Title: Between Reality And Dreams, Where The Memories Lie (art) Link: Click Here To View And Comment

You can imagine the restrain it took for me not to let my people loose. But where does that leave us?

Now, THIS is Madi leadership at its best. Because she knows how to prioritize the cause and stop the cycle of hate and revenge at the same time. She only fight for justice and equality, to ensure what happened to her parents and to her friends doesn't happen to anyone else. Her intentions are the purest and that's what makes her so valuable.

@mdzsnet | MDZS Network’s Anniversary Requests ⤷ requested by anonymous: Wangxian + Shrike

I couldn’t utter my love when it counted Ah, but I’m singing like a bird ’bout it now I couldn’t whisper when you needed it shouted Ah, but I’m singing like a bird ’bout it now — Shrike (Hozier)

Poison Ivy #15 variant cover by Seb McKinnon

😘💋

Well, what graphic description could be more accurate for my own reaction to the last ep?

Thank you for reminding me how haunting that was (it threw me out of balance for days and I'm still thinking about it).

I'll brace myself to go through all of this once again now that I'm reaching the end of my rewatch😢

Not to be unhelpful, but try going through season 4 knowing how it is going to end. Painful experience.

just finished black sails…..

"The sustained heat of an intense fire"

...and it's just Lestat's gaze.

"But I hear other voices. A chorus of voices. Multitudes. They reach back centuries. Men and women and children who lost their lives to men like you. Man and women and children forced to wear your chains. I must answer to them.

And this war, Flint’s war, my war, it will not be bargained away to avoid a fight. To save John Silver’s life, or his men’s, or mine.”

I’d like to start from this beautiful speech from Madi to explain why I think Madi is the war itself. Why she was exactly what Flint needed to start fighting it and why she couldn’t be further away from Silver as a person.

Just because I rewatched the final ep. today and I feel the need to honor the one who lost part of herself in this and to reason about the dynamics among the two persons who might have changed the world and the one who kicked that hope back into the dark corner of the untold.

As always, Flint and Silver’s conversation at the end of ep.XXXVIII made me think A LOT. First time I guess I was overwhelmed by emotions, but this time, between the bitterness of the betrayal and the desperation of Flint's loss, I think I started to see exactly what Silver couldn’t get about the war. Which basically is its meaning.

But let me begin with Flint, because is the character I think I know better by now and because I need to start from a warrior who is not the war itself.

Flint started by fighting a war, another one, an easier one, alongside Thomas. He found himself in that period of time, but he lost that war and the one he loved the most with it. Then he started to fight another kind of war, twisted himself in order to fit into its lines. That war was never about liberation, even if that was what he had been telling himself all along and maybe what he hoped he could eventually accomplish by fighting it: it was just about revenge and something to grab in order to stay afloat. It took him to lost every hope of happiness he had left (Miranda), the last possible meaning of his life and of the person he felt he really was deep inside to see the chance for yet another kind of war. A wider one, a harder one, a most fundamental one. It took him to meet Madi. Knowing her, someone completely different from anyone he had known and fought along in the past, someone who was somehow closer to him as a person than anyone he had ever known (except maybe Eleonor, I’m talking mainly about the pirates. Thomas and Miranda were close to him but not very similar in character I’d say and maybe this is why they got along together so well), he finally had the chance to understand that he was not alone in his misery. She had the courage to be what Flint didn’t even know he could become, the fight not for the fight’s sake but for the outcome, as much as he reputed himself already excluded from it, because however he couldn’t ever be part of anything again, not in the way he had been with Thomas and Miranda. But there’s a difference between fighting just to kill and fighting to save who the one you are killing would have been willing to kill, and Madi represented that change for him.

And the war represented the only meaning he was still able to give to his life.

He is defined by his past, absolutely and mainly, and this makes him both someone with valid reasons to fight and someone with reasons to stop fighting.

In the previous episode we see how Silver instead refuses to be defined by his past, which could be a good or a bad thing, depending on how one let that past influence themselves, but that in this specific situation is basically what makes him unable (just my point of view of course) to get the general meaning of that war.

He chooses to erase his experience in favor of the moment, of the future maybe, and this makes him unable (as much as he likes to affirm the contrary, which I had never agreed upon) to understand the minds of the ones who let that experience shape them. And even more, it makes him unable to understand the minds of the ones who don’t need to have cruel experiences behind them in order to feel the fight. That is, Madi.

To link with my previous post ( https://www.tumblr.com/dragonsinthedarkness/758840316125216768/from-the-moment-he-started-speaking-i-couldnt?source=share ), in that infamous conversation in the last ep. Silver confesses he felt the war only (or especially, but I’d say only) when he lost Madi, because he felt the need to honor her sacrifice, avenge her lost and everything Flint had been doing for years, and the point is that that war was EXACTLY that. It was answering to the multitudes of voices who had undergone all that suffering and that demanded justice for it. It was trying to accomplish that as few others as possible could undergo that same fate.

And the point I want to make is that Madi was not only a warrior but the war itself because she felt those voices and the need to answer to them EVEN IF she had never personally experienced such tragedies. She was raised with the Guthries, then in the camp, she had probably even had the chance to be happy in her childhood, but this didn’t prevent her from developing the knowledge of that evil or the responsibility to fight it as leader of her community and as sisters of all the ones who had suffered before and may suffer again.

She wasn’t defined by her own past, but she brought on her shoulders the most painful and important legacy and decided to honor it.

And one may ask for justice for what happened in their own lifetime with a single chance of succeeding, that can make a great warrior of them, but those voices REACHED BACK CENTURIES, as she said. Her justice, their justice, would have been hopeless as long as something bigger as that war started to change things, and this is exactly what Silver couldn’t understand.

Now of course I know changes don’t happen overnight because “the world is too strong for that”, but I’m talking about their reality in that age right now and I think that as much as a war couldn’t have probably changed things, it would have been a beginning at least. A scream echoing in the night of their existences who would have maybe be heard, and as long as even a single person was able to gain goodness from it, it wouldn’t have been in vain.

As I believe all their efforts had not been in vain, despite the outcome.

For one hour, a month or a year (to improperly quote Silver) of freedom.

For one single moment of victory, of light in the dark.

He’s a liar. He’s a thief. He’s reluctantly a pirate. He’s no one from nowhere belonging to nothing. And now? He’s a doll<3

Absolutely yes to all of that.

(warning: black sails spoilers)

every time I see a bad Miranda Hamilton take I have to try so so hard not to engage. I see so many people blatantly misunderstand her character or call her ‘annoying’ (especially when talking about season 2 episode 9 and her rant at Peter) and it pains me so much. She is just as much forged by loss as Flint, she is just as traumatised. And, on top of it, she is expected to sit around and wait for deliverance, she isn’t afforded the same opportunity to take matters into her own hands. Call her annoying all you want, but know that you’re wrong. Her rant in s2e9 is not unnecessary and it’s not overly emotional, it’s actually very fucking justified. It’s one of the only times she actually breaks her cool, allows herself to be angry, and she is killed for it. It’s a response to the revelation that Peter, once her friend, sold Thomas out for status, colluded behind their backs with Alfred fucking Hamilton to destroy their happiness. And he dares to claim it was a ‘civilised’ solution? So she says fuck your civilisation. Fuck your solutions. Fuck your pardons, your country, your empire. It should all burn for what you’ve done. And don’t miss the connotations of burning: purifying, cleansing, starting fresh. You know who else was being ‘purified’? Thomas. Rotting in a mental hospital for being queer.

She has every right to be angry. And it makes sense that she is killed for it, as empire cannot abide any challenge to its official narrative. The mere fact of her raised voice is enough to condemn her to death, yet she and Flint are treated as monstrous for their killing of Alfred Hamilton. The man who destroyed their lives and orchestrated their tragedy.

So fuck your takes. I’m so so fed up of people talking about her as if she’s just some irritating tag along. She is integral to the show’s message, and in this particular episode, Flint’s realisation that empire is not the answer. He learns that, whilst he is villainised for his use of violence in service of a noble goal, empire is allowed to practice violence with no consequences. It takes Miranda from him just as it took Thomas from them both.

Agatha All Along week | day 5 | vampires AU

Your Highness, I’ve always watched you.

“I understand your everything.”

“Your courage, your despair; your kindness, your pain;

your resentment, your hate; your intelligence, your foolishness.

“If I could, I would have you use me as your stepping stone, the bridge you take apart after crossing, the corpse bones you need to trample to climb up, the sinner who deserved the butchering of a million knives.

"But, I know you wouldn’t allow it.”