#madi

[vampy-campy]

Black Sails IV & XXXI

[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.

[rosettyller]

BLACK SAILS

4x09 ● “XXXVII.”

[blacksailsblr]

BLACK SAILS 4.10 “XXXVIII.”

[brotherconstant]

Black Sails • XXXIV "Before this war began, before everyone's roles changed, your father mistrusted Flint as much as anyone in Nassau did. I assume you were in some contact with him all that time. I'm surprised that his feelings didn't influence you."

[dr-empty]

everyone lives au and flint gets all the bitches do you see the vision

[everythingfeelslike-themovies]

black sails memes (7/?)

[yinza]

Madi for February's portrait!

[Image Description: A digital portrait painting of Madi from Black Sails, as portrayed by Zethu Dlomo. She is shown from a 3/4 angle against a blue background, looking determinedly ahead. /end ID]