comtessedebussy:

Anon you have given me the perfect opportunity to go off on a meta rant. 

So first of all, it should be noted that Flint and Madi weren’t so much starting a war as changing the terms of an ongoing one. Oppression, slavery, the tearing apart of families, throwing people into Bedlam and torturing them because they’re inconvenient…those are, in their own way, acts of war against marginalized people. They are meant to either eradicate these kinds of people or make them conform so that they become cogs in the machine of imperialism. There is this false assumption that neutrality is possible where oppression exists – that’s not true. Its not true in the show and it’s not true today: if you’re not actively trying to dismantle an oppressive system, you are validating it, allowing it to continue to exist, and likely benefiting from it. 

And Rogers is the literal incarnation of this oppressive system. He represents everything that Flint is fighting. Flint’s ultimate motivation – the original thing he was trying to do – was to create a free an independent Nassau. That is, a Nassau without British rule, where the laws and oppressions of the British government did not exist. Where a man couldn’t be hanged for loving another man, where madness and homosexuality could not be used as a pretext to imprison and torture a man, where people couldn’t be enslaved. He has been supremely fucked over by the British Empire, and his act of revenge was to try to create a place where the Empire couldn’t reach, where it couldn’t have that kind of power to destroy lives. (And yes, his motivations were’nt pure and altruistic and he wanted revenge, etc, etc, but I’ve been over this before)

And Rogers may have showed up on Nassau with pardons, but let’s not pretend that he would have created anything like that. His ultimate goal was to institute the same kind of tyrannical rule on Nassau that existed everywhere else in the British Empire. I mean, are we under the impression that the people of Nassau would have been somehow free and happy under his rule? He issues a mass pardon, then revokes it for Jack because it’s convenient. His wife holds a kangaroo court in order to convict and hang Charles Vane and Rogers wholeheartedly approves. He uses Max for information and has an agreement with her that she won’t name her informants, then Berringer goes back on that promise. He literally has Nassau razed to the ground when it looks like it might slip out from under his fingers. Can you imagine what it would be like to live on Nassau with him as governor? It would literally be a regime of terror, where people would disappear when it was convenient and anybody could become a pawn or a scapegoat. When I say he represents the British Empire, I mean he represents the worst of the British system that Flint is fighting to eradicate. 

Of course, it’s a different question what kind of system Flint would have instituted had he had the chance, and what a free Nassau would have looked like, and of course Maroon society seems to have an absolute monarchy as well. But Rogers very, very obviously represents the maintaining of the status quo of the British Empire, and that status quo is not a pretty thing. He is the incarnation of everything Flint is fighting against – the very incarnation of empire and of oppression.