Anon, I don’t even know. Not making that comparison is like, idk, not analyzing that Pearl in The Scarlet Letter is named for the biblical verse or that Nick in the Great Gatsby is queer enough to sleep with dudes. It’s explicit enough in the text that there is an existing comparison to be made between Peter Ashe and Silver that they use the same dialogue. They use the same justification! Like, I hate Peter Ashe as much as the next person, but he is very clear that he did it because Alfred Hamilton threatened his future and threatened his daughter. How is that any less of a justification than doing it for Madi and the future that Silver wants with her? He is just as clear! He says to Flint that he sees a future with Madi and wants it. It’s right there in the text. It’s not like, “ho ho, i want to find the worst possible read on Silver because he is a mustachioed villain.” It is because everyone has a reason for doing what they’re doing. If you’re extending sympathy to Silver because he is afraid and wants to save Madi and is trying to have a future where he saves lives, you should be able extend that sympathy to Peter Ashe for wanting the same things. If you are using Silver’s practicality as it regards Madi and Flint’s end goals to justify what he does, you should be able to give that same acknowledgment to Peter Ashe who, again, does the exact same thing. Just because we see the fall out of what Peter Ashe does and not the full fall out of what Silver does doesn’t mean that those things don’t happen.
One of the moral and ethical complexities of this show is that you can have good reasons for what you are doing, really sympathetic understandable reasons, and still do terrible things. The good sympathetic understandable reasons don’t make the terrible things less terrible. They don’t make the people who pay the price of them less hurt. Does anyone who burned in Charlestown or any of the other towns Flint sacked give a solitary shit why he did it? No. Is the first runaway slave to get turned away from the Maroon camps or returned as per the terms of the treaty going to give a single fuck that Max and Jack and Madame Guthrie and John Silver made it so that the treaty was part of the terms of surrender in a war the Maroons hadn’t actually lost? I doubt it. Is that person going to care that Julius wants to preserve the things they have instead of risking the future? God knows I wouldn’t.
AND THEN. Yeah, let’s get into Alfred Hamilton and John Silver because this is where I think things get really interesting. Let’s throw Hal Gates in there too, because he does this to Flint as well.
There are three pivotal moments in Flint’s life where someone looked at him and essentially said, “What I want matters more than what you want and I am going to make you go away to get it.” Do they all have good reasons for it? I’m sure Alfred Hamilton thought the preservation of his name, power, and influence was more than enough reason to make an officer from the lower classes and his troublesome daughter in law go the fuck away. But do we think that? No. Because it hurt characters we’re invested in. Because the reason isn’t good enough for what he did and he only ruined three lives. Hal Gates wanted Flint and Miranda to go away because Flint maybe possibly killed Billy and didn’t care about his men. Were his reasons good? Maybe. To Billy, sure. To Dufresne and Degroot and the rest of the crew, yes. Good enough to make it so they thought that Flint should hang for killing him.
So what makes John Silver’s actions different? His reasons are good to him. He wants to save Madi at all costs. He wants not to go to war. These are all fantastic reasons, much like Gates’ reasons are fantastic reasons. Alfred Hamilton’s reasons are excellent reasons to him. But the end result for Flint is the same: he loses all the things he’s worked for, he is made to go away, and someone else dictates the terms of his story.
Silver has his reasons for wanting the war to end. Max has her reasons. Julius has his. Flint and Madi and the pirates and maroons who came to fight England had theirs for wanting it to continue. Everyone counted up the costs to what they were doing and decided those costs were worth it and that put them into opposition with each other. That doesn’t make one side objectively right or wrong. It means that you take the reasons the show presents and compare them to your own ethics and morals and fucking engage with the text on those terms. And, much like the show, everyone watching it has their reasons for their reaction and those reactions are entirely valid based as they are in our own lived experiences and our beliefs and our histories.
This is why that assertion that the people criticizing Silver for what he does in the ending are flattening the ending or losing the moral complexity of it by comparing what he does to previous antagonists really really irk me: the ethical complexity of the show is LITERALLY the point of the comparisons. Good people do terrible things. Terrible people do good things. Everyone contains multitudes. Everyone’s reasons for what they are doing are good and justifiable to them. Whether those reasons are good or justifiable to anyone/everyone else is the one of the points of the show.
Hey! Really good and well discussed meta above, however I’d like to contest something. What Silver did in the end may be comparable to both Alfred Hamilton and Peter Ashe’s actions in terms of “he had his own excellent reasons and so he sent Flint away,” and so they may look similar on the surface but they are absolutely not comparable when you consider the way those characters felt about Flint. Alfred Hamilton considered Flint to be disposable. He probably barely gave him any consideration. Peter Ashe betrayed both Thomas and Flint in the process and separated them for ten years, and when Flint showed up at his door asking for pardons he continued the ruse and thought it a better idea to expose Flint to London’s ridicule and judgement rather than admit to what he did and tell him about Thomas still being alive. (You could argue Silver does this for half of s4 and you would be right. Except Silver comes clean and Peter does not. The threat of Alfred Hamilton no longer exists. He could tell Flint, and yet he doesn’t.)
The closest betrayal to Silver’s is probably Gates. Gates loved Flint, in some ways, and Flint loved him in some ways. This betrayal is also completely different to the ones mentioned above. I think its doing a disservice to both Gates and Silver to throw them together into this pile of shit.
Silver literally reunited Flint with the man he loves. Silver did the exact opposite of what both Peter and Alfred did. It still served to take Flint out of the picture but it still has to be taken into consideration when judging the moral rightness vs. wrongness of his actions, and especially when considering their relationship. It’s not the same thing. It’s not. It might stem from the same motivation (to protect their own), but the way they go about it and the repercussions that Flint ultimately faces is completely different. It is absolutely a betrayal, but it’s not of the same kind. Gates and Silver both loved Flint, and wanted on some level to keep him safe. This is an aspect that needs to be considered and I don’t think that’s contestable. It’s still paternalistic and it is most definitely robbing Flint of any agency, but the underlying relationships between these characters definitely have to be considered. That’s what’s being flattened when both Silver and Gates are lumped together with Alfred Hamilton.
Let’s also remember: Silver sent six men to kill Flint and tried to kill him himself literally hours before he reunites him with the man he loves. Reuniting him with Thomas wasn’t the goal, which we know because he doesn’t do it when Flint is of use to him; reuniting him with Thomas was the carrot to keep him away from restarting the war.
But in the end, i would argue that whatever the feelings motivating the actions don’t actually matter to the person being disposed of. We don’t know how Peter Ashe felt about James McGraw or Thomas, just that when weighed against his wife and daughter, they were worth less to him. Flint, when weighed against Billy, was worth less to Gates. Flint, when weighed against Madi’s survival, was worth less to Silver.
The relationships are context for the tragedy but they don’t actually change the action.
I’m not saying they change the action, I’m saying they should change the way the action should be judged. In the same way Flint killing Alfred Hamilton and Flint killing Gates is not the same thing.
I also fundamentally disagree that Thomas was a….carrot. I think if the only goal was to keep Flint from starting the war, Silver could have just killed him. That’s surest possible way to keep him from restarting the war, wouldn’t you say? Why bother keeping him alive? Why bother hunting Thomas down? Why bother offering days and weeks and months of your time to convince Flint to let the war go other than just outright shooting him? Why bother taking Flint to Savannah at all? All of this is active effort in the middle of a war. Keeping him alive is Silver going out of his way to keep him alive.
The way I see it, if Flint is alive, re-uniting him with Thomas was at least some part of the goal. If the goal was to get rid of him, there’s a sure fire way to do so. If Flint is alive, there is something that stays Silver’s hand. There’s is something that has him hunt Thomas Hamilton down, there is something that has Silver go on the ship to Savannah and deliver Flint to Thomas. That’s a thing that should be considered. That’s the way I see it. I don’t understand at all how that can be ignored. There’s complexity here that is being missed out on. That’s the whole point.
This is addressed in the show. The reason Silver can’t kill Flint is named Madi, who would have continued the war in his name if Silver had martyred him by shooting him. I don’t deny that he cared about Flint or that Flint cared about him, but that wasn’t what stayed his hand, as evidenced by the fact that literally a few hours earlier, he was fine with sending men to kill Flint and then tried to do it himself. The difference is that in the time between then and the end of the finale, Flint had very publicly won a major battle in the war against England and had the loyalty of a lot of people from that, which meant that he could no longer be painted as a traitor to the cause. Instead, he had to be gotten rid of in a way that made it seem like he’d disappeared willingly. No one’s ignoring the complexity of anything, we’re simply saying that Silver had reasons other than fondness to do what he did.
Esp yes to what @flintsredhair said above:
The difference is that in the time between then and the end of the finale, Flint had very publicly won a major battle in the war against England and had the loyalty of a lot of people from that, which meant that he could no longer be painted as a traitor to the cause.
Silver could not afford to let Flint become a martyr or be seen to be betrayed.
As for the grand gesture of reuniting Thomas and Flint- however late, at however convenient a time- please let us not forget that it was essentially condemning Thomas and Flint to a life of slavery. Oh it’s dressed up and made to look palatable: but it is NOT a paradise of any sorts, from any angle. It is a slave labour camp that we know houses not just murderers but also people who are ‘inconvenient’- i.e. those who have not committed any crime at all, except that of violating society’s codes.
Also, idk, this may sound Strange and Weird to people on this site, but y’know what? True Love does not make up for everything else wrong with this world. At best, reuniting Thomas and Flint helps in the sense they no longer have to face the world’s injustices alone (esp in the case of Thomas, in Flint’s case it is more complex- he is denied one kind of solidarity and given another), but it does not change the fact that those injustices exist and must be faced and lived with and fought against. Sending Flint to the slave camp sends him to a place where he is possibly literally without any resources to fight. You’ve devastated him emotionally, robbed him of his allies and friends and then- sent him into enslavement and it’s supposed to be magically OK because…True Love???
Thomas and James are people who existed before they met each other, who had principles and causes and ideals before they met each other; yes they probably profoundly shaped each other’s thinking: but they exist outside of their relationship with each other too. So think on that for a second or five and then consider what it means to keep these characters in perpetual enslavement and then call that A Good Thing just because they are together.
Tag: js critical
But when did the parallel between Silver’s decision and Alfred’s became a bad thing? O_O Some of the most prominent s*ilverfl*nt blogs have done it in the past. The parallel *is* there. The reasons are different, but the parallel is there. Why is it a problem now? Because a non-s*ilverfl*nt shipper has done it? captain-flint(.)tumblr(.)com/post/159649086888/flint-is-gone-retired-from-the-account-he-was gaysails(.)tumblr(.)com/post/159321573042/i-dont-know-why-you-did-this-but-i-know-you-did
Anon, I don’t even know. Not making that comparison is like, idk, not analyzing that Pearl in The Scarlet Letter is named for the biblical verse or that Nick in the Great Gatsby is queer enough to sleep with dudes. It’s explicit enough in the text that there is an existing comparison to be made between Peter Ashe and Silver that they use the same dialogue. They use the same justification! Like, I hate Peter Ashe as much as the next person, but he is very clear that he did it because Alfred Hamilton threatened his future and threatened his daughter. How is that any less of a justification than doing it for Madi and the future that Silver wants with her? He is just as clear! He says to Flint that he sees a future with Madi and wants it. It’s right there in the text. It’s not like, “ho ho, i want to find the worst possible read on Silver because he is a mustachioed villain.” It is because everyone has a reason for doing what they’re doing. If you’re extending sympathy to Silver because he is afraid and wants to save Madi and is trying to have a future where he saves lives, you should be able extend that sympathy to Peter Ashe for wanting the same things. If you are using Silver’s practicality as it regards Madi and Flint’s end goals to justify what he does, you should be able to give that same acknowledgment to Peter Ashe who, again, does the exact same thing. Just because we see the fall out of what Peter Ashe does and not the full fall out of what Silver does doesn’t mean that those things don’t happen.
One of the moral and ethical complexities of this show is that you can have good reasons for what you are doing, really sympathetic understandable reasons, and still do terrible things. The good sympathetic understandable reasons don’t make the terrible things less terrible. They don’t make the people who pay the price of them less hurt. Does anyone who burned in Charlestown or any of the other towns Flint sacked give a solitary shit why he did it? No. Is the first runaway slave to get turned away from the Maroon camps or returned as per the terms of the treaty going to give a single fuck that Max and Jack and Madame Guthrie and John Silver made it so that the treaty was part of the terms of surrender in a war the Maroons hadn’t actually lost? I doubt it. Is that person going to care that Julius wants to preserve the things they have instead of risking the future? God knows I wouldn’t.
AND THEN. Yeah, let’s get into Alfred Hamilton and John Silver because this is where I think things get really interesting. Let’s throw Hal Gates in there too, because he does this to Flint as well.
There are three pivotal moments in Flint’s life where someone looked at him and essentially said, “What I want matters more than what you want and I am going to make you go away to get it.” Do they all have good reasons for it? I’m sure Alfred Hamilton thought the preservation of his name, power, and influence was more than enough reason to make an officer from the lower classes and his troublesome daughter in law go the fuck away. But do we think that? No. Because it hurt characters we’re invested in. Because the reason isn’t good enough for what he did and he only ruined three lives. Hal Gates wanted Flint and Miranda to go away because Flint maybe possibly killed Billy and didn’t care about his men. Were his reasons good? Maybe. To Billy, sure. To Dufresne and Degroot and the rest of the crew, yes. Good enough to make it so they thought that Flint should hang for killing him.
So what makes John Silver’s actions different? His reasons are good to him. He wants to save Madi at all costs. He wants not to go to war. These are all fantastic reasons, much like Gates’ reasons are fantastic reasons. Alfred Hamilton’s reasons are excellent reasons to him. But the end result for Flint is the same: he loses all the things he’s worked for, he is made to go away, and someone else dictates the terms of his story.
Silver has his reasons for wanting the war to end. Max has her reasons. Julius has his. Flint and Madi and the pirates and maroons who came to fight England had theirs for wanting it to continue. Everyone counted up the costs to what they were doing and decided those costs were worth it and that put them into opposition with each other. That doesn’t make one side objectively right or wrong. It means that you take the reasons the show presents and compare them to your own ethics and morals and fucking engage with the text on those terms. And, much like the show, everyone watching it has their reasons for their reaction and those reactions are entirely valid based as they are in our own lived experiences and our beliefs and our histories.
This is why that assertion that the people criticizing Silver for what he does in the ending are flattening the ending or losing the moral complexity of it by comparing what he does to previous antagonists really really irk me: the ethical complexity of the show is LITERALLY the point of the comparisons. Good people do terrible things. Terrible people do good things. Everyone contains multitudes. Everyone’s reasons for what they are doing are good and justifiable to them. Whether those reasons are good or justifiable to anyone/everyone else is the one of the points of the show.
Hey! Really good and well discussed meta above, however I’d like to contest something. What Silver did in the end may be comparable to both Alfred Hamilton and Peter Ashe’s actions in terms of “he had his own excellent reasons and so he sent Flint away,” and so they may look similar on the surface but they are absolutely not comparable when you consider the way those characters felt about Flint. Alfred Hamilton considered Flint to be disposable. He probably barely gave him any consideration. Peter Ashe betrayed both Thomas and Flint in the process and separated them for ten years, and when Flint showed up at his door asking for pardons he continued the ruse and thought it a better idea to expose Flint to London’s ridicule and judgement rather than admit to what he did and tell him about Thomas still being alive. (You could argue Silver does this for half of s4 and you would be right. Except Silver comes clean and Peter does not. The threat of Alfred Hamilton no longer exists. He could tell Flint, and yet he doesn’t.)
The closest betrayal to Silver’s is probably Gates. Gates loved Flint, in some ways, and Flint loved him in some ways. This betrayal is also completely different to the ones mentioned above. I think its doing a disservice to both Gates and Silver to throw them together into this pile of shit.
Silver literally reunited Flint with the man he loves. Silver did the exact opposite of what both Peter and Alfred did. It still served to take Flint out of the picture but it still has to be taken into consideration when judging the moral rightness vs. wrongness of his actions, and especially when considering their relationship. It’s not the same thing. It’s not. It might stem from the same motivation (to protect their own), but the way they go about it and the repercussions that Flint ultimately faces is completely different. It is absolutely a betrayal, but it’s not of the same kind. Gates and Silver both loved Flint, and wanted on some level to keep him safe. This is an aspect that needs to be considered and I don’t think that’s contestable. It’s still paternalistic and it is most definitely robbing Flint of any agency, but the underlying relationships between these characters definitely have to be considered. That’s what’s being flattened when both Silver and Gates are lumped together with Alfred Hamilton.
Let’s also remember: Silver sent six men to kill Flint and tried to kill him himself literally hours before he reunites him with the man he loves. Reuniting him with Thomas wasn’t the goal, which we know because he doesn’t do it when Flint is of use to him; reuniting him with Thomas was the carrot to keep him away from restarting the war.
But in the end, i would argue that whatever the feelings motivating the actions don’t actually matter to the person being disposed of. We don’t know how Peter Ashe felt about James McGraw or Thomas, just that when weighed against his wife and daughter, they were worth less to him. Flint, when weighed against Billy, was worth less to Gates. Flint, when weighed against Madi’s survival, was worth less to Silver.
The relationships are context for the tragedy but they don’t actually change the action.
I’m not saying they change the action, I’m saying they should change the way the action should be judged. In the same way Flint killing Alfred Hamilton and Flint killing Gates is not the same thing.
I also fundamentally disagree that Thomas was a….carrot. I think if the only goal was to keep Flint from starting the war, Silver could have just killed him. That’s surest possible way to keep him from restarting the war, wouldn’t you say? Why bother keeping him alive? Why bother hunting Thomas down? Why bother offering days and weeks and months of your time to convince Flint to let the war go other than just outright shooting him? Why bother taking Flint to Savannah at all? All of this is active effort in the middle of a war. Keeping him alive is Silver going out of his way to keep him alive.
The way I see it, if Flint is alive, re-uniting him with Thomas was at least some part of the goal. If the goal was to get rid of him, there’s a sure fire way to do so. If Flint is alive, there is something that stays Silver’s hand. There’s is something that has him hunt Thomas Hamilton down, there is something that has Silver go on the ship to Savannah and deliver Flint to Thomas. That’s a thing that should be considered. That’s the way I see it. I don’t understand at all how that can be ignored. There’s complexity here that is being missed out on. That’s the whole point.
This is addressed in the show. The reason Silver can’t kill Flint is named Madi, who would have continued the war in his name if Silver had martyred him by shooting him. I don’t deny that he cared about Flint or that Flint cared about him, but that wasn’t what stayed his hand, as evidenced by the fact that literally a few hours earlier, he was fine with sending men to kill Flint and then tried to do it himself. The difference is that in the time between then and the end of the finale, Flint had very publicly won a major battle in the war against England and had the loyalty of a lot of people from that, which meant that he could no longer be painted as a traitor to the cause. Instead, he had to be gotten rid of in a way that made it seem like he’d disappeared willingly. No one’s ignoring the complexity of anything, we’re simply saying that Silver had reasons other than fondness to do what he did.
But when did the parallel between Silver’s decision and Alfred’s became a bad thing? O_O Some of the most prominent s*ilverfl*nt blogs have done it in the past. The parallel *is* there. The reasons are different, but the parallel is there. Why is it a problem now? Because a non-s*ilverfl*nt shipper has done it? captain-flint(.)tumblr(.)com/post/159649086888/flint-is-gone-retired-from-the-account-he-was gaysails(.)tumblr(.)com/post/159321573042/i-dont-know-why-you-did-this-but-i-know-you-did
Anon, I don’t even know. Not making that comparison is like, idk, not analyzing that Pearl in The Scarlet Letter is named for the biblical verse or that Nick in the Great Gatsby is queer enough to sleep with dudes. It’s explicit enough in the text that there is an existing comparison to be made between Peter Ashe and Silver that they use the same dialogue. They use the same justification! Like, I hate Peter Ashe as much as the next person, but he is very clear that he did it because Alfred Hamilton threatened his future and threatened his daughter. How is that any less of a justification than doing it for Madi and the future that Silver wants with her? He is just as clear! He says to Flint that he sees a future with Madi and wants it. It’s right there in the text. It’s not like, “ho ho, i want to find the worst possible read on Silver because he is a mustachioed villain.” It is because everyone has a reason for doing what they’re doing. If you’re extending sympathy to Silver because he is afraid and wants to save Madi and is trying to have a future where he saves lives, you should be able extend that sympathy to Peter Ashe for wanting the same things. If you are using Silver’s practicality as it regards Madi and Flint’s end goals to justify what he does, you should be able to give that same acknowledgment to Peter Ashe who, again, does the exact same thing. Just because we see the fall out of what Peter Ashe does and not the full fall out of what Silver does doesn’t mean that those things don’t happen.
One of the moral and ethical complexities of this show is that you can have good reasons for what you are doing, really sympathetic understandable reasons, and still do terrible things. The good sympathetic understandable reasons don’t make the terrible things less terrible. They don’t make the people who pay the price of them less hurt. Does anyone who burned in Charlestown or any of the other towns Flint sacked give a solitary shit why he did it? No. Is the first runaway slave to get turned away from the Maroon camps or returned as per the terms of the treaty going to give a single fuck that Max and Jack and Madame Guthrie and John Silver made it so that the treaty was part of the terms of surrender in a war the Maroons hadn’t actually lost? I doubt it. Is that person going to care that Julius wants to preserve the things they have instead of risking the future? God knows I wouldn’t.
AND THEN. Yeah, let’s get into Alfred Hamilton and John Silver because this is where I think things get really interesting. Let’s throw Hal Gates in there too, because he does this to Flint as well.
There are three pivotal moments in Flint’s life where someone looked at him and essentially said, “What I want matters more than what you want and I am going to make you go away to get it.” Do they all have good reasons for it? I’m sure Alfred Hamilton thought the preservation of his name, power, and influence was more than enough reason to make an officer from the lower classes and his troublesome daughter in law go the fuck away. But do we think that? No. Because it hurt characters we’re invested in. Because the reason isn’t good enough for what he did and he only ruined three lives. Hal Gates wanted Flint and Miranda to go away because Flint maybe possibly killed Billy and didn’t care about his men. Were his reasons good? Maybe. To Billy, sure. To Dufresne and Degroot and the rest of the crew, yes. Good enough to make it so they thought that Flint should hang for killing him.
So what makes John Silver’s actions different? His reasons are good to him. He wants to save Madi at all costs. He wants not to go to war. These are all fantastic reasons, much like Gates’ reasons are fantastic reasons. Alfred Hamilton’s reasons are excellent reasons to him. But the end result for Flint is the same: he loses all the things he’s worked for, he is made to go away, and someone else dictates the terms of his story.
Silver has his reasons for wanting the war to end. Max has her reasons. Julius has his. Flint and Madi and the pirates and maroons who came to fight England had theirs for wanting it to continue. Everyone counted up the costs to what they were doing and decided those costs were worth it and that put them into opposition with each other. That doesn’t make one side objectively right or wrong. It means that you take the reasons the show presents and compare them to your own ethics and morals and fucking engage with the text on those terms. And, much like the show, everyone watching it has their reasons for their reaction and those reactions are entirely valid based as they are in our own lived experiences and our beliefs and our histories.
This is why that assertion that the people criticizing Silver for what he does in the ending are flattening the ending or losing the moral complexity of it by comparing what he does to previous antagonists really really irk me: the ethical complexity of the show is LITERALLY the point of the comparisons. Good people do terrible things. Terrible people do good things. Everyone contains multitudes. Everyone’s reasons for what they are doing are good and justifiable to them. Whether those reasons are good or justifiable to anyone/everyone else is the one of the points of the show.
Hey! Really good and well discussed meta above, however I’d like to contest something. What Silver did in the end may be comparable to both Alfred Hamilton and Peter Ashe’s actions in terms of “he had his own excellent reasons and so he sent Flint away,” and so they may look similar on the surface but they are absolutely not comparable when you consider the way those characters felt about Flint. Alfred Hamilton considered Flint to be disposable. He probably barely gave him any consideration. Peter Ashe betrayed both Thomas and Flint in the process and separated them for ten years, and when Flint showed up at his door asking for pardons he continued the ruse and thought it a better idea to expose Flint to London’s ridicule and judgement rather than admit to what he did and tell him about Thomas still being alive. (You could argue Silver does this for half of s4 and you would be right. Except Silver comes clean and Peter does not. The threat of Alfred Hamilton no longer exists. He could tell Flint, and yet he doesn’t.)
The closest betrayal to Silver’s is probably Gates. Gates loved Flint, in some ways, and Flint loved him in some ways. This betrayal is also completely different to the ones mentioned above. I think its doing a disservice to both Gates and Silver to throw them together into this pile of shit.
Silver literally reunited Flint with the man he loves. Silver did the exact opposite of what both Peter and Alfred did. It still served to take Flint out of the picture but it still has to be taken into consideration when judging the moral rightness vs. wrongness of his actions, and especially when considering their relationship. It’s not the same thing. It’s not. It might stem from the same motivation (to protect their own), but the way they go about it and the repercussions that Flint ultimately faces is completely different. It is absolutely a betrayal, but it’s not of the same kind. Gates and Silver both loved Flint, and wanted on some level to keep him safe. This is an aspect that needs to be considered and I don’t think that’s contestable. It’s still paternalistic and it is most definitely robbing Flint of any agency, but the underlying relationships between these characters definitely have to be considered. That’s what’s being flattened when both Silver and Gates are lumped together with Alfred Hamilton.
Let’s also remember: Silver sent six men to kill Flint and tried to kill him himself literally hours before he reunites him with the man he loves. Reuniting him with Thomas wasn’t the goal, which we know because he doesn’t do it when Flint is of use to him; reuniting him with Thomas was the carrot to keep him away from restarting the war.
But in the end, i would argue that whatever the feelings motivating the actions don’t actually matter to the person being disposed of. We don’t know how Peter Ashe felt about James McGraw or Thomas, just that when weighed against his wife and daughter, they were worth less to him. Flint, when weighed against Billy, was worth less to Gates. Flint, when weighed against Madi’s survival, was worth less to Silver.
The relationships are context for the tragedy but they don’t actually change the action.
Maybe people just need to have their partners/family members/friends make the most crucial decisions for them, and see for themselves how well “but I did it for you!” justification works and how much worse it actually makes you feel.
Honestly, Anon – I get where you’re coming from, but I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. I’ve had someone do something very similar to me. I’ve been the one left standing there gaping while someone does something incomprehensibly shitty and then refuses to see that they were wrong (and yes – they too had reasons that I actually understand and can sympathize with but still here we are and their decision was the wrong one and it damaged my relationship with them permanently.) It’s the shittiest feeling in the world. I’m truly glad for everyone that doesn’t understand why I’m not ok with Silver’s decisions that they’ve apparently never had someone do that to them. For anyone who has had someone do that, though, and still supports his decisions – I don’t get it. I’m sure you have your reasons, but I truly do not understand and I don’t think I’m going to or that I want to. I’ve fought hard to get to the point where I understand that I’m allowed to be angry about what happened and I’m not turning back on that now.
Someone: Why don’t you like Silver/ship S*lverfl*nt/feel sorry for Silver?
Me: Because Silver reminds me of people I knew who were abusive and the finale opened some really old emotional wounds. Also because abuse victims do not get a pass on their own shitty actions.
Someone: People who don’t like Silver are morons.
apparently i gotta do this because wow really?
amongst all this tag policing and other “we own this fandom” bullshit, i’m seeing people publicly refer to anti-Silver fans as morons, stupid, and lacking critical thinking skills etc etc the list of degrading insults go on and on
if there’s anyone trying to reduce the complexity of the show, it’s definitely not us, and it would be fucking splendid if you could stop insulting people who see things different than you (or perhaps… just taking the source material as is instead of twisting it into something it’s not, but what do i know). so Silver made a difficult choice for the sake of the people he loved; guess who else did that? Peter Ashe. he went ahead and betrayed his best friend because Abigail (and presumably his wife) would’ve suffered if he didn’t. and to him, this was considered “the least awful outcome”– one that would at least keep Thomas, James, and Miranda alive. that’s how he conceptualized it in his own mind. that’s how he excused his own actions. and surprise! Silver is doing the exact same thing. and, just like Alfred Hamilton, Silver came to his decision independently, without consulting anyone, and he acted to end the war permanently, quietly, and in a manner of his choosing. for all the parallels that the show keeps referencing, it’s ironic that you lot refuse to acknowledge this one, the one that continuously shows up within the show. it makes me wonder which one of us is actually failing to see the complex nature of what we’ve been shown?
You say: I don’t understand how you can look at Silver and see a villain. You’re reducing the complexity of the show.
I say: I don’t know how you can look at him and not see it, and I never said it was fucking easy for him. I said that no matter how hard the decision he made was, it was still fucking wrong.
Listen can we get one thing straight John Silver was not “planning to reunite James with the love of his life for an entire season” he knew that Thomas was alive since before he thought Madi was dead and only chose to use that knowledge when it was convenient for him
and like. if he was doing it for james then he why didn’t he just?? free thomas?? and let them go off together??
I mean that was going to be my next post but yes
What do you think, when should he have done that?
um, immediately? John Silver knows how completely losing Thomas destroyed James, and that James would give anything to have him back again, and yet he waits until ending the war is convenient to him before shipping James off. If Silver really was doing it “for James” because he cared so much about him then why the fuck did he wait and let James keep suffering as he missed Thomas every second of every day
But also, like, shipping aside it is demonstrably untrue that Silver was ‘plotting to reunite them all season” like canonically he had that information for a prolonged period of time before he revealed it, he literally tells Madi he knew since before he thought Madi was dead, regardless of when he “should” have told James it is canon that he did not as soon as he had found out
Hmm.
So he sent Morgan to Savannah, and Morgan came back at a time where Flint was imprisoned by Eleanor. Should Silver have sent a letter to the fort?
“Dear Flint,
I just found out that Thomas Hamilton is alive! Unfortunately, you’re sitting in a cell right now, but I guess you don’t mind Eleanor reading this message. Also, Billy is tryint to get me to kill you, but what else is new. Let’s stay in touch, yeah? The cache should be here soon. Yours, etc., John Silver.”
They only saw each other again at the Underhill plantation. Should those have been his first words to Flint?
“Capain, good to see you! We’ve got this Spanish invasion at our hands, but since I know hat you keep suffering as you miss Thomas every second of every day, I think it’s my duty as a friend to tell you that Thomas Hamilton is alive and in Savannah, oh, by the way, where is Madi?”
Only then Flint delivered him the message that Madi was dead, but I assume that in order to be a good friend, Silver should have found the time to tell Flint about Thomas.
Of course, then there were those days they spent on Maroon Island plotting their campaign before the governor sent message of Madi still being alive, and I assume that Silver should have made it his priority to care about Flint’s love life rather than the loss of his sgnificant other. That’s what a good friend would do, doubtlessly. Since, you know, Flint was missing Thomas every second of every day, and suffering so much.
Come on. There’s reasonable criticism at a characters’ actions, and then there’s stuff like this that’s just … not very reasonable at all.
I know we have different view points, but I honestly have to say, I think you’re way off the mark with this one.
Um, yes, I do think Silver should have told him at some point before he pointed a gun at Flint because it served his needs. Quite frankly, life doesn’t stop when a war is going on. He could have found the goddamn time. Alternatively, if your assertion is that he was too busy with all the other shit going on, then the suggestion “he was plotting to reunite James and Thomas” is also patently ridiculous, because if he didn’t have time for that conversation, he most certain did not have time to plan to reunite James and Thomas.
I’m still stuck thinking about the fact that Silver all but asked Flint if he’d want to know if Thomas was still alive- if he’d trade the war to have Thomas back- and Flint’s response was a far cry from a resounding “yes”- and the fact that telling him about Thomas right then could have had a disastrous effect on the war, a war which at the time Silver still backed, and which a large portion of fandom is (understandably) enraged that he later stopped. He believed that learning Thomas was alive had the ability to unmake Flint; certainly it would have served to divide Flint’s focus at the worst possible time, given how heavily they were relying on Flint to lead them in the battles.
It’s not that I think people are wrong to be upset that Silver didn’t tell Flint right away, or wrong to be upset that Silver stopped the war, but for people to be mad about *both* simultaneously confuses me, because at least in Silver’s mind, telling Flint about Thomas risked imperiling the war effort. So if the bigger argument is that Silver shouldn’t have done *anything* to get in the way of the fight for freedom, wouldn’t the argument that he should have absolutely done something that *would* have impeded that fight be counter-intuitive?
I like Silver, but I don’t think he deserves to be forgiven for taking away the war from those who were so desperate for it. I wish he’d made different choices, even if the narrative wasn’t designed to allow for it, since the writers were always walking him towards the kind of ending that would make him into Long John Silver. At the same time, I wonder if the outcomes of him making different choices earlier on in season four would have landed the same degree of hate on him by fandom; that if Silver had told Flint about Thomas the moment he confirmed Thomas was still alive, if fans wouldn’t be just as mad at him for not waiting to tell Flint until just a little later, just until everyone could afford for Flint to not fully be Flint any more.
I actually read that scene as absolutely a resounding “yes” that James can’t even bring himself to say because it’s too painful. The suggestion that there’s something he could give up to have Thomas back is too painful to consider for even a second, because then he’d have to return to the reality that Thomas is gone forever. And honestly, as much as I get mad at Silver for his choices, I will acknowledge that yes, Flint would likely have given this war for Thomas. He would give anything for Thomas. If he had had the cache and it was Thomas, not Madi, he would have traded it. And yes, that rather throws a wrench in all my anger at Silver unequivocally ending the war and I will admit that keeps me up at night and everything but this isn’t even about that. It isn’t about whether or not Silver should have/had the right to/whatever phrasing you want to use stop the war; what I was trying to get at with this post is that Silver was absolutely not planning to tell James the truth about Thomas and reunite him with his lost love for the entirety of the season. You’re entirely right that he didn’t tell James right away because at that point he backed the war, and only told him when he didn’t back the war anymore – and putting aside the question of whether or not that was the right thing to do, that immediately invalidates the idea that Silver was “planning to tell James all along.” Like, the crucial point here is that Silver’s stance on the war, and hence on telling James the truth, changed drastically with Madi’s not-death, and that is canonical, and that fact invalidates the idea that Silver had been planning the James/Thomas reunion all along.
And basically I too am confused, because I’ve seen people defend Silver because ending the war was the right thing to do because of the casualties it would have produced, and I’ve seen people defend Silver because he was planning to reunite James and Thomas all along, and you simultaneously can’t have both. Either Madi’s death made him realize the cost of the war and that was the right thing to do, or he had been planning to end the war all along and reunite James and Thomas and that was the right thing to do but honestly, pick one? I’ve seen people claim that Flint’s war was mere rage and revenge and not actually a movement of liberation and thus defend Silver’s ending of it while ignoring that Silver not only allowed it to continue but aided it for a very long time, and if the war is truly terrorism rather than a liberation movement, does that not make him equally guilty?
Basically, the question of the validity of Flint’s war is a really interesting one to me and one I”m happy to have, but I get very annoyed when people defend Silver reuniting James/Thomas “for their own sakes” or to make them happy or because he cared about them because yes, Silver may have had his own very good reasons for ending it but making James happy was not one of them. It was demonstrably not, and if he had cared merely about unmaking Flint he would have freed Thomas rather than, ya know, selling James into slavery.
See I read that conversation about whether Flint would give up the war if he could have Thomas back differently. I thought Flint, at that point, would have given life, limb and gold to get Thomas but he was also thinking about the larger notions of freedom, autonomy and justice. And his answer read to me as “I dearly would but at this point in the war, I may say no.”
And he knows how Thomas thinks. This is a man who probably sacrificed himself to ensure Miranda and James were allowed to leave England with their lives.
And so Flint deflects and says if Thomas were to know what’s at stake, he won’t want me to give up.
And I think that’s probably what unnerved Silver. See that’s scary – Silver knows James’ history and knows his depth of love for the Hamiltons and what their loss drove James to do and here, at this crossroads the man says he might not give up this war even for Thomas. So then, John is now worried that Flint would give them all up for the war.
What Silver doesn’t realize, and this is because he sees only the rage in Flint, is that James thinks differently. Flint is a tactical genius and you can’t plan for contingencies like that. That’s the way of compromises. When and if such a situation were to occur, there would be far more variables in play and that makes it easier to make a move. And if Thomas had come into play, Silver would have received a definite answer.
James is thinking large here and unfortunately, Silver and Rackham and Max believe him to still be fighting for himself.
See, I kind of always read Silver asking Flint if he would give up the war for Thomas as the prelude to what he does in the finale. Because he starts off with asking Madi what would happen if the war ended. If he would be enough for her. If she could give it up, and, like Flint, she doesn’t really answer him, and that scares him. Honestly, though, I think the point at which he realizes Thomas might be alive comes when he’s already realized what the war could cost him. He’s already spoken to Billy. He’s already had the thought planted that he could lose Madi, and that thought tortures him. He says as much to Flint, and then when he finds out that Thomas might be alive, that looks to him like a way to end the war that he already doesn’t want to be fighting, and he waits to tell Flint that Thomas is alive until that information can have maximum effect.
And honestly, yes, I do blame him for not telling Flint about Thomas and for ending the war simultaneously because they’re both wrong for their own reasons and I don’t think it’s contradictory to do so, because honestly I don’t think he really had any expectation that telling Flint about Thomas would end the war, especially after that conversation he had with him during the prisoner exchange. I think he understood that telling Flint Thomas was alive would, at best, serve as distraction for a while and then the war would be back on, hence why he feels it necessary to enslave James to make the war end. If he had felt the war might have ended with Thomas being alive and Flint knowing that, then he could fucking well have freed Thomas, brought him to Flint, and gone “here’s your husband, now STOP.” That’s very demonstrably not how things went down. He kept Thomas’ survival from Flint until the moment he could get Flint separated from anyone who would help him and dragged him North in chains. Bottom line: Silver took a look at the cost of the war to him personally (and the cost to a fair number of other people, I’m not going to deny he did consider that but it wasn’t his primary motivation), decided it was unacceptable, and proceeded to make every effort to end it, including lying to his best friend by omission, lying to the woman he loved, and enslaving his best friend. The point here is that he had no right to do either, and telling Flint about Thomas would not have accomplished Silver’s goal on its own because Flint wasn’t just fighting for himself, he was fighting for what Thomas wanted and for the right to be himself without getting hanged for it. This boils down to what you believe Flint was fighting for, and yeah, if you think it was about rage and nothing else, then yeah, asking Silver to both tell Flint about Thomas and not end the war is contradictory but if you understand that that’s not the only thing driving Flint, then no, they’re not contradicting each other at all.
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.
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.
@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.
Meg's Mumbles 