comtessedebussy:

lukearnold said:

STEPHENS: The thing about Flint is that he’s playing out his own psycho-drama on a massive canvas. It’s motivated not by altruistic reasons of wanting to emancipate all these people. It’s really that he wants revenge on England for doing what it did to him.

Okay, so here’s the thing: I actually think the reasons why Flint is fighting the war he’s fighting are complex and interesting and worth discussing. And yes, I value Toby Stephens’ insights into Flint a lot, but I’m also not willing to take them as The Gospel. 

So here’s the other thing: revenge and fighting oppression are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and for Flint, it’s even more complex, because for him, a battle against oppression by definition cannot be a fight for altruistic reasons. He’s one of the people who’s oppressed, so if he’s fighting England, he is, in part, fighting for himself. The same is true for the maroons. They may not be fighting out of spite or revenge like Flint, but they are also not fighting for altruistic reasons: they are fighting for the very, very selfish reasons of not wanting to be fucking enslaved. 

Yes, he wants revenge on England for what it did to him. But the form he wants that revenge to take is by making the world that Thomas Hamilton wanted. Thomas Hamilton wanted to “rethink systemic things” and make the new world, well, a new opportunity. England took that from them and “killed” Thomas, so Flint’s act of revenge is to do the things that England killed Thomas for. As a friend of mine said (who I am not mentioning here, because she does not want to get involved in this and have people showing up calling her posts ridiculous): 

So from a purely narrative standpoint, it is vitally important that James proceeds to do everything in his power to achieve the greatest upset to the status quo that he possibly can.

And, honestly, I think it’s telling that Flint wasn’t always going to fight an outright war. He sailed to Charlestown. He was willing to go on trial, to go to England, to tell his story, and to be branded a monster to make Thomas Hamilton’s dream a vision. He wanted to upset the status quo, even at the cost of his own life. But then Miranda died, and his rage was rekindled, and he went to war. 

And yes, he is indeed motivated by rage in that war. But, funnily enough, rage can be a great motivator for changing things. Oppressed people who fight oppression are, shockingly, full of rage. (I wonder why…) Fighting oppression is complicated and it’s not done by pure morally upright people with no investment in the outcome for altruistic reasons because it’s the “right thing to do.” It’s done by angry people who suffer from the system and want to change it. That’s how it fucking works. 

And yes, we can have a conversation about his methods and how effective they were. We can have a conversation about the fact that he didn’t think he would even be around to see this new world that he was making. But Flint wasn’t just trying to burn everything down to the ground for kicks. Flint was trying to burn the system of civilization to the ground so that something better could be built from it, and he did it very largely out of rage an anger and I for one don’t think that makes it somehow any less. And, again, I would note that he was allied with Madi and the Maroons, who had a very valid stake in this fight that wasn’t just rage or revenge, and who were more than happy to fight this war alongside him. Who saw this war as a valid fight that needed to be fought (and I think it would be doing Madi a disservice, as a character, to suggest that she was naive in trusting Flint and allying herself with him). 

And one last thought: the idea that if you’re angry and full of rage and the desire for revenge, your fight against oppression becomes somehow invalid is really, really harmful. If you’ve been systemically oppressed and hurt and vilified and hunted down, you’re going to be pissed. That is normal and valid, and being nice and “not fighting hate with hate” is not a thing that works.