unstatedmartini:

you know what i can’t stop thinking about, is how flint lost both thomas and miranda because of men like alfred hamilton and peter ashe. men who were supposed to be reasonable, restrained, able to see the bigger picture. men who were supposed to be civilized. men exactly like woodes rogers. 

it seems to me that so much of flint taking the cache in that clumsy, obvious way, risking silver’s trust in him, causing the foreseeable deaths of good men, is driven by his sheer panic at the thought of losing madi exactly the same way he lost thomas and miranda. he’s terrified of putting faith in the restraint of a civilized man and being repaid with horror. that’s why over the past couple episodes he is repeatedly, almost frantically insistent that they need to be rescuing madi RIGHT THE FUCK NOW, while they still have the cache. yes, flint cares about the war, and keeping the cache keeps the war alive (and, at this point, it’s madi’s war as much as it was ever his). but also the cache represents leverage of the kind he never had before. james mcgraw/flint never had a goddamn thing that the alfred hamiltons or peter ashes of the world wanted as much as they wanted to silence and erase inconvenient people like thomas and miranda. with the cache, he does. he can’t allow it to be traded away in the hopes that woodes rogers will be civilized. 

IDK, i just love so much that the ultimate test of silver and flint’s relationship isn’t silver’s love for madi versus flint’s need for a war. it’s that they both love madi. they’re both desperate to rescue her. neither of them see a future without her. silver believes (with pretty good reason!) that he can write his own story – his own happy ending reflecting his own priorities – and feels deeply betrayed when flint won’t play his part, especially when silver’s stories have benefited flint and his damn war so many times in the past. but flint can’t accept silver’s story of compromise and trade-offs, not because he cares less for madi, but because his own story is that of England taking everything and leaving nothing, over and over again. to flint, anything…the end of his partnership with silver, the death of the crew, his own death…anything would be better than making that silver and madi’s story as well.