hi you seem like a good person to yell about this to even though idek if u watch. so i LOVE black sails, its amazing! so i started watching outlander & i only finished the 1st season and WTF. the villain talking about how hes "embracing his DARKNESS" right before abusing & raping the main male character?his "darkness" is his sexual deviancy & the classic "depraved homosexual" trope?why the fuck is this starzs darling show? why does it get all the attention when black sails is right there? fuck!
Ohhh, nonny. Yeah. The many joys of Rapelander. I watched the first season and then maybe a quarter of 2x01 before I decided enough was enough and I bailed. I honestly don’t understand why Outlander gets so much more praise and attention than Black Sails. It’s truly bizarre. It has good episodes, but overall the storytelling just isn’t on the same level. And the predatory gay trope is the worst of its sins. I know the series is based on books which, much like Poldark, contain outdated themes and ideas of what’s acceptable, but I’m not sure that’s any excuse. The popularity of the books probably explains why so many people watch the show though.
That big, apparently ‘highly anticipated’, rape scene/episode was genuinely one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever watched, tbh. I never want to see it again. I do hope that was deliberate, and I suppose there’s almost something to be said for them not shying away from showing m/m rape and torture in the same graphic way many series show the same things happening to women, and for the fact it seemed like they were going to seriously explore the traumatic effects of that rape in episodes to come (though I didn’t stick around long enough to find out if they did), but that doesn’t make having a gay villain with that particular, apparently singular modus operandi any less horrifying. Can we really not do better than that at this point?
It’s a couple of years since I watched it, so I’m probably forgetting a lot of details, but evil gay not-Claire’s-1940s-husband keeps trying to rape her (and others? or just her?) because of…reasons. Reasons turn out to be that he’s evil and secretly gay and predatory and actually wants to rape her husband because of that one time he popped a boner while basically flaying him alive? Something like that? Maybe there was more to him than that, or maybe he got more development later on, but all I can remember is that. I’m all for morally ambiguous characters, but there didn’t seem to be any ambiguity to him at all. He was just vile because he was evil and his gay darkness made him an incorrigible rapist. I wish that trope would just fuck off and die. It’s disgusting and I’m tired of it.
