only tangentially related but I think of it every time this post starts getting notes again:
listen. I love slut silver interpretations. I do. they're very good and very fun. love to read 'em, love to joke about 'em, love to write 'em. but what the black sails canon actually shows us is a silver who is incredibly repressed.
by "repressed" I do mean closeted— silver IS deeply closeted and in denial of his bisexuality— but I don't ONLY mean closeted. I mean that, textually and metatextually, sex and physical intimacy for silver are completely walled off. they are behind a locked door, and the audience is only allowed to catch a glimpse by staring through the keyhole.
to back up for a bit and address my own point from the original post, silver doesn't seduce flint. silver doesn't seduce anyone. we see him employ a wide variety of manipulation tactics throughout the series, but seduction is never one of them. he plays up his youthful naivete in s1 to make people underestimate him; he becomes the shit-stirrer, the provocateur, giving his addresses to make the men turn on each other instead of turning on him; he makes a spectacle of his own disability to incite fear; he uses humor; he uses threats and intimidation; he uses outright lies. he NEVER uses sex. eleanor, miranda, vane, idelle, max— all of them use sex as part of a power play at some point or another, to gain some sort of leverage. there are probably more on that list I'm forgetting! but silver is not one of them.
text and metatext. okay. we don't see silver fuck.
we skirt around silver fucking. we see the beginning and end of the pilot orgy, and we see him in bed with madi immediately after fucking. but we do not see the fucking. even in flint's one miserable sex scene with miranda when he's barely participating, we see the act on camera! but silver's scenes cut around it. there is a vulnerability in intimacy that is being shielded from the eyes of the audience.
and even in those scenes peripheral to sex, silver's mind is elsewhere. max calls him out after the orgy for being more focused on the schedule in his pocket than on the handful of women supposedly pleasuring him. while basking in the post-orgasm glow, what he wants to talk about with madi is the spreading legend of long john silver and whether or not she should trust flint. he's in the brothel nearly every episode in the first two seasons and he is only ever there on business. his interest in sex is either minimal or deliberately obscured— and I'm inclined toward the latter given his awareness of narrative, his resentment of narrative, and his desperation to escape narrative. the most vulnerable parts of silver's life are the parts he refuses to let the audience see.
silver's not a prude. he's not completely celibate. he feels sexual attraction, and occasionally he acts on it. but that action is private. that action is rare. his scheming is frequent and front-facing. if seduction were EVER to be part of a scheme, he'd have to unlock the door of his sexuality and leave it open for scrutiny by the other characters, by the audience, by the narrative, by himself— and silver, through four seasons of black sails, is entirely unwilling to do that.
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