#anne and flint could also be 'angry gay ginger pirates'

[thewinterbucky]

John Silver aka Tricky Precious Pirate Boy

Charles Vane aka Angry Trash Pirate

Anne Bonny aka Badass Angry Knife Pirate

Jack Rackham aka Scheming Pirate Boi

James Flint aka Captain Angry Sad Pirate

[rheaitis]

Writing has been #difficult this week. I was gonna write about my own mental state as part of Mental Health Awareness Month, but apparently I'm not well enough to be able to write that stuff out for strangers yet. Moving on, then.

Today marks the first day of US Pride Month, so the five media posts this month are all gonna be queer as hell. And, like, happy; no dead queers here, so buckle in that rainbow seatbelt, cause this is gonna be one gay-ass ride.

Today's media is some 38 episodes long, and both diverse and diversely queer. It's got transformative work, it's got early eighteenth-century politics, it's got pirates, it's got treasure, it's got lesbians and bi women and genderqueer historical figures, it's got long-term committed poly folk, it's got blood, it's got gore, it's got amaaaazing black women ruling their own communities with care and compassion, it's got disabled folk being given focus and allowed agency, it's got conspiracies and alliances and mentoring between people of all genders and generations, it's got really lovely cinematography and music, it's got Toby Stephens' fabulous micro-expressions.

That's right, gentlefolk, today's media consumption is Black Sails. This is more of a weekend binge project, or a month-long thing if you're inclined to be sensible about things. It is also aimed at creasedknees, because I want her to watch it so we can squee.

Black Sails is a prequel of sorts to Treasure Island, dealing with the adventure that leads to the discovery and burial of that treasure. It takes up Captain Flint (Toby Stephens), Billy Bones (Tom Hopper) and of course John Silver (Luke Arnold) from the novel, and peoples itself with various fictional and fictionalised historical figures of the time, most significantly Jack Racham, Anne Bonny, and Charles Vane, who function as foils to our heroes throughout the show. I'm going to talk about them in just a bit but first Our Hero Captain James Flint, whom I adore entirely. (I want to like John Silver, but as in the novel Silver is a marvelously done character, without ever being someone it's safe to trust wholeheartedly or really at all.)

Captain Flint kills someone in the very first episode, and he doesn't actually get any nicer. (Even that killing is preceded by the pirate crew taking a ship with due savagery, so if you dislike gore I sadly cannot recommend watching this series.) In fact he escalates considerably, up from individual acts of piracy to cannonades directed at cities, and the show doesn't particularly gloss over this violence or the human cost entailed. Flint is the most consistently Slytherin character I have ever seen (and the fact that he resembles his mother to the last and most infinitesimal degree is often jarring): a man of vaulting ambition and enormous rage, with a capacity to hold onto grudges undiminished over a decade and longer. I love him. I love him absolutely, and not just because he is so wonderfully tender with all the women around him without ever doubting or trivialising their personhoods or capacity for doing what they set hands and minds to, though that is admittedly a very large part of why.  Flint is always furious, always hurting, always ruthless with himself and his crew and associates, groaning away from a primal wound.

Primal wounds are maybe a good way to talk about this show without showering people with spoilers, as so many of the main characters have such wounds, inflicted by living in systems characterised by ills ranging from slave trafficking, bonded labour, debt prisons, early marriage, sexual violence, weaponised misogyny and institutionalised homophobia, and too often and deeply realistically by the rutted interstices of such injustice. Again realistically, the show's leads do not emerge from these experiences as noble crusaders, but rather as a den of Slytherins desperate to get ahead in whatsoever manner they can, and find whatever they think of as safe harbour: from Max (one of the characters original to the show and superbly played by Jessica Parker Kennedy) who wants to leave behind her miserable childhood and exploited adulthood by gaining entry into the Big House where life is soft and easy, to Madi who wants to lead her enslaved people into liberty, to Rackham who wants to make his mark on the world through narrative instead of having his story told as one of crushing poverty and debt. Our villains have stories as well, but even the few delineated in any detail are effectively subsumed in the institutional machines of which they are privileged cogs.

But important as all these stories are in motivating and substantiating the show, Flint's is the wound at the core of Black Sails. There are problems with this centering of white queer trauma in a show that, set in West Indies, could and almost certainly ought to have instead centered PoC and enslavement. It does deal with these issues, and inarguably allows Max and Madi Scott together as much space as Flint. Still, one has to accept at the start that this is a show about queer resistance that includes other aspects of marginalisation, rather than being a show of marginalised resistance against the institutions  perpetrating and perpetuation said marginalisations. Significantly, Max and Mr. Scott are not initially characterised as being interested in working towards liberation, but the viewer complaints about the slow reveal of Mr. Scott's plans in this regard seem as facile as the screaming about Flint being queer.

I can go on about this show endlessly, as T, poor child, can easily testify, because I love everything about it, from the cinematography, to the gore, to the wlw relationships and just Anne Bonny queen of my heart and every violent impulse. And I do think that if I was a better person I would dwell longer on the gorgeous and deeply complex relationships between Charles Vane, Jack Rackham Anne Bonny and Max, and how I want them all to be alive and married but for Charles and Max to never ever ever touch, OR for Charles to scrub himself raw and bleeding before he's ever allowed to be near Max, and also Max's brilliance and subtlety and compassion and ruthlessness, how she's clung on to kindness in a deeply unkind existence and how that in no way signifies a lack of Nature, red in tooth and claw, and the way her change of clothing reflects and reiterates her change of status and and just. Her faaace, her golden glowing beauty and that heart-stopping smile. But the thing is my interests were set early and I imprinted on exactly one sort of character as a child and I continue to love them more than anything, and much as I adore Max, and much as I worship Madi Scott's regal compassion and strategic mind and her trust in and friendship with Flint and her renewed affection for Eleanor (whom I love also! and who is so sharp and such a merchant-prince and so tramelled by her gender), well. Look. I love Flint. I love his anger, and his sorrow, and his everything. I think it's remarkable how Flint’s story goes from Achillean (my lover is dead I will go to war, my lover is dead I will burn down this town, fight this empire, challenge fate/gods) to Odyssean (I am home from the wars and here is my lover who has longed for me as I for him). But what I love the most is how in a story that is almost entirely about stories and how and when and by whom they are told, Flint gets to say, angry and wounded and betrayed again,

This is how they survive. You must know this. You're too smart not to know this. They paint the world full of shadows... and then tell their children to stay close to the light. Their light. Their reasons, their judgments. Because in the darkness, there be dragons. But it isn't true. We can prove that it isn't true. In the dark, there is discovery, there is possibility, there is freedom in the dark once someone has illuminated it.

I love it so much, so intensely, so much more than Rackham's playing around with narratival style and truth, I love my sad bi ginger pirate uncle, and so would you if you gave the show a chance. It's all on directseries.net, at fairly good quality, with subtitles and everything. Please pretty please?