#love you black sails

[mercutiotakethewheel]

ok but what is pirate media’s obsession with blackbeard??? dudes not cool or special. like at all. he had two ships. literally just two. he operated for two years. just two. why do movies/tv act like he was the uniquely badass and godlike??? he wasnt. i know its cuz of a general history of pyrates but yall come on.

[trashy-greyjoy]

really love dynamics that are like 'it honestly doesn't matter if you view them as romantic or platonic, the point is that they love each other. the type of love is inconsequential, all that matters is that it's there'. gotta be one of my favorite genders.

[maxanor]

QUEER CHARACTERS IN PERIOD DRAMA TELEVISION → pre-twentieth century [insp]

[fuck-you-jack]

you can see how annoyed vane is when his new quartermaster is like "yeah idk how defending miss guthrie would be beneficial to us". vane is like god i miss jack. he let me make decisions with my dick all the time

[adastreia-12]

oh the moment I fell in love with captain james flint you say? glad you asked, black sails season 1 when he brutally murdered a man and stood up covered in his blood next question

[kairennart]

And the true power here… is a little more complicated than that.

For the Black Sails 10th anniversary week: Favorite story arc.

[artigas]

I’m really happy that Black Sails is experiencing a bit of a renaissance, but (predictably) some of the takes I’m seeing online are so busted. It’s wild to me that anyone would complain about the fact that Anne Bonny kisses Jack after she’s developed this life-changing relationship with Max. It’s absolutely wild to see anyone roll their eyes or feel uncomfortable about the fact that Flint has sex with Miranda when he returns to her in season one or that Max is most likely a lesbian but actively has sex with men for pay and knows how to make that pleasurable. It’s crazy to me that some of the very audiences who claim to want queer representation feel so discomforted when they actually see the mess and seeming inconsistencies of queerness that they asked for.

The reality is that there are lesbians who have had (and will have!) meaningful, mutually-gratifying, and deeply sexual relationships with men. There are gay men who’ve enjoyed having sex with women, who are gay as the day is long and nevertheless feel sexually attracted to a woman or two and are nevertheless gay men, full stop. There are gay cis men who are happily married to trans women. There are femme dom tops and butch bottoms and there are mascs afab people who like femme boys. There are non-binary people and trans men who actively identify as lesbians. There are ace and aro people who enjoy thinking about and engaging with sex — sometimes in fiction and sometimes in real life. Queerness, in fiction and in reality, defies neat categorization. That is the beauty, power, and (perceived) unorthodoxy of queerness.

Now, I’ll say this — do I think the straight men behind Black Sails were actively thinking deeply and insightfully about the paradoxes and fuckery of queer identity when they wrote Black Sails? No! By their own admission, Steinberg and Levine have owned up to the fact that some of the writing of the show was really hinged on their own blind spots as people who are not (to my knowledge) members of the queer community. If I want to be generous, I think that the beautiful mess of Black Sails is that, in not feeling like experts enough to designate specific identity labels to any of their characters, the writers stumbled their way into more authentic representation of lived queer experience, which is to say that the notion that James Flint was actively thinking of himself as a gay man was anachronistic. As many lesbian archivists and theories have noted, the notion of a queer identity — as in, queerness is who you are, not what you do — was patently unthinkable for most cultures in the past. In other words, the idea that Anne Bonny operates in the eighteenth century as a lesbian and thus would not willingly engage in relationships with men is not only untrue of the series, but untrue of most recorded lesbian experiences in the real world. The notion that a lesbian would operate her entire life without engaging sexually or romantically with men, for instance, is a very new privilege that some of us are very lucky to enjoy, but it is not true for the vast majority of human history — hell, it’s not even true of our present world.

This is all to say that think that there’s something really funny about how we want queer characters to fit into neatly organized boxes. This isn’t a new problem, either. When the show was still airing, the BS fandom would get itself into tizzies about wether or not Flint is gay or bisexual, wether or not Anne Bonny is a lesbian, wether or not Silver is queer when his only canonical relationship is with Madi, etc etc. We’ve been having these discourses for years and I don’t know. I get that much of it is fueled by how badly some people want to see themselves represented in media, but . . . well. The siloing of queer characters and queer narratives into neat little boxes has never felt very authentic to me and nine times out of ten, it’s also just so damn boring.

[pulsingvoid]

not negating anybody's experience i know black sails is outstanding regardless of how or when or how quickly you watch it. but also, as a gay person who watched it in real time, you really had to be there. they introduce anne bonny and you know your pirate history so you KNOW she's a girlliker. she has a moment with max but youre not sure where it's gonna go. because it's 2014. you wait over a year for 2x01 and she and max fucking obliterate you with the sword drop kiss scene. all anybody is talking about in the tags is vaneeleanor. a few weeks later 2.05 drops and flint is not only textually gay and kissing a man but he is waging war on england, on all of civilization for taking away his male lover. you find this out after investing fourteen hours on this show that have spanned over a year and a half in your real life. not to mention the miranda stuff and silver's arc and mr scott and madi and the death march that seasons 3 and 4 feel like when you have no inkling of how it's gonna end. but you stick with it regardless because it's good and besides it's 2014-2017 and the only genre show with gay people in it is fucking... the 100? lol anyway. more gay people flock to black sails between seasons and the tag becomes more about the gay shit than vaneeleanor, thank fucking god, finally. you all dread the last season. you brace yourselves for the worst. you thank the stars this show airs weekly because watching even just two episodes together is too overwhelming. 4.08 airs. you cry. 4.09 airs. you cry. 4.10 airs. your life will never be the same. you cry so hard you catch a fever and have to stay in bed all week to recuperate. you know this was a once in a lifetime experience never to be repeated again but you can't help but hold every other show to this impossible standard.

[springcatalyst]

AND REAL QUICK the fact that the governor (rodgers??) seeing eleanor after she dies is classic 'my dead wife haunting me' shit and it IS filmed in a REALLY cool way but hes seeing her KNITTING????? something that she has never once done in the whole show we have no reason to believe she enjoys knitting or even CAN knit and in fact probably the opposite seeing as how she didnt enjoy embroidery the one time we see her try it. hes really mourning a woman that never existed

[tidesreach]

"black sails fans are so mean" "this is a reign of censorship and fear" yeah well everyone is a monster to someone since you are so convinced that i am yours i will be it

[takiki16]

Flint and Silver taking the Spanish warship is just one of those things that HAS TO BE WATCHED in video. Many excellent fandom gifsets have visited this scene, but you HAVE TO WATCH IT IN REAL TIME to understand just how fucking funny it is. The comedic buddy cop timing is FLAWLESS - the way Silver barely even waits for the Spanish soldier to start threatening them before he spills his guts, the JUST as rapid heel turn when he spins the audience expectation on a dime once again, Flint’s furious little chair hops as he tries to scoot his way over to Silver to…chew his throat out while tied to a chair, i guess!

Oh, and of course the KING LINE: “well WHATTHEFUCKDIDJATHINK WAS GONNA HAPPEN?!?!!?!?!!?”

[mouthpoisons]

the thing that messes me up the most about john silvers “my backstory isn’t relevant” moment is the way it turns character analysis of him into this horrible meta-violation. He didn’t know he was a fictional character being listened in on by thousands of curious voyeurs behind the 4th wall when he was talking about giving up on trying to make any sense of his past and how much he also doesn’t want hypothetical storytellers attributing meaning to the unknowable terrible thing that happened to him and being able to say “ohhh that’s why he’s like that”. we were just made even more curious by his admittance that there’s things he can never ever tell, and by engaging with the story and loving him as a character and headcanoning and theorising and psychoanalysing him we’re doing the thing he Didn’t Want People To Be Able To Do to the point where he felt like he had to become mr nobody from nowhere to protect his peace

Absolutely diabolical writing to make the natural response of engaging with the text via character analysis feel wrong. I wish more stuff alienated the audience like that

[bumblebeebats]

It's all fun and games knitting/crocheting/etc while you binge TV until you realize that the Vibes of whatever you're watching will be inextricably woven into the item you're making for the rest of time. Exhibit A, I now have a cozy autumnal lap blanket that feels like Succession.

[frau-kali]

[toadlessgirl]

when you guys said Interview with the Vampire was good I thought you meant like 'horny campy melodrama' good, not 'prestige television 2x5 may be the single best tv episode i've ever seen everyone involved in this deserves an Emmy HOLY SHIT' good

[the-wreck-of-1852]

oh nothing just thinking about that period between xvii and xviii where flint wakes up alone in a cell, his partner’s blood drying on his face, and realizes with a terrible clarity that nothing will be the same ever again