PERRO RABIOSO

(a black sails side blog so i can be annoying)

[kabaks]

no light, no light (x)

[ash-is-mythical]

"John Silver was the only pirate captain flint feared" is a narrative by Silver because he couldn't handle what it actually was and how he pushed away the man he loved back.

[maremote]

imagine you're an actor on black sails. you're just some random dude from australia or america doing shitty acting jobs (or royalty/maggie smiths son). then you get a part in this big pirate show. you get dumped in south africa and you're kind of just stuck there for four years. you spend it obsessively rehearsing and delivering the best performances of any of your lives in arguably one of the craziest stories ever told. then afterwards you go back to america or australia or england and for the rest of your life play side characters in like. The Flash and Umbrella Academy. or narrate pirate smut audiobooks. Crazy

[maremote]

or if you're zach mcgowan now ur playing a dogfucker on the boys

[fagflint]

silver is so fuckable in s2 bc flint wants to fuck him. he pressed that dude against the wall and put a knife to his throat and found out he was actually being smart and his dick got naturally hard for the first time in 10 years. the only reason he didnt proposition silver is bc he knows silver is a liar and a thief and could 100% blackmail him so instead flint allows there to be this very thick sexual tension in the hopes that Silver will crack and do something about it. alas. silver is insane.

[fagflint]

guy who is rediscovering what it feels like to be actually sexually aroused after ten years of pure grief and rage

[santners]

BLACK SAILS | 1.04

[lyuricheva]

any conversation about who could play odysseus well (as opposed to the obvious terrible choice matt damon) is inane, in my view, because it’s already been done and served by toby stephens of maggie smith’s son fame in an acclaimed yet underwatched show black sails under the name james “flint”—

[baldflintfucks]

ok fuckboy calm down

[fagflint]

he doesnt even let us hear him scream. we barely even see him, just other people reacting to it. im going to be violently ill

[fagflint]

its crucial for the rest of the story that we know it Happened. but we dont get to see it. we dont get to hear it. we only get to see other peoples' reactions to it. we dont see any of the healing time we get cut to 2 weeks later and then Multiple Months later. guys guys guys remember john silver. i wish i could stop.

[fagflint]

#and when I SAY that silver's privacy (adjacent to his shame) is the driving force behind what the camera chooses to elide #we watch the other characters live through atrocities. we hear them get raped tortured murdered #we even watch flint have bad sex #but when silver approaches any of those things we cut away #I know other people conceptualize the show as being About Flint for the first half before shifting to be About Silver #but silver has this level of meta-control over the editing of black sails itself even in the PILOT #we watch flint kill a lot of people in the pilot. we don't watch silver kill the cook #we watch max and eleanor have sex in the pilot. we don't watch silver have an orgy #when silver says 'you know all of me I can bear to be known' the you is plural and he is talking to the audience @lichfucker

exactly. idek what else there is to say

[dilfdyke]

just saw a tiktok (sorry) saying its gonna be pirate romance summer over clips of will/elizabeth and some other straight couple and then. eleanor/vane. with the caption "watch black sails". and like whatever gets ppl watching but i cant help and imagine whatever straight girlies turning on black sails expecting to see vane be some hopeless romantic to eleanors self insert and instead seeing them immediately punch each other followed by max/eleanor extended lesbian sex scene. pirate romance summer indeed

[aoya]

I was scrolling through old drawings. Found this one from 2019. Not that bad, actually.

[fuck-you-jack]

imagine being the tattoo artist on nassau. perfect job. you get to hang out with all the hot people without having to join a pirate crew or work at the brothel. you get bonny and vane breathing down your neck while you put a kind of fuckass dog on rackham's ribs. you give flint a little moon and he doesn't say a single word the whole time. you think he's secretly gay and you're right

[nohtora]

THIS IS NOT WHAT I WANTED

based on Ilya Repin's 'Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan', 1581

[aquatransmissaest]

Often neglect to think about the true extent of all that's wrong with him as Silver's inimitable form of batshittery keeps me occupied but. He was up there! He WILL receive a consolation prize for how much he enjoys causing a fright

[aquatransmissaest]

Could scrounge up a few more. He's reliable like that. But the LAST TWO are different from the rest because those grins are involuntary—they are not curated to induce fear or a sign of his typical amusement at garnering that sort of reaction. They are instances of unmixed sadistic enjoyment prompted by genuine distress that he is the cause of, which is somewhat rare for this guilt-ridden motherfucker. The one on the Maria Aleyne makes plain his thrilling in retribution, and he grins when he sees Hamilton Sr. (and his companion) begging for his life on his knees. Understandable, I mean. To say the least. The one with Silver in 3x01 stood out because it was an abrupt and real flash of a smile that was totally incongruous with the rest of his detached (i.e. depressive) affect which remained otherwise intact until the shark hunt. The hurt (and fear, decide what kind) he saw on Silver's face was able to reach past the apathy to access satisfaction, however fleeting. This isn't a defining aspect of who he really is, but we know he has examined this tendency in himself (see: "because it feels good" conversation with Billy, "cloaks itself in whatever it must" conversation with Silver), and he speaks of it like a pattern of behaviour, because it is. Him being aware he does most of what he does because some part of him, however small, likes it that way is made all the more remarkable as he's introspective enough to know beforehand exactly how much he's going to suffer for it. Miracle that for somebody with his specific set of Problems, he managed to function like a normal-adjacent person on the daily. Just as soon as he found some things he thought were worth freely pouring all his love into

[aquatransmissaest]

The little scaring Silver mostly for kicks bit right before parallel parking the ship was so good too. Flint just likes scaring people. He thinks it's funny even when he isn't trying to be evil. It's as simple as that

[eldritchmacncheese]

head in my fucking hands because flint unlocks real care for silver after the damn shark date (when he has no one else to possibly attach to) (when silver has made himself vulnerable out of sheer necessity) and silver asks pre-battle about flint's past but he doesn't even think to return the favor until the cliff scene weeks (months?) later. and silver's Thing of course requires that this frightens him. he can't be known but he wants and needs love anyway. and flint gives as much as he can but because of who they are it is incomplete on both sides. like we knew this. we've known this.

but i think about vane and how his trauma mirrors silver in some ways, and how he isn't afraid for his past to be known. he WANTS to be understood. his problem, as a foil for silver, is that while others want to know silver, others do NOT want to know vane. anne knows where he goes when he leaves nassau to confront albinus, but she either doesn't care or has so staunchly squashed her emotions that it's functionally the same. eleanor refuses to know vane because it suits her vanity for him to be an emotionless animal straining at the leash. teach knows vane, but he uses that knowledge to also put him on a leash. and rackham uses the fact that he knows vane so well to excuse what he does with that knowledge. in a lot of ways, vane is just as friendless as silver and flint.

i think silverflint is real in that the connection and the love is there. but the monstrousness of silver's past warps that love so badly that silver can never acknowledge it, and flint can never properly address it. so it can never be consummated in any sense of the word.

but vane and flint see each other. flint doesn't share his story with vane on purpose, but i think he definitely overheard at least part of the conversation with miranda in the tavern — and vane doesn't use that information against him. then given the nature of vane's letter to eleanor, flint definitely knows at least part of vane's story — and it's that knowledge which allows flint to tell him to forget about debts and oaths and decide for himself who he is. maybe the first time in vane's life he has ever been given that option.

all of this is cemented in charlestown: when vane realizes their common purpose and articulates it in the bluntest possible manner, and when flint repays that trust by protecting the remainder of vane's crew afterward.

to be seen is to be loved.

[aquatransmissaest]

Did the crew notice that Flint kept dedicating actual time and effort into maintaining his physical appearance under continued threat of gruesome and terrible demise. Everyone is splayed out on deck decaying beneath the pitiless sun raving about how the lord has abandoned them. Silver is gutting eels and catching on to pathetic fallacy through the power of desiccation and driving his mountain of a friend out of his goddamn mind about it. They are rotting away and they look like it. Yet their grief-riddled bloodthirsty ex-navy ultra-despotic mass-murdering gayass captain that they really fucking hate is still dressing head to toe in black and holing up in his gloomy fucking quarters to shave his own head and groom his beard to picture perfection. Suicidally depressed but won't get caught dead looking sloppy

[jaynovz]

Listen. A lot of John Silver meta posts are like 75% there. And the part that gets on my nerves is the *intent*

Assertations that this character is constantly purely calculating and self-aware and consciously scheming and in control are the things that really rub me the wrong way. It discards the strength of the performance and editing and script and the things that that performance indicates as far as expressing vulnerability or lowering the mask.

Does he still keep like five different layers up even while trying to lower two of them? Yeah, of course, we see that on screen.

But for me where a lot of these Silver takes fall short is failing to acknowledge that the character himself doesn't even realize that he's lying half the time because he's the best at lying to himself. And that it's self-defense mechanism and survival instinct and that it's just like breathing. It's a default state.

For many of these interactions, especially with Madi and Flint in s3 and s4, he often thinks he's being truthful.

Anyway, it would be good for people to keep in mind that John Silver is not actually a malicious super villain and is in fact a deeply traumatized and tragic figure.

[jaynovz]

Something else that I see pretty frequently that's been weighing on me--

The assertion that Silver showing vulnerability specifically via his disability is a conscious and malicious manipulation. Frankly, not only does it creep insidiously into ableism when folks assert that he is using his disability as a manipulation tactic, it also doesn't line up with the rest of what we're shown in canon which is that this is a person who the very implication of being taken care of or being weak makes him want to crawl out of his skin.

He says this point blank to Muldoon in 3.2, in fact, and then again to Madi in 3.6, and then again Flint mentions it in 4.9 on the cliffs. That he knows Silver finds it intolerable to be seen as weak, but for the sake of sword training it's going to be better to use the crutch.

There are many other examples but those are the three coming to mind right now. John Silver is a man whose worst fear is to not be able to run and to not be self-sufficient and then the narrative puts him in his worst nightmare.

Therefore anytime he lets the walls down and allows himself to lean on someone, for Madi and Flint both, this is in fact a big show of trust and love. The narrative itself communicates this to us through the aforementioned conversations and, on a personal level, it echoes resonantly into the real world--

For my disabilities and for the disabilities of the people closest to me... Yeah, that's how it is. You only display that weakness to people who are heavily vetted, who you trust and love. Because of how cruel the world is and how unforgiving and unwilling to empathize people usually are. It's a leap of faith every time.

So yeah, just food for thought when you're writing meta about the character. Think about how it sounds to call a disabled character manipulative for showing vulnerability with regards to their disability.

[santners]

BLACK SAILS | 1.06 - VI.

[an-inexplicable-delight]

[image description: Black Sails gifset of Flint and the Walrus crew boarding another ship by moonlight. Pirates carry goods across a plank between the ships, and a cannon is hoisted onto the Walrus. Flint looks over the scene while holding onto the rigging, then walks out onto a beam while the wind blows his coat around him. Letter, the Walrus sails away while the other ship burns in the distance. End ID]