“I Miss Him Too.“

“his relationship with thomas hamilton– the initial friendship– and them then becoming lovers is sorta’ like– it was the realization of himself. i think he became himself with thomas hamilton. he finally could be who he– his potential was kind of unleashed with hamilton.” - Toby Stephens (x)

"From the moment he started speaking I couldn't stop thinking about her. She died for this. She believed in this, and if it all goes away then it was all for nothing. I can't let this be for nothing. I just can't.”

I just listened to Silver's words in ep.XXXV and they reminded me at once of Flint's final ones: “All this will be for nothing. We will have been for nothing.”

Sorry to all Silver's supporters, but I couldn't help thinking…how selfish is that?

I mean, the war had a meaning as long as it was the only thing left and the cause Madi had died for, but it suddenly doesn't anymore as soon as she “comes back to life”? When even her own mother understood the meaning of her sacrifice. Of course I was glad she was alive, and I'm not saying Silver should have believed in a war which didn't belong to him (‘cause it never belonged to him, he just joined) but EXACTLY for this, who gave him the right to decide when to put an end to it?

He should have remembered how it felt like to have that war as the only thing left, to know that who you love has died, even if not for it specifically, at least for the same principles, trying to gain the same results, and what did he do? He deprived Flint of that only thing left. He deprived Madi of something she had been ready to DIE for, even without having ever suffered directly what she tried to save all her people from. Who was him to take that decision? How much arrogance does it need to do that?

And ok, he told Flint about Thomas (but ONLY when it came useful to himself to do so) and probably granted him the only thing he still really desired (admitted this is really how things went), but I’m not considering this because this is not the point. The point, just for me of course, is that that scene when Flint says that phrase is probably the most haunting of the last episode, because the treason and the injustice there cut so deep that it really hurts.

Despite everything, he should have left Madi her war and -if he really was a friend to Flint- should have told him about Thomas, regardless if it was useful or not.

Guess it's the main reason why the final is so conflictingly sad and beautiful.

It isn't even about whether the revolution could work or not, it's really only about selfishness.

I'm the breath on your hair, the endless nightmare, devil's lair. Only so many times I can say I long for you The lily among the thorns The prey among the wolves

It doesn’t feel like living anymore.

I love Miranda. And this is maybe the moment I find her the most arresting and beautiful. It’s such a raw, desperate moment. Asking to be seen. I love her contradictions. How she is both selfish and self-sacrificing. She is incredibly strong in so many regards, and yet struggling to find her own agency. She is honest and yet underhanded. She is kind and petty, smug and patient. As an avowed hedonist, she comes to endure even when she’s past her endurance. An in the end she becomes a martyr, when I think all she ever wanted was to be her own person.

That complexity is reflected in her relationship with James I think. There are many different takes on it, all of them valid, obviously, so this is just my own…

I find their relationship fascinating. It’s obvious that they love each other. It’s also obvious that this love is different than the one they had for Thomas, although that shared love for him certainly plays an important role in their relationship. But I think that Miranda maybe doesn’t love like James and Thomas at all, not in this all consuming way. The way I see her, she’s also completely aromantic, but that doesn’t make her love something lesser.

Miranda loves Thomas as someone who shares her interests and temperament, an intellectually stimulating partner, a great man. They were a harmonious couple, their relationship seemingly effortless. Her relationship with James on the other hand is a constant struggle, and not just because of the circumstances they find themselves in, I think. They are both too alike and too different. The one that fit with them was always Thomas.

Miranda and James’ love for each other is mostly built on loyalty. On knowing that whatever may come, the other will stand with them to the bitter end. And because of that loyalty they both try to be more for the other, to fill the void Thomas left, and failing miserably at it.

James tries to give Miranda things that connect her with her old life: books, a spinet, delicate tea cups. Even sex. But it’s a poor substitute, and the thing she most longs for —companionship— is unbearable for him to provide, because being with her reminds him of what he lost. Miranda wants to remember Thomas and talk about him, but James can’t.

James tries to keep Thomas close by striving to bring his vision to life, finish what they started, and prove England wrong in the process. And Miranda tries to be a partner in this. She helps him plot and patches him up and harbours prisoners, but she hates it just as much. They both hate the things the other needs from them. And yet they stubbornly hold on to each other, and try to keep each other safe. It’s not a passionate love. At times it’s almost resentful. But it’s deep and true.

How hard it must be for Miranda to love James. Love him in Thomas stead, knowing that she falls short by miles. How hard it must be to see him try to love her better, and failing because he, too, isn’t Thomas. Loving each other with such loyal devotion across the divide, the hole that Thomas left. Loving each other even though it is hard, and it hurts, that’s what makes it beautiful to me. 

so this is me basically yapping about my queen’s complexity😊 regina mills they could never make me hate you

ANYWAYS. one thing i absolutely ADORE about her complexity is her voice. lana parrilla’s voice consistently changes depending on her scenes and i think it is done absolutely BEAUTIFULLY.

when she’s with cora, her voice is sensitive and quiet, as if she’s afraid to get yelled at but still looking for approval and validation.

with henry, her voice is firm but still caring. it’s her SON, after all.

with daniel, it’s free and joyful and you can just tell the difference when she speaks to him vs to anyone who’s not her family.

her voice is so powerful in so many other ways. it shows weakness, strength, fear, love, and it’s all portrayed and executed in a way that’s purely majestic.

next thing is the parallels.

regina’s greed is eventually fully explained, she loses everything, but something i’ve noticed is that everything she loses is everything she’s never actually had.

her mother’s approval, daniel, henry, hell even graham. something archie says in s2 is that everything she loses is because of magic. i think that’s true and they should’ve extended that theory further throughout the show.

her mother never truly loved her — only taking advantage of her daughter’s weakness, her need for love.

i’m not sure if this is stated, but i’ve always interpreted this way. i don’t believe she and daniel were together very long. yes, long enough to fall in love, but in ouat, that normally seemed to happen rather quickly. anyways, regina was this close to marrying daniel until cora killed him. she never truly had him in the way she wanted — and we all know nothing happened in the way she wanted.

with henry, she, again, never really had him. he was never her son, not in the way she needed him to be. he was always emma’s son, even if it felt like he was hers. yes, henry loves her, he cares about her, but at the end of the day, his determination to stick with emma in the earlier seasons always seems to overcome that.

the last one is obvious but graham could not feel anything. meaning, whatever regina felt for him, whether it was love, lust, or nostalgia, was not real. which, equals in false hope, false love, all that. (i say nostalgia because in my mind, regina sees daniel in all her past/current lovers.)

so, in conclusion to this little yapping session, regina goes several seasons with absolutely nothing. it hurts to say it, but that’s just the way her life was portrayed. now, i’m leading up to how her greed is involved in this, along with her almost drug-like addiction to magic.

she consistently goes after things she cannot have. an example of this is her attachment to children. in later seasons, regina takes away her fertility with magic to piss her mother off. this soon comes to bite her in the ass and leads to her adoption journey with henry.

maybe three times she tried to take someone’s children as her own. yes it sounds bad but there’s an explanation for that. since she can’t have children, regina’s greed for one only grows stronger. the first time she did this was with owen, a little boy who managed to get inside storybrook with his father — whom she framed for drunk driving and i believe child neglect when owen refused to live with her and abandon his father.

another time was with ava and nicolas, at the time known as hansel and gretel. after retrieving the iconic apple from the blind witch, hansel and gretel come back to regina’s castle and as a “reward,” she tries to invite them to live with her. she basically tried to bribe them, but their love for their father was so strong, so out of spite she uses magic to separate the twins from their father.

and lastly, throughout season one, she attempts to kill or frame emma several times. this is because of her attachment to henry — which this time is somewhat explainable. for once, she finally has the child she deprived herself of and all of a sudden, after years of trying to fully connect with her son, she loses him. as she did several times before. hence why i said henry was never truly her child.

ANYWAYS.😊 regina mills you are a being of majestic and conflicting things that make you the woman you are and i absolutely LOVE IT.

This is the last thing Flint says to Miranda in a private conversation and I think is one of the most revealing things about Flint as a character he directly states.

Flint was created to be ephemeral and that explains where his fear of being perceived as the villain comes from. Up to this point, what James has been doing is compartmentalizing the actions and feelings of his two versions: McGraw and Flint. And since his intention has always been to get rid of Flint because he is not who he believes himself to be, he can't stand the thought of people only taking into account what the latter has done.

But it's inevitable, James McGraw and James Flint move in completely different circles, they are known to different people. Only one person has lived with both of them: Miranda. She is the anchor to his past life, the one who reminds him that no matter how many years he has been called Flint, he was McGraw before and he still is.

So that's why what is about to happen at that dinner has huge implications for him that will turn him into what he was so afraid of becoming.

10 YEARS OF BLACK SAILS (2014–2017) – Created by Jonathan E. Steinberg & Robert Levine

Death's beloveds

Long haired James McGraw absolutely is a vision. 😍

"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.