Mabie-Todd Blackbird Fountain Pen

Many many months ago, I decided to do some digging on a whim. The Traitors is a reality competition show I refuse to shut up about where a group of "Faithfuls" in a Scottish castle try to deduce whom among them are secretly "Traitors" meeting up every night to murder them one-by-one. Fun show if you're into games like Mafia, Werewolf, or Town of Salem.

This show is absolutely every level of "extra" you can imagine. Specifically for today, the Traitors every night write down the name of the Faithful they plan to murder with a fancy fountain pen and seal it with wax and a special seal with their insignia on it. They used to sell that wax seal on the Traitors website (which I regretfully missed out on buying myself), but they did not directly say which fountain pen they used. All we had were quick snippets of footage of people who statistically don't use fountain pens often holding most of the pen to write and only letting us see the nib and a tiny bit of the barrel.

Leave it to Reddit to easily figure out which model of pen it likely was: a Mabie-Todd Blackbird.

Now, if anyone actually opened that link, they'd notice a mistake I didn't notice for a while. I still ended up buying the pen and love it regardless, so I'm still happy I made the purchase. I'm still calling it my ✨ murder pen ✨ regardless. I'm planning a Traitors-themed party at the moment and plan on using this pen regardless for the pre-written letters, so it still works out.

Most of this blog post is going to be about the actual nonsense I went through to get this pen, but if you're more interested in the actual review at the end, feel free to skip ahead.

I'm going to skip ahead to when I actually got around to buying the pen. It took a while to find a listing I liked.

This was also the first time from my memory where I ordered something outside the United States, so this was also my first time waiting an entire month just for it to even make it out of customs.