Tag: Anonymous

I just wanted to thank you for your posts these months, they made me feel less alone and it’s nice to know that I’m not crazy to have this opinions about BS 4 finale and Flint and Silver thank you so much :)

*hugs* you are not alone – not at all. I know all too well what it feels like to wonder if you’re losing it and then find that there’s someone else that sees what you see and feels what you feel, so I’m happy I could make you feel less cut off from the rest of the fandom.

Anon – lovely, wonderful, supportive Anon. I do not know who you are, but I really, really appreciate the kind words and I wanted you to know that. I’m probably not going to directly answer your asks today, I’ve had enough arguments with people that are just not ever going to get what you and I have been saying, but I do appreciate hearing from you and wanted to let you know lest you think I hadn’t gotten your messages or just didn’t care to respond – it couldn’t be further from the truth, I promise! You do know that you can talk to me, right? Just send me a message and we’ll chat, I promise I don’t bite!

Ook… so the problem is the fandom, isn’t it? The fact that there are people who like him and say that he has done the right thing? But maybe this is a Tumblr problem. I have seen people on Facebook and Twitter really angry at him

Yeah, pretty much. I can understand people liking him. Really, truly, I can. And I can understand them still liking him after the finale, because we like who we like and it’s not easy to give that up and there’s nothing wrong with still liking a character when they’ve fucked up. But I really, absolutely can’t support the view that what he did was in any way right. I’ve discussed on here why I think he was as wrong as wrong can be. I’m not going to rant about that again. If we’re talking about what I have a problem with, it’s with people acting as if love excuses doing something horrible to the person you claim to love and telling them it’s for their own good. That’s the root of it – I have a problem with people acting as if what Silver did was something someone who loves James or Madi would ever, ever even consider doing, because let me tell you – love does not look like that. Love does not say “what I want for you is more important than your dearest ambitions, hopes, and dreams. what I want for you is more important than how much you fear that very thing.” That is not love, it is control, and you can like Silver until the day you die but please, for the sake of those of us who have survived people like him and for the sake of people who are currently dealing with people like him and need to hear they deserve better than to be treated like that – do not try to tell me that what he did was right.

Sorry for the late reply! I’ve read yours and I’m just a little confused so… are you saying that characters like silver should not exist because they are bad examples for the audience (or the readers?)

No – I’m not saying that at all. Silver is a brilliant character, actually. He’s morally ambiguous shading into villainous the longer the show goes on. He goes through one hell of a journey to become the character from a book many of us read as children, and he’s actually an excellent example of a character being relatable or sympathetic – but absolutely, completely not right. The phrase I’m looking for is “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” and I think that somewhere in a book of phrases, there should probably be a picture of Silver’s face next to that phrase. He’s a great character – I’m saying that as a fandom there’s a tendency to paint a character as one thing in s1 and then refuse to allow that character to grow and change, yes, even for the worse, as far as our portrayal of him outside the original medium he came from. S1 Silver was stumbling his way through life, getting into messes and getting out again with a grin and a few glib words and maybe a murder or two, but was certainly not a monster or a villain. S4 Silver has moved on apace into being a genuinely scary, certainly manipulative individual who is very short-sighted when it comes to the difference between his needs and wants as regards other people and what those other people have envisioned for their lives and why those things are important to them. Silver’s not a bad character by any means, but our reaction to him and understanding of him as a fandom has proven to be problematic, to say the least in that it’s static and actually sometimes harmful to people who see clearly what he became and have quite rightly said we’re not fond of him as a result.

I don’t know how could you say that you like the finale when you’re writing so many fics and metas to criticize it

Actually, Anon, I don’t recall criticizing the finale.

I recall criticizing the actions of a character in the finale and during the rest of s4. I recall criticizing the way the fandom has reacted to the actions of that character, but I do not ever recall saying that I considered the finale bad in any way. It’s brilliant, frankly – anything that makes me react the way I did and has me still talking about it seven months later has to be something pretty special. It’s complex, it’s heartbreaking, it’s wonderful in the fact that we all got something we never expected to get – a semi-happy ending for a character that quite frankly I expected to be mourning by the end of the series. I loved the finale, but I did not love the fact that while I saw a man get the love of his life back but at a truly horrifying, to me unacceptable cost and be betrayed by someone he trusted, other people seem to have seen that character being forced into slavery as an act of love. I did not love the fact that while I watched a woman’s lover turn on her and treat her very, very poorly – even arguably abusively – other parts of the fandom seem to have disregarded her worth and decisions in much the same way to say that her lover did the right thing in treating her like her needs mattered less than his.

Do you see the difference? I can love a thing but not love the actions of a specific character or the way the fandom reacts to them.

Hi… sorry but I don’t remember that flint and silver were based on people really existed… maybe madi but they are from a novel, aren’t they? And the legacy between pirates and maroons never happened, please correct me if I’m wrong because you talk about the final as what happened in it has consequences in our time

Flint and Silver are, yes, from a novel. So are Billy Bones, and Gates, and Max, and Eleanor Guthrie and her father are only loosely based on real people. Vane, though, and Teach, and Rackham, and Bonny, and Hornigold, and Rogers, and yes, even the Maroon Queen were real people. Julius could arguably be based on an entirely real person. They existed. The pirates of Nassau existed, they did in fact manage to irritate the shit out of the British to such a degree that pardons were given as a way to make them stop being a threat to British rule in the region, and the Maroons’ fight with the English was also a thing. That treaty that Rogers offers to Madi in 4×09? Was real, and let me tell you, the terms of the historical treaty were awful. There were pirates who resisted the pardons, Vane and Rackham most definitely among them. Pirates did in fact lay siege to Charleston around this era, and there was very definitely a ship called the Urca de Lima (a nickname, actually – the ship’s proper name was the Santisima Trinidad, and she wrecked just off of Fort Pierce in Florida in, you guessed it – 1715. 

What I’m saying, Anon, is that while Flint and Silver did not exist, the fact is that the events that they’ve been firmly inserted in the middle of DID. And that takes this discussion from the realm of “it’s a novel and we can’t know what would have happened afterward” to the realm of “we most certainly do know the fallout of Silver’s decisions and it’s bad. Really, Really Bad.” So while I cannot say that Silver’s decisions have any impact on the world I live in – I can say in all certainty that they had one hell of an impact in the universe that he lives in, and on all the people in it for generations to come. 

More to the point – his decisions, fictional though they might be, do in fact have an impact on our world here in that I don’t think it’s ok to ever, ever portray them as being acceptable, because that’s the kind of thing that leads to people internalizing some really harmful ideas. Like the notion that you can ever enslave someone for their own good. Or that making decisions for oppressed minorities when you’re not among that minority yourself is alright. Or that you can ever, ever ignore your loved ones’ fondest dreams and hopes and deepest fears in favor of what you want for them and have them just – roll over and let you take over the running of their lives while you treat them like a naughty child that can’t make their own decisions. Once that kind of thinking takes hold, that’s when Silver’s actions start to be replicated by real people in the real world and that’s the point at which we all have a problem that’s based on what started out as fiction. So in a way, yes – I do think that Silver’s actions have consequences in our time, and I do think that we need to read his actions in his own setting with the knowledge of what the continuation of British rule in the West Indies led to in our world and presumably his. I think we need to take a good long look at what men like him agreed to in the real world and understand that it got a lot of innocent people killed, enslaved, and tortured, and understand that in his own universe, Silver was the one making the decision that led to that for everyone. 

I’ve seen a few ppl mention that Silver’s vague backstory is the reason some fans don’t like him. But I don’t think that’s true. For example, Vane was given an explicit backstory and lots of ppl hate him. Silver and Gates were the only major characters without a backstory. Everyone else was given one and people still hate some of them. Including Flint. No amount of tragic backstory will make them like him. I think the same would’ve been true for Silver if he was given one.

I have to agree. Honestly, for my part, I don’t give a flying blue fuck about Silver’s backstory or lack thereof, and I’ve heard other people who also don’t like him say exactly the same thing. My dislike of him – and theirs – is about his actions in canon, pure and simple. He could have the most complex backstory in the world – one that was fully as fleshed out as Flint’s, and as heartbreaking, and I would still be every bit as furious at him, as I would be at Flint or at any other character had they done the same thing. I am not talking about equivalent actions, because there are none – what Silver did has repercussions that reach down the generations to the modern day world, affecting billions, not just a couple of hundred or thousand people living in the West Indies at that point. My dislike of him is visceral, and it stems from the fact that I forgave him for ages – right up through 4×09, in fact – and then got to 4×10 and discovered that not only had he done the things I had forgiven him for – no. He’d betrayed Madi, and betrayed James, and done it starting as early as 4×04, and intended to do it perhaps since the season began. He’d lied to them time and time again, pretending to be their friend – and then he’d kept the knowledge that James’ husband was alive from him, despite experiencing the pain of losing Madi, and knowing how James must feel about losing Thomas and knowing he could make that pain stop for him. He tore Madi’s dream – the dream of being able to move about the world and not risk being enslaved or murdered merely for the color of her skin – out from under her by ending her war and thus any possibility of making real change. He’d done that to her people, too – her people, whom she held above all, above him, above herself, above anyone, and then he’d told her that he did it for her own good. In what world does “I did it for your own good” encompass “I actively put you at risk by keeping the status quo which is set by a world that wants you dead”? He enslaved James – took away any chance he had of being remembered for who he was instead of allowing society to call him what it liked and do to him what it liked. He took away in the process his freedom, his dignity, and his peace of mind, because I guarantee you that betrayal cemented in James Flint’s head that he could trust no one to care enough about him not to send him away. It’s only what – the third time that’s happened? The fourth? 

I can’t forgive any of that. I won’t, because I understand what they were fighting for and I am furious at Silver’s callous disregard for the danger they faced merely in living in the society he prevented them from tearing down, his backstory be damned. Quite apart from caring about all oppressed peoples, he should have cared enough about them individually to treat them like they mattered more than that. I’m female, I’m Pagan, I’m queer, I’ve experienced oppression at the hands of people who want me dead or worse for those things, and let me tell you – if anyone told me that they thought that they, as a member of a group that is not oppressed in any of those ways, had the right to tell me how to fight for my rights as a human after pretending that they loved and supported me?

That person would be goddamned lucky to just be told to leave my life and never come back into it. 

tbh i don’t think pronouns should be a reason to get punished/fired at work. i had a coworker purposefully calling me the wrong name all the time and no one ever thought it should be addressed so why pronouns should be different

A. That coworker needed a sharp attitude adjustment and I’m sorry they were a dick to you and B. People deserve the respect of having their gender identity recognized. It’s every bit as important as a name, as you indirectly noted, and I’m firmly of the opinion that if you can’t respect people, then you don’t belong in a customer service job, particularly not one where you’re dealing with sometimes very vulnerable young people, as in this case. The student is transgender, and even if my coworker did not know that, she still needed to acknowledge her mistake, learn from it, and not throw a ten minute hissy fit about being required to refer to the student by they/them pronouns. There’s not knowing, and then there’s refusing to do the right thing once it becomes obvious that you’ve made a mistake and covering it all under the guise of “it’s not gramatically correct.” We’ve had that conversation before, she and I, and her insistence on the point is becoming more and more obviously a smoke screen for her being flat out uncomfortable with trans people. So yes, I’m sorry, but that does, in my book, warrant at least someone sitting her down and saying “hey, this is not acceptable.”