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.
Meg's Mumbles 