‘Our Flag Means Death’ heals the wounds of SuperWhoLocke queerbaiting

This post contains spoilers for Season 1 of Our Flag Means Death.

As the inaugural season of HBO’s Our Flag Means Death played out last month, survivors of the Tumblr-era queer fandom found themselves anxiously holding their breath, apprehensively awaiting the show’s moment of truth.

Was this clearly LGBTQ-coded show going to actually deliver on its gay promise? Or were we being set up for yet another devastating queerbait, where the heavily implied romance between a show’s same-sex protagonists would suddenly be abandoned — along with the dedicated fans who so desperately yearned for the legitimacy of explicit, canonical representation?

Some managed to remain hopeful, assuring themselves that 2022 is a better time for LGBTQ stories in Hollywood than the early aughts. Over the years, an increasing number of male-on-male love pairings have been allowed to exist on popular TV, slowly but surely allowing them to come out of the AO3 slash fanfiction closet and into mainstream canon. Still, others couldn’t shake the disappointments of past queer bait-and-switches from back in the SuperWhoLock days, when an extremely gay mega fandom propelled Supernatural, Doctor Who, and Sherlock into even more avid cult following through dedication to same-sex ships that the creators and cast members often wound up openly mocking.

The show is allowing us to learn to love and trust again, after so many years of our thirsty yearning going ignored or outright exploited

But then, Our Flag Means Death‘s aptly titled “This Is Happening” episode arrived on March 17. Queer fans didn’t just let out a sigh of relief (and maybe even a few tears). They inhaled the fresh ocean air of what feels like a new era of LGBTQ representation on TV. At the very least, the show is allowing us to learn to love and trust again, after so many years of our thirsty yearning going ignored or outright exploited.

Episode 7 confirmed that soft-spoken Gentleman Pirate Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby) and fearsome Ed “Blackbeard” Teach (Taika Watiti) are indeed not another homoerotically charged odd couple pairing pink-washed into a heteronormative “bromance.” Our Flag Means Death is the full-blown love story that its creators had been laying the foundation for all season along. And queer-loving fandom didn’t just get to watch their wildest dreams leap from the virtual pages of AO3 and Deviantart to finally be brought to life with the full might of an HBO budget, either.

We got our own audience stand-in, too, in the pivotal scene where scribe Lucius Spriggs (performed with endless charm by Nathan Foad) demands Watiti’s Blackbeard treat their blossoming gay love with the care and respect it so deserves. It’s a conversation that every avid JohnLock shipper (aka fans of the popular Sherlock Holmes/John Watson romantic pairing) probably fantasized of having with the Sherlock TV show creators, who infamously failed to make good on the obviously non-platonic chemistry that their most avidly dedicated fans were so sure would end in queerness.

Really, the whole scene reads like a metaphor for the tension between the HBO show creators and an LGBTQ audience they’re clearly targeting. It’s obvious at least one person in the writer’s room was very aware of just how much baggage courting this under-represented demographic came with, as an audience so often left in the margins of a fan board.

The first exclusively gay moment of Our Flag Means Death happens after Stede entices Ed to join him on a treasure hunt, as they piece together the obscure clues of the map promising to lead them to bounty. It’s not unlike the LGBTQ fans who spend countless hours online, piecing together a show’s queer hints to develop fan theories that they sincerely believed would lead to the coveted treasure of canonical gay romance. But in the show, the map burns by accident while Stede helps Ed get some food out of his beard, a classic rom-com moment that leaves both the audience and Spriggs to raise some eyebrows.

I don’t even need to scream kiss! They do it! No demand for gay kisses needed!
Credit: HBO Max

Embodying all the mixed feelings of that queer-loving audience burned too many times by these kinds of gay will-they-won’t-theys, Spriggs’s expression is equal parts skeptical hope and exasperated longing. But when Ed tells Stede to just give up already as he tries to “fix” this underwhelming “natural conclusion” to their misadventure, the usually mild-mannered Spriggs unleashes a tirade of anger on the fearsome Blackbeard.

“Don’t be a dick!” he demands under his breath. “That bizarre little man likes you very much, and you like him.”

The realization dawns on Ed’s face at about the same time that it dawns on the audience. This is happening. It’s really, actually happening.

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Instead of either Ed or the creators backing off of the charged exchange, though, Sprigg’s confrontation appears to only open the LGBTQ flood gates. We don’t just get to witness one of the most endearing male-on-male love stories to ever grace TV. There’s also the casual non-binary representation embodied by Jim/Bonifacia (Vico Ortiz), who goes from disguising themselves as a man to escape a bounty to abandoning the getup but asking everyone to just keep calling them Jim. No one questions them. Of course, even Spriggs gets his own gay-ever-after with the idiosyncratic Black Pete (Matthew Maher).

As Our Flag Means Death grew gayer and gayer with every episode, the internet sure did take notice too.

While the show flew under the radar for a bit, the online discourse exploded after the final two (very explicitly queer) episodes aired. One viral tweet deemed it the new SuperWhoLock, which others were quick to jokingly call that labbel out as a menacing threat because… no! It’s actually the exact opposite of that whole mess. One investigative TikToker even started tracking the spike in fanfictions published onto AO3 post-gay explosion, going from a measly eight pages for the majority of the season to a whopping 1,600 in the 16 days following episode 7’s release.

What the success of “Our Flag Means Death” goes to show is that we’re in fact all still here, still queer, still thirsty as hell for more honest representation.

The power of queer audiences to champion TV shows that champion us has been proven time and time again. As we grew savvy to the false promise of queerbaiting, though, we started demanded better. But what the success of Our Flag Means Death goes to show is that we’re in fact all still here, still queer, still thirsty as hell for more honest representation.

To its pirates, the show’s flag may mean death. But there’s no doubt that it’ll mean love when it’s inevitably waved at countless Pride parades this coming June.