So What’s With The Soup In OFMD?

So what’s with the soup in OFMD?

I’ve seen a few takes on what the soup symbolizes in OFMD S2 because it does come up a weird amount of times. I’ve seen takes that the soup is a lie and shouldn’t be trusted. Takes that the soup represents love and all that is good. I’ve seen takes that the soup isn’t anything at all, it’s just soup.

I don’t agree with those takes. But I do believe that the soup is more than just soup.

In my opinion, the soup represents community.

Community doesn’t necessarily mean love. A community can be arrayed against you as much as it can be with you. You can choose not to have a community, to break bread, with someone. But a community is something most of us desire and as Izzy notes in the trailer, being a pirate is about being part of something.

- Zheng Yi Sao makes damn good soup. Symbolically, I believe this is a reflection of how she runs a tight ship. How effective she is as pirate queen and in general as a leader of her community. People in her community are well treated. Her leadership style, like the broth of the soup, is balanced. Had Olu remained with her, he would have been well treated. She wasn’t being duplicitous with Stede and his crew. Her soup is great, her community is great, and they would have been well fed there had they stayed.

The soup isn’t a value judgement on anything beyond the quality of the community offered. Should they stay? What happens now that they didn’t? Not relevant to the soup metaphor. We’ll find out what happens when you reject Zheng’s amazing soup. At the very least, you just don’t get any more of it.

- Hornigold offers soup to Ed. Ed rejects it. He finds Hornigold’s community poisonous. He doesn’t trust it and he doesn’t want to join it.

It’s simple as that. The soup wasn’t necessarily literally poisoned. The more relevant metaphor is breaking bread with someone as a sign of trust. Ed wants nothing to do with Hornigold’s community.

Most likely where this is leading is a continued used of soup as a metaphor for Ed and Stede and the crew figuring out what kind of community they want to build together. Is the broth balanced? Is it poisoned? Is it too salty, too sweet? Who do we share it with? Who do we refuse to accept soup from? It’s all about community.