Alright so I have seen the post you are referencing – obviously its creator is perfectly able to create whatever gifsets they want, however this argument is one that I disagree with, and I’m going to take this chance to explain why. I do think that you have missed the point of that gifset – which appears to be ‘Max says the plantation is a good place’ = ‘the plantation is a good place’ = ‘the prisoners in the plantation are not slaves’.
The first point you have addressed, and I agree with you that if Max does indeed think that it is a good place – and later in this post i’m going to discuss why i think there is some doubt about whether she thinks that or not – then it does not necessarily follow that it is in fact a good place. As you say, Max and Anne have never been there. And even if the men there were not deliberately mistreated, sugar plantations of that period were notoriously dangerous places for the men who worked in them. Furthermore, the guards at the plantation all appear to carry cudgels – hardly something one would expect from a ‘good place’. Then there’s Oglethorpe’s horrible speech from the beginning of 4×10:
Here, they must cease to be.
You can argue that for James this could be considered a mercy – I might even agree with you – but what about Thomas? What about the rest of the men at the plantation?
Now to the point of Max thinking it was a ‘good place’ – did she though? I would argue that she saw it as an acceptable alternative to death for a man she did not like, and was not close to. A man she viewed as one of her ‘enemies’. Furthermore, back in s3 she said:
The things it took to make that room possible, they were awful things.
In my view, it’s more than likely that she viewed sending Silver to the plantation as one of these ‘awful things’. I also think it’s quite telling that she describes sending him to the plantation as:
A return to civility
Especially given that that is almost word for word how Peter Ashe describes himself sending Thomas to the plantation:
A hard choice, made under great duress, but with the intent to achieve the least awful outcome. You wish to return to civilisation, that is what civilisation is.
Another interesting parallel is in Max describing the men at Oglethorpe’s plantation as ‘labourers’ – the exact same euphemism that Madam Guthrie’s man uses in 4×07 when speaking about slaves.
Finally, to the point about Max not viewing the plantation in the same way as she does slavery – I must admit, I don’t quite understand this line of argument. Yes, Max tells Madam Guthrie that she refuses to own slaves, but throughout the show she demonstrates a willingness to work with people who do own slaves. Eleanor, Jack, Mr Underhill, even Madam Guthrie herself. Just because Max considers the plantation an acceptable place to send Silver (and, one assumes, James) does not mean that the prisoners on Oglethorpe’s plantation are not slaves?
So far, the only argument that I’ve seen against it is that the men there don’t appear to be treated badly, but the show itself goes out of its way to remind us that however they are treated, a slave is still a slave? From Charles Vane’s speech in 3×01 to Madi reminding Eleanor Guthrie in 4×06 that her father had always mistrusted her despite Eleanor saying to him in 1×07:
You know I’ve never seen you that way [as a slave].
There is no such thing as benevolent slavery. The men at Oglethorpe’s plantation may have been ‘convicts he solicits from prisons in England, where their treatment is far less humane’, but that does not change the fact that he essentially bought them, transported them across the ocean, and forced them to work on his sugar plantation for no wages, and with no prospect of release. It doesn’t matter that Max was willing to send people there. It doesn’t matter that Oglethorpe claims to treat them well. Just as it didn’t matter that Eleanor trusted and relied on Mr Scott.
still can’t believe fucking peter had the audacity to hold the murder of alfred dickface hamilton over james and miranda while being perfectly aware of what he himself did to them both and thomas actual angel hamilton.
Calico Jack adopts every stray kitten he sees. It started with just a calico kitten in Harbor Island because haha it’s funny, it’s a calico kitten and he’s Calico Jack.
But then he started feeding strays and now he just has this small army of cats at each port he docks in who hang out in one particular alley that he goes and feeds every day every time he’s in that port.
silver being set on being made of moments, of being moments, on transcending what is past and an eventual nameless trauma: all of it is narratively meaningful, it is a piece of a larger thing that is beautiful by it, but it is, emotionally, part of what made it so incredibly easy for me to run completely out of sympathy for him when i also realized, rationally, that he didn’t deserve it
silver is the one transgression to a show full of people whose pasts direct them, and because of his singularity and because of the way he uses it, his detachment from his past can be misconstrued as power or emotional mastery, or even just as special, but in truth it’s just that, detachment, apathy, it’s someone being small either because of a self-imposed lack of a past tense itself or because of a past tense he denies (himself and us), a past we know isn’t larger than himself because he clearly cannot understand (or care for) the difference between wanting to change an unfair system and meaninglessly raging at a meaningless wound, a past i do not think we are meant to be burdened with inventing or even inventing the weight of, and that i certainly struggle to care to make up for him when i watched so many viscerally inspiring marginalized characters undergo a detailed hell on my very screen and crawl out of it a force and an hymn
god it didn’t even hit me last night how long silver had known where thomas was, that he brought the possibility up before flint to gauge his reaction and saw his face at that moment and his desperation in insisting that it is impossible that thomas is alive, that he heard flint say how thomas would not let him give up the war for his sake and saw how badly flint needed to hold on to that, then resumed to do what he had done, thinking it benevolent.
thinking it a solution, thinking it the thing to end flint’s pursuit of righting the wrongs of the british empire, instead of seeing it as it is: flint’s anger is not specifically about losing thomas, it is about the system that made it impossible for him to have thomas.
silver broke the trust of the person who, despite knowing better because life taught him better, trusted him wholly. and he knew that that’s what he was doing, he talked about exactly this to madi. and he believed he was different from all the other people because he did it out of a sense of rectitude, he gave flint his thomas back, and he kept the world calm.
but he still held that same system against flint, sustained it. he found a loophole and thought it enough. he always thought about “being enough” and couldn’t see that in this world, enough is not enough. he still took away from flint the possibility of reclaiming the history, truth, self that the system took from him and from thomas and from miranda and from countless people.
he gave flint an ending to his stolen story. he did not give him his story back.
Meg's Mumbles 