Black Sails + Things And Places That Feel Like Characters 

Agathario AU | part 2 insp.

Max my beloved <33

My captain🖤☠ (and king).

Perfect description.

I'd forgotten how exceptional the first episode of Black Sails and the introduction of Captain Flint are. In one (1) episode they point to this soggy, angry little man and go: this is the most dangerous pirate of the seven seas. he wouldn't even win a swordfight. he beat someone to death with his bare fists and is ready to do it again. he probably cries himself to sleep at night. he's the most collected, composed man you've ever seen. he throws furniture around in a fit when he's angry. he talks about the importance of trust and honesty. he doesn't believe any of it. he can completely change someone's mind when he talks to them. the people closest to him know not to trust a single word that comes out of his mouth. he's in control of the narrative. he's trapped in a web of lies of his own making. he's made himself into a legend. everything he's built is just one second away from falling apart. he inspired a whole nation. he's the number one public enemy. he's a hero. he's a monster. he's just one man. he's starting a war against the whole world.

"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.

Im not the first person to post about this, but I just rewatched VIII with a friend who is watching the show for the first time, so it’s fresh in my mind again, but like jfc on a rewatch the scene where gates tells flint that his crimes are too great that he is going to have to be spirited away with miranda in the dead of night to avoid the noose, the look on flints face, the way he says please. Please don’t do this is just. Fucking devastating. when you, the audience, are burdened with the knowledge of exactly what happened to him and miranda and thomas back in london. Flint killing gates is so horrific, so completely incomprehensible and unforgivable on the first watch, my friend was basically shouting at the screen, “why would he do this? It doesn’t solve any of his problems! That’s his only friend! What the fuck! Fuck this guy!” And like. Yeah. This doesn’t fix any of Flint’s problems. It doesn’t make any sense for Captain Flint to do this. I could hate Captain Flint for doing this. The ghost of James McGraw however…? I understand exactly why he does that.

@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)

Day 2: Discover

“They paint the world full of shadows... and then tell their children to stay close to the light. Their light. Their reasons, their judgments. Because in the darkness, there be dragons. But it isn't true…in the dark, there is discovery, there is possibility, there is freedom in the dark once someone has illuminated it.”

Edit: very helpful image ID from @etoilesombre added as alt text!

This is great! 😍

Love her so much🖤

i really love to make collages with aesthetics for characters uu

marie-joseph sanson, «innocent : rouge.»

I HAVE SO MANY THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS BUT IN SUMMARY: LESBIAN YEARNING!!!

agatha looks at her with so much hurt and restraint.

rio looks at her with so much adoration and yearning.

agatha and rio looks at each other with so much familiarity that with just one look, you could count the centuries they have loved each other.

aubrey and kathryn both played their characters so well *chef’s kiss*

(and don’t forget the music for this edit. pure lesbianism. at its core.)