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thinking about how all the lannisters want to be people they can never be. Jaime wants to be the archetype of the honourable knight that fundementally can't exist outside of The Book of Brothers and whenever he tries to be like them it all comes crashing down, being branded a kingslayer, losing his hand. Tyrion, for all his posturing, wants to be more than 'the imp', 'the halfman', the freak. he's made his peace with the fact that he never will be, but he still gets the women he pays to fuck him call him 'the giant of a lannister' Cersei, in the least transgender way one could possibly say such a thing, wants to be a man. or at least, hates the powerlessness of being a woman in a pre-feminist patriarchal society and wants to be a man to unfetter herself and actually just wield power like the men around her do so freely. (she also definitely isn't cis but also isn't self aware enough to figure that out without any frame of reference).

and Tywin, descendant of the greatest trickster in westeros and the house that lived up to that for centuries, wanting nothing more than to be the dignified, important house that the highgardens were, and though he never pulls it off, he fakes it well enough for his kids to believe they could too.

the epitome of fake it till you make it. but they never make it and never will

Note how Jorah blames his exile on Ned for literally doing his job rather than confronting his pattern of poor decision-making. He married a girl he had just met in what could be described as a decision made in the drunken, heat of the moment based purely on infatuation. He found Lynesse was used to the luxury of being the daughter of one of the wealthiest lords in the Seven Kingdoms, and Jorah ended up running out of money to provide the luxuries to keep her content. Rather than admit the marriage wasn’t working out like he planned and have it annulled, he employed the sunk cost fallacy, and ended up selling his own smallfolk to slavers. That just resulted on bringing down Ned upon him and made him flee in exile. 

His comments of it being over “lice-ridden poachers” shows a clear classist contempt as well as lack of concern for the smallfolk. Nor is it exclusive to Westerosi peasants as it’s carried over into Essos where he states children captured could be brought over a grueling march to Meereen to be sold for the purpose of being made into sex slaves. 

It can be said that the seeds for his dismissal from Daenerys’s court was seen in that exchange. His self-interested, amoral. pro-slaving attitude towards the downtrodden clashed with Daenerys’s compassion towards them with him enslaving free people while Daenerys freed the enslaved. His refusal to accept responsibility and face accountability for his actions did him no favors when Daenerys confronted him over his spying on her, and had the same result: he was forced to leave in exile.  

Jorah ultimately had to leave because he no longer fit with the vision of what Daenerys was trying to achieve in Slaver’s Bay and his own character flaws made him a liability.  

Miranda's S2 journey is soooo good. She had mentioned the Maria Aleyne to Flint knowing what he'd do, because she also craved the consequences. She desperately wanted that violent revenge and now she feels she might need, under Peter Ashe's gaze, to face judgement for it.

And instead she sits there and—notices. Ashe has a sedate, handsomely furnished outpost of Empire, and it is shadowy and still. It exists in near-silence but for the ticking of the grandfather clock by the window which, as it ticks onwards, seems increasingly familiar.

Ashe has listened to their proposal and returns to sit opposite Flint, Miranda in the middle of the table between them. Visually, she sits in judgement of the scene. Ashe proposes a return for Flint to England, to become once again James McGraw, and for him to prostrate himself before the country and become before all the world a flawed man, a man that England can relate to, and offer its forgiveness.

Forgiveness! Miranda shoots a burning look to Flint, who is not looking her way. This ends when I grant them my forgiveness, not the other way around, she might think. And it might—it might be possible to let Flint shake Ashe's hand and for him to be trusted in this moment. She knows what the consequences will be if she indicates otherwise, but once again, she craves them.

How dare Ashe act like he's the dignified man, the man who deigns to offer them a path forward, even if it is strewn with endless, biting humiliations and defeats? Forgiveness? What forgiveness are you entitled to while you stand back in the shadows, pushing James out in front of the world to be laid bare for the sake of the truth? Tell me, sir, when does the truth about your sins come to light?

It's honestly so good. Fucking incredible how she's written.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Vane’s remark to Flint in 3.08 while they’re in Miranda’s house: “I can understand a woman’s desire for domesticity, but a man’s? That, I can’t understand.”

There’s obviously some degree of sexism in play, especially due to the influence Blackbeard has had on him, but I think that conclusion is far too simplistic.

This remark comes after Vane’s spent the season watching the once-independent Eleanor in his eyes recede into a life of domesticity in order to retain some semblance of power in Nassau. Even from afar, he sees what this has done to her and why she has done it to herself. In his eyes, then, submitting to domesticity is submitting to civilization. 

He makes this point explicit after Flint questions his initial statement. In response, he tells Flint: “had I that instinct [for domesticity], I would resist it with every inch of will I could muster. For that is the single most dangerous weapon they possess, the one they tempt. ‘Give us your submission, and we will give you the comfort you need.’ No, I can think of no measure of comfort worth that price.” 

His beheading of Richard Guthrie was a misguided attempt to set Eleanor free from this need for civlization’s domesticity, and the result of it has made Eleanor cling even more tightly to domesticity.

So his statement is not just “women are weak and men are strong,” but rather an assessment of how civilization forces women to give up their power and why women would choose this option.

God the dynamic between Flint and Silver is just

I can’t stand you. I need you. You’re the only thing I’m loyal to. I’m betraying you as we speak. I trust you. I don’t trust you. I will never trust you with my past. I’ll see you through this. I’ve put good men in the ground for you, and I’d do it again. I’m done with you. There is no daylight between us. I’ll stand here with you for a year until you find a way to accept that we will never stand together again.

eleanor guthrie really is such an interesting examination of white femininity and in a way, girl boss culture. like she finds out that scott has been supporting the maroon camp for years without her noticing, using the tools at his disposal (which included her) and her response is to be offended that “yet another man manipulated her and used her for his own devices”. no contemplation of their power dynamics. no questioning of herself and her ignorance. no consideration of race. no questioning of her own position as a fucking slave owner. she immediately casts herself as the victim simply because she is a Woman. it seems like gender is the only axis of power she’s capable of seeing and understanding herself as a part of, maybe because it’s the one where she can most clearly see herself as being marginalized. “too many goddamn men here” shut the fuck UP eleanor

the mistake is in thinking silver starts out relatively well-adjusted and then goes crazy during the course of the show. no. he starts out hollow and he ends up hollow. he’s a black hole. a non-person forced by circumstances to become something akin to a real human being for a while but of course he doesn’t know how to do that, how to sustain that, he knows only hunger, he consumes but can never be filled. so he kills and eats the person he was becoming. and he’s still hungry afterwards.

Flint is an example for the dangers of opening yourself up to love and therefore loss. Silver is an example for the dangers of not accepting that both love and loss are a necessary and inevitable part of life. The lesson is that they both get hurt but only one of them is alone in the end.

ive always just thought that black sails was kind of a nothing title for a show that has so much to it (and also didnt really make sense to me bc their sails literally arent black, thats their flags??)

but yesterday i happened across a summary of some of the founding myths of athens, and in that, crete had been taking 14 young people from athens every year to get sacrificed to the minotaur. theseus and his crew set out on a journey to stop this, and his father king aegeus knew that with how strong theseus was that this was what needed to be done to put an end to this.

but still he was scared of the idea of his son dying in the process, so he asked theseus to put black sails on his ship, and change them to white sails on his way back if he was still alive so he could know before the ship reached shore.

theseus did survive, but forgot to change his sails to white. in seeing the black sails as theseus’s ship came back to shore, aegeus didn’t wait to see, and jumped off a cliff into the sea to kill himself in his grief. the aegean sea was named after him.

so like well. thinking about this in more abstract terms in the context of black sails’s themes of the power of hegemony vs the need for revolutionary optimism. the questions of how much of one's own domesticity they're willing to sacrifice in the face of the fight for a better world and the leaps of faith and hope required to still work towards that better world in the face of that and. Um.

since the debate about whether or not silver lied about flint in the finale is making the rounds again i thought abt it again and my conclusion is not necessarily that silver lied and killed him, but that silver lied about Something.

i am not sure about which part, it could be anything from flint being dead to flint being in savannah but thomas being dead to flint getting shipped to london idk idk! somewhere in the story he is telling is a lie and even if it only was that he would wait a day, a month, a year

because i think the thing is that when he sold the war for madi THAT was true. that was his grand gesture of truth. but i dont even think it was about her, i think that choice was about him admitting to himself that if he let this war happen this would turn Too Big, Too Visible and too final for him to weasel out of in case he ever needed to. no more place to run for someone who is a nobody from nowhere u know? he needed to get the fuck OUT of there

and for the record i don't think that made his love for madi any less true i think he really thought he loved her but i think he never understood her the way flint did and this was just the breaking point where he was unable to fill the space flint and madi made for him anymore and snapped back into his old self-preservational habits bc he was under a lot of stress and pressure except This Time, unlike before, his actions affected others as well and he cared about it

and as much as silver is obv the most repressed guy alive i think he is v much self aware, at least insofar as that awareness extends to others' perception of him. so i think he Knew this truth would be unforgivable and i am sure he also knew how madi would react, bc he knows her principles, even if he cannot necessarily rationalize or understand them himself, so he knew he would lose her for this (flint voice you're too smart not to know this) but :) he loves her! and he is loved by her! and from what we know of him this seems to be something incredibly rare and unprecedented for him he is literally starved for care and affection bc he is Mr Detached Solo Nobody Fakename plus lbr he is pathetic ♡ so obviously he would try to hold onto that love despite the betrayal! but how?

and that is where i think the lie comes in: imo he had a lie Somewhere In All Of This to soften the truths impact bc he knew what would happen and even if he saw no other way around it he wished there was another way around it (there was. just not to him not like this) so he lied to make it less terrible bc what can a lying liar who lies do when he knows the truth is the worst thing to say?

treasure island john silver laughing and cajoling and manipulating his way back to the place where he last mattered....finally making another human connection and betraying it yet again so that he can dig up the proof of his former existence, becoming one of the greatest villains of children's literature and fulfilling flint's curse...

so i’m watching black sails, and i’ve been having thoughts about s1-s2 and why they feel different from each other and how it serves the narrative.

so, the first impression from s1 was that somebody lied to me and the show is just your average one. like you see the characters who act a certain way, but you can’t tell why the hell they are doing what they are doing. see, eleanor, flint, they say what they’re doing it for, but it’s not what actually drives them, as we discover later. but in the beginning it still feels shallower and simpler than it is. even the relationship between eleanor and vane seems to have a completely different power structure (at first, the viewer is lead to expect the usual toxic dynamic with vane as the abuser, but i’d argue that eleanor has always had all the power, whenever she was with him, she used it for her political ambitions). or ned low who we expect to be the villain of the season and then he’s very quickly decapitated (bc he isn’t not the true villain of the story). there are many examples, but the point is that the viewer in s1 (and partly in s2) is an outsider to the story, is making assumptions based on what we are used to seeing in media, on the expectations and tropes we all subconsciously know and naturally employ to interpret situations when lacking information and later hold these interpretations as the ultimate and indisputable truth. and then they start debunking all that. the viewer begins to learn the truth, begins to immerse into the story.

and this experience of the viewer is necessary to the following dismantlement of the idea of “civilization”. this is the word being thrown left and right in s2, and it’s no coincidence that right until miranda is dead even flint still wants, desperately, to make peace with it, to be a part of it. discourse is a power structure, it is desired, everything that is spoken exists within it and according to its logic, like the concepts of good and evil, men and monsters. and if in the beginning to flint the purpose was to somehow make himself, his family, nassau, worthy of being a part of it, he later realizes that this will never mean freedom, so he tries to build a world outside of the reach of the empires, outside of the discourse.

because that world was never going to accept flint, a queer man, even though we see in his face before miranda speaks up that he would go through with peter ashe’s plan to tell the whole truth. because that world never existed for us, and i relate so much to it, the entire season is the pinnacle of the queer experience.

to sum up, the parallel that is drawn here is that in both cases the viewer is reminded not to trust the expectations we have of the world, not to expect what seems to be the truth to actually be it, that what you are being told is all lies and bullshit. because when miranda says that nobody but her knows why flint is doing it [trying to destroy the fort], we should believe her; because when we see the flashbacks with james and her, we should not assume automatically that the affair is between them, as it was only stated as a fact by other people like eleanor’s father, because it was thomas that james was in love with, because it was all the “civilization” needed to destroy their lives, because we, the lgbtq+, have always been pushed aside, into the shadows, from which captain flint as a persona was born; because when they, the empire, claimed then that this persona is the essence of the person, they did so to excuse the damage they’d inflicted, to hide the fact that the pain brought into the world was caused by them.

* i’d like to add something about the idea of the western world as a discourse (i’m including imperialism, patriarchy, queerphobia here as the basis of the power structure, hence the generalization), in the show it’s not just the word “civilization” that is used, it’s also “reason”, “society”, “rationality” and so on, bc they belong to this discourse. a very illustrative scene is the negotiations between jack rackham and that captain about sharing the prize like “reasonable men”. where it turned out that reasonable ≠ fair, that it meant that the one with more power was to have everything, according to “reason”, and the other one to end up with nothing. it’s a detail, but everything is connected in this show and so fuck the discourse :) fuck the empire :)

I’m not sure if it was talked about before but I think it’s fascinating how over the course of the show Billy is gradually stripped of his POV. In season 1 he is more of an audience surrogate, a relatable everyman with good morals, we are treated to his inner turmoil and his struggles, his decisions greatly affect the plot.

Then Silver takes over most of his roles in season 2 and after Billy comes back he can’t step back into them. The majority of his development happens off screen, his actions become a little more surprising.

In season 3 he is mainly treated as a plot device, he drives Flint and Silver to be equals and creates the legend of a pirate king. We don’t spend time on his personal conflicts the way we do on Flint with the loss of Miranda or Silver and the loss of his leg. We never see him cope with the death of Gates or his guilt over keeping Flint in power (we just see the results of it through his reactions).

And finally season 4, where Billy no longer exists outside his relation to other characters. He is only ever seen through someone else’s POV despite establishing himself as a major player. Even after he joins Rogers there is no aftermath from other characters reacting to this extreme decision, the story just steamrolls over Billy as he’s trying desperately to affect the outcome in any way. He set the whole story in motion and then was rendered completely inconsequential to it. What is a character who lost all integrity when he ends up completely isolated? A blank page.

ok I don't want to overstate the obvious but black sails remaking silver's epithet to be about his long fucking memory is fantastic. like they didn't have to do that because the rumours about nassau's pirate king made him out to be a giant and that could have been left as the origin of the name. and yet - in this story about stories and testimony, silver's 'greatness' (morally neutral term here) is not about his physical size (like in TI) but is instead linked to his memory, to him being the one who tells the tale and the one who gets to the urca gold again after all these years. btw the man who made long john silver is the one who knows where the urca gold is. memory memory testimony stories memory this show will not leave my head oh lawrd

the way John Silver has no background and no story of his own. the way John silver did not want to be in the story. the way he actively tried to get out of the story time and time again through the first 2 seasons. the way the crew voted John silver as their quartermaster when he was unconscious and not even there. the way his decisions change the course of the narrative so dramatically that all the other powerful figures find themselves working around him. the way that throughout this show, this work of historical fiction, John silver is one of the only characters guaranteed to survive the narrative from beginning to end because we know everyone else is dead but this is his prequel. the way the whole show is long john silver’s prequel. the way the real historical figures literally write him into existence at the end of season three. the way long john silver is both the most real and the most unreal figure in the show. the way he doesn’t want to be in it.

I saw this post in the tag complaining that black sails weakened its point about the British empire as an institution being evil by making woodes rogers personally evil through the keelhauling scene. I dont want to directly respond to them cuz i doubt they care but i disagree so much. Tho to me s4 does have its flaws I don’t believe showing woodes to be this mask off violent person is one of the weak points and it goes perfectly hand in hand with the theme of imperial institution being inherently violent because what gives woodes the power to be in a position to violently murder and to face no repercussions for his violence.

The violence and thieving ways of the pirates make them criminals, animals who need to be put to death but Woodes steals directly from max by forcing her to house and feed his troops knowing that he’s bleeding her dry but it’s okay because he’s an agent of the state. He’s violently murdering people even suspected of piracy/communicating with a pirate but it’s okay because he’s an agent of the state. He’s gleefully using ancient torture techniques to kill people due to his personal vexation that it’s taking too long to civilize nassau but it’s okay because he’s an agent of the state.To me the whole point of revealing him to be personally cruel and violent is that working within the framework of these institutions everyone will be corrupt and hypocritical in their persecution.

I've recently seen a few people talking about media literacy in relation to Flint's sexuality and labels and figured I'd throw in my two cents on the discourse that seems to pop up every few months.

Because, I honestly think it does a disservice to Black Sails as a whole to focus on "gay vs. bi Flint" because like... does it matter? if Flint only has attraction to men, that doesn't change the fact that he's canonically, willingly, had sex with women (namely Miranda). But, on the other end of the spectrum, it's just as important to recognize how, societally and culturally, gender is a construct, which will inherently mean that sexuality is fluid! Flint can be a gay man with some level of attraction to women (hell, the majority of the fandom agrees that Anne is a lesbian, yet she's clearly in love and has sexual attraction to Jack, and that doesn't take away from her lesbianism!), and that attraction doesn't make him any less of a gay man! Or he could be bisexual, and that doesn't take away anything from the overarching narrative of his queer relationship with Thomas! The focus on a single 'correct' interpretation of his sexuality, in my mind, takes away from what the show is really trying to say about sexuality, which isn't the "this way" or "that way" to be queer, but the overarching connection that struggle and strife can bring to a community. (For a similar issue, see James Baldwin's response to critics arguing whether the main character from his novel Giovanni's Room is gay or bisexual, his response is incredible.)

And, on the other hand, it's also not entirely accurate or even fair to try and ascribe modern labels and perceptions of queerness to a character that existed long before those terms were even coined? In Flint's time, homosexuality was something a person did, not who a person was. While, yes, his queerness is inherent to his journey as a character, and he very clearly views it as a part of his identity, it's also very much worth noting that two things (homosexual love and desire, and heterosexual love and desire) can coexist, and not either way take away from his narrative as a whole.

Finally, then, there's the common thread of 'media literacy' in determining Flint's label (which, again, I honestly think is just a non-issue because it has such little impact on anything in meta discussions?). To present an opinion like "Flint is gay" is an example of an interpretation, one which can and should exist among others! To have a single, 'correct' interpretation of a piece of media, especially one like Black Sails, is an inherently flawed idea, because every interpretation should have its own merit on its own. Flint can be both bi and gay, and both arguments have perfectly equal weight, but in the end, it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of Black Sails meta. Either way, Flint is queer, and that queerness was a defining feature of his character for the rest of the show. To assign such importance to "gay or bi" just feels unimportant.

What’s so interesting about the idea that Eleanor deserved better than her ending is that it’s both the ending she deserved and the only ending she could have had, and *that* is why she deserved better. 

She was a woman born of great wealth amassed in part or totality through participating in the slave trade. Her claim to power in Nassau rested on her last name. She repeatedly chose to secure that power through siding with empire over freedom, and in this quest for power, she sowed the seeds of her destruction. She was a queer white woman whose reliance on her whiteness and her wealth amassed through that whiteness put her at odds with every other queer character in the show, as well as the notion of queerness itself. She sold off parts of herself until she was a husk of the woman we first met, and it was not enough to save herself from the fate foretold to her by her father, from the fate that had met her mother.

She got exactly what was coming to her, and yet her ending, deserved though it was, still was tragic. It was not tragic because she was done wrong by the narrative, but because everyone deserves better than life under capitalism. The entire economic and political structure of capitalism necessitates the selling of parts of ourselves in doomed quests to live lives of material prosperity. It requires endless structural and personal violence. It requires the denial of fundamental parts of ourselves, such as Eleanor’s queerness. There is not one person alive who would be less happy without capitalism.

Eleanor’s arc is thus both cathartic and a deeply cautionary tale.

Eleanor is the ultimate controversial white woman character.

She has a sex scene with a beautiful prostitute in first episode. They almost run away together. She tries so so so hard at making it in a man's world and meets resistance at every turn.

She thinks she's quite revolutionary, she thinks she's saving Nassau, she thinks she's showing all those fucking men that a woman can do it, she thinks she's so counter-culture by trusting a slave as her mentor, she thinks she's doing it for love of a place and love of people.

But. She's doing it for daddy issues, to be the business-owning son her father never had. She's doing it to please her own ego. She's doing it whole throwing friends and former lovers under the bus. She's doing all this WHILE OWNING SLAVES. She eventually tries to fold into the nice wife shape and it creaks and aches at her. She is an ally to other marginalized groups until it forces her to be truly uncomfortable or give ground.

People hate her because she's a gaslight gatekeep girlboss (and they're right). They love her because she feels so real, because she can never see and define her own shape, not really (and they're also right).

She's caught in a cage of white patriarchal making, and she sees it and she doesn't

i think there’s something to be said with the way queer identity exists in black sails. there’s the casual queerness of max and eleanor: it exists as a part of them, but isn’t a particularly impactful thing to their narratives. they fall in love, and that queer love is just the same as anything else. then you have flint and anne: it exists as an inherent, defining aspect of them. for anne, it’s her identity, it’s finding who she really is, it’s finding her sense of self outside of her relationship with jack. for flint, it’s one of the reasons, and even the catalyst, for his revolution against england. like there’s such a large breadth of that representation thats still so uncommon in todays media, and even more uncommon back when it aired.