#black sails is the gone with the wind of rebellion lore

[storkmuffin]

On not watching the ending to the end

I think this is a Black Sails dead dove post. #anti black sails almost.

Being a descendant of colonized people and an appreciator of Black Sails feels untenable because the net effect of the finale is that the descendants of colonizers (and compatriots of colonizers of now) have John Silver tell a black woman, whose people were enslaved, that rebellion against colonization and enslavement is not worth it because it won't succeed on this try after he made sure that it would fail. It's insulting and infuriating. And after punching me in the face, they are going to dangle my favorites at me like, Hey look but Max did OK for herself, and Anne survived and went back to being a kick ass woman pirate! (Thank you to everyone who gave me such vivid summaries). It's too humiliating to endure, and the fact that the show is so entrancingly well made and beautifully put together makes it much worse.

It's very similar to reading Gone with the Wind, actually, except that book wasn't about me and mine, so I'd read along and think, If a Japanese novelist wrote a fun story like this and then had a Korean person depicted like Mami, Pork, Prissy, Uncle Peter or any of the field hands, and insisted that Koreans found happiness and fulfilment in being colonized and self determination confused & ruined us, I'd be homicidal. Arguably, Black Sails isn't directly about me and mine either, strictly speaking. The rub is that there's so much of the now in Black Sails - my liveblog where I intensely identify with Flint and Billy and Max and Eleanor is evidence. This isn't an issue of me disliking the narrative structure of the way the show ended, though I do, and not just about hating John Silver, which I do. It's the fact that the net message of the show's conclusion is to tell you to make your individual peace with oppression, because you're going to fail anyway.

I think my personal compromise will just have to be, the show ended with Silver pointing the gun at Flint and saying "I don't care." Which is the only true thing he's ever said in his whole life. He didn't get to give that speech. I didn't have to hear it. I do not know that Jack Rackham pontificated about narrative. And so on.