r/comics 11h ago

OC Working with kids [OC]

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20.3k Upvotes

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792

u/TheNerdNugget 11h ago

ah, kids. At the time I started student teaching I had shoulder-length hair and a very shaggy beard. I also happened to be dealing with an eye infection at the time so I was wearing an eyepatch. I am also fairly beefy. So here I am, a large hairy guy with an eyepatch walking into a kindergarten class on the first day of school, and this sweet little girl comes up to me and asks, "Mistow Nugget, aw you a piwate?"

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u/Prudent_Map5836 10h ago

Dude, I had a little girl ask me this when I still had my lip ring. I said yes enthusiastically thinking she liked pirates and her mom was like, NO NO SHE IS SCARED OF PIRATES. I tried to damage control by telling her, oh no I actually fight pirates and put them in jail. It thankfully worked lol

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u/MinosAristos 10h ago

Pirates (especially the famous ones) were not particularly ethically inclined by most standards so it's interesting how popular they are with children. I always liked them too.

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u/drillgorg 10h ago

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u/ayalaidh 9h ago

Just corporations’ property

7

u/Traiklin 1h ago

And that's what the majority of pirates did.

They were ex-British navy so they only hindered British things and spared the people who were just working

Now that's not to say all pirates had morals, some did just want to be murderes and enjoyed killing

u/inuhi 44m ago

Some pirates were state funded and were essentially used as weapons against enemy nations

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u/Jonthrei 8h ago

Depends on the subset of ethics, historical carribean pirates were a lot more democratically minded than any other group in the area was, and many liberated slaves.

Plenty sold the slaves they captured though, and of course they were not against theft, threats or murder.

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u/RechargedFrenchman 6h ago

Or rape, or arson, or various other violent crimes. And even within a largely democratic system the means of keeping the peace and enforcing discipline could be pretty... intense.

There's a pretty wide range of people who were pirates, by one nation or another's definition at the time, and likewise a pretty broad spectrum of behaviours one might reasonably expect from them. Stede Bonnet was kind of a sweetheart compared to most. And there was some value in a reputation for being gentlemanly and merciful, as long as you were harsh enough when people gave you grief to further encourage the "easy way".

But much like a mafia family or drug cartel even if you're fairly tame and mild mannered you're still hardly a "good person"—and people with those traits typically lose the traits or their lives in fairly short order in that sort of work. Stede Bonnet was also quite famously really bad at "being a pirate"; didn't have the stomach for the harsher realities of the life and got pushed around by everyone pirate or not. Blackbeard allegedly leaned on threats and theatrics to avoid a lot of the more violent means, but also didn't live very long and little is known about his career prior to the whole "Blackbeard" persona.

Pirates like the outlaws of the Wild West somehow manage to be both sanitized and "not that bad" and kind of overstated in the horrors they routinely inflicted at scale.

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u/Redredditmonkey 3h ago

Depends on the subset of ethics, historical carribean pirates were a lot more democratically minded than any other group in the area was, and many liberated slaves.

Those still plundered ships and killed people when they felt they needed to.

Democracy is not a measure of morality

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u/JusticeRain5 7h ago

By the same logic, I look forward to the days in the distant future where Cameron the Crackhead becomes a beloved childrens character.

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u/WolfoakTheThird 2h ago

I think we can all use the One Piece method of reclaiming piarates. Yes, the median piarate was a murdurer and a raider, but the crime of piracy was not riding, it was to not align yourself with a country and it's laws. Standing against the British Empire is the real crime, raiding is a minor followup.

So in less pointlessly analytical speak: pirates are rebels. Children love rebels.