Tumblr shitpost convinces many that Pirates of the Caribbean had gay pirate divorce

polygon.com:

“I cannot BELIEVE how soon you people forgot that jack sparrow is literally canonically gay divorced,” reads the end of a Tumblr post by user everythingispirates. The post argues that Pirates of the Caribbean deserves a place at the table with Our Flag Means Deathand Black Sails, as an example of pirate media with queer representation. More importantly, the post argued that because this trio could be a possible competitor to Superwholock, the infamous hybrid Supernatural-Doctor Who-Sherlock fandom that ruled Tumblr in the early 2010s.

For the record, Jack Sparrow is not canonically gay divorced. But with some edited screenshots hinting at a relationship between Sparrow (played by Johnny Depp) and fellow pirate Hector Barbossa (played by Geoffrey Rush) and a few other blogs playing along, it certainly seemed like it could be true. At least to a reader only loosely familiar with the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise. While the original post was made on March 31, it wasn’t exactly an April Fool’s joke. Instead, it was simply meant to be an inside joke among the Pirates of the Caribbean fandom on Tumblr.

But nothing on the internet is ever completely isolated, and the joke bled out from the community it started out on, and further from its initial context. The original post ended up racking up tens of thousands of notes, and soon enough so many people were posting about Pirates of the Caribbean that the franchise became the number one trending topic on Tumblr in the first week of April. Last week, like a sleeping kraken rising from the depths, Pirates of the Caribbean breached the most buzzed about movie list on Tumblr’s official Fandometrics blog. This week, it was #1.

“We saw a 1,207% increase in engagements