Angsty thought of the day (this is the first thing I thought of this morning when I woke up, I live the angst life):
What if Thomas knew James was Captain Flint the whole time? What is Thomas heard James tell the story of ‘Mr. Flint’ from when he was a child?
What if when he was in bedlam, or when he just got out he started hearing about this new pirate captain who’s been making life quite difficult lately. This pirate captain doing all these extreme things, and scaring people shitless. This pirate captain named Flint with red hair and the hourglass flag.
What if when Thomas is told that James and Miranda are dead, he doesn’t believe the lies, because of course, that’s what they’d want him to think. He knows that in truth they’re all shaking in fear at the hell James McGraw turned Captain Flint can bring upon them, and finds comfort in that thought,
What if when he hears that Captain Flint killed his father, that is the final thing that confirmed all of Thomas’ suspicions, (whether it happened before or after he was sent away from bedlam.)
What if when he’s on the ship to the new world he hears the sailors and the other people aboard talk about Captain Flint, the terror, and Thomas just praying that Captain Flint would attack the ship. That with every bump, a fight would start above decks and then his James would barge in through the doors and save him. But that doesn’t happen.
What if when they approach port, Thomas has this hope that when he arrives, Captain Flint, his James, would be standing there with a whole hoard of pirates ready to rescue him. But that doesn’t happen.
What if when he arrives the plantation there’s still this last hope. After a year or two of working in the hot sun, he still occasionally glances at the gates, hoping to see them come down and to see his James, Captain Flint, storm in with an army, burning the place to the ground. But as years go by he starts looking less and less, hoping less and less.
What if still after that, he keeps hearing that stories of newcomers and the guards talking about the great menace, Captain Flint, and his latest conquests, and Thomas smiles to himself. Because, even though he might not be coming to rescue Thomas, the thought that James is still alive is good, and after everything he’s been thought, the thought of James getting his revenge on the world that took everything from them doesn’t seem that bad.
What if after many years he hears after the success of nassau, and while it is run by pirates it is successful and free, and no doubt, that had a great deal to do with the efforts of Captain Flint. But he’s lost all hope of Captain Flint coming to find him, his James must think he is dead.
What if he hears of the burning or Charlestown, some 10 years after he last saw James and things, how much pain must he be in, what horrors has he faced, Oh God he is still fighting.
What if he hears the news of Captain Flint being killed by Hornigold and spends several nights and even days crying, but in the back of his mind thinking that after all the things that James has been thought, surely he must be some have he could have gotten though this too.
What if when he hears about Captain Flint’s return and victory over Woodes Rogers, he has a smile on his face for days that no amount of hard work under the unforgiving sun can take away. Because his James, his Captain Flint, is still alive and still fighting.
What if when Captain Flint, his James, finally returns to him, it is far from the reunion Thomas ever imagined, because after the shock, he realized that his James came back to him broken and in chains. And Thomas thinks, perhaps it is now his turn to fight, his turn to stand up against those who have wronged them and burn this place that thrives off their misery to the ground.
Tag: fuck Oglethorpe
the things i think about when i think about thomas hamilton
- there’s a kind of exile in what happened to him that looks like Miranda’s exile: a loss of power, of influence, the destruction of his reputation and name, loss of the freedom to act in the ways that he was accustomed to doing. The closing in of his world to the environment immediately around him. Miranda says that she felt like Abigail was a clock that had struck its chime (it’s fine. i mean i will never be okay with clocks in this show ever but sure. it’s fine.) and woken her from a dream. is that what flint’s arrival is like for thomas?
- Does he know that James and Miranda were alive? Was he waiting? Or had he let them go and hoped for the best?
- sorry i just cracked myself up thinking of Thomas-as-Penelope and the suitors thing and flint’s whole :[ response to that kind of mess
- i keep thinking of thomas and change. he’s a catalyst for flint, who is a catalyst for literally everyone else. and his fate in all of it is to be confined and regulated in a way no one else really is. he’s an agent of change and he ends up in a situation where there isn’t any nor hope for it really.
- and how does he deal with the idea of never being free? if the shame farm’s goal is that people who come there are never seen or heard from again, that those people effectively cease to be, what is the actual psychological effect of living without actually living? Miranda says that there’s no life, no joy, no love on Nassau for them; how much worse is that for Thomas?
- Thomas’ WHOLE THING IN LIFE is that he’s about not feeling shame. And then he’s stuck in a place whose whole reason for being is to be a repository of it. The disgraced sons, the embarrassments, the outcasts. The unjustly imprisoned. The whole farm exists as a place where families send people they are ashamed of to make the problem go away. fuck that place. can you even imagine the level of outrage Thomas would feel about the whole concept? He goes from trying to change the world specifically to prevent the damage the old world causes from being in the new world and then he ends up in this place in the new world which is designed to perpetuate and hide the sins of the old? Oglethorpe makes a profit off it and calls himself a reformer and the reform is being less of an asshole than an asylum? The level of “what kind of bullshit nonsense is this?” that he must feel is staggering. Also that it doesn’t help anyone but the wealthy. ao;fjisldfsaljoidfkljasdflkj
- The stigmatization of queerness as anathema to civilization, that he and people like him are considered to be debris on the march toward progress, the isolation and estrangement from society, the rejection of everything he is capable of for the sake of propriety and the status quo? not to bring this all back to James McGraw, but this is an amplified and external manifestation of James’ whole entire fucking life and Thomas gets to live it for a long time.
- How much does Thomas quiet himself down as a response to institutionalization? Especially in response to Bedlam and then the shift to the kinder but no less restrictive environs of the shame farm. There’s got to be some amount of that kind of response: a relinquishing of his autonomy and agency for the some of the trappings of civilization or acceptance of this status quo because the alternative can be worse.
- What are the lines that can be drawn between Eleanor and Thomas? both of them are children of privilege and both of them have that privilege stripped from them and go to prison. What are Thomas’ responses to that? IDK but they’re fucking profound in Eleanor.
- I think about this line a lot: “sooner or later, you are going to have to confront these realities, chief among them being that England takes whatever, whenever, however it wants. Lives. Loves. Labor. Spirits. Homes. It has taken them from me. I imagine that it has taken it from you.” That loss (lives, loves, labor, spirit, home) is the motivation behind everything Flint does. Thomas lost those things too. How does that manifest? 2/3 of that trio responded with wrath.
- i don’t trust a single word that came out of peter ashe’s mouth. thomas forgave him? mmmmm. maybe. unreliable narrator is unreliable.
Meg's Mumbles 