to be called) builds into a profession of love and an on-screen kiss. 

That’s right! A queer on-screen kiss between the two main characters of a sitcom on a mainstream platform! You can see why queer fans – who were hooked from the moment we saw the nonbinary pirate Jim (Vico Ortiz), or Black Pete and Lucius’s giggly hook-up, or, let’s be honest, Stede’s struggle to descend the ship’s wobbly ladder – exploded with glee (which would quickly turn to bittersweet frustration with the last episode of the series).

I had the exciting experience of watching the show as it was being released weekly (yes, I am bragging). As a queer viewer, I immediately recognized the underlying homoeroticism, and hoped against hope that the show would openly explore the love between Ed and Stede. However, having been misled before, I couldn’t actually allow myself to believe that a mainstream TV show would allow an explicit queer romance between the two main characters. 

Even after the undeniable on-screen chemistry, even after creator David Jenkins tweeted, “Historical pirate rom-com. That’s it. That’s the pitch,” even after Waititi wished Darby (his “onscreen crush”) a happy birthday with a photo of the iconic toe-touch, even after we found out that Blackbeard had had a sexual relationship with his old buddy Calico Jack, and EVEN AFTER an episode literally titled “This Is Happening!,” I couldn’t get my hopes up. 

A couple of days before the finale, I texted a friend and asked if he thought they would actually establish a romance between Ed and Stede by the end of the season. Both of us agreed that we couldn’t really count on the show to fully commit to the relationship. “On one hand, I have hope but on the other hand, I’ve been burned too many times before,” I complained. We then worried about another possible trajectory, and perhaps an even worse fate: if they admitted their love and then one of them immediately died. (*cough* Supernatural. *cough*)

No matter how obvious it seemed to me, I couldn’t let myself completely trust Jenkins and the Our Flag Means Death writers’ room until Stede and Blackbeard kissed in the penultimate episode, at which point I audibly gasped. Our brains are designed to recognize pattern and story, so what happened in my queer little brain that caused the divide between my intuition and my faith in the show? The most likely culprit is queerbaiting, a marketing tactic most common in television and film, where a media entity entices LGBTQ+ viewers with the implication of queer content while never actually delivering. 

Even though I had been ranting to my friends about how the characters’ love was undeniable, queerbaiting in TV and film has damaged my ability to trust my own perception to the point that I couldn’t believe my eyes when the exact outcome I had expected came to life.

Queerbaiting has damaged the queer community’s relationship with film and television. A lot of queer viewers, such as myself, have resorted to keeping supposed queer couples on-screen at arm’s length unless we have photographic evidence, such as a kiss, which arguably disrupts our ability to tap into the emotional journey of a story.

One popular example of queerbaiting is BBC’s Sherlock, which garnered a huge queer following due to the intimate relationship of John Watson and Sherlock Holmes, which was jokingly mistaken for a romantic one by other characters on the show. Similarly, and perhaps in response to all the criticism they received for teasing a romance between Dean Winchester and Castiel, Supernatural haphazardly had Castiel confess his love in the last season before being sucked into The Empty and effectively killed off. In a devastating blow to the Killing Eve fanbase, Villanelle recently met a similar fate in the show’s finale, an echo of her queer predecessor, Lexa in The 100. And sometimes, these relationships are even belittled by the creators, such as when the cast of Supergirl seemingly made fun of Supercorp, a popular queer ship between Kara and Lena, at San Diego Comic Con in 2017. 

As queer people, we are accustomed to not seeing ourselves reflected on the screen, whether that is because a character is drenched in stereotype beyond recognition or just because there are no queer characters to be found. But queerbaiting seems to be an especially insidious form of ridicule. When you think you’ve finally found stable footing and then queerbaiting pulls the rug out from under you, you fall harder. Like Badminton’s ghost, you can almost hear your high school bully saying, “Did you REALLY think that they were going to be like you? Pathetic.” 

In a recent interview with The Verge, David Jenkins spoke about the reaction to Our Flag Means Death, saying, “I think I didn’t realize – because I see myself represented on camera, and I see myself falling in love in stories – I didn’t realize how deep the queerbaiting thing goes. Being made to feel stupid by stories, I guess.” He continued, “[P]art of me felt like, ‘We’re going to do this story, and they’re going to kiss, and maybe that’s not even going to be that big a deal. Maybe it’ll just be a blip.’ But then, looking at how people were kind of afraid to let themselves believe that we were doing, that was a surprise to me, and it’s heartbreaking.”

OFMD not only avoided the use of queerbaiting and the Bury Your Gays trope (as far as we know, though we may have to wait for Season 2 to find out!), they also gifted us three unique queer romantic relationships. There is arguably also an unlimited number of queerplatonic relationships between The Revenge crew members, as OFMD makes use of the Found Family trope, a favourite in the queer community. Furthermore, they queered the familiar cliché of a woman dressing as a man to gain passage on a ship à la Elizabeth Swan in Pirates of the Caribbean, or the true stories of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, by using it as an opportunity to explore the gender complexity of Jim, the stowaway pirate, and easily incorporating the use of they/them pronouns into the show.

Since the release of the final two episodes, the OFMD fandom has exploded online. According to Parrot Analytics, it has been the number one Most In-Demand Breakout Series for almost eight weeks in a row, beating out even Marvel’s Moon Knight. The refreshing authenticity and care with which Our Flag Means Death handles queer stories is what has created such a devoted fanbase. Scrolling through Twitter, I see hundreds of pieces of fan art that would make da Vinci jealous, and just two months after the finale there are already more than 6,700 Our Flag Means Death fan fiction pieces on Archive of Our Own. Additionally, the fandom is collaborating to explore in-depth future plot lines, as discussing Season 2 predictions is so much more engaging and joyful when the writers have queered the realm of possibility in your favour.

Watching Our Flag Means Death blew me out of the water like Calico Jack being hit by a cannonball. I could not believe a show like this actually existed. By avoiding the harmful queer tropes and instead providing fans with an exciting and carefully developed slow-burn romance, Our Flag Means Death is steadily rebuilding the trust of queer viewers that had been broken by so many TV shows before it. The explosive fandom and dedication to seeing the show renewed for another season indicates the desire for this kind of story on our television sets.

Having a concrete example of a mainstream queer love story, one that we could see coming from miles away, not only proves that we can trust our own instincts (and, sometimes, even TV show creators), but could also indicate more shows like Our Flag Means Death on the horizon as other networks take inspiration from this underdog hit.

You can watch Our Flag Means Death on HBO Max or through its Canadian provider, Crave.

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ROWAN O’BRIEN is a queer writer and filmmaker based in Toronto who loves ranting about LGBTQ+ representation in media while creating their own queer stories. Their queer coming-of-age short film Crushed played at the Toronto Youth Shorts festival, and their next short film, City Limits, will be released this year.