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.
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.
I was going to write a massive Anne Bonny essay, but I realised it was turning into a dissertation. Instead, let me just say how much I appreciate this simple representation in Anne Bonny’s character growth.
S1 Episode 1:
Stealth murder kitten, keeping to the shadows, hat pulled low, face almost always half-concealed. Speaks low and gruff as if to disguise her gender. Lurks a lot. Is quiet and quietly menacing. This generally is her default look for a lot of the show.
Through the course of four seasons, she faces her own crew threatening to use her as a sex doll if she doesn’t shut up and get with the programme, forges an alliance with another woman to save the third woman, ends up dealing with a belated sexual awakening thanks to said third woman, is screwed over by her boyfriend, has a journey of self-discovery since she’d never been without said boyfriend, reunites with said boyfriend, is screwed over by her girlfriend, rescues her boyfriend from Evil English Soldiers and leads the vanguard in taking an English ship. Oh and in the final season takes down three English soldiers with a couple of pieces of broken glass where a dozen men had failed.
Which brings us to S4 Episode 10:
Anne, Queen of the Ship. She’s no longer lurking in the background. The hat that once covered her face is pushed back. No more hiding who or what she is. And best of all, when Jack goes off in a huff about his flag, Anne is the one giving the orders and they are being obeyed.
She has gone from being a disrespected shadow who was tolerated by much of the crew because she was good with a blade to a confident woman who is second only to Jack on this ship and everyone knows it.
(Special mention to this shot, though. My Queen on her first command after she has just taken an English ship)
it’s just hilarious how pre s4 if I were to watch s2 and be like “thank god thomas never actually died and he and james are at their summer home right now drinking tea and reading to each other in bed” it would be a coping mechanism but post s4 if I do the same thing it’s actual literal truth????? like I can’t believe this show Did and continues to Do That
So – in thinking about it, I really truly do not get where this idea of pacifist!Thomas is coming from.
I mean – I get it in theory. I get where the idea comes from, I suppose, but I don’t agree, because the Thomas that I saw wasn’t a pacifist so much as he was a proponent of mercy for people who had been pushed to criminal acts by an unforgiving and autocratic society. Thomas, as Flint notes, wanted to change England and he wanted to do so by taking the people that it had deemed undesirable and giving them a second chance. He was attempting to demonstrate that the poor were not, by nature, criminals or destined to become criminals but people who had been treated unfairly by their government and by the upper classes – Thomas’ own class. I don’t know that that necessarily translates into being a pacifist so much as it indicates an ability to see people as people regardless of their class. Furthermore, his attitude toward Israel Hands and the other pirates who killed the Governor’s family and something he says to his father indicates to me that Thomas Hamilton is not a pacifist. He believes in forgiveness, yes – for those who would seek it. Those who, on the other hand, are dedicated to chaos and violence when offered an alternative and do not want anything else, he was not proposing to pardon.
As to what he would think of James and his war – I like to think he would understand that it was not about chaos. It was not about violence. It was about trying to change the world in the only way that had been left to him. James had demonstrated willingness to turn away from that war several times. He had tried to end it in a peaceful fashion, and every time he was turned on by the same civilization he attempted to make terms with. By the time Rogers offered him a pardon, he had, as he himself noted, come to the end of his willingness to trust in civilization, and who could blame him? I think it’s important to note that the war he was fighting wasn’t just for himself, either – it was for millions of people like him that were going to continue to be savaged by that civilization. That’s something that I don’t think Thomas would have wanted him to ignore – he hated injustice, and slavery and England’s treatment of queer people was very definitely that. Also – Thomas at the end of canon had had eleven years of being tortured and enslaved. He had seen the results of trying to change things peacefully – do we really think that he wouldn’t be both angry at the people and the system that had done that to him and his loved ones and ready to try more drastic methods?
The thing that always kind of gets me about Thomas-the-pacifist is that Thomas, the wealthy titled son and heir of the Earl of Ashbourne, has the space to pursue his ends in a way that uses the system instead of overthrowing it. The resources available to him include politics and the law and money and contacts. He can pull together the 3+ ships and carpenters and farmers and ministers to populate Nassau. He uses every resource at his disposal to see to a) making nassau stable and profitable and b) making sure that people like him and his family can’t fuck it up the way they have the old world. Thomas the ex-prisoner does not have the same set of resources. James McGraw/Flint never had them. Miranda didn’t have them. The thing we see consistently across all characters on all sides of the war is the attempt to utilize the resources available to them to change the world in whatever way they see fit.
So Flint wages war because his ability to wage war is the tool at his disposal to accomplish his aims. Miranda uses soft contacts. Eleanor uses trade. Max uses secrets and money. Silver uses people’s emotions. Woodes Rogers uses money/politics/influence/war. I keep feeling like the questions to ask about post-series Thomas are 1) what does he want and 2) what are the resources available to him to get it?
Whatever the answer to number 1 is, the answer to number 2 is he has his own mind and he has James.
So do I think he’d be pro The War? If I’m being honest? Probably, but only if he’d satisfied himself that there was no other way to achieve their aims. Do I think he’d retire to the interior and become a farmer? No. Do i think he’s a pacifist? Not…entirely. I think he is a person who would recognize that the peaceful achievement of change is a luxury and that not everyone has that as an option. And I think he would recognize that peace and security and comfort is a tool wielded by the powers that be to discourage a disruption of the status quo. Ultimately I guess it depends on what his relationship to the status quo is and how pissed off he is about it.
Meg's Mumbles 