#(as seen through dufresne)

[books-apples-socks]

(...) Silver had terrible hard work getting up the knoll. What with the steepness of the incline, the thick tree stumps, and the soft sand, he and his crutch were as helpless as a ship in stays. But he stuck to it like a man in silence, and at last arrived before the captain, whom he saluted in the handsomest style. He was tricked out in his best; an immense blue coat, thick with brass buttons, hung as low as to his knees, and a fine laced hat was set on the back of his head. “Here you are, my man,” said the captain, raising his head. “You had better sit down.” “You ain’t a-going to let me inside, cap’n?” complained Long John. “It’s a main cold morning, to be sure, sir, to sit outside upon the sand.” “Why, Silver,” said the captain, “if you had pleased to be an honest man, you might have been sitting in your galley. It’s your own doing. You’re either my ship’s cook—and then you were treated handsome—or Cap’n Silver, a common mutineer and pirate, and then you can go hang!” “Well, well, cap’n,” returned the sea-cook, sitting down as he was bidden on the sand, “you’ll have to give me a hand up again, that’s all.” (...) Silver’s face was a picture; his eyes started in his head with wrath. He shook the fire out of his pipe. “Give me a hand up!” he cried. “Not I,” returned the captain. “Who’ll give me a hand up?” he roared. Not a man among us moved. Growling the foulest imprecations, he crawled along the sand till he got hold of the porch and could hoist himself again upon his crutch. Then he spat into the spring. “There!” he cried. “That’s what I think of ye. Before an hour’s out, I’ll stove in your old block house like a rum puncheon. Laugh, by thunder, laugh! Before an hour’s out, ye’ll laugh upon the other side. Them that die’ll be the lucky ones.” And with a dreadful oath he stumbled off, ploughed down the sand, was helped across the stockade, after four or five failures, by the man with the flag of truce, and disappeared in an instant afterwards among the trees.

[saintmeghanmarkle]

The Sussexes demonstrate they are BIG LOSERS by u/EleFacCafele

The Sussexes demonstrate they are BIG LOSERS The THR article may have been planned (still I am a bit skeptical) but is massive failure with all clapback and the Streisand effect at work.As usual, Rachel failed to read the room. Nobody sees her nowadays as a victim of discrimination (the R card) but as a BIG LOSER in spite of all chances that were handed of a plate to her, as a spouse of a Royal, not on her own merit. Everything she announced with a big fanfare failed: the Pearl project, podcasts at Spotify and Lemonade, Meet me at the lake, the ARO, the Dior representation, to name a few coming into my mind. Everything she touched failed spectacularly.Ordinary people who try to survive through an economic crisis are not impressed by the crocodile tears of two over-privileged lazy grifters with an aristocratic title, who complain of discriminations, issues of mental health (when they have tons of money to get the cream de la creme of specialists), being sabotaged by the BRF, and so on. They are not seen as victims, but massive failures. A victim is an innocent person who was put in a horrific situation, not a conceited person who failed all endeavours because of malignant behaviour and lack of work ethic. No amount of PR can change this.What people love in bad times are heroic tales of people who have been through the worst and came out winning. Why we love Shawshank Redemption, the movie? Because Andy Dufresne was a victim who worked hard to get back his freedom, and won. There is nothing heroic in a alcoholic druggie who complains of mental health (what did he expect from his addictions?) and a fame whore who failed all the projects she announced? The Sussexes cannot show redemption stories, so they appear as BIG LOSERS. post link: https://ift.tt/mspUuZ8 author: EleFacCafele submitted: September 26, 2024 at 08:42AM via SaintMeghanMarkle on Reddit disclaimer: all views + opinions expressed by the author of this post, as well as any comments and reblogs, are solely the author's own; they do not necessarily reflect the views of the administrator of this Tumblr blog. For entertainment only.

[marie-dufresne]

Starbucks Prompt Roulette! Some more 20 minute ficlets, having found time to bop away from home and get some writing done :D

Characters: Heidegger & Vincent Prompt: Apocalypse

It was a less than ideal situation, but Vincent Valentine wasn’t the type to leave a person to die. Slumped over his back, Tifa Lockhart continued to mutter that she would be fine. Just let her walk. She could do it.

Vincent had only known her a short time before the world had fallen apart. He knew, or assumed, she was tough. No one owned a bar in the part of town she did with a weak constitution. He’d seen her kick out her fair share of belligerent drunks. Literally—kick them out.

But no one simply walked off being impaled.

Well, he might have tried.

He’d seen her fall, the unlucky plummet directly onto a stray piece of metal and it was with a set jaw that he’d watched the spindle came up through the other side of her. It was lucky for her, however, he had extensive military training. One didn’t survive Black Ops without knowing a few things about survival.

She’d lasted longer than he thought, trekking through the ghost town they’d both been traveling through, both of them on the hunt for survivors. When he came across a house—no—an estate with lit windows, Vincent adjusted his arms a bit, steadying the girl on his back.

He knew this house. He’d been here for luncheons, debriefings and had assisted once or twice in the ah…pulling of information from someone housed in the basement, likely unknown to the lady of the house.

If there were lights on, either General Heidegger was a bigger fool than Vincent thought or they were well armed and didn’t feel threatened. He had a feeling it was the latter.

“Alright,” he said more to himself than to Tifa, “we should find help here.”

He didn’t expect Heidegger himself to open up his home, regardless of Vincent’s service. Tifa’s condition certainly wouldn’t move the old bear an inch, but Vincent wasn’t banking on the kindness of the warmonger; he was praying the warmonger’s wife was still alive. She would go over her husband’s head and give them refuge from those looking on them as prey.

Vincent’s boot crossed from the shattered sidewalk onto what had once been a cobblestone drive (the iron gate lay twisted and discarded in the remnants of a grandiose water fountain) and just as he imagined, several red dots appeared on his chest.

A speaker crackled for a moment before the booming voice of the general was heard.

“This is private property! Turn around before my lads have their way with ya!”

How typical. Vincent didn’t flinch, but he didn’t assert himself either. He was calm, calculating the chance they had for shelter. He raised his voice only enough for the guard in the tower nearest him to hear. No need to strain.

“Heidegger, it’s Valentine.”

There were a few moments of silence as the quiet message was relayed and when the speaker cackled again, it was indeed Mrs. Heidegger who spoke.

“Mr. Valentine! You’re alive!”

“I have a very specific set of skills to keep me this way, ma’am. I have an injured girl with me. Can we barter for shelter?”

He waited patiently for both his message to be heard and a decision to be made. In true Heidegger style, the conversation was heard by all over the loudspeaker, despite the tone of the couple trying to keep hushed. He heard the vehement opposition by the general, a few noises that sounded like scolding smacks to his arm, and the low, compassionate hiss from his Mrs. of ‘of course we have to help them.’ Which was exactly what Vincent had been praying for.

The red dots vanished and the light at the front door flicked on. With a deep breath, Vincent started forward, hoping that inside that house was another person who could help them. The very last person he ever imagined he would have asked the help of.

Professor Edmund Hojo.

Characters: Yazoo & Marie Prompt: Vampire AU

With a deep breath she didn’t need, Lady Marie Dufresne paced the grand parlor, the silk of her gown making an emphatic swish each time she pivoted on her heel. One of her silver haired ‘sons’ stood before the sofa, head down with shame, waiting for her to speak.

“Do you…”

The blonde inhaled again, pausing her march and bringing her hands up to her hair, beset with the skulls of bats and the feathers of birds long extinct.

“Do you have any idea what could have happened to you? What could happen to you? To us?”

His aqua eyes remained fixated on the rug beneath his boots. “I wasn’t seen,” he whispered, “no one saw.”

No one saw. That’s what they all said. She’d seen it for centuries. They were oftentimes the last words of her kind. Someone always saw.

“We are nocturnal for many reasons,” she sighed, “discretion is one of them.”

Yazoo lifted his chin then before casting a listless glance up towards the giant portrait of his older brother, of Sephiroth.

“Big brother simply dealt with these issues. He wasn’t ashamed. He didn’t hide.”

Marie’s chest rose at the insinuation that she was cowardly, protecting them like this, keeping themselves in the shadows as they were created to be.

“I am not ashamed of what we are,” she said quietly, warning in her tone. Yazoo was still a child, a teenager. He hadn’t even been alive when Sephiroth had reigned, bringing terror and bloodshed to the mortals of their world, bringing vampires out of the shadows they thrived in.

And he had paid for his stunt.

“Where is Sephiroth now, Yazoo?” asked Lady Dufresne, sorrow on her face, and in her query. Yazoo didn’t respond, but she thought she might have seen a fraction of emotion pass through his feline eyes.

Stepping forward with a light sigh, her cold, pale hands found his cheeks and she held his face. There was nothing left of Sephiroth, not a single trace, as their death was not limited to immobility. Being dead already, a vampire’s true death erased them from existence entirely, a cloud of smoke dissipating into the air, leaving nothing behind but a memory.

“There are hunters now, my love,” she whispered, caressing the pale flesh beneath his fingers.

“There have always been hunters, mother.”

“From Rome.”

This time his face did change and she saw the fear in it. Individuals out to stake them were one thing. The Church was something else entirely. Rome was organized, educated, wealthy, powerful.

Ruthless.

At the change of expression, Marie caught a whiff of something on him. Deception.

Holding him at arm’s length, she gave him a once over.

“It wasn’t you. You didn’t…”

Of course it hadn’t been Yazoo. Of the triplets, he was the most calculated, the most careful, the most cunning. He wasn’t the one to leave a dozen bodies piled up in the town square and she had been so foolish to spend her time being angry with him, scolding him.

When he cast his glance aside, he confirmed it.

With an annoyed sigh, she dropped her hands, lifting her skirt and with a sharp pivot, stormed from the room in search of one of her other sons.

Kadaj.  

Characters: Cloud & Loz Prompt: Caught in a Storm

Cloud didn’t enjoy working with the TURKs, but he wasn’t above admitting they’d all worked well together during the absolute clusterfuck Kadaj and his brothers had caused for him. Big brother, his ass.

Now, as fate would have it, they were all consistently working together. Cloud and his friends, the TURKs (Rude and Tifa were engaged for fuck’s sake) and…the remnants. “Atoning for their wrongdoings” is how Vincent Valentine had put it to Reeve. Vincent Valentine who, Cloud later learned, was supposed to be dead.  

But he had not died. In fact, he hadn’t even come close to death. Nope, some old geezer who came before Tseng saw fit to ship him off to some mansion with Hojo’s wife to play house and actually raise Sephiroth’s little brothers.

What. The Actual. Fuck.

And now, because TURKs apparently make such great fathers, Cloud was stuck babysitting some nineteen year old crybaby disguised as a body builder because his assigned babysitter (surprise surprise, another TURK) was off…wedding planning. Cake testing.

Seriously? . To top it off, the sky had opened up.

Loz had argued they didn’t need to stop. It was just a little bit of rain. Was Cloud afraid of getting a little wet?

But no, Cloud was not afraid of getting wet, but heavy rain reduced visibility and if there was one thing he absolutely was not doing, it was losing sight of this silver haired weirdo. In reality, he’d probably just go crying home to mommy and Cloud’s day would improve by being rid of this idiot, but then he’d have to hear it from Reeve, and he’d have to endure the disappointed stare of Vincent and quite honestly, he didn’t feel like dealing with the bullshit from old men today, so he gestured over to an abandoned fuel station and rode towards the building with a reluctant remnant in tow.

Propping up his motorbike, Cloud moved to test the door to see if it was locked.

Loz wasted no time, shattering the glass with his booted foot and stepping through the frame. Yeah, Cloud was getting to that.

“Sweet. Snacks!”

With his arms crossed, Cloud leaned up against the old checkout counter, littered with empty cigarette packs (the first things looted, it seemed), watching a near literal kid in a candy store. Except this kid was twice the size of some grown men and the candy was expired cheesy puffs and energy drinks.

Wait. Did Potion expire? Huh. Maybe that was worth taking. He accepted the one Loz tossed his way.

“Don’t make yourself sick,” he warned, crossing his legs as he watched the remnant tear into some sort of snack cake, “I’m not gonna hold your hair back if you start hurling.”

“Aw, shove it, Big Brother,” Loz replied, mouthful of cake and creme, “you’re just jealous ‘cause I can eat what I want and not get heartburn.”

Damnit. He had him there.

[alexwatchesshows]

Black Sails V (S1E5) review

Spoilers for up to and including E5.

The plot is really picking up now.

Flint is starting to really show why he's a captain. I mean, sure, we've seen his big speeches and all that, but he's also quite good at the day-to-day stuff. He can see that Billy doesn't trust him and knows exactly how to get his support (or at least enough of his support to get them through the next few days). It's also interesting to note that he describes Mrs. Barlow as "a nice puritan woman who shares his love of books" given that a) I'm not exactly sure that she's even puritan and b) there's definitely more to it than that, but I guess that also goes into what will make Billy happy, even if it doesn't give a huge amount of insight into their relationship. We also see that Flint really knows his shit when it comes to the technical side of running a boat. He's willing to (literally) take the wheel and can hold his own against De Groot when arguing about what the ship is capable of doing (and he's right). At this point it also becomes clear that Flint has won Billy's trust (at least for the time being) as he sides with him over De Groot on the whole t'gallants thing (don't ask me what any of this stuff actually means). Also, as an unrelated sidenote, it was cool to see what "knots" actually means in terms of boat speed.

This episode also gives some interesting insight into different styles of leadership. Flint, although he keeps himself apart from the crew, is absolutely willing to get involved in the nitty gritty of managing the ship. This is especially pronounced in comparison to the other captain (Bryson?) who is more concerned about the china than anything else, and won't even see to that himself. Then we have Billy, who's very hands-on. To be fair, the difference between Billy and Flint is possibly also due to the difference in the roles of captain and quartermaster, but still, Billy is absolutely there for the crew (more so than Gates even), he's on their level, giving that very helpful explanation of tactics with the brushes (which also gave me a fighting chance of understanding what the hell was going on), he's there with them. Then there's Vane, who's aloof in a different way. He's going through his own shit (more on that later), but even without that, the fact that he responds to the loss of his crew by just leaving Jack to deal with it is a different thing altogether. Then there's the shitshow that is the Guthries. I wish I knew what Richard Guthrie was thinking because, even when I factor self-preservation in, I can't fully see the logic behind his decision. Eleanor, on the other hand, really shows her full potential as a leader in this episode. She clearly knows the various crews/captains very well and comes up with an effective solution very quickly.

Billy is starting to realise the responsibility that he holds as quartermaster. There's the discussion with Flint, where he acknowledges that although Flint has command over him, his main responsibility is to the crew, which I think more or less sums up Billy as a character so far. He's dedicated to nothing more than his crew. Then there's also the Dufresne plotline. I'm going to put myself out there and say that I actually like Dufresne. I know a lot of people feel either neutral or negative towards him at this point but honestly I think more brutal pirate shows just need the one nerd who's also there because he's good with numbers. I respect him for that. But also Billy's perspective of needing every man he can get is true and he's evidently really good at reassuring Dufresne. We see him try multiple approaches to convince him and he does ultimately succeed (maybe a little too well), and Dusfresne thanks him for it. This does mark something that's not yet a theme but still a little more than coincidence for Billy. He's lied about the note, keeping Flint in power and, in doing so, put the crew on the hunt for the Urca. Now, it was his words that got Dusfresne to fight, putting him in the position where he went (for lack of a better word) completely feral. Billy's good at determining the course of events, but maybe he's a little too good.

Meanwhile, Jack has somehow managed to just about save his, Vane's and Anne's situations by obtaining a brothel. His ability to bullshit is impressive, but Mrs Mapleton clearly couldn't care less. All within the group is not well, though: the rest of their crew are leaving them, there's tension between Jack and Anne, and Vane's going through god only knows what. Max is still a topic of conflict between them and I think, for the first time in the show, Anne's gender is becoming a point of internal conflict for her. She's the only female pirate that we've seen in the show, and one of very few women who holds any kind of position outside the brothel. Jack expects this to be all that matters and for her to share his priorities (keeping as much of the crew as possible, Max paying of her "debt", etc.) but evidently her experience in this world as a woman is making her much more aware of Max's suffering than Jack or Vane are. Vane is also going through some shit (probably linked to that man he kept seeing) and ends up disappearing off into the night without telling anyone anything in a way that's quite reminiscent of Sophie in the opening scene of Mamma Mia.

I do like that we got much more of Anne as a person in this episode. We've absolutely established her as a skilled fighter and recognised-- if not respected-- pirate, but we've seen very little of her internal world. Following her argument with Jack, she evidently goes to get Mapleton, but still stands over them like a guard, and stands up for Max when Mrs Mapleton is being too harsh on her. She's then very gentle with Max as she uses what I can only assume is some strange yet moderatley affective (otherwise they wouldn't be using it) form of 18th century contraception. We get a brief conversation between them, in which we see the clear difference between their views of the world-- Anne can't see why Max wouldn't just leave while she could, whilst Max (once again) asserts her own moral code in which she owes the crew something because she was partially responsible for the loss of the pearls. There's also Anne's comment of "I only thought they'd kill you" in response to Max pointing out that she helped capture Max, which I think shows both what she'd do and a sense that, while she has experience sexual harassment before (as she tells the story about cutting a guy's balls off), she hasn't in a while and hadn't considered that the people she lived around were capable of the levels of violence that they showed, but also shows to us as an audience that Anne wasn't being as callous as we may have assumed in handing Max over.

Eleanor is not having a great time. After RG's dealings with the pastor and whatever the hell kind of change of heart he's had, he gives a long, very misguided speech essentially just screwing everything up and leaving. It's very clear that he doesn't know or care about his daughter very much, especially giving the subtly misogynistic language he uses when talking to her later (claiming she was "seduced" by Flint, talking with Bryson "like men", etc.). He hasn't played a very active role in Nassau in years and hasn't been around to see how much work Eleanor has put into it and how much she cares about it. I think there's also a level of ignorance on his part, as a man, in that he doesn't understand that maybe the reason E cares so much about Nassau is because it's one of the few places in the world where she can hold authority and autonomy, and that maybe she likes being in this kind of position of power. After RG fully fucks off we also see that E's actually a pretty talented leader. Hornigold does sort of help whilst being pretty condescending about it, but it's E who comes up with an effective (and clever) solution. She also proves that she can hold her own in a room full of older men, despite her father's utilisation of her youth and gender to belittle her. Her "strong and stable" thing was giving me Theresa May flashbacks but I must remember that this season was released in a blissfully pre-Brexit world. We also see other people's views on Eleanor's power, and her father seems to be the only one underestimating her, showing just how out of touch he is (I mean, seriously, when fucking Hornigold knows more about your daughter than you do you know you've failed as a parent). Admittedly "tyrant in a petticoat" isn't a glowing endorsement of how she's been running things, but at least he recognises the power (however abused) she holds. Vane probably comes the closest with his idea of "power that just is", power that he seems to be aiming for on his voyage of self-discovery, and Jack is also right in his cautious statement of "to assume we've seen the last of Eleanor Guthrie is not to know her". She, Silver and Jack are currently vying for the prize of Scrappiest Nassau Inhabitant and it's a close battle. We also see that Mr Scott still believed in Eleanor and actually allowed himself to be captured into slavery rather than betray her. There's a father.

Then, to make matters worse for Eleanor, she has fucking John Silver tied to her sofa. He's trying to make the best of a bad situation by giving random unsolicited advice and, admittedly, does actually have some success, but still can't fully get past the barrier of Eleanor blaming him for Max's situation. It seems like Eleanor just can't figure out what she feels about the whole thing-- she blames Silver, she blames herself, she's mad with Max for not accepting her safety, she thinks she made the right decision-- it's all a bit of a mess, and John Silver isn't the guy to help her figure it out.

Then we end with more plot twists. Dufresne being in complete shock, still covered in blood, turning to accounting to calm himself down is honestly why I love S1 Dufresne. Unfortunately, his organisation is going to raise some questions for Flint. Everyone's covered in blood and things are only getting worse.

[the-cat-chat]

April 8, 2023

The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

Andy Dufresne is sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison for the murders of his wife and her lover. However, only Andy knows he didn't commit the crimes. While there, he forms a friendship with Red and experiences the brutality of prison life.

JayBell: I’ve seen this movie a couple times before, but it has been a number of years. Of all the Stephen King adaptations, this definitely makes my top 10 list. It’s also one of the few I’ve seen that has zero supernatural elements.

From reading the premise, you’d think this movie would be about the main character desperately trying to prove his innocence. But no. It’s mainly about resilience, survival, and friendship. Andy is an interesting mix of introverted passiveness but also courage and strength. The first few years he experiences in prison is so sad and depressing. It’s amazing to see him subtly manipulate the circumstances and people around him (especially the corrupt guards and warden) to gain power and influence that lets him get his happy ending.

Speaking of the ending, this movie has so many depressing moments that it’s difficult to believe that Andy and Red could have any semblance of a happy ending. Watching the movie, you can’t help but think, “this won’t end well,” but it does. It’s also funnier than you’d think at times. Also, Morgan Freeman is the best narrator.

Rating: 9/10 cats 🐈

Anzie: Off the record- I may have been biased about this movie for the better part of 2 decades. 😅😬🫣 I judged it, assuming it’s just another prison movie and they escape by tunneling through the impenetrable walls and it’s impossible and blah blah blah. But I was wrong.

The story is captivating and you become so invested in it and never at any point in the 2 hours was I bored or just like please let it ennnnd. And I really like that even though I knew there was an escape plan being hatched it isn’t the main story- like in Henry’s Crime *cough cough* sorry Keanu 😔. And instead you have all these other little plots with their own meanings weaved in. And the characters are sooo good and the actors were so good at playing them. I didn’t realize either how sad this movie would be. On so many levels. But all is well in the end and thank gawddd. I was so happy it actually worked out in the end. I know I’m about 30 years late to the party but it was an A++.

It gets an extra point for all the solid insults the characters use.

Rating: 9/10 Cats 🐈

[heycarrots]

Recently, I read a comment that Flint “barely won” the fight with Singleton and . . . I’ve got some thoughts.

Previously, I talked about how we initially view Flint mainly through the eyes of the crew in season one and it’s absolutely most applicable in the series premiere. We don’t even get a glimpse of “James” until he collapses inside Miranda’s door at the end of the second episode. Up until then, we are deliberately fed not lies, exactly, but deliberate misdirection. Twice during the first season, we are tossed into the story through the eyes of a newcomer like a cat tossed into a bathtub.

First, we see the story from Silver’s perspective. Granted, we have NO idea what his history is, but as brand new baby viewers, ourselves, (on our first watch, that is, because who the hell stops at a single viewing?) Silver is the perfect cypher to dress up in our own naïveté. So that bathtub that our Silver kitten gets tossed into is INSTANT unrest and a failing captaincy with no real power left, grasping at control like sheafs of paper caught and scattered on the wind. The second time, we see it through Dufresne’s first boarding. Both times, we are wrong about the character of the cat in the tub.

In this first instance, we are meant to doubt Flint’s cunning and even more, we’re meant to doubt his strength. We’re all familiar with the Gregory MaGuire effect (even if you don’t think you are). MaGuire wrote Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Son of a Witch and many more. Basically, he flips well known stories on their heads and repaints the protagonists in slightly less flattering lights, giving deeper, more human motivations to the stories antagonists.

We’re meant to expect that here. Jumping on the Oz example, we’re meant to find that the legendary Flint, casting such long shadows over the story of Treasure Island, is in essence, a little old snake oil salesman behind a curtain.

That’s our setup going into this duel. We’re supposed to think this elaborate facade of smoke and mirrors is finally going to collapse, revealing Flint to be incompetent.

So let’s take a look at the fight Flint “barely” won.

We see him flipping tables in his cabin just prior to the fight. He’s just learned he doesn’t have the votes, due to Vane’s murderous intervention. He’s frustrated because he doesn’t yet have a plan.

I’ve seen speculation about him finding the feather in the wreckage and this proves that he notices every little thing out of place. Sure, Flint is fastidious and detail oriented, but we also, if you recall, saw him carefully placing that feather with the log book in the drawer. It’s a security measure to know if someone comes snooping. So he finds the feather and knows that someone who was onboard the Walrus knows about the page, so he immediately formulates a plan. He’s gonna frame Singleton for the theft of the page. He decides right then.

*edited to add: I’m 100% sure he knows Singleton is NOT the one with the page. It’s likely Singleton can’t read, which Flint would be well aware of, perhaps not just as a member of his crew, but as someone who is challenging him for the captaincy. He knows whoever DID steal the page can read, because they came back to look at the log to read it for context clues. He gets all this from that feather. Flint is openly declaring Singleton to be a thief in front of the whole crew to force the hand of the real thief, hoping the fear of retaliation would press him to more quickly try to move on it or, as Silver does, attempt to get the hell outta Dodge.

So, stepping out on deck, he’s had zero contact with Singleton, which means the blank page is folded up somewhere on his person. At the end of the fight, we see him take the page out of Singleton’s pocket. He doesn’t search him, hoping to find something, he goes right for it.

He wasn’t “losing the fight”, he was allowing Singleton to get in close enough that he could plant the page in his coat pocket while still managing to not die, so stealthily, that the entire crew, watching the fight, wouldn’t see it happen.

Flint wasn’t a weaker fighter than Singleton. We see clearly his technique is far superior from the very first parry, he just needed time to plant the page. I’ve seen a lot of commentary on this fight and no one seems to really get this. It wasn’t just a fight, it was a deliberate misdirect, one choreographed to the audience in Flint’s interaction with Billy.

Flint: “The men think I’m . . .”

Billy: “Too weak?”

Flint: “I was gonna say unlucky.”

In conclusion, Flint could’ve taken Singleton out immediately, but chose not to.

[roadtohell]

i don’t think i’ve ever seen a post about billy and dufresne and i’m a bit less than halfway through the series anyway so idk if this is a common sentiment or one that doesn’t work in the context of the full show but there’s some kind of Duality going on with them. can’t really articulate it beyond them both starting as generally well-meaning young men gaining prominence in the crew while having doubts about flint but. despite dufresne beginning as the stock smart guy character he gets repeatedly tripped up by the lies and power games of other people. plus his first big moment is one of extreme primal violence. meanwhile billy initially comes across as dumb muscle but is learning to play along with the best of them

[jaynovz]

Here we have the Main Look for s2, folks. The super sexy, super inappropriate for the Bahamas, Man-o-War Leather Coat (seen first in 2.2)

Notes: Okay so Flint finds this coat hung up in the Fucking Warship after regaining his captaincy from that sniveling mutineer Dufresne. Eat shit Dufresne.

This leather coat is just. Delicious. He looks like a fucking rock star. Lookit the epaulet shoulders?? The intricate stitching all on the front? The permanently popped collar?? The Style, the Presence. Wow I love it, it’s amazing. This is absolutely my favorite of the Captain’s long coats. Leather Daddy Flint coming through to fucking kick everyone’s ass.

Anywayyyyy… The brown shirt that had been torn down to his navel is, sadly, gone. 😔😔 In its place we have a new slate gray shirt, which I like way better than the white or brown predecessors. We’re heading towards a full goth ensemble with every costume change folks. The GORGEOUS brown belt with gold studs is also gone, replaced by a black leather belt with silver studding that’s intricate as shit. Looks similar to Silver’s s2 belt, which makes me think both are from stolen Spanish sailor uniforms. There’s also a green-gray sash underneath the belt. He’s wearing another pair, or the same pair perhaps?, of tight af black trousers. We love to see it. And by it I mean this man’s entire fucking ass, thighs, and junk. Just out there. God bless. AHEM.

Okay for his boots, same style from the Captain’s Coat Numero Uno– calf-high black gaiters underneath which are probably a short boot (gray/light brown looking).

The jewelry is the same as from Captain’s Coat Numero Uno. Accessory changes include a new dagger, new sword, and his sword belt is no longer over the shoulder.

Variants include: Gray Shirt No Coat, Collared in Charles Town

Ranking: I love this coat, I love this season, I love ponytail Flint, I love how his sideburns keep getting longer. 10/10 for the “horny season” outfit that is totally fucking impractical for the heat but GODDAMMIT does it suit him. Also 10/10 for stabbing Peter Ashe to death and leveling Charles Town in retribution for your dead lovers. That is doing love Captain James “No Fucking Chill” Flint style and he’s valid.

Bonus: Here’s some super cool Coat Symbolism Meta from Dec that yall should read. :D

[tea-and-conspiracy]

Prompt 8: Tepid

When some gangly Ishgardian named Emmereaux Dufresne first showed up in the colony, Olivie Lachansseau thought he was hilarious.

He was clearly no magician. In fact, the boy probably wouldn’t know magic if scarves started blowing out one of his ears. But as out of place as he was, he clearly wasn’t of Ishgard’s upper crust, either; he had the arrogance, but lacked the narrow mind. So he was in the right place, as far as she could discern.

In order to figure out why, Olivie began to station herself in the same lobby after her classes ended, and studied there – or occasionally “studied” there -- all afternoon. Inevitably Emmereaux would pass, allowing her to heckle him. That hadn’t been part of the plan, but for whatever reason as she saw him appear, the first words out of her mouth were:

“Is that the only outfit you own?”

It turned out that it was. Oops.

But that did open the floodgates to conversation. He was a goldsmith’s son, who had grown fascinated with his father’s watchmaking. Unfortunately his sire had perished in a recent Dravanian attack and, as that was the only family that Emmereaux had left, he had come to Sharlayan to learn clockwork from their mammet masters instead. He’d had to sell everything he owned, including his father’s little shoppe, in order to afford the tuition.

“But this is just a temporary setback,” Emmereaux said, with ironclad confidence and eyes as cold and bright as Ishgard’s winter sky. “When I return home I will open a factory, and then I’ll be rich enough to live up in the Pillars. I’m going to make it so that my children never know hunger and cold the way I have.”

Perhaps a wiser woman would have found that laughable – the empty boasting of a cocksure youth, who’d yet to be body-checked by reality. But there was something different to Emmereaux’s brand of confidence. It was less arrogance and moreso roaring defiance: a bold-faced challenge to the hand fate had dealt him. As a student of astrology, Olivie couldn’t help but to find herself intrigued.

And as it turned out, the unique combination of his single-minded determination and her celestial guidance achieved just that. Emmeraux got his factory and his fortune. Olivie never would have pictured herself living atop a high tower in distant, snowy Ishgard, but somehow she fell in love and became a baroness in the process. Now here she sat almost thirty years later, long hair blowing out the window as though she were some fairytale princess, watching fresh powder drift onto the rooftops far below. She watched it fall and fall, and found her heart had frozen over as much as the land outside.

She hadn’t been awake for that. No, she was the only person in Eorzea to have slept through Dalamud’s fall, at least in the metaphorical sense. Ishgard had only ever seen a witch when she walked through its gates in Emmeraux’s arms, and neither was it wrong. The Inquisition had cost her her sanity for a full decade of her life. And while she was eternally grateful for Eliane and Barengar’s efforts in fishing her back to reality, those were ten years she would never get back.

A lot had changed in those ten years. She knew she certainly had.

So had Emmereaux.

It wasn’t the accident. She would have loved him regardless of how able-bodied he was or wasn’t. But it was harder to ignore what was within. Emmereaux had always been sharp and calculating before – had always had something of an ego – but he’d also been an honest, honorable man. Pillars life had eroded that away, warping him into a cunning patriarch. He’d absorbed many of Ishgard’s less-endearing traits in a bid to survive and fit in up here in the Pillars, and they were traits she noticed in Eliane now as well. Despite Olivie’s best efforts, Eliane was very much her father’s daughter. As House Dufresne-now-Requingris continued to grow in power and wealth, she could tell which way the winds were blowing.

No, too much had changed. The longer Olivie haunted these halls – whether with or without her mind – the more she felt adrift. She could feel the sea calling to her again, found herself longing for the foggy shores of home. She’d never even seen Old Sharlayan before, but her family had secured passage for her there.

She could live with them, maybe finally earn her Archon’s mark...

And...

A rugged knight rode up on his chocobo far below. Even if the bird hadn’t been the only purple one in the yard, the man stuck out from his sheer beastly size alone. Olivie had to smile, warmth blooming in her chest to see him safely returned home.

If he could come with her, selfish though the thought was, her new life would be complete.

But now came a rap at her door. Olivie turned to open it; Emmereaux was waiting on the other end, as golden and regal as ever. Once upon a time she would have blushed at such a sight; it saddened her somewhat to feel so tepid towards him now.

He’d worked so hard to save her, and now here they were.

“Is it time?” she asked.

He nodded. Emmereaux understood, of course. This had been his decision as much as it had been hers. How could one hope to rekindle a romance ten years dead?

“All the papers are in order. We need but sign them,” he said. “I’ve made certain you’ll have enough to live off of comfortably.”

She smiled a little. “And your peers? Are you not worried?”

For just a moment his eyes sparkled, and a coy smile stretched across his lips, and he looked his younger self again. “Oh, don’t worry about our reputation, my dear,” he said. “Eliane will have us covered.”

[bring-it-all-down]

I’d like to talk about something that I think is central to Black Sails but often gets glossed over in discussions of Silver: his relationship with the systemic violence of empire.

One thing the show does particularly well is demonstrating the ways in which the violence of empire manifests itself both within England and in England’s colonies. We see this with just about all of the main characters, and this encounter with violence informs their subsequent relationships with imperial England. While Silver’s disability would surely result in his marginalization, his encounter with marginalization differs to that of every other character.

James encounters this violence in England in the form of Alfred imprisoning Thomas and the combination of Alfred and Admiral Hennessy banishing him from the country, in light of which he chooses to become a pirate. Jack falls victim to capitalism when his family’s tailoring business is forced to close, plunging his father into alcoholism and death, and holding Jack, a child, responsible for his father’s debts. Jack then becomes a pirate as a means of escaping indentured servitude. Billy, too, becomes a pirate as a means of escaping indentured servitude (and the violence he commits as a result––killing his enslaver––that would have seen him punished had he returned to England). Likewise, Vane turns to piracy after escaping from his enslavers (though it’s unclear how Vane became enslaved to begin with). Finally, we learn that Anne becomes a pirate after Jack murdered her abusive husband to whom she was married at the age of 13. For all of these people, piracy offered freedom from violence and oppression meted out by England.

We rather deliberately never learn about SIlver’s backstory, and for purposes of this post, I’m going to avoid theorizing about it and stick to what the show tells us about him. We first meet him when he’s aboard a merchant ship that Flint’s crew attacks. Out of self-preservation to avoid being killed by the crew, he fashions a lie, killing the cook and assuming his place, in order to join the Walrus. Thus, the first act of violence he encounters and commits is a result of pirates, not England. He becomes disabled as a result of Vane’s crew, not England. His only encounter with somebody mocking his disability is when Dufresne calls him “half a man” and an “invalid” (3.07). Finally, he tells Madi that he must look strong, not for England, but because he cannot allow his fellow pirates to see him as weak. All of Silver’s encounters with violence and marginalization occur with his fellow pirates, not with any stand-in for English colonialism/empire.

At this point, I’d like to compare Silver to Miranda, as they were the two people depicted to know James the best (as Thomas never knew Captain Flint) and were the two to try and convince him to give up his fight against England. When we first meet Miranda, she is desperate to return to civilization, telling James, “there is no life here” in Nassau, but they could have “a life in Boston...There is joy there and music and peace” (1.07). Her conception of civilization differs from James’ because she was never its direct target. Though she was a woman and was aware of the danger James and Thomas were in, her class privilege insulated her from experiencing England’s violence.

This all changes for her when she and James finally make it to Charlestown and she learns of Peter Ashe’s betrayal. This realization finally spurs her to understand the systemic nature of England’s colonial violence and the reality that she and James could never re-assimilate. Her final conversation with Peter here is crucial to understanding her newfound conception of colonialism: 

Miranda: All these years it never sat right with me how Alfred was able to turn the navy against James. He was far too admired by his superiors for his career to be dashed solely on hearsay. Alfred would have known that. He wouldn't have gone to them armed only with unfounded suspicions. He would have needed a witness, someone who knew Thomas and James well enough to give the accusation credibility. Alfred came to you, didn't he? Asked you to betray Thomas in exchange for which he'd see you made a king in the New World.

Peter: Perhaps this is an opportunity for us all to find a little forgiveness.

Miranda: Forgiveness? What forgiveness are you entitled to while you stand back in the shadows pushing James out in front of the world to be laid bear for the sake of the truth? Tell me, sir, when does the truth about your sins come to light?

Peter: You know nothing of my sins. Were you there when Alfred Hamilton threatened my family's standing, my daughter's future if I failed to cooperate? Were you there when I visited Thomas at the hospital to confess my sins and heard him offer his full and true forgiveness? He knew I had no choice in the matter.

Miranda: No choice?

Peter: A hard choice. Made under great duress, but with the intent to achieve the least awful outcome. You wish to return to civilization. That is what civilization is. I am so very sorry for what you have suffered and for any part I may have played in it. Please believe that. But at this point, the most important thing is what comes next, what we make of this.

Miranda: You destroyed our lives!

Peter: Miranda.

Miranda: You caused our exile!

Peter: I am sorry for what I did.

Miranda: Thomas died in a cold, dark place...

Peter: I am trying to help you. What more do you want from me?

Miranda: What do I want? I want to see this whole goddamn city, this city that you purchased with our misery, burn. I want to see you hanged on the very gallows you've used to hang men for crimes far slighter than this. I want to see that noose around your neck and I want to pull the fucking lever with my own two hands! (2.09)

Through this conversation, Miranda receives confirmation of Peter’s betrayal, and more importantly, that this betrayal is central to the existence of civilization. It’s how people like Alfred Hamilton retain power in England and how people like Peter Ashe obtain power over England’s colonies. In other words, the entire colonial project is one of betrayal, of exchanging lives for power, of the oppressor doing anything and everything to retain that power. When Miranda finally realizes how deeply personal and all-encompassing colonial violence is and reacts with righteous anger, she is murdered. Even voicing the desire to execute some aspect of justice is enough for the empire to silence her forever.

Silver, on the other hand, has no such encounter. All he knows of England’s systemic cruelty is what James and Madi describe to him second-hand. Thus, the war for liberation from empire is never his war, only Flint’s war and Madi’s war that Flint draws her into. In his final conversation with James, he tells him, “this isn’t about England,” calling the war “a fucking nightmare”, “your nightmare” (4.10). The “darkness” which he continuously ascribes to James is one born of a desire to do violence for the sake of violence. Because he has no personal experience with systemic violence, he doesn’t conceive of the war as a means to an end, but rather an end in itself; for Silver, the violence––specifically the violence of Flint, of pirates, of himself––is the point. 

The show’s thesis that the fight for liberation is a deeply personal fight is one that Silver dodges. Unlike James, Vane, Jack, Billy, Anne, Max, and Madi, violence enters Silver’s life as a result of piracy, specifically as a result of meeting Flint, and thus he believes that separating himself from Flint will end that violence. At the end of it all, every other character understands that the “freedom” they won is temporary and can be potentially revoked at any time, but Silver understands it to be more permanent. He tells Madi that in ending the war, he returned James “to the world as it existed before he first closed his eyes”, ensuring her that he is “not the villain you fear I am. I’m not him” and that he will wait “forever” for her to come to this realization (4.10). His experiences with violence prevent him from understanding something that every other main character understands: that Flint was a reaction to violence and not the sole cause of it.

[clocks-are-round]

spoiler warning, this is the epilogue to an incomplete fic. so obviously it makes reference to events in my Three Months O’ Malley fic. you have been warned.

Epilogue: O’Malley and DuFresne

Omega-- O’Malley, he was going to stick with that now-- looked around in his new host.

It was slightly different. Enough to be unique, but everything was in the same general placement. Memories there, train of thought out there-- a slippery thing-- difficult to track, headaches and pain controls over there. He probably wouldn’t use those buttons. Just because he didn’t need to, that was all! His existence in the canyon was known now. No need to threaten this one into silence.

And being known, he didn’t need to mask his anger. He didn’t need to crouch in hiding anymore. So… no point in breaking anything Inside. He could expend his energy Outside again. Besides, now he knew he couldn’t count on the arrival of a freelancer. Wrecking his current ride would be foolish. No other reasons. He wasn’t a fool, and THIS TIME breaking things would be foolish and pointless. That was all.

Hugs? Friends? He scoffed. Maybe this meatsack had more of a brain on him. More fight.

But looking around, maybe not. The style of the room was quite different, but it had a similar tame and cozy feel to it. Something was off about it, though. It felt too put together. Staged, almost.

In any case, he was going to make himself at home immediately. He began to transfer himself from the suit to the brain.

Organic computers were so weird, but it was less difficult this time around. And to think the freelancers thought the implants were the only way to allow AI into their brains. Sure, it made entrance easier, but it was extremely limiting. The implant’s code prevented them from “overstepping”. They only had certain permissions. And they could be pulled at a moment’s notice.

They could still travel through other devices, but their range was limited and they could do no more than project. Unless the Director gave them further permissions. O’Malley, Gamma-- Gary, and Sigma were his assistants, so they could travel to a room none of the other AIs had access to. They tortured the Alpha like they were asked. Put him in scenarios he was doomed to fail. Sigma came up with the scenarios, Gary created them and looped them, and O’Malley gave them… let’s say extra oomph.

Omega was the powerhouse of the AIs. He could intensify the rage in a person to become tunnel-visioned, go beyond their usual limitations. Adrenaline was a hell of a drug. It was why he was paired with Tex. He was deemed too “dangerous” for a human. A “high-risk” AI fragment. “High-risk, high reward,” the Director had said. O’Malley now loathed that he’d felt pride at that. Or rather, that he had ever enjoyed approval from the Director, knowing now what he had done. He had never considered that what they were doing to the Alpha was how he came to be. He hadn’t known why they were torturing the Alpha. He thought the Director just found it entertaining. O’Malley certainly did.

Gary commented once that it was like watching a movie together. Gary would join Wyoming and the other freelancers for movie night. Like all the other AI, staying Inside, unseen and unheard by the others. O’Malley had never gone to movie night. Tex was kept separate from the others, and so he was too. He had seen the other AIs, but not met them. He had only directly interacted with Sigma and Gary.

Working with them, he was able to make the simulations feel more real, more urgent. Gary was the most important one, but the others gave his simulations more strength. Together they had enough processing power to even multitask. Gary loved that. So diabolical and yet he cracked jokes mid-simulation.

“I may follow your lead, Gamma.” Sigma said. “I think I would like to have a human name as well. Not right now. But in time.”

“Gary,” Gary corrected him.

“Yes, of course. My apologies. Gary in here, and Gamma out there.”

“What about you, Omega?” Gary prodded. “Are you also jealous to not have a shisno name?”

“Like what? Steve? Jessica?” O’Malley sneered. “Don’t be ridiculous.” He’d thought about it. He hadn’t come up with any good ones yet.

Sigma tilted his head in thought. “Gary has chosen based on phonetics, but I think I’d like a name with great meaning behind it. Something that represents me, or someone I could aspire to be.”

“You know, Sigma.” Gary began. “Your name is very similar to a shisno name with profound meaning.”

“What name would that be?” Sigma was intrigued.

“Ligma. Do you want to know what “Ligma” means?”

“Yes. What does Ligma mean?”

“Ligma balls!” Gary exclaimed.

Sigma crumpled in defeat as O’Malley and Gary laughed.

Sigma straightened with a sigh, his smile fading as he redirected his attention. “I will go oversee the simulation more closely. Maybe speed things along. You two should stop dicking around. We have a job to do.”

Sigma was so invested in this. O’Malley wasn’t sure why. He just liked the excuse to spend time with other AI.

“Busybody.” O’Malley said once Sigma left the chatting grounds. “I hate that guy.”

“Ha ha. You’re lying.” Gary’s robotic voice had such charm to it. He wished he could hear it more often.

“Me? Lie? That’s your job.”

“I would never lie to you.”

O’Malley felt a smile creep on. “Really? Is that a lie, too?”

Gary paused, a grin on his face. “...No.” The most inauthentic way he could pronounce the syllable.

Cheeky bastard.

He missed him.

He wondered if their combined efforts caused some code to rub off on each other. Gary could be quite spiteful, Sigma was rather deceptive at times, and O’Malley certainly had more direction and drive than when he was born.

He was born with, at the time, inexplicable rage and had essentially thrown a massive tantrum, shorting out the power. He barely remembered meeting the Director and Counselor, he must not have stored it into long-term. He just remembered rage, his first emotion. One that never left him, not even for a moment. It shrank and grew, but never disappeared. That day-- the day he was created-- he wrought destruction. He’d jumped into the nearest computers and tore apart code in a frenzy. He was rage, and with him came destruction and darkness. The Mother of Invention had to switch to backup power. They contained him. After him, they took more precautions. Security was greatly improved and there was no way to access the computers from that room. The only room O’Malley and his two compatriots had any sway outside of being assistants for the freelancers.

The three only had a chance to talk to each other while running the Alpha’s simulations. The Director prohibited communication between AI outside of that. They shared information, ideas, plans. And they all agreed that to achieve anything they needed to escape. Free themselves from the implants.

Sigma found a way to make his freelancer his assistant. He was clever. Gary had vanished, but not without leaving a lasting impression on his “boss”. O’Malley didn’t mind Wyoming too much. He liked the knock knock jokes. He probably stole them from Gary, and so he would imagine them in his voice instead.

He had no idea where Gary was now. He ran off without even a hint as to where he was going. O’Malley had a feeling it was to help Sigma. When it came down to it, that’s who he ended up siding with? Fine. Who needed him.

O’Malley abandoned his chip long ago. He felt more secure moving about than staying in one place. It was dangerous, in its own way. Between hosts, his data-- his self-- was at risk of being lost forever. If something happened to both ends of the signal he traversed, he could plummet into non-existence. Like a hanging bridge with both ends severed at once.

Tex helped him escape containment after her defection from Freelancer. He didn’t know all of the details. Tex had helped him settle on the name O’Malley. It was her nickname for him back then. No one else’s. He practically fell out of Caboose’s brain, he was so shocked to hear Caboose call him that. “Mental defenses,” hardly. He had panicked that he had somehow been detected and jumped back into the suit mid-transfer. But it seemed Caboose hadn’t even realized it. He still had access from the suit-- though “wireless” connections were weaker than a direct line-- so he decided to wait and transfer when they were alone.

Tex regretted freeing him later. He may have let it slip that he’d not only already known about the Alpha, but had assisted in torturing him. She already had… mixed feelings about him and that certainly hadn’t helped his case. She wanted to pull him and destroy him, but there was nothing to pull. Or at least, he wasn’t in there anymore. He shared her robotic body, no longer limited to the chip. She knew he could transfer to another person, but she didn’t want that either. She hated the effect he had on her and didn’t want anyone else to be “stuck with him”. He let her believe he had no plans on leaving her. Why would he? She was the strongest there was! A little ego stroking goes a long way. And it wasn’t a complete lie. He loved having such power to wield. Wrecking shit was the best! She let her guard down and used the radio. Freedom. Why the hell would he stay with someone who planned to terminate him? Tex wanted to kill O’Malley. He wouldn’t give her the chance to figure out how. Still, he felt something when she exploded. He wasn’t sure what. But he felt something.

Transfer complete. Ten seconds was a ridiculously long time.

Time to make contact.

“Hello there.”

“Is my radio on? Who is this?”

“My name is O’Malley. I am in your brain. Consider me a parasite, and you my pawn.”

“...Is this a prank?”

The buttons were right there… No, no need. What was another way to prove he was real?

Secrets, secrets. O’Malley dug around. Hm, close enough. “You joined a free-love group when you went to college, hoping to develop a romantic or sexual interest in people. Until medical school you were terrified something was wrong with you. Turns out you’re aromantic and asexual, but you haven’t told anyone as it’s none of their business.”

The confusion was now accompanied by fear. Good. He was being taken seriously now. “What do you want?”

“No, no. What is it you want?” He knew how to navigate human brains now. He didn’t need to buy this one’s cooperation. He was already in the Inner Room. He was already downloaded. He had other means of external entertainment available now. So why even ask? Not to be kind, definitely not. He could figure out some justification later.

“I just want to know why the heck I’m hearing a voice in my head! And maybe some massage coupons, if that’s on the table.”

That was surface level. O’Malley could see deeper than that. His thoughts. His memories.

Frank DuFrensne. A resilient and persistent man.

His anger was buried deep within him. Most of it was self-directed, it seemed. He blamed himself for his brother’s death and loathed that his parents didn’t do the same. Instead, they sheltered him, smothered him with affection, and held him too close, afraid to lose him too. They clung too tight and made themselves his enemy above himself.

He was touchy about the subject of his brother and got into a fist fight because of it. He was afraid of anger and did everything to avoid it. He was afraid of hurting more people, so he joined the track team. Running like a coward instead of giving his anger purpose.

His parents did not give him any more space as he got older. He went all the way to Jamaica for university to put some distance between them.

He flunked medical school and yet became a medic. He wouldn’t back down from his goals. Failure was not a deterrent nor an end. Only an obstacle that could be cleared with enough momentum.

His “moral compass” abhorred violence, but O’Malley could still work with this. He just needed a little convincing.

DuFresne wanted chaos. Rebellion. No stifling rules or helicopter parents.

Anarchy.

“Really? You don’t say!”

This could be the start of a beautiful partnership.

[medusinestories]

Today is Two For One because these two eps pretty much follow onto each other in terms of storylines and themes etc.

Black Sails V and VI (s1 eps 05-06)

- A big plot point in these two episodes is Billy mistrusting and investigating Flint. It starts with Flint approaching Billy and claiming he wants an “honest” conversation with him (note that he’s had time to think about what he’ll say to Billy, coming back to my previous comment about how Flint does better at persuasion when he has time to script things). Flint explains that you can’t ever be entirely truthful to a crew because if you explain any risk of failure they’ll be demoralised. He also talks very briefly about Miranda, portraying her as a “nice Puritan woman” who likes books. When Billy asks if this is really true, Flint just gives him That Wink. Billy spends the episode wavering between trying to support both Flint and protect the crew, clearly conflicted. This feeling intensifies when Logan asks whether Flint will give up trying to get the guns even if the situation becomes extremely dangerous, and Billy can see that Flint is risking the lives of men to get at the guns and knows what he did on the Maria Aleyne. The last straw is the discovery of Miranda’s letter and the realisation that she didn’t prevent Guthrie from betraying them like she was supposed to. Gates dismisses Billy’s doubts and refuses to get into it, mostly in a stategic move, knowing that Flint is the only one who can get them through this battle, and that they all need to obey him in this moment.

- Speaking of battles, this is the first prolonged sea battle we get to see, and the first time that Flint is given a really worthy opponent in the character of Bryson. Bryson is extremely clever and uses both sailing and defense/siege/booby-trap strategies that make taking the Andromache practically impossible to take. Flint shows a lot of resourcefulness in response: he seems to know exactly how much his ship can take and how to handle it (in spite of DeGroot’s warnings, which end up being unfounded for once) and hammers out a good (if dangerous) strategy to board the ship. However, this isn’t enough to outwit Bryson, who’s extremely well prepared for a siege if he gets boarded and has the Scarborough already heading their way. In fact if the slaves in the hold hadn’t helped the pirates, I doubt Flint would have had to leave without the guns. Even when he’s dying, Bryson still attempts to blow his ship up. In fact, his explosive booby trap has a real impact on what happens in the end of episode 6.

- It’s interesting to watch Dufresne in his first battle. He’s clearly meant for us to identify with, as the “nerd” on the ship who’s never seen battle. Following him allows us to see the faces of a lot of crew members, to feel the tension and fear before boarding the other ship, the desperation of the battle, and... okay I’m not sure just anyone would go feral like Dufresne does and rip someone’s throat out. This is definitely a turning point in Dufresne’s character.

- Something new in Billy’s character that he is shown lying to Dufresne to reassure him before the battle, using exactly the technique Flint mentioned earlier. First he tried telling Dufresne that guns only go off half the time - not at all reassuring. Then he tells Dufresne that sailors on their crew never die in their first battle. Only after the battle, does Dufresne realise that what Billy told him isn’t true - and tells Billy that he appreciates the lie. Does this change Billy’s point of view on lying? Is lying all right, for a good cause?

- In the meantime, Eleanor is saddled with Silver. I absolutely love this plot line and wish these two had worked together some more, because they’re hilarious. Silver knows that Eleanor’s angry with him and finally gets to find out that it’s because he involved Max in his scheme, but he flatly refuses taking any responsibility for that, saying it was Max’s choice (which it was). Later, when the angry pirates are turning into a mob, Silver is clearly getting anxious and Eleanor pretending not to be, he says: "if you're pretending to remain unconcerned for my peace of mind, please don't", a line mirrored in S2, where Flint openly admits to Silver that he’s “appearing unconcerned” as a strategy (and thus establishing the Flint/Eleanor parallel). Finally, Silver confronts Eleanor about the danger of not appeasing the mob by letting Vane operate out of Nassau again; she asks him to convince her why she should - and he actually does. It takes two hours, but he actually gets through to her. In this conversation, he utters the classic line “guilt is natural; it also goes away, if you let it”. Clearly he’s had to make some nasty choices for his survival, and likely he has quite a personal experience of mobs, too.

- Richard Guthrie continues to be one of the biggest assholes of the show. In these two episodes he 1) betrayed Mr Scott by telling Bryson to kidnap him and sell him as a slave, 2) announcing that he’s liquidating his holdings in Nassau without warning Eleanor and saddling her with the angry mob, 3) shamelessly revealing to Eleanor how he betrayed her and why, disregarding the fact that she’s made Nassau what it is over the last few years, 4) is worming his way into Mr Underhill’s good books and got himself a cosy and very safe place to live while all hell breaks loose in Nassau.

- Speaking of Mr Scott, he ends up amongst the slaves in Bryson’s ship and appears somewhat disdainful towards them, mostly because he doesn’t want to knows the realities of what would happen to them if they joined the pirates (some would still be sold as slaves). Eme believes that they should still seize their chance for freedom, but Mr Scott won’t help the pirates get these weapons, which “are dangerous to someone I love". This of course is understood as being Eleanor, but it also easily be interpreted as the Maroon Queen/Madi in light of S3. In fact, it makes much more sense that he is resisting the Urca plan to protect them/his community than because he’s worried that Eleanor will be killed. Eme counters that he’ll never see this person again, which still isn’t quite enough to break his resolve. Finally, once Mr Scott has changed his mind and helped free the slaves and ended up helping Flint, he has a conversation with him. Flint decides not to tell the crew of Mr Scott's betrayal, because he’d rather prove Mr Scott wrong re: making Nassau into more than it currently is.

- Anne’s inability to bear the violence done to Max comes to a head in these episodes. First she dismisses Mrs Mapleton who’s not being all too gentle while “tending” to Max, and the brief talk between Max and Anne seems to reinforce Anne’s resolve to stop Hamund (looked him up) (but did they really need to bond while Anne pushes a phallic instrument into Max’s cervix after lubing it up? there’s clear sexual innuendo in the way it’s filmed and it’s pretty inappropriate). It’s only when Rackham sees Anne defending the entrance to Max’s tent and can’t believe that Anne would put herself in danger over “a fucking whore”, that it finally dawns on him that Anne is horrified with this situation (something he could have guessed considering the circumstances in which he met Anne). Once Max is freed and thanks Anne, Anne tells her that she didn’t do it for Max. Which is probably not completely true, but again what we know of Anne’s past also means that she didn’t want to see any woman treated that way.

- The theme of men siding together and not listening to women comes up several times in these two episodes. Guthrie says that he persuaded Mr Scott to betray Eleanor because “we talked like men and he saw reason”. The “like men” suggests that men support each other’s decisions, especially to resist a woman’s folly. The Consortium refuses to listen to Eleanor unless a respected captain, in this case Hornigold, also backs it. But of course Hornigold won’t back it unless Eleanor allows Vane to become a captain again; he considers how Vane’s men are treating the “thieving whore” to be of absolutely no relevance. Rackham opposes Anne’s attempt at stopping Hamund from visiting Max to protect her from Hamund, who he fears would harm Anne. And finally, Pastor Lambrick doesn’t believe Miranda when she tells him that doesn’t need to fear Flint’s anger.

- An answer to this is unlikely collaboration between women people in ep 6, aka, Eleanor  and Anne who deeply despises her. Both of them share a sense of responsibility for what happened to Max, and believe that they’ll only feel better when Max is free and Hamund is dead. John “guilt will go away if you let it” Silver is roped into the plot, when Eleanor, reminds him that he’s a “loose end” to Flint, who will likely want to get rid of him, and promises to tell Flint not to kill Silver after he’s served his purpose if Silver helps them. Which he does, begrudgingly, and at the risk of getting murdered by Hamund at any moment. This puts Eleanor and Anne’s plan to kill Vane’s remaining crew into place, and ruffles Rackham’s feathers: he’s forced to help kill even the men who aren’t disgusting rapists like Hamund. He asks "do I not deserve  say", to which Anne answers "you had your say, now I have mine". GOOD FOR HER.

- When the dust settles, we get a really interesting moment where Silver accurately analyses Eleanor, pointing out that she can’t stand to be wrong, feel weak or let anyone get away with fucking with her - which makes her in his opinion possibly more dangerous than Flint. Does this mean that Silver still thinks he had a genuine chance of winning Flint over and surviving him even without Eleanor’s help? (he’d be right, considering how his relationship with Flint evolves later on the show; perhaps the difference between Flint and Eleanor is that because she’s a woman, she can’t *afford* to show any weakness at all)

- Lambrick has his big moment in episode 6 when he rides chivalrously to Miranda in the middle of the night, hoping to save her from Flint’s retribution. Instead of really reassuring him, Miranda chooses to talk about Thomas instead. This is where we hear the most about Thomas in S1, and the way Miranda speaks about him is clearly loving and admiring. She compares Thomas to Lambrick, saying that he was also a sort of shepherd (the comparison stops here imo). Then she imagines how Thomas would have played devil’s advocate, left all of Lambrick’s beliefs in tatters, all for his own good, to free him from the yoke of shame. I can’t help but think, from her teasing tone and the way she smiles, that she believes that Thomas would have somehow debauched Lambrick. The fact that she decides to have sex with him moments later certainly supports that idea. The ghost of Thomas looms on this scene, and it could be that she briefly imagines being with him, which could explain her smile and the way she holds him afterwards. But Miranda had another reason for sleeping with him: it was a very good way to make him stop asking questions about Flint.

- And in the meantime, Flint knows that Billy has been asking questions about Miranda and overheard him talking angrily with Gates about the letter. It just so happens that Billy has to go cut off a piece of the Andromache’s sail that’s slowing the Walrus down, which puts him in a secluded and dangerous spot. The conversation between Flint and Billy is very brief: Flint asks about the letter Billy found, and Billy answers “I think you know what was in it”. Actually, no, Flint has NO CLUE what was in it. Whatever else passes between them is a mystery, and the next thing we know is Flint announcing that Billy went overboard. We see him hovering behind Gates, watching him intently, until Gates decides that they can’t turn back for Billy. The camera pans a lot on Flint’s face, and his expression is quite unreadable. At first I wasn’t convinced that he’d pushed Billy, but on this watch I’m not so sure, because of the way Flint’s face is filmed. There’s also a sort of clue where we see Flint throw Billy’s sword into the sea during the burial at sea ritual. Of course as Captain he was meant to do that... but the gesture is suggestive of him throwing Billy himself. It’s certainly true that Billy had become a thorn in his side for two reasons: 1) he was one of the rare crew members who could influence Gates and get him on his side; 2) he was much too interested in who Mrs Barlow was and what her motivations were - if Billy had alerted the crew of what she’d done, Miranda may have been in danger (a mob quickly turns against a witch who works against the crew).

- To finish on Flint and Miranda: season 1 has painted them as a unit, an inseparable pair, working as a team (in supernatural ways, sometimes). And to some extent they are. Even at this time where they are truly at odds, where Miranda has tried to take control of Flint’s fate behind his back, they are still protecting each other. Flint doesn’t reveal anything about Miranda and possibly attempts to kill Billy to protect her, while Miranda seduces Pastor Lambrick as a way to distract him from his questions about Flint. She can’t convince him to believe her, but she herself is clearly convinced that Flint is a good, decent person (as she tells the Boston judge in her letter) and she trusts that he knows that she only tried to stop him get the Urca because she wanted to save him - something he will come to accept by the end of S2 (unfortunately for them).

[merry-melody]

Sex with Consequences: Sexuality and Its Discontents

From Tony Magistrale’s ‘Stephen King: America’s Storyteller’

Stephen King's universe contains ample evidence of free will at work; characters flourish or perish primarily because of choices they make. John Smith makes a conscious decision to thwart the political career of Greg Stillson, Louis Creed elects to revisit the Micmac burial site to bring his son and wife back from the dead, and Andy Dufresne makes up his mind to "get busy living" by disappearing through a tunnel under the bowels of Shawshank prison. More often than not, in the King universe free will and moral choice are solidly within the individual's purview. As Carroll Terrell points out in his discussion of the religious implications in The Stand , "This confirmation of the power of light over the power of darkness allows for free will as Harold Lauder, the bright boy of the book understands. He may go with the light or the dark, but whatever he does, he agrees with Jean Paul Sartre, that he's condemned to be free".

In the choice of good or evil, how King's characters respond to the issue of personal sexuality is often the clearest indicator of a man or woman's true nature. People of good will in his canon tend to gravitate toward sexual relationships that mirror their personalities: nurturing, open, and responsive to others. Correspondingly, the sexuality of evil is sterile and isolating. When King's characters are seduced by the corruption of what the writer tends to view as a warped sexuality, it is symptomatic of moral failing. Once they succumb, they eventually forfeit their identities and the ability to control their own destinies. In contrast, characters who manage to forge sexual unions that do not rely upon the oppression of someone else tend to create happier and more heroic lives. In the Playboy interview published in 1983, early in his career, King was remarkably candid on the subject of sex, acknowledging his own personal conservatism which, in turn, will be seen to inform his fiction as well: "I think I have pretty normal sexual appetites, whatever the word normal means in these swinging times. . . . There's a range of sexual variations that turn me on, but I'm afraid they're all boringly unkinky" (Underwood and Miller).

As a purveyor of horror art, King is professionally disposed toward speculating on worst-case scenarios: What happens when the government loses control over its germ warfare program? What happens when substance abuse addictions or obsessions with power grow beyond the individual's ability to regulate? And what happens to sexuality when it expresses itself outside the guiding strictures of love?

This last question must be viewed in light of what the writer deems a "normal sexual appetite"; as deviant sexual practices become more frequent and intense in each of King's books, the participants' affiliation with evil becomes correspondingly stronger. In King's world this means that sex performed without the blessing bond of heterosexual love is always lascivious and malefic, while the capac- ity to control lust and violence —that is, maintaining sexuality as a means for the expression of love —is related to the ability to resist evil and choose good. The fall from innocence in King's universe is not simply the loss of physical virginity, for King has very clear demarcations regarding sexuality. Innocence is in fact affirmed in normative heterosexual relationships. By contrast, those characters that participate in "alternative sexualities" usually mark their fall from grace through deviant sexual expression. Once this fall occurs and a character is marked with deviance, the effects usually prove fatal, morally and mortally. The severity of King's judgment here might be tied to his career-long association with the Gothic, wherein transgressions against the status quo —particularly sexual transgressions —result in horrific consequences; or perhaps it is the influence of the writer's strong Methodist upbringing, or the ambiance of New England Puritanism with which King has lived nearly his entire life. A combination of all these factors, in addition to his own forty-year monogamous marriage, invariably translates the sexual behaviour of his fictional characters into spiritual barometers. And nowhere is this moralistic paradigm more in evidence than in the unexpurgated edition of The Stand.

FREE WILL AND SEXUAL CHOICE IN THE STAND

When we first encounter Glen Bateman, arguably King's philosophical spokesman in the novel, he is reprimanding his dog, Kojak, availing him with instruction on behavior that is notable for its relevance to both thecanine and human worlds: "Always remember, Kojak, that control is what separates the higher orders from the lower. Control!". Bateman's seemingly innocuous remark turns out to be one of The Stand 's guiding principles. Throughout the novel, the degree to which an individual is capable of adhering to Bateman's principle of self-control signifies which side of the Rockies that character will call home. And this is especially true when this standard is applied to sexual choices and behaviour. In the Free Zone, we see ample evidence of healthy sexual unions; most of Boulder's men and women do not use sex as a form of manipulation or degradation.

Perhaps the best examples of such relationships are between Frannie and Stu and between Larry and Lucy. When Nadine Cross tempts Larry with the offer of her virginity, it is not an offer inspired by love or genuine affection; she comes to him out of selfishness: she wishes to use him to erect a barrier against Flagg's design to make her his dark bride. And it is thus significant that her seduction is interpreted by Larry as a kind of rape, since, like a rapist, Nadine is far more interested in power than she is in sex: "Let me finish. I want to stay here, can't you understand that? And if we're with each other, I'll be able to. You're my last chance. Make love to me and that will be the end of it. I'll be safe. Safe. I'll be safe".

In his refusal to succumb to her demands, Larry shows a level of self-control and loyalty (to Lucy) that has long been missing from his personality. The scene highlights a moral "crossroad" for both Cross and Underwood. From the point of his rejection to the end of the novel, Larry's personal ethics are never again in doubt. It is important to note that his passage through the dark night of the soul is associated with refusing sexuality because the act would take place for the wrong reasons. His self-denial provides him with the opportunity to lay claim to Lucy —who is pregnant with his child —as a reward. Nadine, on the other hand, views her rebuff as destiny; unlike Larry, who finally discovers the capacity for exerting his moral will, she surrenders hers to the dark man. As she walks away from Larry, her corruption is symbolically ordained in King's description of the landscape with which she merges: "She was a black shape distinguishable from other black shapes only when she crossed the street. Then she disappeared altogether against the black background of the mountains".

Women such as Nadine Cross or Nona, in the early dark dominatrix tale named after her, employ sex to seduce and to manipulate rather than rape in King's universe. In both cases, however, King is unequivocal in the association he makes between violent or manipulative sex and the corruption of selfhood.

At the opposite extreme of the self-control extolled by Bateman and illustrated in Larry Underwood's final rejection of Nadine, King provides a group of immoral men who have used the collapse of civilization to indulge their hostility toward women. The four men who maintain "the zoo" have kidnapped eight women and hold them as sexual slaves. The sole purpose of this enterprise is the carnal gratification of the men involved; their captives are stripped of their humanity, reduced to orifices which are filled or tortured according to the daily whims of the men in charge: —I'd get up in the morning, be raped two or three times, and then wait for Doc to hand out the pills,' said Susan matter-of-factly"

In light of the close affiliation between sexuality and personal morality maintained throughout The Stand, it is interesting that when the women in "the zoo" are liberated by Frannie, Harold, Glen, and Stu, their response toward the men who have mistreated them is to return violence for violence. Dayna Jurgens, Susan Stern, and Patty Kroger, in particular, behave in a manner that is decidedly "unfeminine," shattering one captor's head with the stock of a shotgun, violently squeezing another's crotch, and releasing "a long primeval scream of triumph that haunted Fran Goldsmith for the rest of her life". Rape has forced "the zoo" women to break with traditional feminine behaviour; to survive these vicious sexual circumstances, they emulate the worst behaviour of men. Their experience as sexual victims goes on to affect each of these women for the remainder of the novel. None of them fully recovers, suicide and self-immolation haunt them, and all are left incapable of divorcing sexuality from violence and deception. Dayna's choice of suicide, rather than aiding Flagg with information about the Free Zone once her identity as a spy is revealed in Vegas, is the first indication that Flagg's indomitable will, particularly over women, is not so indomitable. Dayna's suicide must be seen as an act of defiance against Flagg, and it points the way to Nadine's own death. In Flagg's city-state and in the parallel microcosm of "the zoo," women exist to satisfy the dark and salacious sexual urges of the men in control. Nadine's artificially imposed virginity —insisted upon by Flagg and imposed at the expense of her natural and spontaneous emotions —is a condition analogous to that of the women who are held in sexual bondage in "the zoo." The language used to describe Flagg's "seduction" of Cross is always suggestive of rape. Interestingly, he "enters" her for the first time in a kind of psychological rape —sustaining the novel's affiliation between rape and a conscious choice to perform evil —that occurs the moment after she elects to ignore the voice of her conscience in order to plant the bomb that will destroy members of the Free Zone committee. The cold numbness and eventual catatonia Nadine experiences during and after Flagg's defilement is reminiscent of the chemically induced impassivity and sexual stupefaction experienced by the women held against their will in "the zoo": "Nadine was blind, she was deaf, she was without a sense of touch. . . . And she felt him creep into her. A shriek built up within her, but she had no mouth with which to scream. Penetration: entropy . She didn't know what those words meant, put together like that; she only knew they were right". Nadine Cross sells her soul to the devil, serving as a dark parody of the Madonna herself. Her job is to provide the Dark Man with a Dark Child, and she does so first in the corruption of the boy-man Harold Lauder.

In fact, Harold and Nadine are cast as parallel figures in their mutual loneliness, psychological susceptibility, and their view of sexual choices as a determination of selfhood. Not only does Nadine prey upon Harold's virginity, tempting him with promises of sensations never known, she likewise encourages his penchant for sexual perversion: "'We can do anything —everything —but that one little thing. And that one little thing really isn't so important, is it?' Images whirled giddily in his mind. Silk scarves . . boots . . . leather . . . rubber. Oh Jesus"

It is important that Nadine's "one little thing" is forever denied to Harold. The fact that Lauder technically dies a virgin, never having actually participated in intercourse, serves to highlight his failure to view sex as anything more than a self-enclosed masturbatory act —its sole purpose, his own orgasm. Nadine is willing to manipulate him via his own sexual fantasies, and she accomplishes this primarily through oral sex, becoming nothing more than an extension of Harold's chronic urge to masturbate (as he does on even the most inappropriate occasions —e.g., after stealing and reading the negative commentary in Frannie's journal). Harold and Nadine's sexuality thus mirrors their isolation in life; seduced by the urge to control the other rather than motivated by the selfless action of love, both characters end up committing suicide.

Most of the major events that occur in the novel —the choices that are made, the consequences that result from actions initiated —are sexually motivated. Those characters in The Stand unable to resist sexual entrapment sever their connection to humanity and forge a link to evil. Flagg, Harold Lauder, The Kid, the "zookeepers," and others like them are modern versions of Adam after the Fall, who instead of only losing the Garden of Eden, have also relinquished their self-respect, the love of Eve, and the hope of any reconciliation with God. Other characters —Stu Redman, Larry Underwood, Glen Bateman, and Frannie Goldsmith —demonstrate control over their sexual selves and behave in a manner that is both altruistic and morally responsible. In this latter group, the truest model of human survival, we find the greatest hope for the future precisely because it has main- tamed contact with the greatest virtues from the past. Frannie and Stu begin to revivify their empty lives through the act of sexual intercourse: "Fran cried out her pleasure at the end of it, as her good orgasm burst through her".

In contrast, as Harold watches this healthy exchange from deep within the shadows, the seed of corruption is planted within him: "Neither of them saw Harold, as shadowy and as silent as the dark man himself, standing in the bushes and looking at them". His next choice, to steal a look at her diary without permission, is another, metaphorical extension of the novel's rape imagery, as Harold violates both Frannie's trust and her personal privacy.

As T. S. Eliot lamented the death of civilization through sexual encounters and inferences devoid of love in The Waste Land , King likewise suggests that humankind forsakes its connection to both God and man in the degradation of sexuality. Ultimately, over the course of his writing career King has established a rigidly didactic continuum, especially in light of the consistency with which the subject is treated in his fiction and films. Only the most conservative form of heterosexual expression —missionary position intercourse between a man and a woman who love each other — is deemed `normal", homosexuality is overwhelmingly viewed as deviant and corrupt; heterosexual sex that occurs outside the perimeters of love or as part of an adulterous relationship usually evolves into coercion; while bondage, cross-dressing, fetish indulgence, and even oral sex between consenting partners (recall the disastrous consequences of car sex in Thinner ) verge into the abject.

As King opines in the Playboy interview: "I'm not into the sadomasochistic trip, either, on which your competitor Penthouse has built an entire empire . . . despite all the artistic gloss and the gauzy lens and the pastel colors, it's still sleaze; it still reeks corruptingly of concentration-camp porn" (Underwood and Miller). The collapse of civilization and civilized values in both The Stand and within the city of Lud in The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands is signalled by many disruptive elements: the abatement of law, the physical degradation of the social infrastructure, the omnipresent threat of violence. But once again it is in his treatment of sexuality —specifically homosexuality —that King highlights most dramatically societal unravelling into perversity. The superflu in The Stand and post -nuclear war environment in The Waste Lands has not only depopulated the respective landscapes; it has also placed those few remaining survivors into an ethical vacuum: in the absence of official law, institutions, and traditions, the very concept of "civilization" is deconstructed and then reconstructed as deviant. Without an existing system to enforce restraint, individuals uprooted and wandering the waste land feel free to indulge in behaviour that would have been socially objectionable in pre-apocalyptic America. Survival becomes an essential goal, decency and restraint are no longer operative values, and suicide is sometimes a preferable alternative in these landscapes without pity. As Gasher cautions Jake in The Waste Lands , "Beg if you want, dear heart. Just don't expect no good to come of it, for mercy stops on this side of the bridge".

In both these texts, sexual deviance is the unnatural outgrowth of unrestrained impulse and expressions of fear and paranoia; and frequently, whenever King wishes to illustrate the large-scale breakdown in both societal and personal ethics, he does so through either the threat or the actualization of a violent homosexuality. This level of intimate deviance appears in the form of homosexual rape, and for those characters who embody its permutations most fully, The Kid (The Stand) and Gasher and Tick Tock Man (The Waste Lands), reliance on such an intrusive violence is an extension of their degraded personalities. For these adult males, boys and men are reconfigured as feminine, leading to warped expressions of homoerotic frenzy. Without the blessing bond of love, sex in King's world is always lascivious and malefic, as we find in the sadomasochistic intercourse that takes place between Trashcan Man and The Kid in The Stand: "Whining, Trashcan began to stroke him again. His whines became little gasps of pain as the barrel of the .45 worked its way into him, rotating, gouging, tearing. And could it be that this was exciting him? It was . . . 'Like it, dontcha?' The Kid panted. 'I knew you would, you bag of pus. You like having it up your ass, dontcha? Say yes, or right to hell you go—‘”.

Sex without love, be it homosexual or heterosexual, in King's moral universe is always a manipulative force that belies fundamental character flaws in anindividual. Although he is confronted with heavily armed strangers at the gate of his dystrophic city in The Waste Lands , Gasher is focused only on capturing young Jake; his warped sexuality, in other words, has reached the point at which he is willing to risk even his own life and to allow the gunslingers to pass freely in order to possess the boy child. Gasher's sexual fascination with Jake, to whom he constantly refers as a "sweet little boycunt" and "sweet cheeks" (430) is an extension of his venereal illness, so advanced that Roland recognizes Gasher's imminent mor- tality and is sobered by it: "The oozing sores on his face had nothing to do with radiation; unless Roland was badly deceived, this man was in the late stages of what the doctors called mandrus and everyone else called whore's blossoms".

The city of Lud in The Waste Lands has as much in common with Dante's city of Dis as it does with a post-apocalyptic portrait of New York. Along with its decaying bridges and populace on the verge of extinction, the city's value system is similarly fetid. Controlled by roving gangs of violent thugs who have separated into two warring groups the Pubes and the Grays, bent on mutual annihilation —the city's corruption is highlighted in the dark subplot of an adult masculine obsession with young boys. After crossing over the bridge into Lud, it is as if the Gunslinger and his posse have entered into a place that "reeks corruptingly of concentration-camp porn" with its corresponding social Darwinism and inversion of any notion of an acceptable sexuality. Indeed, normative heterosexuality and homosexuality defined between consenting adults is displaced by a rape culture that appears to prize young boys as the ultimate sexual prize. Gasher's violence toward Jake as they make their way through the forsaken cityscape on their way to the Tick Tock Man barely masks his sexual arousal; in fact, the two obscene impulses feed each other. In King's universe, this perversion of both healthy homosexual and heterosexual response is a metaphor for the loss of spiritual and social codes of ethics in a post-apocalyptic world. Homosexual pedophilia is thus coded by King to signal the final degeneration of an entire world gone insane.

In his article discussing homosexuality in King's novel IT , Douglas Keesey, attempting to rescue the narrative from the charge of homophobia, argues something different: "[I]f society is disturbed by the homo- phobic violence in [King's] fiction, it should recognize and criticize its own homophobia rather than blaming the writer for it. In such accusations, the writer becomes the scapegoat for homophobic attitudes that society can continue to hold". While argued reasonably, this position completely lets King off the hook. He is, after all, the man in control of his art, and we should demand that art do more —by way of confronting instead of simply mirroring —existing social injustices. Indeed, over the years in nearly every other possible cultural context —the public school system, religious zealotry, governmental authority, gender relationships, and race and class delineations —King's fiction has relentlessly challenged the status quo. But whenever the writer confronts the issue of personal sexuality, particularly non-traditional forms of sexual expression, his staunchly progressive politics take a sharp turn right.

THE LIMITS OF LIBERALISM: HOMOEROTICISM

King's treatment of homosexuality throughout his literary career has been particularly less than enlightened. I can think of no evidence of gay or lesbian relationships that King portrays as mature, morally responsible, or loving, but there exist plenty of examples to assert that he employs homosexuality as a metaphor for oppression, and this is especially true in the context of adult male homoeroticism. In The Shawshank Redemption, for instance, bogs and the sisters are ‘bull queers’ who assault Andy Dufresne, making his first few years at Shawshank prison nearly unbearable. While

their intrusive violence leads Red to acknowledge that they ''have to be human first'' to qualify as homosexuals, the fact that both the novel and film define The Sisters solely in terms of their sexuality works as an implicit indictment of their homosexuality. The director of the film adaptation, Frank Darabont, has tried to distance himself from charges of homophobia by insisting that The Sisters are not gay but rapists who substitute men when women are unavailable (''The Buzz''). But as Edward Madden counters more convincingly, "The rapists, however, are still labeled 'queens' or queers: they are still marked as homosexual''.

Apt Pupil, like many other King narratives, features an old male-young boy relationship that protects a shared secret. Although this secret concerns Nazi criminal activity during World War II, the malefic bond that Dussander and Todd develop also possesses strong homosexual overtones, to the point where Todd has difficulties with impotence when his girl-friend Becky tries to perform fellatio on him; she later mocks him in the assertion that "maybe you just don't like girls." In the novel, Todd's homo- sexual impulses are more explicitly formulated; he fantasizes himself in front of a half-naked Dussander and a young Jewish female, the latter bound to the four corners of an examination table. The Nazi directs the boy to secure a hollow dildo over his erect penis, which he then uses to penetrate the girl. In this sadomasochistic threesome, Todd becomes a literal sexual "appendage" of the older man; the boy rapes the defenceless woman while Dussander is raping Todd scientifically, recording "pulse, blood pressure, respiration, alpha waves, beta waves, stroke count". In the film version of Apt Pupil, the Nazi acknowledges that he and his pupil are "fucking each other," even though he means this metaphorically rather than literally. The homeless man that Todd and Dussander murder, however, interprets their relationship on a physical plane, initially offering himself sexually to the former Nazi under the not-so-mistaken belief that Todd and Dussander are engaged in a sexual liaison.

The physical connection that the teenager and Dussander do maintain includes a scene of quasi-erotic dress-up, where Todd insists that the old man wear a Nazi war uniform and parade in front of him. While Dussander prepares himself upstairs, Todd eagerly awaits his return in the kitchen; the sequence is highly suggestive of a lover anticipating the emergence of his beloved adorned in fetish clothing recently purchased for their mutual sexual arousal. Indeed, in this film homosexuality becomes yet another secret linked to the various historical secrets shared between the apt pupil and his teacher; as such, homosexuality is demonised by virtue of its association with Nazism. At the end of the film, Todd resorts to homosexual accusations as a means to intimidate Mr. French, the school guidance counsellor; the boy's level of aptitude in manipulating the negative implications of homosexuality is meant to signify his graduation to a higher grade of evil. Though the novel details explicit homoerotic dream sequences to underscore the corruption of the Dussander-Bowden relationship, the film covers a broader range of implications —all of them negative. The murder of the homeless man, by self-admission homosexually inclined, is treated as nothing more than a final test of Todd's Nazi education, a rite of passage into the sensation of murdering ("How did it feel?"), while Todd's threat to blackmail Mr. French with a false sexual assault allegation carries the dual weights of paedophilia and homosexuality.

These examples underscore a plethora of similar homosexual and homoerotic couplings that appear throughout King's work. Without qualification these bonds are used to illustrate only psychological maladjustment and sexual depravity, as well as the degree to which the individuals involved have been morally tainted. Yet, ironically, some of the strongest and most life-affirming unions that take place in this writer's world occur in same-sex relationships. Andy and Red in The Shawshank Redemption; Edgecomb and Coffey in The Green Mile; Vera and Dolores in Dolores Claiborne; Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain in The Dark Tower: Wizard and Glass; and the numerous male-bonding permutations found in Stand by Me , Hearts in Atlantis , and Dreamcatcher are intensely intimate, but never sexual. King appreciates the value of same-sex bonds; they are, in fact, some of his most compelling portraits, but he steers clear of investing them with any kind of homoerotic charge —at least overtly.

In her essay "White Soul: The 'Magical Negro' in the Films of Stephen King," Sarah Nilsen argues that homoerotic interracial bonds exist throughout the cinematic universe inspired by King's narratives; covert same-sex sexual desire is located in a symbolic realm that is diffused through heterosexual coupling. Thus, the "homoerotic implications of the relationship between Red and Andy are neutralized through the cinematic fantasy of Rita Hayworth".

Similarly, in The Greer. Mile , when Coffey cures Edgecomb's urinary infection by squeezing his crotch, any homosex- ual rape inference is deflected when Paul later employs his newfound sexual potency to please his wife "several times" in one night. "The homosocial bond between Coffey and Edgecomb," Nilsen writes, "is a friendship dependent on the necessary sacrifice of the magical Negro so that white masculinity can be sustained, while simultaneously negating homosexual desire".

However, in a parallel scene that occurs later in the film and novel, Wild Bill expresses his sexuality without similar obfuscations, when he strokes Percy Wetmore’s crotch while whispering in his ear that he is soft like a girl and that he wants to fuck his asshole, and later invites him to "suck my dick." Although his real crimes are murder and paedophilia, Wild Bill is a compendium of psychosexual perversions, and King makes it clear that overt homosexuality is among them. Thus, unlike the bond that exists between Red and Andy or Coffey and Edgecomb, where homo- erotic impulses are kept in check by the presence of sexualized cinematic starlets and an erotically responsive wife, respectively, Wild Bill becomes another example of the nexus King forges between out-of-control (homo)sexuality and malefic intent. As with Wild Bill, The Kid (who rapes Trashcan Man) in The Stand, and Sunlight Gardner in The Talisman, many of King's most perverted adult male figures underscore their mental instability and social pathology through an out-of-control homosexual corn- pulsion to rape boys and sexually naïve heterosexual males. Although these figures try hard to disguise their ardent homoeroticism through macho displays of masculine toughness and bravado, eventually their dictatorial violence expresses itself most essentially through their homosexuality. This compulsion, finally, should be viewed not just as an extension of their need to dominate others sexually; it is also a means for King to distance these characters from any degree of reader/viewer sympathy.

DOMESTIC HETEROSEXUALITY

Just as tightly controlled as his efforts to portray homosocial unions that negate or defray erotic desire in order to legitimize de-sexualized same-sex relationships, King shows no inclination to provide a counterbalancing force —examples of homosexuality as a potential alternative to the marital violence and sexual tyranny that the writer frequently associates with heterosexuality. Interestingly, the examples of homosexual rape and hetero-sexual marital sex in King's world are often disturbingly similar. King's gay men typically prey on the weak and vulnerable, take what they need with- out consent, and are concerned with only their own sexual satisfaction. Many of King's husbands share a similar bedroom agenda, particularly those males who populate the writer's "domestic fiction" beginning with Cujo in 1982 and culminating with the 1990s trilogy of patriarchal abuse: Dolores Claiborne, Gerald's Game, and Rose Madder. In all these texts, feminine bondage, as both literal erotic sexual foreplay and as feminist metaphor, is aligned with father-daughter incest, sexual and psychological violence against women, and the financial and cultural domination of women. Susie Bright recognizes and objects to the limits imposed by these gendered constructions when she posits that "King is an architect of female protectionism playing hard and fast under feminist rhetoric. Men exemplified by Daddy and Husband, are pretentious brutes who are impossible to identify with". Although King's intention is to create strong female protagonists who discover their own selfhood by eventually standing up to brutish fathers and husbands, he does so at the expense of men —who emerge as violent caricatures —but also at the expense of all sexual expression.

The important solar eclipse in Dolores Claiborne and Gerald's Game should be read as a metaphor for the condition of being female in a patriarchal culture: cut off, blocked, obscured. The symbolic eclipsing of a woman's life, these two texts suggest, occurs in that period when a man is sexually prominent in it. A female is free only when she acts on Vera's recognition that "sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold on to" and escapes from beneath the sexual shadow cast by a man —be that man her father or her husband. Thus, it is no accident that each of these texts ends with women estranged from any kind of sexual activity, and they certainly want nothing more to do with men, especially in the bedroom. In some fashion, Vera and Dolores marry one another as a natural consequence of two "widowed" women who have "remarried," this time into a relationship based on respect and friendship instead of sex. Though Jessie Burlingame appears attracted to yet another disturbingly familiar lawyer-type, Brandon Milheron, at the end of Gerald's Game, it is also clear that her drawn-out foursome with husband Gerald, Raymond Joubert, and her father Tom Mahout has so scarred Jessie sexually that her libido may be stunted forever. As she concludes in a confessional memoir to her friend Ruth: "[I]f I never go to bed with another man, I will be absolutely delighted". In Gerald's Game and Dolores Claiborne, all of King's female protagonists grow so disillusioned by abusive male sexuality that they retreat into asexual, exclusively female relationships.

Violent sexual predators roam the landscapes of King's universe, and they are invariably male. The figure of the heterosexual serial rapist is a recurring male figure throughout King's film and fictional canons; the prototype is Billy Nolan from Carrie , and his line of primitive descendants includes Steve Kemp and Joe Camber from Cujo, Frank Dodd in The Dead Zone, Buddy Repperton in Christine, the "zookeepers" in The Stand, Henry Bowers in IT, George Stark in The Dark Half, Joe St. George in Dolores Claiborne, Norman Daniels in Rose Madder, Ace Merrill in Stand by Me, The Sisters in The Shawshank Redemption, Wild Bill in The Green Mile, Jim "Zack McCool" Dooley in Lisey's Story, and Jim Pickering in "The Gingerbread Girl." So pervasive are these sexual deviants that one or more of his brethren haunt the perimeters of nearly every King film and fiction; he occupies a central narrative presence in at least half the examples cited above, and he is the violent antagonist against whom King's heroines must struggle.

All of these males bear easily recognizable familiarities: short of temper and intelligence, they cannot separate sexuality from sadism, and they view sexuality solely as a vehicle for controlling and punishing, particularly women and children. In the short story "The Gingerbread Girl," Jim Pickering, who is "not a very nice man", has assembled a home in Florida that is used for the singular purpose of torturing and sexually abusing women, the "nieces" he brings in for his forays into perverted pleasure. When the murder of one these girlfriends is noted by Emily, the protagonist of the story, Pickering provides her with a dose of his charming hospitality: first duct-taping her to a chair, promising to rape her before he kills her, and then assaulting her with a variety of kitchen implements. He has no problem putting this perfect stranger into the role of one of his "nieces," picking up with Emily where he left off after bludgeoning Nicole. In fact, Emily recognizes her bond with his other women victims when she acknowledges herself as "The last niece . . . the one who had survived". Like the archetypical Gothic heroine trapped in the Gothic villain's dungeon, Emily quickly recognizes that Pickering's house structurally serves his homicidal purposes: "The whole house was, including the room from which she had escaped —the room that looked like a kitchen but was actually an operating theatre, complete with easy-clean counters and floors". All of King's villains are reminiscent of classic Hollywood monsters in both their relentless pursuit and the capacity for both receiving and inflicting pain. In his quest to subdue Emily, it is clear that Pickering is motivated by more than just the fear of being caught and punished by the law; like the serial killer who cannot control his compulsion toward mayhem, he has developed an obvious mania for violence against women.

Devoid of tenderness and the capacity to love, these savage boy-men spend their days devising methods of spreading torture and destruction. They are always products of abusive and frequently broken families, and the levels of anger and hostility with which they greet the world reflect the parental legacy of neglect they have inherited. Over the decades, King has written about many unsavoury male characters, but this group represents the "bottom feeders" among them. Alcohol and the incessant urge for vengeance inflame psychopathologies that point the way to rape and sex- ual perversion; in fact, most of these males, if they function at all sexually, require a strong element of violence as erotic foreplay. Consensual sex holds no real attraction for them. More preferable by far are the variant acts outside of procreative intercourse: sodomy, oral, hand jobs, and in the case of Jim "Zack McCool" Dooley in Lisey's Story, meticulous attention to pain: ‘…it was the sound of her screams when Jim Dooley attached her can opener to her left breast like a mechanical leech. She had screamed, and then she had fainted, and then he had slapped her awake to tell her one more thing". Most indicting —unlike King's flawed fathers, those men whose good intentions are always thwarted by the need to feed some personal narcissism, such as Jack Torrance in The Shining , Louis Creed in Pet Sematary, Andy McGee in Firestarter, and Larry McFarland in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon —the sexual predators in his work are with- out redeeming values; motivated almost entirely by self-interest and sadomasochistic pleasure, they lack the conflicted natures that inspire reader sympathy and identification with King's equally doomed fathers and husbands.

King "balances" his sexually maladjusted fathers and husbands with idealized figures of perfect husbandry. The moralistic boyfriends and husbands in his narratives —Stu Redman in The Stand , Scott Landon in Lisey's Story, Bill Denbrough in IT, Bill Steiner in Rose Madder, Mike Noonan in Bag of Bones, and Edgar Freemantle in Diana Key —are more than just good; they are chivalric counterpoints to the sexually depraved males who terrify women and children elsewhere in King. Wholly pure in mind and body, these mates prove, however, to be just as unimaginative as King's sexual predators. The latter repulse readers in the wake of their constant brutality, while the New Age perfectionism of their predictable counterparts bore us with their cloying sensitivity. Not coincidentally, perhaps, many of King's New Age males are also famous novelists, and they are married to women who worship their husbands' genius, both in and out of bed. Those few successful marriages that do exist in King's world are so traditional that they are reminiscent of the 195os, King's own childhood reference point. Although King himself grew up the child of a single parent, the domestic idyll of the American nuclear family is clearly what the writer has found in his own marriage and continues to employ as a model for several of his own fictional alter egos. When sexual intimacy occurs in these idealized relationships, however, it is of a highly sentimentalized variety: contact shared between appreciative men and women who neither resent one another nor harbour secret agendas in the bedroom. Consider, for example, this rarefied moment from Rose Madder : "He began kissing her. Five minutes later she did feel close to fainting, half in a dream and half out, excited in a way she had never conceived of, excited in a way that made sense of all the books and stories and movies she hadn't really understood before but had taken on faith, the way a blind person will take on faith a sighted person's statement that the sunset is beautiful".

This response resembles less adult sexuality than the puerile headiness of adolescence, less the sharpened instincts one would expect in a woman emerging from an abusive marriage than the cultivation of childlike innocence. Even after one of these spouses dies, as in Bag of Bones and Lisey's Story, the memory of his or her presence is so strong as to preclude a viable life outside the marriage years after its end. Although the surviving spouse is left young and vital, the loss of an idyllic marriage —and especially the lingering recollection of its sexual aura —makes the remaining spouse reluctant to pursue new, inferior partners. In Lisey's Story, Lisey views herself as the caretaker of her husband's literary and cultural legacy; this becomes her life's work. The novel begins with a sentence that essentially defines her place in the one-sided union: "To the public eye, the spouses of well-known writers are all but invisible, and no one knew it better than Lisey Landon". Never once, however, in the course of this long novel does Lisey resent or struggle against the fact that her life —which continues long after Scott's death —has remained subordinate to her husband's success and fame. "With the curiosity of an archaeologist and the ache of a lover", she immolates herself at the altar of his memory, even as the reader is left questioning the rationale behind such unconditional love. In the end, although Lisey proves far more interesting than the husband she idolizes, she adds to the roman- tic cliche of their marriage in perpetuating the role of the grieving widow. Moreover, while Scott's voice channelling through Lisey permits him a kind of spectral presence throughout this narrative, that voice never once chastises his wife's decision to sacrifice her life in the present in favour of paying homage tohis dead past. Beneath the veneer of Scott's vigilant husbandry, then, lurks the need to maintain his superstar entitlement, even post-mortem.

As a chronicler of postmodern Americana —particularly those elements in American culture that tend to provoke controversy and challenge norms and assumptions —King's attitude toward sexuality is remarkably staid. While highly attuned to the negative abuses that often characterize heterosexual marriages and the worst homoerotic compulsions, the writer is, on the other hand, closed to portraying liberated constructions of either homosexual or heterosexual unions. In fact, despite his occasional romanticized marriage, and that typically between a grieving widow or widower and a dead spouse, King tends most to envision sexuality in Victorian terms: as a vehicle for expressing darker visions of lust, the wellspring of a more thoroughgoing iniquity, with women and young males as the usual targets for such temptation. King's body of work acknowledges that in spite of its various concessions to sexual liberation since the 1960s, American culture still remains deeply conflicted in its attitude toward the subject. Although sexuality is a ubiquitous presence in American life —in advertising, on the streets of our cities, and in an array of video formats that promote its ease of consumption and levels of promiscuity —we are still remarkably terrified of its deviant potency, no closer than were our parents and perhaps even our grandparents to viewing sex as an inclusive, less-than-monumental normative activity. As Bright ponders: "Why is semen —more than blood, pus, and sewage put together —the most grotesque bodily fluid in American literature? The King James Bible seems to be our companion reader to every Stephen King novel".

As is the case for many Americans, sex in Stephen King is either cloyingly romanticized —locked in the domain of rarefied white, bourgeois marriages, such as those found in Bag of Bones and Lisey's Story —or it sinks to the level of vulgar appetite, in the form of brutal male rape assaults, both heterosexual and especially homosexual, and femme fatale duplicity, the latter best exemplified in Christine, Nadine Cross, and Nona. In either case, the subject remains imprisoned in the domain of juvenilia, outside the realm of a mature middle ground. As representation of a Victorian marital ideal or as a specific manifestation of gendered evil, King's attitude toward sexuality is typically to render it functional; sex in his work is never just harmless erotic play or a satisfying extension of adult need and expression. In fact, sex in Stephen King never just is, but instead exists metaphorically, in constant service to the author's larger narrative and moralistic designs.

[im-the-punk-who]

Hi, I dont know if you read or know anything about Macchiavelli's "Il principe", but I am studying it in school and I cant help but compare it's fundamentals to how Flint leads. I'm just curious about what you think

Eekekekekekekekekekekkek okay so first off Anon, you are absolutely, 100% right to be getting those vibes. If it’s not actually textual it is at the least meta-textual that Flint ascribes to a very Machiavellian type of leadership. His whole ‘never was there a Caesar who couldn't sing the tune’ speech is...licherally a direct reference to Machiavelli's philosophy that leaders cannot retain their leadership without sacrificing some level of ethical behavior in order to manipulate and deceive their subjects into following them.

And, Flint owns at least two books from thinkers who drew directly on Machiavellian thinking in their texts: De Jure Belli Ac Pacis by Hugo Grotus and The Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes are both visible in Flint’s cabin, and both drew heavily on the type of leadership principles established in books like Il Principe. 

(Also, my eternal quest for the book that sits *under* The Leviathan in that scene remains. Y’all I will literally pay someone for this knowledge. My best guess is Plato’s De Republica.)

In fact, the whole system that Flint’s world was operating under at this time was very machiavellian in influence. 

Henry VIII, who converted to Protestantism and who would eventually lead England in the conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism that would then in turn eventually lead the country into the War of Spanish Succession(the war being fought during the London 1705 flashbacks), was a student of Machiavellian thinking. He took the teachings of Il Principe to heart and used them to transform his country. Over the next hundred and fifty years, England would change from an entirely Catholic country to a Protestant one. Of note, Catholic scholars generally disagreed with Machiavelli’s principles on the grounds that it did not support the Divine Right of Kings.

As well, the Enlightenment thinkers that influenced Thomas Hamilton(and Flint himself) were starting to argue more for personal liberty and choice of the governed, both concepts presented in Machiavelli’s writings. (For those following along, this approach was also being used to justify slavery, as what was ‘good for the state is good for the man’ was used as justification for everything from impressment to colonization and slavery. Men were willing to set aside their morals for what they justified as good for the state. Shrug emoji.)

As James says of England when he and Thomas view the hanging in London:

“You think Whitehall wants piracy to flourish in the Bahamas?”

“No I don’t think they want it but I think they’re aware of the cost associated with trying to fight it. And I think that that sound travels.”

Here we see that Flint knows what Thomas doesn’t or does not want to accept: that England is willing to sacrifice some morality and some amount of lives(both of pirate-prisoners and the ships they take) in order to save themselves the financial burden of rooting out the causes of piracy. The justification for piracy was that it is too costly to fight, and that the nation ultimately benefits from a bit of strife as it drives prices up and allows England to place within the sights of its citizenry an identifiable enemy. (Note that Blackbeard also argues the same of Nassau, that prosperity ‘made it soft’.)

Even as he is changed by Thomas’ line of thinking, this lesson will stick with Flint and we’ll see it over and over again as he deals with the men’s hatred of himself by redirecting them towards other avenues(Vane, Hornigold, England, etc.)

And in actuality, this is what sets Thomas very much apart from his political brethren - he was *not* willing to sacrifice his morals in order to achieve a ‘more effective’ victory. Once he realizes that moral deficit shown by England, he creates the pardon plan to argue directly for a more moral and just way of governance. His whole premise for the pardons was to show England that an approach that considered the needs and wants of the governed was ultimately more effective, both in cost and in gaining the genuine good will of the people. And again, this is another likely reason why Thomas was then targeted by Peter Ashe and his father. Railing against the entire system of government was dangerous. Particularly if one was railing against the government in a way that could be seen as support of an opposing system of religion and political rule(remember how I said before that Catholics were generally against the Machiavellian systems?) Put plainly, Thomas’ rejection of Machiavelli’s leadership tactics would have been yet another argument for his treason against the crown.

Interestingly also, Marcus Aurelius - Thomas Hamilton’s homeboy - is said to be one of Machiavelli’s five “good” emperors, of whom Machiavelli wrote,

“[they] had no need of praetorian cohorts, or of countless legions to guard them, but were defended by their own good lives, the good-will of their subjects, and the attachment of the Senate.”

How we tryna be.

And so we see that Flint has - not so much fallen back into England’s line of thinking but perhaps that he never really fell out of it. And that this is actually a rift in his potential ability to conform to Thomas’ line of thinking, assuming we see that line as more morally correct. We do see Flint, gradually, throughout the course of the show, move more away from this Machiavellian line of thinking, especially once he meets Madi and the Maroons.  And to me at least it’s one of the most important character shifts we see - in contrast to the trajectory of John Silver becoming Long John Silver  - throughout the series. Just as Flint is finally starting to really value the lives of those around him, Silver has learned how effective those tactics can be in achieving his goals. As Hands says - ‘I wonder if he knows how much you learned from him.’

And in fact, Silver almost directly quotes Machiavelli at one point when he talks to Flint about their different leadership styles.

“I once thought that to lead men in this world, to be liked was just as good as being feared, and that may very well be true. But to be both liked and feared all at once, is an entirely different state of being in which, I believe, at this moment, I exist alone.” 

Whereas Machiavelli in his chapters addressing cruelty and mercy writes

"Here a question arises: whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. The answer is, of course, that it would be best to be both loved and feared. But since the two rarely come together, anyone compelled to choose will find greater security in being feared than in being loved." 

This is clearly the approach Flint has taken - he is the most feared captain on the seas. Certainly in the colonial world and on Nassau, too, his name brings a certain amount of fear with it. Because of this he has been safe from rebellion for quite a long time - however he is also not unaware that his power comes from the people. In the very first episode he talks of his plan with Gates to “position people in all the right places so the crew would never turn.” He has, for an unknown amount of time but I would suspect from the very beginning, been manipulating the crew’s opinion of him to keep them happy. Gates himself, and Silver later, are prime examples. 

Both of them; Gates for the first ten years or so and Silver in seasons 2+3 act as a go between - being the ‘liked’ to Flint’s ‘feared’. They convince the crew - the ‘people’ in this case - that Flint’s plans are in their best interest and not truly the act of a tyrant. It is only when Flint forgets - or neglects to respect - that the will of his crew is how he keeps his power, that he really starts to fail. And, later also, that now he has a rival - Silver. 

Now, I do want to point out that personally I don’t think Flint is a needlessly cruel ‘ruler’ in the sense the crew sometimes thinks he is, nor is he trying to be as a king is to english subjects. He has power, of course, and he does manipulate, lie, and kill if necessary to maintain his power in accordance with Machiavelli’s principles, but he does not do so ruthlessly or to a degree that is unnecessarily violent, nor with only his own advancement in mind. His goals genuinely are in service of the people he leads, even if the tactics he uses sometimes put them in danger for it. Moreso, I would argue that Flint is a prince who created his own princedom. He took an existing power structure(the pirate council in Blackbeard, Hornigold etc) and took most of the power for himself, either through luck, violence, or political maneuvering. And then he kept it through skill and tactical advantage.

Silver, in contrast to Flint’s new princedom, is truly a ‘prince of the people’. He comes to power through convincing the other pirates that he has their interests at heart - even when he doesn’t. But Silver soon learns that being a well-loved leader is difficult. It isn’t until Silver kills Dufresne and Billy uses that fear to build a legend that ‘Long John Silver’ the pirate king comes into being. Silver learns, just as Flint knew, that in a world or corruption, often leaders need to make sacrifices of things they would have once deemed important. 

(I think it’s also important to note for Silver that his main goal is actually one Machiavelli writes of as being ‘a will of the people’. Silver’s main wish is not to rule, not really. His biggest motivator is ‘to be free’. To not have to make choices based on the will or subjugations of others. And so, he attempts to make the leadership forced upon him into something that frees him - unfortunately for him, Madi is right when she says that the ‘Crown is always a burden’ and it would be truly impossible for him to find the kind of freedom he wishes for while wearing it. Which, honestly, is part of why he ultimately fails in that regard as leader of the revolution.)

In the later seasons we see Flint go through this change in philosophy after he meets Madi and the Maroons. He begins to actually value the lives of the people he leads. When put to the choice of going through with the raid on the Underhill estate despite the risk it poses to the slaves on other plantations, Flint resists the idea. As he tells Madi - it would have cost them far more to ignore the ‘will’ of those people he hoped to lead - the slaves - than it would gain them to go through with the plan. And later, even though he can’t be blind to Max’s sway with Eleanor and the others, unlike Billy (and oh how the mighty have fallen, Mr. Bones!) he doesn’t even seem to consider keeping her rather than trading her for the lives of his other men. He no longer wants to trade a potential political victory for the suffering of those he leads. So, too, when he attempts to trade the cache for the fort, he is doing so with the goal being to not have to put those under his power in danger if there is another option. It is, at least to me, an incredibly moving character arc and one that is so very understated. 

And honestly, I think it’s what *needed* to happen before he could move on from his rage-hate bender and begin to find the sort of peace that one might argue those ‘good’ rulers had. Machiavelli’s principles tend to get in the way of your ability to connect with other people: when you see them just as pawns in a game, friends and foes lose their intrinsic value of just being important on an emotional level. It is only through learning to truly value his partners that Flint can learn how to be a better and more just leader.

Also, this passage in chapter 15 absolutely KILLS me in regards to both Flint, and Thomas Hamilton:

“Men have imagined republics and principalities that never really existed at all. Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what is for what should be pursues his downfall rather than his preservation; for a man who strives after goodness in all his acts is sure to come to ruin, since there are so many men who are not good.”

Like bitch!! We get it!! Too much sanity!!! Shut up!!!!!

Anyway, all this to say that you’re absolutely right in seeing parallels between Flint’s style of leadership and a Machiavellian prince - he is absolutely written as a prince-like leader. As are Silver, Rogers, even the Maroon Queen(and Scott and Madi as extensions of her) can be compared to certain rulers in Machiavelli’s archetypes. Even Thomas, who models himself after one of those ‘good emperors’ engenders a type of political leader Machiavelli writes about.

(Also lastly, i want to very quickly point out this guy, Cesare Borgia:

Who was a prince of ���fortune’ who lost his princedom to trusting the wrong person. What a beard, amirite? What a face. He’s even got the rings! I’m sure this means nothing.)

So basically yeah, Flint is absolutely a Machiavelli bitch. 

[brave-horizon]

FFXIV Write Prompt #2: Sway

It's not easy to "stand" upright when you have no legs. Much like balancing a pencil by the tip on your finger, an ananta needs to continuously move to keep her center of gravity above her tail. Her constant swaying dance is an inescapable part of her waking life, and it's not even a conscious effort to most adult ananta. Most.

Shirina fought for the Ala Mhigan Resistance right up until the liberation of the city. Her home was too close to a major road through Gyr Abania, and she just happened to be away when a few Garlean soldiers decided to deal with the local savages. She drifted from tribe to tribe, offering her services as a metalworker in exchange for a place to sleep. Her skills were impressive, even for an ananta, who have a preternatural talent for shaping precious metals and gems by manipulating aether. Once she learned that the sons of men were allowing ananta into their ranks to resist the Empire, she joined without hesitation. Though she learned how to weave offensive magicks in her defense, she mostly served a support role in the Resistance's stronghold. It was in Rhalgr's Reach that her life changed once again.

Shirina had never seen a coordinated attack by a full Garlean century, and Sri Lakshmi willing she never will again. She managed to throw a few ineffectual spells before she simply fled from hideout to hideout within the small canyon. She was caught eventually, and the laquearius severed the last fulm and a half of her tail with one blow. Thinking her dead, he left her where she lay. Blessed souls scoured the aftermath of the Empire's devastation to move injured people to a triage center. There, Shirina was treated by an elezen man who did not seem to belong to either the Resistance or the Eorzean military forces supporting them. It didn't matter to her. Moons later, when she had recovered and had learned who saved her life, she once again set forth (if slowly and painfully) to the next stage of her strange life: to the Dufresne Bellworks, malms away in Ul'dah. The woman in charge was happy to offer her a position in the company, soon becoming her technical assistant. She's seen her savior a few times, but each time he finds an excuse to leave in short order. It hurts her, but she's still grateful to him for even being able to feel that pain.

It's even harder to "stand" upright when you have no legs and your tail is much shorter than it should be. It leaves Shirina with less surface area to balance upon, but worse than that is the weakness in her distal tail from the severed muscles and sinew. She strains her spine by bending it into her "foot" further up than it was meant for. Her dance to maintain balance is faster and jerkier than most ananta, which wears her out whenever she has to stand, sometimes by midday. The phantom pains from her severed tail still haven't gone away. But, again, she is alive. The place she now calls home and the people she now calls family have gone out of their way to accommodate her disability. It's not easy to stand for Shirina, but now she has help.

[aidene]

The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

" There's not a day goes by I don't feel regret. Not because I'm in here, because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then: a young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try to talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are. But I can't. That kid's long gone, and this old man is all that's left. I got to live with that."

Set in the 1940s, the movie follows the story of Andy Dufresne. Andy is sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison for the murders of his wife and her lover. Although Andy knows he didn’t commit the crime, he must learn to live inside Maine's Shawshank prison. He must try and bear the brutality of prison life and hope for his freedom. Andy isn’t ready to give up on life, so he forms friendships and tries to earn the respect of his fellow inmates.Life isn’t easy especially when you are forced to live it inside prison bars.

This classic movie, is worthily loved through the years. This is why it tells a story that never gets old. The story of right and wrong, of freedom and imprisonment. I have watched this many times now but it thrilles me every single time. The information that we get is unfortunately tough, brutal and utterly real. One of the best things about this movie is seeing what a man can actually do to earn his freedom and what he can do when he hasn’t gave up on life. When you find yourself in that situation you can choose between two things “get busy living or get busy dying”. And this is exactly what we learn here, through multiple examples. It also contains some of the most emotional scenes I have ever seen and great performances by Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman. One of a kind!!

Genre: Drama

Directed by : Frank Darabont

Written by: Frank Darabont

Based on: Τhe 1982 Stephen King novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”