Last night, whilst not sleeping, as I am apparently want to do, I decided to watch The Pirates of the Caribbean. A week ago I watched The Curse of the Black Pearl, so watched Dead Man's Chest. I'd seen it before, but only once, when it first came out (2004). And hoo boy...

The first thing I noted was a distinct tone shift: CotBP is _distinctly_ an action-adventure film with supernatural elements, but the framing is done to capture a world that — on its surface — is very (almost painfully) normal. This is, after all, Elizabeth's whole struggle.

DMC on the otherhand completely tosses that out, and immediately introduces the supernatural as almost... not mundane... but accepted. It's not a world of "superstitious" pirates, but one of acknowledged magic.

The second element of this tone shift was in it's handling of action and humour. CotBP frames its stunts as _things the pirates can do_ which ordinary people can't: Jack can swing down a rope-line using his manacles; Jack and Will can fight on a see-saw; etc.

These moments, whilst ridiculous, are all relatively possible. A person _could_ do those things in the real world... But it would be very inelligant or dangerous. Pirates, being freedom-loving-scallywags, are immune from that inelligance and danger, and get to swashbuckle.

DMC, though, throws that out too, with all sorts of characters performing not just pirate-level shenanigans, but also simply _impossible_ feats. Consider all the times they tumble in a rolling cage, or a rolling wheel, or just off cliffs, or (there is a lot of tumbling).

I have to imagine this was a shift in writing for a younger audience, because budget wasn't a problem on CotBP.

The third thing I'll note is the MASSIVE shift towards racism. Holy SHIT DMC is a racist film. It's extremely anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and just generally racist...

CotBP has a few _questionable_ moments, but nothing overtly racist given its release date...

Even the references to "cursed Aztec gold" are framed as _not necessarily an unjust thing_, as Cortez's atrocities are rightly denounced by literal murdering pirates.

But DMC. Good Lord, they didn't hold back. In the words of Ryan Begara, "Let's get into the details."

1) The very few Black characters we see are extremely bad stereotypes:

a) The West-Indian mutinous crew members who are also _cunning_ and _sneaky_ and for some reason mix lots of cultural artifacts together into a pastiche of "Generally South Asian".

b) A literal cannibal with a Jamaican accent.

c) Apparently the above dude's brother, who seems to be French Haitian despite his brother being Jamaican, a massive coward (though he's been to cannibal island a lot, so I'm not sure why?) and apparently unintelligent...

d) And a hyper-sexualised, largely mad, witch. (We'll talk more about her later.)

Then we get to 2) The depiction of Indigenous people as cannibals and strangely... vacant? Almost like mindless zombies. In fact, the Indigenous folks seem to have _less_ reasoning, focus, and ability than the literal mindless enslaved sailors on the Flying Dutchman, so...

Like. I just can't say enough about how fucked that entire sequence is. They make the white dude their god (classic trope, let's just ignore what we said last time about Cortez, eh?) and then eat everyone largely mindlessly.

I don't want to go too much more into detail on that one. It's just _bad_. So I'll go to 3) Other PoC which are...

...

Just nowhere, I guess?

Well, no: we get a "stupid" Chinese Flying Dutchman-crew with a conch-shell head who speaks Chinese as comedic effect... *sigh*

I want to cycle back to Tia Dalma, the witch, who we learn in At World's End is actually the "goddess" Calypso.

Now... This might shock some folks, but I'm actually _not all that mad about this._ There are some things which I'm like... k... to, but on the whole it's fine?

Though I'm _certain_ beyond a shadow of a doubt that the writers didn't make this link: it's cool to me that they framed Calypso as a dark-skinned woman.

Calypso is an Ogygian nymph in the Classical Stories, meaning she lives on what is now Gozo in the Maltese archipelago.

Indeed, I have been to her home. It's... _confronting._

But, as a figure from the Classical Stories, she predates the period of Homer's writings by a considerable time... Odysseus made his voyages ~1200 BCE, which puts them before the Phoenician colonisation of the islands...

...but WELL WELL after our main temple periods. However, the folk of the archipelago would have, at this point, still been largely indigenous Ammi (most likely settling from Northern Africa). Which means, whether Calpyso was born among them, or born to blend in with her folk...

...she would have looked much closer to pre-Arab Northern Africa. See the Copts, or Sub-Saharan Imazighen, et al.

Now... The accent makes little sense, but can be easily explained as her learning English for the first time among folk in the Caribbean, so *shrug*.

But, yeah. This is a detail I actually want to call out as being _curiously good_, though I am going to assume it was largely by accident. The writers just needed a magical Black person to help the white protagonist.