says the man to whom the world handed everything

another Black Sails blog // Ash // any pronouns // 30s

[acceptingtheworldasitis]

a pinned post

I watched Black Sails all the way through for the first time this year and am already rewatching it. My brain has been rewired and now it's your problem. Spoilers ahead but I won’t spoil in tags.

This is a fandom blog that runs mostly on queue. Asks are encouraged but may not be answered promptly.

[unheardoracle]

I love characters who are like "I'm a terrible person" but when you look closer it's more like

"I adapted to survive something and now I don't know how to stop being that version of myself."

[aquatransmissaest]

"There," John would add, "you can't touch pitch and not be mucked, lad."

Silver and Flint (Black Sails) + Psalm 42:7, KJV/excerpt from 'O Night' (Khalīl Jubrān)/from Treasure Island (RL Stevenson), Silver speaks to Hawkins

[theseconddoctor]

on that last post re. the white gaze in black sails. just occured to me flint is literally that one james baldwin quote from conversations with a native son i think(?) about white gays but transported to the age of sail. he (ablebodied white born in imperial core male) is convinced of his own greatness and what the world owes him and feels cheated by the fact of his bisexuality it suddenly becomes denied to him and that is his motive for anti imperialism. not solidarity with the people who have been and are subject to colonial violence and oppression not to people who know where they are and where they are is never having had a choice. but he feels betrayed what he was owed and theres no solidarity only utility and the hollow guise of the white saviour

[ronanlynchdefender]

Thinking about how in s2 Miranda knows after seeing the clock that Peter Ashe betrayed them. You see it in the disturbed look on her face but then when Flint asks her if she’s alright she says it’s just “nerves.” She keeps her revelation to herself and her rage to herself to prevent Flint from going on a dark path. To prevent herself from sending him on another revenge plot like she did with Alfred Hamilton. Why? Because she still believes this is the best way for Flint to bring about Thomas’ dream for Nassau. To honor him.

She keeps the revelation to herself up until the moment when she discovers the cost of Peter Ashe’s and England’s cooperation. The request that James go back to England and lay himself bare to Whitehall. Tell his most intimate story in the hopes of winning their sympathy. It is only at that moment that Miranda reveals Peter’s betrayal which led to Thomas’ death. When she realizes that the cost on James to go through with this plan is too high. She can’t let him do it especially knowing how vulnerable it would require him to be in front of people who would be pitying at best and repulsed at worst. She couldn’t let him do that especially knowing what it would mean to him. How it would probably break James’ spirit to do it. And so she puts a stop to it right then by revealing information she had put together hours before. God I fucking love this show

[seaemberthesecond]

I can’t think of how to properly word this, but there’s something about how Silver’s final betrayal is in service to this ultimate fantasy of the nuclear family, this idea that domestic comfort and felicity is the natural terminus to which all peoples should strive and once achieved should award perfect fulfilment; an idea rooted in patriarchal, colonial, and heteronormative ideals. He wants to settle down with Madi and is willing to betray her deeply and fundamentally to make it so! And moreover, he believes that she too will come to see it his way eventually! Crucial here, is how he refers to her as wife when he thinks she’s dead – a very loaded term in the show, see Anne saying I can’t be your wife, Jack, Max refusing to marry the future governor, Eleanor’s s4 arc as Mrs. Rogers and the parallels between her and Madi – not lover, not friend or comrade or leader or partner, but wife! He has reduced her to this specific domestic function in his mind and in order to actualize that fantasy he betrays the cause she’s given her life to and the people she’s been groomed to lead.

And it’s a fantasy that is not remotely rooted in reality not just because of who Madi is as a person (I hear a multitude of voices) but because, even if she wanted to, she can not co-exist with the empire in the way Silver can. She is a black woman, the escaped slave daughter of escaped slave parents, leader and heir-apparent of the Maroons. There can be no peace for her, even in a world where the war she wants to start never takes off. It is through the very struggle that Silver shoots dead that she could have carved out a future for herself and her people, and in trying to save her, Silver condemns her.

Furthermore, Silver ships Flint off to the boyfriend farm to live out his days with Thomas in a bizarre distortion of the ‘a simple life in the country’ pastoral fantasy – a thing Flint purportedly longed for (trade my oar for a shovel etc. etc.) and also shared with Miranda in the Interior (in and of itself a heteropatriarchal prison they were both miserable in) – but because Flint is a queer man in the 18th Century, this fantasy of domestic bliss can only come to be in a penal plantation/conversion camp. Silver frames his betrayal as a mercy, as a happy ending, that Flint is reunited with the love of his life at long last, except that Flint’s life’s work is obliterated, his name and legacy ruined.  He is made into the very villain he dreaded to become in the eyes of history. This is no more a mercy than shooting him in the head would have been, maybe even less so! Does the fulfilment of romantic love outweigh the rubble of everything else?

Through his betrayal, Silver ensures that as Flint’s story began in shame so it ends in shame, ensures that as the story of Black Sail’s began in shame (Hume’s monologue about the necessity of shame to the survival of civilization in the first episode) it ends in shame (Oglethorpe’s monologue about the necessity of pruning the vine of civilization in the last episode).

From this, we can construe maybe some shadow of a shadow of Silver’s backstory – why would a man be so desperate to believe that the domestic institution is the key to happiness? – but more importantly, it brings to mind the nuclear family unit as the basic building block of civilisation, and thus, of empire. It brings to mind Charles Vane saying comfort breeds complacency, makes men willing to betray each other and their shared cause to have a little bit more of it for themselves. And it is ultimately this desire for domesticity which allows England to achieve its final, inevitable victory over Nassau.

[artemideaddams]

Flint is so funny because he's an example of anti-system leader who want the best for his fellow man.

But doesn't LIKE his fellow man. Or woman. He tries, but he really just can't help but feel annoyed by most of the people he is trying to lead against the system (or liberate from it) and feels slightly superior to most of them.

He settle on wanting to free his fellow man or woman from an evil Empire because he likes and respects England even less than he likes and respects his fellow man.

Which is valid btw but it's fun how he genuinely only likes and respects a max of five people in the whole show, and yet he still says things like "I can't believe we are so poorly made as that."

Yes you believe that in your daily life, that's why you can't open up with anyone and you can’t stop treating them as your politically, morally and intellectually inferiors!

I think it's fascinating that in abstract he believes in the inherent goodness of humanity and the idea that in a more equal and less corrupted society, people would not oppress each others for fun and history would be a journey though progress; in concrete he thinks that every person he interact with is dumber than him and need to be manipulated and convinced to do exactly what he thinks is the right thing to do, with very fews exception of two or three people he considers as smart and morally righteous as himself.

What a funny character.

The contraddiction of his character between his political/ideological optimism about humanity as a whole and his deep distrust and dislike of almost any individual he meets on a personal and intellectual level is so entrateining and very realistic.

[thatbitchwhowritesstuff]

do you think Anne and Charles ever saw the scars on each other’s back. do you think they were ever aware that they shared shackles. do you think they realized their violence was born of the same yoke. do you think they considered the way the other was used for the sake of men who saw them as tools for pleasure and wealth. do you think they they knew that their freedom would always be tainted by the past and that its pursuit stemmed from fear. do you think they recognized the pain in those marks. do you think they ever talked about it. do you think they thought their bodies would never truly be theirs because of it. do you think—

[normalmammal]

flint gives his mini speech about how people only need to realize that there can be a world without the british empire in order for them to stand up to it and madi quotes cervantes at him to obliquely compare him to don quixote and flint makes This Face because there's no way she can know that ten years ago flint knew another guy who was compared to don quixote for his idealism and who was deemed mad for it. you'll never get away from the sound of the english nobleman that loved you

[chimaerakitten]

One thing that I like very very much about the way Black Sails handles Miranda is that like. She’s obviously dead from the beginning; she represents the hope of reconciliation, and there’s only one way for that to end.

But.

But, in any other show, they would have forced her to die innocent. Not of everything, perhaps. She could be allowed to know she was betrayed before she died; showing her shock and sorrow would heighten the tragedy. But still, it would have to have blindsided her. She wouldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise. Other characters would be able to use “this isn’t what she would have wanted” against Flint. This is all very classic for this type of plot beat.

Which is why it’s so great that the show doesn’t go that way. Miranda dies, yes. She dies quickly and brutally and at the hands of a person who didn’t give a fuck about her as a person. But she does get something; she gets to die enraged.

She is the one who sees the clock. She is the one who puts it together. She is the one who weighs the choice: go along with the reconciliation she pushed for and wanted, or take the violent path, with all the miseries of the last ten years and the risk of death?

And she chooses. She dies for it in the very next instant, but she chose.

Which is a hell of a lot more respectful of her as a character than dying still wanting England’s forgiveness would have been.

[chimaerakitten]

Top three “Silver Almost Knows he’s Fictional” moments

“No Billy I’m not dehydrated, it’s just that the weather always matches Flint’s mood.”

“Well you see I do sympathize with your tragic gay backstory but I have noticed a troubling structure to it. Namely that it currently is a perfect fit for the rule of three. As we all know, the classic subversion of the rule of three is a secret fourth instance with an inverted outcome. Therefore I am going to be the one to kill you”

“I’m sorry, best friend. I can’t tell you where I came from. Robert Louis Stevenson wanted me to be mysterious, you see, so he didn’t write me a narratively satisfying childhood.”

[creepygnocchi]

the thing about black sails is you're always thinking about it. years will go by and you're still thinking about it. you're never over it. it's with you forever. you can't move on. you'll return to it again and again in your mind. an experience my good buddy john silver knows all about. come closer. have you heard the story of captain flint

[seaemberthesecond]

I find it very hard to sympathise when characters in black sails are like "Flint is CRAZY!!!! You can't trust him, he'll beat you to DEATH if you get in his way!!!" because like. he's right. he's literally always right. And if you just listened to him, he wouldn't have to beat you to death now, would he? godddd 🙄

[greatviolenceonthatthang]

james flint's most endearing trait is that he understands women to be inherently three-dimensional, complex and deserving of respect (especially for the positions of authority they occupy). in contrast, he is barely convinced that most men have brains.

[hillhouseeleanor]

I know the “Vane called Flint gay for living in a house” thing is funny but I think in all seriousness Vane was calling Flint a class traitor for living in a house which is in some ways much funnier

[fuck-you-jack]

i love these tags so much

[acceptingtheworldasitis]

“I always thought this journey would end in battle. Now, was it turns out, something else ends at the end of this road” - Flint on going to Charles Town, but also of the series

[acceptingtheworldasitis]

Vane in his letter to Eleanor: as long as I draw breath, Nassau is free