(no subject)

[owlectomy]

I want to make it very clear right up front that I wasn't expecting anything unconventional and subversive from a movie like this, a Disney movie that is clearly marketed at children despite all the violence and that is expected to make a ton of money, and of course it wouldn't have anything that could get in the way of that. I know, yeah?

But I found out two things--a plot point that had sort of been elided from the movie for time, and the after-credits scene--which I didn't stay for, and I'm so glad I didn't, because it truly would have harshed my squee, in which Will comes back after his ten years and meets Elizabeth and their ten-year-old kid. The plot point is that after Will's ten years are up, if his true love stays true to him, then the curse gets broken and Will gets to stay in the land of the living again.

Everywhere else in POTC, morality is entirely situational, entirely pragmatic, entirely contextual, and pretty much optional. Even though, indisputably, it presents a very romanticized portrait of piracy, still, these people are pirates. And every character, even the pretty ones who have access to the secret on-ship showers, is willing to commit murder and treachery when necessary. Or, in Jack's case, when they feel like it. In the "Brits vs. Pirates" arc of the movie, the symbolic fight is a rigid, unmovable morality which is necessarily cruel versus the freedom to live by your own rules which can be cruel or kind on a whim. And both Will and Elizabeth get their hands dirty as much as anyone.

Yet it never occurs to anyone, apparently, that One Twoo Love Forever And Ever might not be the only possible pattern for their relationship. And Elizabeth gets to be an effectively widowed, celibate, single mother. Yay! In a story which is so much about creative-if-amoral solutions to insolvable problems... I think the movie steps on its own feet by not looking outside of that.

But this is why there's fanfiction.