Tag: black sails meta

Hiii historic questions!! :)) how did you know that Thomas plantation is a sugar one? Can you bring me the references?

My references are as follows: the literal sugarcane that is growing behind them in the following two gifs: 

See the guy with the machete behind Thomas in the second one, cutting down canes? See the piles of the stuff lying in the cart? Now, here’s a picture of actual sugar cane:

Also, here is a section of a book discussing how the British tried to set up sugar plantations in Georgia and failed – this is right around the right time for them to have been doing that: 

https://books.google.com/books?id=2iuMhk2bNlcC&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=georgia+sugar+plantations&source=bl&ots=U6CMHTYsca&sig=nWmQ34vVojIrKG7UGvEAP99A7Ts&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwii0Naeu5XWAhUGSyYKHUZuBP0Q6AEIhAEwDA#v=onepage&q=georgia%20sugar%20plantations&f=false

In conclusion – Oglethorpe’s plantation is a sugar farm, which is to say it’s dangerous as fuck. Here is a link to my source on that: http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/slavery/archaeology/caribbean/plantations/caribbean35.aspx

One of the reasons I’ll never read Flint as Rage Monster are his dreams. It’s a truest look into the depths of his psyche. And he’s not contemplating the burning of the world in it. Miranda doesn’t say, “Burn the world down, it’s what you actually want” (as Silver claims in the finale). She helps him see that he’s not alone in this fight.

Exactly. When we’re inside Flint’s head, Miranda’s not urging him to vengeance. He’s not contemplating destruction and death – he’s tired, and he wants to be done, and he’s wanted to be done since he killed Alfred, I think. He asks what happens if he decides he wants to stay with Miranda, meaning what happens if he doesn’t want to do this anymore. And when Miranda in his head points him in the direction of people who can help with his fight, that’s him picking himself up off the ground, going “ok, I can do this, I have a purpose,” and from then on, you’ll notice that he changes significantly. If anything, the purpose that he finds in carrying the war forth is what ends the rage monster, as you put it, and that’s why I don’t agree with Silver’s assessment that for Flint, the war is about rage. Maybe it is for him, and he’s projecting more than a bit, but for Flint, it’s about standing up and saying no more. 

oh yes, headcanons on Hennessey, please!

always happy to share! The majority of my headcanons on Hennessey’s reasons for what he does are here: http://flintsredhair.tumblr.com/post/151811259762/so-can-we-talk-about-admiral-hennessey-for-a

The gist of them, though, is that I genuinely do not think that Hennessey actually wanted to do what he did. I can’t reconcile his behavior in the tavern scene or his behavior five seconds before he walks into his office with his behavior immediately after, and the difference appears to be Alfred Hamilton’s presence. I think he knew long before Alfred told him that James was not straight, and I don’t think he actually gave much of a shit about that, although I don’t think he approved of James’ relationship with Thomas for quite another reason – namely that he knew he couldn’t protect him if it all went sideways the way it did. 

I realize no one has to agree with my weird theory about this, but I think Hennessey did what he did in large part because he couldn’t just be James’ father figure/mentor in that moment – he had to be a commander in charge of a lot of men, and if Alfred found him to be breaking the law and defending gay men, there wouldn’t be anybody in the entire Navy safe from the accusation. Alfred stood poised to either be rid of his troublesome son and his lover, or to do that and to take control of every Admiral, every Captain, every officer of any rank that didn’t want to be accused and hanged, gay or not. I really think that Hennessey did what he did because he had to get James out of London if possible while still protecting his men and he did that, at a terrible cost. 

Not saying that I don’t understand other people’s reasons for disliking him, though. I’m extrapolating a lot, but I think it’s a reasonable speculation that the man that James looked up to so much might have been made of different stuff than Alfred Hamilton. 

Miranda’s role as Flint’s partner

squid-inspiration:

hellotailor:

re: this post about rewatching Black Sails, Miranda’s role in season 1 also makes me love one of my favourite Flint speeches EVEN MORE. her relationship with Flint is way more public than i remembered, in a way that ties into the persona he constructs around himself. spoilers up to 3×01 under the cut!

Keep reading

this is all excellent analysis!

another thing that, to me, stands out about flint’s grief over miranda’s death, is the dream sequence in which he says “i am ruined over you”.

now, i’m not a fan of trying to set direct comparisons between relationships, so i’ll leave that aside for another post (one day i might get around to writing that meta about comparisons within black sails, and how sometimes the show flounders a bit btwn its writing and its overall message), but what always always always gets me is this line:

“I was mistress to you when you needed love. Wife when you needed understanding. But first and before all, I was mother.”

there is SO MUCH wrapped up in this line. let’s remember first that this is his subconscious speaking. it’s not miranda’s ghost, it’s flint himself. that means that on some level, flint himself thinks of miranda as not only his friend/parter, but his mother and his wife. setting aside his sexuality (bc i don’t feel like getting hate-mail again, and i am perfectly happy w either bi or gay flint, so hold your insults pls), i think this line is remarkable.

it really portrays just how difficult and plain jawdroppingly complex their relationship is. i am firmly of the opinion that during flint’s formative years he had no sginificant or lasting female presence in his life, as evidenced by his string of unfortunate father figures: the man he calls the closest thing to a father is his superior officer, not his grandfather that raised him or his biological father that sired him. considering that he probably entered the male-dominated navy young, i assume he had few relationships with women in any significant capacity.

ofc this is a bit of wild conjecture on my part, but i hold to it bc it means that miranda is remarkable and important to him in multiple ways: she occupies the places that multiple women would otherwise have held throughout his life. he never had a mother, mistress, wife, and thus, with her strong presence in his life and her role in shaping him (which is significant!)  she somehow naturally comes to provide for him all these things, without ever being confined to one. i don’t think it’s as simple as “mother & mistress & wife? does that mean he wants to fuck his mother figure? has odysseus become oedipus???” bc eh. too simplistic. we know black sails routinely does better than that.

again, i think this is something that is largely independent from the question of flint’s sexuality, bc throughout history queer ppl have married ppl incompatible w their orientation for all sorts of reasons (but then again, it also runs w a bi interpretation, so everyone can be happy), but i think it’s also important to acknowledge that this is how flint thinks of her, personally, in the heart of his heart: mistress, wife, mother.

i love flint and thomas’ relationship for how simple it is. yes, there’s lots of societal bullshit surrounding them that makes things hard, and if you think they never had fallings-out or difficulties then i think you’re terribly wrong, but at the same time, these two are the most straightforward example of star-crossed lovers on this show. they hit it off right away, they’re so obviously meant to be it’s almost ridiculous, and in the end even imprisonment and torture and mortal danger and war can’t keep them apart forever. that’s some fairytale stuff right here.

i love flint and miranda’s relationship for how complicated and real it is, and how i will never, as long as i live, be able to really define it or wrap my brain around it. it’ll forever be a scab i’ll keep picking at, and just like that it’ll forever be kinda painful but immensely, weirdly satisfying.

… i’m so sorry for hijacking your post, op. i hope you don’t mind me spilling my feelings everywhere.

1: “Madi would know that Flint’s been sold rather than, you know, walking away of his own volition” *anon of the original idea* Madi’s the only one who knows. But everyone else has to believe that Flint just walked away from them. They couldn’t say, “We persuaded him to leave” like Jack told Grandma Guthrie. That would’ve gotten their asses kicked! But a General leaving a cause surely means that a cause is lost and they have no choice but to accept a treaty.

comtessedebussy:

2: It had to be something like this: “Flint’s left and I had to negotiate a treaty. Captain Rackham captured the governor and will help us.” Not having a cache wouldn’t have stopped them. Had Flint become a martyr they still would’ve fought as Jack said, even without cache. Not making Flint a martyr was the key. So they turned him into someone who left his allies in the middle of the war because he couldn’t be bothered to fight anymore.

This is one of the reasons I don’t believe Silver killed James (well, other than it being bullshit, but anyway…) Killing Flint would have made him a martyr, and John Silver, for all my dislike of him, isn’t stupid. He knows how these things work. 

No but seriously, listen, Madi may have been forced to sign that damn treaty but I don’t believe she stopped fighting. She would have gotten Flint out of there. She would have tried to rescue his name and reputation. I actually rather think she might have been pissed enough at Silver that she revealed what he’d done. Imagine her telling the pirates and Maroons, “your general has been sold into slavery, the very same slavery we’re trying to fight.” Yeah, Oglethorpe’s plantation is getting burned down. 

sidewaystime:

flintsredhair:

@ladytp replied to your post

But why does common thinking seem to assume – without any real reason besides blind hope – that Flint and Madi’s war would have succeeded in overthrowing British yoke, abolishing slavery and freeing those millions of future generations from the fate worse than death? Would a crew of pirates and runaway slaves really have defeated the British Empire, the most powerful in the world with unlimited resources at hand?

Because there were other successful rebellions against the British Crown in the same area in the same century. Because the American Revolution succeeded with scarcely more resources than the pirates and slaves could have mustered. The short answer is yes, and the long answer is even if they didn’t succeed, it’s important that someone would have tried, because it would have given others the notion that a rebellion could succeed in the future. The fact that the pirates of Nassau managed to annoy the British into offering the pardons in the first place is, as Flint rightly noted, a sign that England thought there was a possibility they could win, because you don’t pardon people you can successfully put down by other means that will scare other dissenters into backing down.

I mean, also, it was framed within the text as being viable enough to be a threat. Not only is there the economic disruption that a concerted fleet of pirates could enact upon trade in the Caribbean, but very specifically the threat was that with Maroon help, Flint could do what he was speculating and get 1 in 4 newly freed slaves to join their rebellion. The threat of that alone was enough to get the Spanish in Havana to join in; that’s the stick Rogers used to motivate them. None of the imperial powers in the Caribbean could withstand a slave rebellion, especially not one backed by a naval fleet disrupting trade. 

And to back up what @flintsredhair says, the other part of the threat they posed was that they stood ready to expose the lie that the British empire was all powerful. Flint knows they’re not, because he was there when they lost Nassau the first time. Madi knows they’re not, because her island even exists in the first place and she’s free. The biggest enemy Flint and Madi faced (and the enemy that eventually defeated them) was fear of Britain’s inevitability. The assumption was that of course Britain would win eventually, so what was the point of fighting now. Institutional inertia is absolutely an enemy and every single time people in the show came close to showing that, they got shot down. 

Also on a metanarrative level: there’s no tragedy to that ending if the war is a futile delusion. The stakes at the end have to mirror each other or there’s no narrative weight to what happens. On Flint and Madi’s side, you have darkness and loss now for the hope of freedom later. On Silver’s (and Max and Jack and Julius) side, you have the guarantee of freedom now and the equal guarantee of darkness and loss later. It’s ambiguous, sure, on if Flint and Madi would succeed. But I don’t think it’s ambiguous within the text they they could have succeeded. 

ladytp:

flintsredhair:

@ladytp replied to your post

But why does common thinking seem to assume – without any real reason besides blind hope – that Flint and Madi’s war would have succeeded in overthrowing British yoke, abolishing slavery and freeing those millions of future generations from the fate worse than death? Would a crew of pirates and runaway slaves really have defeated the British Empire, the most powerful in the world with unlimited resources at hand?

Because there were other successful rebellions against the British Crown in the same area in the same century. Because the American Revolution succeeded with scarcely more resources than the pirates and slaves could have mustered. The short answer is yes, and the long answer is even if they didn’t succeed, it’s important that someone would have tried, because it would have given others the notion that a rebellion could succeed in the future. The fact that the pirates of Nassau managed to annoy the British into offering the pardons in the first place is, as Flint rightly noted, a sign that England thought there was a possibility they could win, because you don’t pardon people you can successfully put down by other means that will scare other dissenters into backing down.

There would always have been a chance, that is true – but from what I observed from the story, pirates did not seem to have real resources to maintain more than a small colony, if left to their own devices. Even the farmers of Nassau were more or less out of the picture, I believe, and they didn’t have statesmen, lawyers nor politicians (yes, an unfortunate requirement for a sovereign dominion). They might have been able to hold Britain off for a while as some Caribbean revolts did, but I doubt it would have had any such influence to the politics of Great Britain that has been raised in some discussions. American revolution certainly did, but at that stage America was big and vast and populous with almost 3 million people and also an established society, commerce and political system, so that was somewhat different….

I certainly believe the cause was noble – but judging characters motivations afterwards based on what could have been and assuming that the best of all options would have prevailed (a period of struggle and deaths followed by peace and prosperity and freedom) is our prerogative – but not the prerogative of those who had to make their decisions based on how they judged the situation and its risks at the time. 

Agreed – the characters could not, at the time, know how history would pan out, but they damn sure did know what England was about. They knew the suffering brought about by her laws. They knew what it was to be considered less than human, and they knew they weren’t the only ones suffering. They knew that Flint proposed to take the war not just to the Caribbean but to the mainland, which, as you noted, possessed far greater resources with which to wage their war, including men and supplies. It wasn’t a question of holding off Britain – Flint proposed to turn a war made up of a ragtag army of pirates and slaves into a conflict that was far better funded and supplied, and I really, honestly do think he could have done it. I think, with Madi’s help, and the help of her people, they had a chance. How many Jameses and Thomases do you think they would have found in British jails up and down the east coast, if the war had gone that far? How many men who could and would have served as lawyers and statesmen? How many women like Madame Guthrie who might have seen the rebellion as a chance to have their own lives at last instead of kowtowing to their men? And I repeat – even if they didn’t win, the chance to be free of the empire that wanted them all dead or enslaved, or tortured like Thomas, was worth fighting and potentially dying for. They wanted it, they knew the risks, and no one – I mean absolutely no one – had the right to rip that out from under them because they judged it unwinnable, especially not someone who faced none of the systemic, unrelenting oppression based on something they could not change that Madi and Flint had both personally experienced.

@ladytp replied to your post

But why does common thinking seem to assume – without any real reason besides blind hope – that Flint and Madi’s war would have succeeded in overthrowing British yoke, abolishing slavery and freeing those millions of future generations from the fate worse than death? Would a crew of pirates and runaway slaves really have defeated the British Empire, the most powerful in the world with unlimited resources at hand?

Because there were other successful rebellions against the British Crown in the same area in the same century. Because the American Revolution succeeded with scarcely more resources than the pirates and slaves could have mustered. The short answer is yes, and the long answer is even if they didn’t succeed, it’s important that someone would have tried, because it would have given others the notion that a rebellion could succeed in the future. The fact that the pirates of Nassau managed to annoy the British into offering the pardons in the first place is, as Flint rightly noted, a sign that England thought there was a possibility they could win, because you don’t pardon people you can successfully put down by other means that will scare other dissenters into backing down.

So now Flint is not a real revolutionary because after getting Thomas back he does not wage another war? What?

I’m fairly certain I just got done reading the post you’re referring to, and….

Ok. If I’m being fair, and I genuinely try to be, the author has some points. James Flint is not perfect. He is selfish as hell in a lot of ways and yeah, he does in fact show again and again that he considers the lives of his crew and the lives of the people in Nassau expendable. He does horrifying things in the name of his war, and to a certain degree, I think Miranda is right about him – he is fighting for the sake of fighting, especially after her death, and it’s not about shame for what he is – it’s about guilt, and about finding some kind of motivation to keep going instead of just dying on the spot. For Flint, that motivation is rage. Let’s be really honest – he’s angry, he’s heartbroken, he’s very much stuck in the mindset of the British officer he was, and he does some things that are frankly indefensible, such as killing Gates, such as destroying Charlestown wholesale, such as shooting women and children in the pursuit of his vengeance. I’m not going to defend him on those counts, because I’m not blind to those facts. Here’s the thing, though –

*takes a deep breath* I really, really don’t give a shit what his motivations for waging his war are. I don’t give a damn, because the fight that he was fighting is one that absolutely and without any kind of question needed to be fought. I recognize that his motivations for doing what he does are all very, very personal, and I recognize that he sacrifices a lot of things that aren’t his to sacrifice in the process, and I weep for the people he hurts, but I think the phrase I’m looking for is “you can’t make an omelette without cracking some eggs.” And yes, that sounds flippant, I’m sorry for that, but freedom is not something that is ever, ever won without making some truly horrible sacrifices – ask any revolutionary. Ask anyone who has ever fought a war for their freedom, and they will tell you that it was not clean, and it was not nice, and they will also tell you that they’re not sorry, because they were fighting to save generations of people to come from the horrors that they experienced at the hands of people who didn’t consider the people they were hurting to be human. Flint was fighting against a society that history and the show both tell us over and over again were corrupt, and twisted, and above all else deeply, deeply wrong. He was fighting against a society that would take a man who only ever wanted to help people and torture and kill him. He was fighting to fortify Nassau, so that the people that did that to Thomas couldn’t come there, so that people running from England’s tyranny would have one place they could go to that would not do that to them on the basis of who they were and who they loved. And if Flint was fighting out of personal heartbreak and loss and anger at that loss, then that’s not something that makes his overall goal any less valid. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, oppressed people do not fight because they are being altruistic, they fight because they have experienced oppression and they don’t want that for their children, or for themselves any longer. Their rage does not invalidate their point, or make their oppressors right. 

And as to Flint not choosing to turn around and go back to war after he’d gotten Thomas back – can I point out that, if we’re going with show canon as we seem to be there – he didn’t CHOOSE not to make war after that, he was fucking enslaved. He didn’t choose that for himself, or for Thomas – Silver did that, and in doing so, ensured that millions of people would face the same horror, thereby proving my point about principles requiring the sacrifice of lives that are not yours to sacrifice no matter which way you slice it. Given the choice between Flint’s sacrifice and Silver’s, I know which one I’d choose in terms of sheer numbers of the dead and maimed and broken, especially because one of these things goes on for a few years, while the other one has gone on for centuries, is still happening, and is now rooted so deeply in society that I don’t know that it can ever be stamped out. That doesn’t even get into what the British Empire did in its other colonies, and gee, how many billions might not have died if England had not been permitted to get her claws into places like India? What might have been if the British Empire had been broken then and there, tossed out of the New World, cut off from its cash flow? How large the cost of Silver’s temporary peace? 

tl;dr version: Flint’s motives are selfish as hell, but that doesn’t actually make much difference given his goals, and I will always, always take his side versus Silver’s because the cost of Silver’s peace is what I would firmly call far too fucking high.