the straight people talking about james flint vs gay people talking about james flint thing really is something in general but there’s also a specific hilarity to how many grown ass cishet white dudes (journalists, actors, but also characters within the show etc) are out there like ‘james flint is a terrifying and ambiguous figure and i’m scared of him’ while hundreds of baby and 20 something lesbians on the web are like ‘james flint is my loving dad and i would protect him and his gay manifesto with my life’
So I just realised why James is so insistent that Silver making people believe something doesn’t make it true. Because if it is true, then England making the world believe that he is a monster makes him one. In the same way that he believes England is not inevitable, he believes that the power of the stories that he and Silver both use has limits:
It is natural for men new to power to assume that it has no limits. Trust me. It does.
And I think that the root of their different perceptions of how important this is has a lot to do with the effect that the stories told about them had on them. Silver said he was:
No one. From nowhere. Belonging to nothing.
But the stories told about him made him a King; gave him power, respect, and love. Whereas James already had those things – Thomas calls him:
A rising star with a bright future in the Admiralty.
Yet because of the stories told about him and his relationship with the Hamiltons, he lost all of that.
Once it had been applied to Thomas, once our relationship had been exposed, defiled, scandalised… everything ended.
Yes, James does use stories like Silver does – but not against people he cares about. And he doesn’t ever seem to believe that other people believing his stories makes them real – he actually seems to reject that idea.
In season 1, Silver says:
Guilt is natural. It also goes away if you let it.
That’s obviously not true, and I think on a deeper level, even he knows that – but he seems determined to believe that it’s possible to just let go of things like that; guilt, his past, etc. which perhaps explains why he seems to think it’s possible that Billy, James and Madi could forgive him for what he did to them in s4. But they can’t let go of their past experiences – of what he did to them – and honestly, I don’t think that he can either.
Meg's Mumbles 