We Have Always Existed, And We Always Will.

We have always existed, and we always will.

my favorite thing so far about season 2 is how, no matter what, the crew of the revenge actively chooses their found family, over and over again

• swede loves and is married to jackie, but double crosses her anyway because of his love and “life debt” for his family

• stede leaves ricky at jackie’z, despite ricky being inexperienced, because he’s fucking around and they all need to leave. stede’s not gonna risk his family just because ricky wants some sort of recognition for something he barely helped with

• oluwande leaves zheng yi sao because he’ll be damned if he leaves jim, who he’s reiterated that they’re family for him

• frenchie and jim disobeys ed’s orders and save izzy’s life because, as jim says, “he’s THEIR dick.” archie follows along cause she knows it’s fucked up and wants to stay by jim’s side

• izzy has chosen ed over and over again, and would’ve continued to if ed had accepted the help he desperately needed, but ed isolates himself and pushes izzy to the point where he HAS to choose the rest of the crew instead

• roach, wee john, and pete all get jobs on the red flag that play to their strengths and they enjoy IMMENSELY, but they go back to the revenge cause there’s no world where they wouldn’t. buttons had the opportunity to probably get more sea witch info and tools from auntie, but he also wouldn’t ever choose that over the crew

• lucius is PISSED at stede, and has a ton of ptsd to work through. i imagine he probably felt somewhat safe finally on the red flag. but after talking things through with stede and pete, i know that it was a no brainer for him as well. he’d never give pete up again after that kind of separation

• even though stede is loving the experience of seeing zheng yi sao doing what she does best and the (seemingly) warm and comforting environment on the red flag, he chooses to rescue the crew, even izzy, and take back their ship. because he knows they would choose him (and did during the act of grace, minus izzy). he’s bringing their family back together despite everything else

• i would say that the crew still with ed DID choose him, constantly. any other crew would’ve mutinied WAY before they did, but they love ed and hoped things would get better despite his behavior saying otherwise. the only times they didn’t choose him was out of self-preservation

• ed became a self-fulfilling prophecy and isolated himself. i would argue that he’s the one exception here. he actively chooses to disregard his family because of his self-loathing and deluded himself into thinking they wouldn’t choose him. BUT, in the end, he finally does because stede cast him that line. he chose to live for himself, of course, but i like to think that that decision was also to come back to the one person that truly felt like family for him