happy pride month to those with ambiguous sexualities and loose morals

Quick! Funniest reason for someone to become a villain

Has a crush on the hero and can't be normal about it

if only i could make a flint amv to this polish song called 'black bread and black coffee....'

cause there are. a lot of versions. but the most popular one that's available in actual recorded from isn't the one i mean

wish for season 4: these three get married; James and Madi make fun of John’s terrible jokes for the rest of his life

somewhere on another earth, there aired a groundbreaking show about pirates beginning in 2014. it was almost identical to our universe's black sails, having the same writing, directing and acting, with only the small change that the costume department wasn't afraid of powdered wigs

BLACK SAILS, XXIX

it's interesting to me that torture just works to us, as a literary device. It's everywhere in movies and stories and whatnot, from big-budget dramas to little grindhouse short stories. It fits neatly into the requirements of plot: character doesn't want to offer information, Gets Tortured, has to offer information.

the issue with this is that it isn't how it works.

torture is a display of power. It fouls interrogation, this is known; a person being tortured will tell you whatever you want to hear to make it stop, which is more often than not a lie, made up on the spot, or if the truth an incomplete and useless version of it. It isn't generally done for information's sake anyway, but as a form of what the ancient Greeks called hybris, the violent exhibition of your power over another person.

This is, every once in a great while, done right in fiction, but it's a challenge to write vs. the idea that it's a shortcut to one character revealing plot-critical information to another. Pretty much every form of torture works this way, even the ones that are legally permissible. Psychological torment or physical discomfort also produce an animalistic desire to escape harm and foul interrogation. The forms of torture the cops can do? The cops do it not to gain information (or if they think it will, they're lying to themselves) but because it makes them feel powerful.

There's probably a master's thesis in it for somebody studying the rise of torture as a plot device since the beginning of the war on terror and the contemporaneous development of the Broken Windows theory of policing. I'm not really aware of any similar level of disconnect between what Works in fiction and what happens in real life!

it's interesting to me that torture just works to us, as a literary device. It's everywhere in movies and stories and whatnot, from big-budget dramas to little grindhouse short stories. It fits neatly into the requirements of plot: character doesn't want to offer information, Gets Tortured, has to offer information.

the issue with this is that it isn't how it works.

torture is a display of power. It fouls interrogation, this is known; a person being tortured will tell you whatever you want to hear to make it stop, which is more often than not a lie, made up on the spot, or if the truth an incomplete and useless version of it. It isn't generally done for information's sake anyway, but as a form of what the ancient Greeks called hybris, the violent exhibition of your power over another person.

This is, every once in a great while, done right in fiction, but it's a challenge to write vs. the idea that it's a shortcut to one character revealing plot-critical information to another. Pretty much every form of torture works this way, even the ones that are legally permissible. Psychological torment or physical discomfort also produce an animalistic desire to escape harm and foul interrogation. The forms of torture the cops can do? The cops do it not to gain information (or if they think it will, they're lying to themselves) but because it makes them feel powerful.

There's probably a master's thesis in it for somebody studying the rise of torture as a plot device since the beginning of the war on terror and the contemporaneous development of the Broken Windows theory of policing. I'm not really aware of any similar level of disconnect between what Works in fiction and what happens in real life!

chewing glass over eleanor handing madi this piece of FLINT to start this fire

BLACK SAILS, XXIX

Ending a dramatic, tragic series on a joke that’s a) genuinely funny and b) connects in a meaningful way to the themes of the show is really A++, I mean honestly.

(source) 

Reveal of the most iconic pirate flag of all time.

Jack Rackham: Meh.

@we-are-pirate, @we-are-scarlet-corsair

flint’s earring(s) throughout the seasons

#okay.#so obviously this is great#but aside from it being a Typical Gay Move to cut off all his hair and change his earring#there’s actually more to it than that#and I can’t stop thinking about it so I have to reblog this again to rant#one of the main reasons that pirates wore gold earrings specifically#was so that if they died there would be enough on them to pay for their funeral#(or to send back to their loved ones to help them get by if a burial is impractical)#so Flint choosing to swap out the gold earring is also him saying that there’s nobody left to care if he gets a proper burial#now that Miranda is gone#there’s no one left to mourn him

hey man how are the hauntings

NATIONAL HOLIDAY

[ID: Two screencaps from Black Sails ep X showing John SIlver standing alone beneath a skylight in the ship's galley. Captions show him saying "An account of goings-on, volume the first on this 13th day in June". End ID]

It was the only way to start it. The resistance in Nassau is now underway.

We are many, they are few. To fear death is a choice, and they can’t hang us all. CHARLES VANE, SEASON 3