Black Sails - Captain Flint’s Reading List.

They eyes, I mean...😍😍

This scene always makes me laugh. Like...Rogers had it all prepared to discuss the bargain with Flint as "civilized" men and then he just begin saying the last thing he should have if he wanted to have any hope of succeding. Of course he couldn't know, but still that's so funny lol

Poor Flint.

THIS BITCH WOODES ROGERS REALLY KNOWS HOW TO PLAY THE GAME. Wow. You can't just SAY the words Lord. Thomas. Hamilton. like that they're nothing to James McGraw/Flint! And just look at the phrasing of this - "I understand that you knew him."

Black Sails x Oceans Brawl by Cœur de Pirate

Part 3/3

Black Sails x Oceans Brawl by Cœur de Pirate

Part 1 (follows part 2)

🖤Exciting news! 🖤

🖤My free-to-play visual novel, "Phantom of the Black Rose Revue," is now available!🖤 This nostalgic yuri game features 19 animated CGs, 13 original music tracks, and an introduction to the world, mysteries, and love interests of the Revue! 🖤

Signal boosts greatly appreciated, especially as this game is entered in the Spooktober Game Jam!

Long haired James McGraw absolutely is a vision. 😍

It took me almost a whole afternoon to write this so I'm glad someone liked it😂 actually, it has been my way of getting over the rewatch of the finale. It's a trauma everytime, even if I already know what's coming (just like ep.XIII)

"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.

They were so beautiful together. Such a true connection there was between them💔

Tell me we’re not crazy, you and I. Crazy? To put ourselves through all this when the outcome’s so uncertain. The outcome is only uncertain for those who disbelieve. I believe in this place, and I believe if there’s anyone who can do what’s necessary to make it something better, it’s you.

*Philippe d'Orléans x Philippe de Lorraine*

"You would make Paris the capital of the world and we would dine and dance there every night"

Gosh, that tear! Made me think about Cabanel's fallen angel.

❤️💔

Absolutely yes to all of that. I think the relationship between Miranda and Thomas is way underrated. We don't know much about it, but definitely /there was/ much. I've thought a lot about their dynamics and regardless of if they were romantic or friendly, it doesn't change the fact that the two of them had shared for years a deep bond which probably had changed both of their lives for the better. I've liked very much the word you used ti define them, twins. I've used it many time myself. I totally agree with this it. To me they were chosen brothers who had been lucky enough to find, in the midst of a society meant to cut off their wings, someone who instead was more than willing to help them take flight, and the importance this can assume in the life of people with such personalities and ideas like theirs is priceless.

I love all the relationships that bind these three characters together and sure, James' pain at losing his greatest love must have been terrible, but to me the love that bound Miranda and Thomas was even deeper, for its span if nothing else, just like the love that eventually bound Miranda and Flint at the time of her death was deeper than the love that had bound Flint to Thomas. So I think Miranda must have suffered even more than him for the loss of Thomas, considering also how it had meant for her the loss of all the life she had known. Not to talk about all the situations she had to endure once in Nassau. I mean, it might be me loving this subject, these three characters and their story, but I believe Miranda's sorrow is something people never really talk enough about.

I mean, the way she talks about Thomas with pastor Lambrick in ep.VI? That gave me shivers. What are we even talking about?

flint gifting miranda la galatea - a story involving two friends in love with the same person who agree to not let it interfere with their friendship, and more broadly as a whole, an examination of how different lives intertwine - as a means of apologizing is so impactful it literally gave me new brain circuitry undiscovered by science. just the quiet understanding between them of how much thomas meant to the other, even though their relationships with him were very different. we don't see alot of miranda and thomas together in the flashbacks but from what we do see, it tells us what we need to grasp the depths of her loss and why she misses her life back then so badly.

truly like... he was her twin. they shared such an open, playful affection. there was an abundance of free-flowing admiration in the way they talked to or about each other, they trusted each other completely with their personal lives without reservation, and their mutual happiness together was so transparent and palpable. when miranda walked into the study and they joked around together the room practically lit up (can we blame james for acting like a deer in headlights there). like their free-spirit bestie bohemian vibe was radiant. regardless of whether you interpret their arrangement as a lavender marriage or a romantic/sexual one, it would have been rare for a man and a woman in that era to find a genuinely happy partnership of equals the way they did.

so the few times we see when james oversteps a bit and acts like his grief and anger are more important than hers and miranda snaps back... miranda truly a better woman than i am because i think it would've been valid for her to hit back a little more severely. james was with thomas for ~9(?) months, but what miranda had with him was presumably years.

so when flint gives her la galatea with the inscription "i'm sorry"... yes, that's a well-deserved apology indeed, and now my neurological functioning will never be the same again