@eastofeden1955 - Tumblr Blog

hey wait can i post here again

Just re-watched 3x09 and noticed that the relationship between Eleanor and Vane is like a twisted version of The Beauty and the Beast.

In the fairy tale, the Beast captures the father; the daughter willingly takes his place and becomes a prisoner of the Beast instead. In time, she learns to love the Beast (which psychologists interpret as her learning to accept and humanize her own sexuality -- the "bestial", instinctive part of her self) and consequently, the Beast is transformed into a handsome prince.

In the case of Vane and Eleanor, the beast captures the father (Richard). The father offers to deliver his own daughter to the beast, to sacrifice her in order to save himself. The beast refuses and kills the father. The daughter refuses to believe that her own father betrayed her and directs her hate towards the beast. In her eyes, the beast remains bestial; in the end, Eleanor refuses to recognize Vane's humanity.

Her last words to Vane:

You're deformed. Unformed. Flesh, bone, and bile, and missing all that which takes shape through a mother's love. You cannot comprehend what you took from me or why it was good, because there is no goodness in you. There is no humanity in you, no capacity for compromise, nor instinct toward repair, nor progress. Nor forgiveness. You are an animal.

#black sails

coolguycy

Girlboy with a he/him pin on one sleeve and a she/her pin on the other. Two people sitting on either side of her aggressively correcting each other on his pronouns

*her pronouns

*his pronouns

@ckbriefs

there are a million ways that one can and should tie black sails to treasure island and examine how the show has fundamentally shifted the entire structure of the novel (in a million phenomenal ways i admit theyre all really fantastic ways) but one of the most bizarrely satisfying changes that has resulted from black sails giving a narrative to the history of Treasure Island is how it changes the introduction of Billy Bones and John Silver in the novel.

this isn’t really an intelligent post i’m a little too brain rotted today for that but in the novel Billy Bones is very much your cliched old sailor who’s kind of going insane from years being marooned and dealing with life on the sea, etc, and most adaptations make him a healthy mix of unnerving but also generally kind to Jim Hawkins. You’re supposed to look at him and sympathize with him as the old sailor who’s on the run from pirates and you are supposed to feel some kind of fear or momentary grief when he gets the black spot and dies at the arrival of the infamous Long John Silver at the Benbow Inn.

but by making him the one responsbile for Long John Silver, by making him the puppeteer in the creation of this myth that takes John Silver and molds him against his will into this now dethroned king of pirates, and giving us the fallout of their entire relationship through s3 and s4, it changes the entire confrontation from an innocent if not haunted old sailor fearing for his life to a man knowing full fuckin well that he is going to one day further answer for the actions he took.

rather than making him just the cliche monstrous pirate, it places Silver in the role of avenger coming to settle this account that has been open and festering like a wound for decades, allowing him to not only try and get his hands on the map to Flint’s teasure (a significant point of closure of course) but to also make sure that Billy has recieved his own Black Spot and answers to it. To get a little bit of closure for himself as well under the guise of hunting Flint’s treasure.

your empathy as a reader is meant of course to be entirely with Jim and his mother but there is an arguement that could be made that by offering this history, black sails has placed the reader’s spare empathy entirely on silver, changing a narrative thats been established sinced the books publication in 1883

when i say the depth black sails offers to an otherwise unreliably narrated novel (that i never the less have loved since childhood) makes me go absolutely insane this is 100% the kind of shit im talking about

#black sails

maremote

fuck but really silver is just. endlessly trying to find a person to be who will be safe and will not be hurt. and it just doesn't fucking work. he is just endlessly trying to live up to the person he feels he is supposed to be, that will put him in a position of protection. first he thinks the money will do it. then memorizing the schedule. and then he knows ingratiating himself to flint will do it because he wants to live. we might be friends by then. and then in season 2 he's sort of started to subconsciously realize ok i don't just need to be someone this guy likes i also kind of. want to be someone this guy likes. i want to be this guy's right hand man. and then to be protected he needs to be someone that the men love. so he becomes that. but then end of season 2 it comes crashing down because in the course of just trying to fuckin not get murked he made people care about him and now he cares about them and for the first time, he doesn't morph into the persona that will keep him safe, he doesn't take the opportunity out (its a sickness truly) and he loses his leg. and now he needs the men. and now its season 3 and hes like oh fuck oh no i am no longer amorphous. i am visible. i am the one legged creature. and i care about this motherfucker. for some reason it bothers me. this is not supposed to happen. he is not supposed ot have there. he is not supposed to have me in a place where i care about him. this impedes my ability to effortlessly morph into whatever i need to be. i am not supposed to be in a place where i care more about him than i care about being the person i'm supposed to be in this relationship, the person who will not get hurt.

#black sails

captmuldoon

Black Sails saying ghosts can linger in objects (”Know no shame”). Black Sails saying we can be haunted by what we cannot give a face (the Black Shadow that follows Flint). Black Sails saying we can be haunted by what we did not do. (”That I did not go after him. That instead I listened to you.”) That we can be haunted by what has been taken from us before we even had it. (”How can we sacrifice so much and have nothing to show for it?”). That we can exist as different phases though we are one person (Miranda with her wound, Miranda dripping in sea water, Miranda the screaming siren, Miranda in London society, Miranda in Nassau - seeing what Flint cannot see yet). That we can be haunted by another’s memory (”You killed a friend of mine. Her name was Charlotte, and you did it for reasons that had nothing to do with her.”). That we might only live on as something that was never us at all but what someone else understood us to be (Eleanor knitting in silence, faceless). Just…Black Sails and ghosts and how ghosts may not always be true to what the person actually but what we believed them to be or for the future we wanted or the consequences we forgot that continue to haunt another.

#black sails

knifeeater

I think it’s so significant that the first time the word ‘darkness’ falls in Black Sails is from the mouth of a colonial fleet officer. because of course 'the thing that’s in all men’ that he is describing is rage and the hunger for power and of course Flints is 'darker’ because he’s a homosexual and it becomes this self fulfilling prophecy because the marginalized are kept in a state in which rage or surrender become the only possible responses to being denied their power. this is what he describes to Silver as the darkness because that’s how he knows to describe it. and of course Silver is hungry for power of story but if he’s honest (which he most likely never truly is, at least not to himself) he feels it also in the way that Flint tells it, when they sit around the fire in the dark. he feels it when he bashes Dufraines ableist face in. and of course he falls in love with Madi who describes a similar thing as Flint so differently and leads her people not through fear but the shared community of Black experience in the face of a dehumanizing imperial power. I think this has been said before but this is why Flint only reaches his full potential when he finds the alliance with the maroons/Madi, because through this he recognizes the inner workings of the machine that is colonial power and that true revolutionary power can only exist in solidarity between people united by their being expelled as the other of civilization. and it’s the one thing Silver can’t ever truly reckon with because he is no one, he has no identity and thus can never acknowledge his own experience as one that is used to draw the borders of proper society. he sees the 'darkness’ only as rage, he is unable to see the transformative power of rage against opression that Flint describes to him in the dragon speech.

#YEAH #was thinking about this yesterday #black sails

maremote

The most fascinating and undoubtedly my favourite aspect of the way Black Sails references and reinterpets Classics (in this post, classics = ancient Greek & Roman) is not any singular instance of reincorporation. It's not the parallels between Julius and Julius Caesar, Augustus Featherstone and Augustus (Octavian), Miranda and Clytemenestra/Cassandra, the Homer references, or even the fact that the first half of season 3 is essentially the plot of book 1 of Virgil's Aeneid. It's not even how skilfully these references are inserted so that you can totally miss them if you're not looking.

It's the fact that they're there at all. I go a little bit crazy if I think about this so much because it's not a meaningless incorporation at all, it's the direct opposite of referencing something "just because you can." It means SO MUCH that Black Sails is drawing so heavily on the study of Classics because that study was so incredibly directly in British imperialism and colonialism. Historically, not just in Britain, studies of the classics were used as major templates and justifications for colonialism. The Athenians were a democracy. They believed, theoretically, that you shouldn't impose your way of life on others, that you should be tolerant and all should be equal. They were also heavily imperialist, arguing that their empire was a gift and if they relented their military presence their ability to preserve their ideals of freedom and democracy would be compromised. The British Empire literally based their system of imperalism directly off of the Roman Empire. The system we see in Black Sails, of governors and provinces, was taken directly from the Romans.

So it is so. fucking cool that a story not only tackling imperialism and colonialism, but also tackling the stories that allow imperialism and colonialism to continue, is using and reinterpreting classics like this. It's so fucking perfect. "These are the stories they tell their children." "This is how they survive." "England survives because we cannot imagine a world without her." These same stories of Virgil, Aeschylus, Homer, etc, are all part of a bank of narratives used by imperialist forces to justify the historical basis of their imperialism. their reincorporation makes so much fucking sense jdkfjdkfkdfjkdfjd

#black sails

diasdelfuego

it was love that did [them] in

sources —

#YEAH #black sails #fave

crepuscularqueens

What happens when somebody tells a story that has real people in it? What happens to the story; what happens to the teller; what happens to the people?

- Devil House, John Darnielle

[image description: 10 edited stills from black sails in muted colors.

image 1: still from season four episode four of Flint and Madi giving each other significant looks while Silver faces away from the audience and towards them. text reads: “What happens when somebody tells a story that has real people in it?”

image 2: still from season four episode three of Madi and Flint walking outdoors along a path together, Madi is on the left and Flint on the right. they are looking at each other while talking

image 3: still from from the same scene of Flint beginning to walk away from Madi but looking back at her, Madi looking in profile so Flint can see her face

image 4: still from season four episode ten of Silver on skeleton island, pointing a gun at Flint, looking conflicted. caption reads: “What happens”

image 5: still of the same scene focused on Flint, he looks clearly upset and resigned, there is an injury on the right side of his face. caption reads: “to the story;”

image 6: still from season four episode ten of Silver after he tells Madi what happened to Flint, as he is leaving, slightly looking back towards her. caption reads: “what happens”

image 7: still from the same episode of Silver when Madi comes to find him sitting on the sandy hill above the ocean afterwards. he is beginning to stand, using his crutch for support. caption reads: “to the teller;”

image 8: still from the same episode of Silver as he gets to the end of telling Madi what happened to Flint, Madi is out of focus and Silver stands behind her. caption reads: “what happens”

image 9: still from the same scene and angle as previous picture, this time Madi is in focus and Silver isn’t, reduced to a figure standing in shadow behind her. Madi looks upset. caption reads: “to the people?”

image 10: still of Madi and Silver on the sandy hill over looking the ocean. Madi is standing on a path and Silver is beginning to walk towards her

end i.d.]

#....#black sails

dhomochevski

And I think– once again, I don’t think the rage was what was so scary. He said he recognized the rage in himself and he saw– which is when he talks about the rage. He saw it there and I think the deflation– he had that. He was like, I want to see the world burn, and then after it, the moment Madi is back, it’s like, oh, that was– god– I mean, he got a glimpse and even if he doesn’t still see Flint is completely that, he got a window into it that he wouldn’t have otherwise, and I think what– for me, it wasn’t that he thought it was rage at the end, which is why this needed to be stopped. The scariest thing for him was that Flint forgave him. That he was that– just that he was that stubborn. That he was that immovable, and whether it’s about rage or not, once again, I think that clarity– that Flint’s clarity of like “it’s fine, we’ll put it back together”. (Luke Arnold)

#black sails

theedorksinlove

JOHN SILVER & CAPTAIN FLINT ↳ black sails ✗ 01.02 - II.

#his gay ass bellyflop #black sails

dhomochevski

I think in both sides you see Silver struggling to– in a way wishing he could be someone else and maybe someone bigger and maybe someone with more, maybe someone more like Flint or more like these other people around him, but being that awful feeling when you know you just aren’t or can’t do that thing and can’t go to that place within yourself, and people have that in life and people have it in relationships all the time, when you’re going “fuck, I wish I could go there. I wish I could be there with you on this thing and it’s just not in me”. (Luke Arnold)

#black sails