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alt title(s): Pirates
Howard Pyle: pirates with prisoners. (Type 1. Definitely Type 1)
Yar, har, fiddle-de-dee Being a Pirate is all right with me Do what you want 'cause a Pirate is free You are a Pirate! — LazyTown, "You Are a Pirate"
Oh some are fond of red wine, and some are fond of white,
And some are all for dancing by the pale moonlight:
But rum alone's the tipple, and the heart's delight
Of the old bold mate of Henry Morgan.
— John Masefield "Captain Stratton's Fancy"
Dashing villains who lived free on the open sea, with a parrot on each shoulder and a chest full of gold. Fond of drinking and prone to fights, out to live "a short life and a merry one." The pirates we know and love were greatly influenced by those of Peter Pan and Treasure Island.
Type 1: Some pirates are major threats whenever they appear. Seeing the Jolly Roger on the horizon is bad news for the dashing, clean-cut heroes, who will soon have to deal with a wave of unwashed brutes intent on looting as much as they can, killing the crew, and... ahem..."abducting" the women. Generally the easy go-to bad guys for anything in The Cavalier Years.
These pirates are Always Chaotic Evil. They have, in fact, thoroughly earned their Real Life designation hostis humani generis or "enemy of all mankind".
Type 2: Pirates featured as dashing romantic heroes and rebels, ranging from the rather goofy to the total rebel; generally, they follow a code of honor. Frequently featured as The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything to prevent their romantic aura being tainted by them harming innocents. The Romantics were fond of this trope, as in Lord Byron's The Corsair. It appeared Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance with pirates who can not oppress an orphan (and swallow any and all claims to be an orphan) and are easily overcome by appealing to their loyalty to Queen Victoria.
In Real Life, a blurry line separated this type of pirate from privateers. The Spanish viewed Sir Francis Drake as a pirate, and the British, John Paul Jones.
Both types are among the Oldest Ones In The Book, and can, indeed, be found in the same works.
Mostly, they can be found in the Caribbean, a few hundred years ago, but any sea-faring hero can expect to meet pirates at least once, and they also occur in the far future, sailing the ocean of space.
Elizabethen-era privateers (such as the aforementioned Sir Francis Drake) used to be quite popular but have fallen out of favour in recent decades.
Pirate tropes include:
- Lots of nautical slang
- Earrings and colourful clothes
- Making victims walk the plank
- Marooning
- Buried treasure
- Treasure maps, to find it with.
- Any combination of peg leg, hook hand, and eye patch.
- A Pirate Parrot
- The Jolly Roger (In real life, the Jolly Roger was a good thing, as it meant that the pirates would accept prisoners. However, a blood red flag meant death to all".)
- Captains elected by their crew (although real sailors that mutinied and became pirates actually did this)
- Swashbuckling
- Swearing "like a sailor" to the degree that can be gotten away with
- Buxom female pirates
- Universally Chaotic Evil for the first, and Chaotic Good for the second.
Space Pirates throw people out of the airlock rather than making them walk the plank, and may substitute some alien flier for the parrot.
Sky Pirates have flying ships but otherwise resemble the standard Pirate.
If the pirates are mixed up with the occult, expect voodoo, zombies and/or skeletons, and cursed treasure.
Not to be confused with real pirates. Modern day piracy is less covered in fiction, with the 1979 Soviet film Piraty XX veka (Pirates of the 20th Century, one of the first real Soviet "action" films) and the japanese anime Black Lagoon being some of the few rare examples of the opposite.
For some reason , there's a running joke about them being the arch-enemies of Ninjas, perhaps because Pirates are the closest, apart from Vikings, of being their antithesis.
Honored every September 19th with International Talk Like A Pirate Day.
Examples:
Live Action TV
- Doctor Who, episodes "The Smugglers", "Enlightenment," and, of course, "The Pirate Planet," as well as the novels "The Resurrection Casket" and "The Pirate Loop".
- A couple of non-traditional space pirates were the Monster Of The Week in the Firefly episode "Our Mrs. Reynolds."
Anime
- One Piece
- Space pirate example: Captain Harlock, a Loveable Rogue space pirate who has appeared in any number of the works of Leiji Matsumoto.
- The manga Crossbone Gundam has the main characters from Gundam F91 opposing the Jupiter Empire under the guise of space pirates, right down to their ship's design and the captain having a parrot.
- It gets even crazier. The titular Gundam has X-shaped thrusters (though they're actually practical), a beam cutlass and daggers instead of the standard saber, a beam gun shaped like a flintlock pistol, a targeting lens shaped like an eye patch and an extra antenna on its head modeled after a feather. Apparently just sporting the Jolly Roger insignia on its forehead wasn't enough for Hajime Katoki.
- The main cast of Black Lagoon are an example of your average modern-day South-East Asian variety of pirate, and prefer AKs and pistols to swords and cutlasses.
- Kyouran Kazoku Nikki's tenth episode is 21 minutes of pirate absurdity. This on top of the normal absurdity the show already has. Interestingly, the episode is about the differing ideals of shows like One Piece where the lead pirates don't do anything and the traditional view. The traditional view wins.
- The main Big Bad of the ninth Pokemon movie, Pokemon Ranger and the Temple of the Sea, was a pirate, complete with a Chatot, a parrot Pokemon.
- First episode of Slayers REVOLUTION has Lina Inverse laying waste to a group of pirates.
- Chosokabe Motochika/Arslan in Sengoku Basara/Devil Kings.
- Castle in the Sky
Comic Books
- Y: The Last Man - Because of the shortage of food and medicine caused by the plague the Australian navy has turned to piracy – one of their spies even has an eyepatch. It later turns out that the Australians are actually trying to stop the pirates who are taking all the food in exchange for heroin.
- El Cazador was comic book from Cross Gen. In the opening issue, the ship carrying Spanish noblewoman Donessa Cinzia Elena Marie Esperanza Diego-Luis Hidalgo and others of her family is attacked by pirate captain Blackjack Tom. The Donessa is one of the few survivors of the attack. She swears to hunt down Tom and rescue his prisoners. To accomplish this, she re-names her ship El Cazador ("The Hunter") and becomes a pirate herself, dubbed "Lady Sin" by her crew. The remaining issues of the series detail the beginnings of Lady Sin's quest as she forsakes her privileged past for life on the high seas.
- Captain Hawk, a.ka.a. 'the Sea Snake', was a fairly tracherous sometimes-ally of Travis Morgan in The Warlord.
Film
- Treasure Island — The 1950 Walt Disney movie version of this featured British Actor Robert Newton as Long John Silver. His wildly over the top performance as the ragged, full-bearded, wild-eyed, sinister but charismatic pirate leader was purely his own creation and quite unlike the actor himself (He had been considered for the role of the role of the handsome, brooding Heathcliffe in the 1939 version of Wuthering Heights, narrowly losing out to Lawrence Olivier.) His distinctive Argggh growl and English West Country accent have been imitated by, literally, hundreds of millions of people over the decades. It is unlikely that any line of recorded cinema can match its popularity.
- Pirates Of The Caribbean — Captain Jack Sparrow was apparently originally written as a fairly straight-laced character. Until Johnny Depp decided he was going to chuck Keith Richards into his portrayal.
- Blackbeard's Ghost, in which modern-day Dean Jones learns that the famous pirate Blackbeard was cursed to forever remain a ghost unless he could perform a single selfless act. Being a Disney movie, hilarity ensues until the predictable ending.
- Pirates, starring Walter Matthau, in which the trope is taken to the other end of the spectrum (i.e., the whole lot is dirty, vile, etc.) for comedic effect.
- The Pirate Movie, starring Kristy MacNichol, which was a (very) loose adaptation of The Pirates of Penzance.
- Yellowbeard. The title character is a Type 1 pirate if ever there was one.
Literature
- Peter Pan
- Lord Byron's The Corsair
- Captain Blood, both as a novel and as the movie where Errol Flynn first appeared.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs's Pirates of Venus, Tanar of Pellucidar, and Tarzan at the Earth's Core
- Conan The Barbarian has been a pirate more than once in his career. In addition to his membership in the Red Brotherhood, he has also captained several ships as well as being the lover and right hand of Belit, the Queen of the Black Coast, in the story of the same name.
- Andre Norton's Scarface
- The Pyrates — comic novel archly highlighting all the pirate tropes.
Western Animation
- On Codename Kids Next Door, the KND sometimes had to deal with candy-stealing pirate and recurring foe Stickybeard.
- Pirates Of Dark Water offers a fantasy take, complete with fantasy swearing.
- In the LazyTown episode that the page quote comes from, the children are playing pirates, and are shown a history book that tells them about Rottenbeard, a pirate who once victimised LazyTown (despite it being very clearly inland) and stole a corner of a stone containing a message from the town's founder, then was driven off by a hero who is dressed suspiciously like an old-fashioned version of Sportacus (presumably one of the former Sportacuses, given that the current is number 10), with ninja-like swords crossed across his back. The kids are impressed, so Robbie decides to take advantage of the kids' pirate fever by dressing as Rottenbeard and singing the quoted song, then getting them to 'help' him look for the missing corner, which he has made a mock-up of that makes the message say "LazyTown should always be lazy". When a real copy is found of Rottenbeard's map, he resorts to tying them up. Sportacus intervenes, and fights Robbie (who is still in costume, and for all he knows could be dangerous) armed with tennis rackets, rather than the bladed weapons seen in the drawing of his presumed ancestor. Robbie is unmasked, and the stone dug up, which turns out to read "LazyTown should always be happy".
- Kim Possible is on a field trip to a Colonial Williamsburg-type historical reenactment town, when Dr. Drakken gets possessed by a pirate ghost and comes gunning for the town in the episode "Captain Drakken". The heroes, complete with Wade who arrives on a white charger, fight him off the old fashioned way, to save their grades.
- By shocking coincidence, this episode aired on The Disney Channel about a week before Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End opened.
- La Resistance in Skyland are proud to call themselves pirates.
- Transformers Animated has Lockdown, a transforming robot pirate.
- Actually he's a transforming robot parts-cannibalizing bounty hunter who just happens to have a hook. However, Cannonball of Transformers: Cybertron is an actual space pirate, complete with skeleton paint apps and a black swath of paint over half of the top of his face in mimicry of an eyepatch.
- Captain Pugwash.
- Captain Hook and his crew in Disney's Peter Pan.
Video Games
- Monkey Island
- Skies Of Arcadia, an RPG for the Sega Dreamcast, later ported to the Nintendo Gamecube, features Air Pirates sailing the skies of a world with no oceans and floating continents. It also draws a distinct line between idealized pirates and real ones: Real pirates are called, appropriately, Black Pirates. Blue Rogues, on the other hand, are generally adventurers and explorers who only attack The Empire's ships and Black Pirates.
- For pirates of the space variety, see the Metroid series. Besides the whole Take Over The Universe thing, this is played surprisingly close to the modern real life version.
- Final Fantasy, an RPG for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), had the very brief encounter with Bikke the pirate, who fixes the Broken Bridge of being stuck on the initial continent by awarding you a boat after his defeat. Ironically, enough, outside of the hat and the "Argh"-speak, he could easily just be a regular boat-owner.
- Final Fantasy V on the other hand, has pirate captain Faris, a long lost sister of Princess Lenna, who was raised by pirates who found her, and disguised herself as a man. The Playstation version is known for giving her the stereotypical pirate accent.
- This is in fact made even better since the game's job system lets you make her a ninja, thus combining two of the most badass forces in the universe.
- In the Sony RPG Rogue Galaxy the heroes are space pirates.
- A couple of Wario Land platformers pits the greedy anti-hero against Captain Syrup and her pirate minions.
- And the Shake King from Wario Land: The Shake Dimension is a pirate with very much similar minions to Captain Syrup. He's also more like an Evil Overlord and a viking.
- Sid Meier's Pirates!, naturally. NPC pirates are mostly of the first type, but the Player Character can be either.
- The arcade/Dreamcast shooter Gunbird 2 has a Team Rocket-esque group of pirates, called the Queen Pirates, as the Big Bads. With a buxom female pirate as the leader. Plus, they also have an army of humongous mecha. What a winning combination!
Web Comics
- A major arc in the popular Sluggy Freelance featured "The Pirates of the Oceans Unmoving"... pirates in flying ships, sailing through cross-dimensional waters where time doesn't exist. In a clever subversion, it turns out that most (though not all) of the "pirates" are actually geeks who ended up "outside time" as a result of various technological mishaps, failed experiments, et cetera, found all these abandoned, flying ships, and decided to live out life-long dreams of adventures on the high (if unmoving) seas.
- Starslip Crisis has absurdly literal Space Pirates. Identical to our pirate stereotypes but...in space. Steel Eyepatches, laser-cutlasses, sails on their ships. Led by Infra-Red Beard, they even have pirate science officers. Who man the Rum Sensors.
- In Order of the Stick, when Elan needs to reach Azure City, he meets a sky pirate.
- In 8-bit Theater, Garland recruits pirates to help him against the Light Warriors.[1]
- I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space. Yes, lesbian space pirates.
Opera
- Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance
Real Life
- Everythings Better With Pirates: York University in England recently held an election for student president. There were two sensible candidates and Mad Cap'n Scott, who carried a duck named Brian on his shoulder, said 'Aharrr' a lot and promised cutlass training for all student officers. He won.
- On "Talk Like A Pirate Day 2008", Facebook created an option to display everything in Pirate Speak.
- Henry Morgan, later governor of Jamacia. Since he fought only the Spanish and while they were at war with the English (at least to the best of his knowledge) a border-line case. Many fictional pirates (Type 2) have drawn on his history, which explains why so many became colonial governers.
- Blackbeard — While having far from the largest haul, Blackbeard is particularly notorious for the stories about him, such as that once, while playing cards, he blew out the light and shot at random, seriously wounding one of his crew, and declared afterward if he didn't act like that, they would forget who their master was; or the time he proposed they test themselves against their future state, and filled up below the deck with sulfur pots to see how long they lasted, and when he lasted the longest he was proud of it. Heavily influenced the Type 2 pirate.
- Captain Kidd, though the true extent of his guilt is uncertain.
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