#untrue stories

[moreaugriffins]

Question : How many fictional depictions of HG Wells do I know?

Answer : too many

Bonus Question : how many depictions of HG Wells have used their time machine to interview (dead) authors?

Answer : two

[inkskinned]

you're grabbing lunch with a nice man and he gives you that strange grimace-smile that's popular right now; an almost sardonic "twist" of his mouth while he looks literally down on you. it looks like he practiced the move as he leans back, arms folded. he just finished reciting the details of NFTs to you and explaining Oppenheimer even though he only watched a youtube about it and hasn't actually seen it. you are at the bottom of your wine glass.

you ask the man across from you if he has siblings, desperately looking for a topic. literally anything else.

he says i don't like small talk. and then he smiles again, watching you.

a few years ago, you probably would have said you're above celebrity gossip, but honestly, you've been kind of enjoying the dumb shit of it these days. with the rest of the earth burning, there's something familiar and banal about dragging ariana grande through the mud. you think about jeanette mccurdy, who has often times gently warned the world she's not as nice as she appears. you liked i'm glad my mom died but it made you cry a lot.

he doesn't like small talk, figure out something to say.

you want to talk about responsibility, and how ariana grande is only like 6 days older than you are - which means she just turned 30 and still dresses and acts like a 13 year old, but like sexy. there's something in there about the whole thing - about insecurity, and never growing up, and being sexualized from a young age.

people have been saying that gay people are groomers. like, that's something that's come back into the public. you have even said yourself that it's just ... easier to date men sometimes. you would identify as whatever the opposite of "heteroflexible" is, but here you are again, across from a man. you like every woman, and 3 people on tv. and not this guy. but you're trying. your mother is worried about you. she thinks it's not okay you're single. and honestly this guy was better before you met, back when you were just texting.

wait, shit. are you doing the same thing as ariana grande? are you looking for male validation in order to appease some internalized promise of heteronormativity? do you conform to the idea that your happiness must result in heterosexuality? do you believe that you can resolve your internal loneliness by being accepted into the patriarchy? is there a reason dating men is easier? why are you so scared of fucking it up with women? why don't you reach out to more of them? you have a good sense of humor and a big ol' brain, you could have done a better job at online dating.

also. jesus christ. why can't you just get a drink with somebody without your internal feminism meter pinging. although - in your favor (and judgement aside) in the case of your ariana grande deposition: you have been in enough therapy you probably wouldn't date anyone who had just broken up with their wife of many years (and who has a young child). you'd be like - maybe take some personal time before you begin this journey. like, grande has been on broadway, you'd think she would have heard of the plot of hamlet.

he leans forward and taps two fingers to the table. "i'm not, like an andrew tate guy," he's saying, "but i do think partnership is about two people knowing their place. i like order."

you knew it was going to be hard. being non-straight in any particular way is like, always hard. these days you kind of like answering the question what's your sexuality? with a shrug and a smile - it's fine - is your most common response. like they asked you how your life is going and not to reveal your identity. you like not being straight. you like kissing girls. some days you know you're into men, and sometimes you're sitting across from a man, and you're thinking about the power of compulsory heterosexuality. are you into men, or are you just into the safety that comes from being seen with them? after all, everyone knows you're failing in life unless you have a husband. it almost feels like a gradebook - people see "straight married" as being "all A's", and anything else even vaguely noncompliant as being ... like you dropped out of the school system. you cannot just ignore years of that kind of conditioning, of course you like attention from men.

"so let's talk boundaries." he orders more wine for you, gesturing with one hand like he's rousing an orchestra. sir, this is a fucking chain restaurant. "I am not gonna date someone who still has male friends. also, i don't care about your little friends, i care about me. whatever stupid girls night things - those are lower priority. if i want you there, you're there."

he wasn't like this over text, right? you wouldn't have been even in the building if he was like this. you squint at him. in another version of yourself, you'd be running. you'd just get up and go. that's what happens on the internet - people get annoyed, and they just leave. you are locked in place, almost frozen. you need to go to the bathroom and text someone to call you so you have an excuse, like it's rude to just-leave. like he already kind of owns you. rudeness implies a power paradigm, though. see, even your social anxiety allows the patriarchy to get to you.

you take a sip of the new glass of wine. maybe this will be a funny story. maybe you can write about it on your blog. maybe you can meet ariana grande and ask her if she just maybe needs to take some time to sit and think about her happiness and how she measures her own success.

is this settling down? is this all that's left in your dating pool? just accepting that someone will eventually love you, and you have to stop being picky about who "makes" you a wife?

you look down to your hand, clutching the knife.

[unclesamwilson]

remember when black sails said “no we’re not going to break the fourth wall. we’re not going to dismantle it or disprove it. the fourth wall is right behind you.”

[ragesingoddess]

Odysseus, on his journey home to Ithaca, was visited by a ghost.

[nicorobinphd]

stg, being an enjoyer of jane twdg is like being forced into an expert-level course on the way misogyny manifests in video game spaces.

god forbid a woman be complex or difficult or provably mischaracterized (see tags) at the end of her arc to service the culmination of a man’s storyline.

[mistermistyyy]

Me, shaking a Magic 8 Ball: "Am I straight?"

Magic 8 Ball: [Yes]

*4 YEARS LATER*

Me, with a boyfriend: "Guess that 8 ball was wrong."

*9 YEARS LATER*

Me, a trans woman with a husband: "Goddamn it."

[somfte]

okay i've had quite a lot of rum and i'm truly not trying to start any shit but "Love, for flint, is inseparable from political alliance." was very confusing to me because it seemed like the opposite of my interpretation of flint and how he loves

i know the post was about eleanor but i don't see him as *loving* eleanor. he has some affection for her, and he is kind when she is in distress. but it's not LOVE. he cares about eleanor more than most random nassau people but at the end of the day... when he says "eleanor guthrie has been arrested" to silver it's just, like...facts and news of the day, he's not distraught about it. he's more focused on silver and silver being his quartermaster and that partnership, that's what that scene is about. the news about eleanor is just exposition

everyone we see him love, he does so regardless of whether they are politically aligned

miranda

thomas

silver

miranda goes behind his back and sends that letter, and after they fight about it he comes home with an apology book because he's ride or die even if they disagree

a core part of the london flashbacks is that james and thomas have very different ways of seeing the world, different political opinions, and he falls in love with him *because* of that. "Strange pairs, Lieutenant. They can achieve the most unexpected things."

he loves silver so much he lets silver point a gun at him and tell him that what flint wants (the path to his political goals) is a nightmare, and then he lets silver [REDACTED]

the way i read it is that flint loves with his whole ass EVEN IF it's politically inconvenient for him, and it often very much is

[holychopshopgalaxy]

black sails ending as an INCREDIBLE rorschach test for the viewer.

bc imho, there really is no ambiguity here for the audience. the flashbacks being triggered by silver's narration seem to be more to make us question whether madi herself believes it (her returning to silver in the end points to her probably believing it, or at least enough of it). in addition to all the s1-s4 foreshadowing of TH's resurrection, while there is a fuckton of lying in the dialogue of the show, what the audience is shown on-screen either in past or present is always the truth of what really happened (related to the no body no death rule which also stays consistent throughout). regarding everyone's ends as narrated in flashbacks, woodes rogers gets put on trial, billy bones was marooned on skeleton island, and flint was forced into gay retirement at a 18th century equivalent country club prison.

so in order to believe the flint dead ending you really have to intentionally be like, "i'm going to deliberately disbelieve my own eyes because it's too idealistic and not cynical enough, #loveloses #lieswin" and then that begs the question.. why would i choose to instead believe the most miserable explanation when the truth is plainly served right in front of me?

absolutely genius move on the part of the writers i must say. why go to therapy when you can watch black sails

[danmeichael]

"shen qingqiu is a liar who is lying about his feelings so we can't ACTUALLY tell how he feels about anything"

so you admit that you can tell he is lying and by extension you can actually discern what his true feelings on the matter are and that he's just unwilling to admit to them.

[lumisails]

Black Sails really changes everything, especially if you're a pirate fan. Which may sound obvious but what I mean is... I've always loved Pirates of The Caribbean so fucking much, some of my favorite movies of all time. And then today I... Was looking at this Jack Sparrow figure I have and it... Dawned on me. The whole thing about pirates being stories. Being portrayed as a stereotype of the actual people who lived through that era, people who were probably closer to what we see in Black Sails than what we see in PoTC... And yet, we grow up with these stories. "Stories they tell their children". Treasure Island is a children's book. Most of the stories that feature pirates are meant to be told to children. It's just...Insane how now, at 32, I'm presented with something that changed my entire view on something that has been with me ever since I was a kid. I can't even remember when I started going crazy about pirates?? It may have been bc of PoTC when I was like 11. But I know that I have watched Muppet's Treasure Island at a younger age and many of the things I watched growing up featured pirates in some episodes like Pokémon, Powerpuff Girls, Spongebob. Freaking Peter Pan and all of its adaptations.

And the same could be said to other types of figures that we mostly know stereotypes of. Fe, I am a Norse Pagan and I research and learn a lot about the ancient Norse people and they are very different from the stereotypical image we have of Vikings. And these are the examples I can think of rn because they are the ones that are most present in my life, but I'm pretty sure it goes beyond pirates and vikings.

And then, you can go beyond historical stuff. What about the way we see people who are not from the same culture as ours? Especially poc cultures. All we know are stories and said stories are often painted in a bad light. Sure, these people can advocate for themselves, but not everyone will do their research and try to learn what's beyond the stories.

This post definitely went way farther than where I first intended when I started it out lol. But I hope it all makes sense and that I don't sound completely insane. But at the end of the day, Black Sails changes the way you view the world itself.

[sandyhorse333]

why are you gay

i just felt like it

[cream-and-tea]

i can’t believe they fucking blacksails-ed carpenter. what the fuck.

[sukibenders]

When it comes to Penelope I feel like a lot of her fans take any valid criticism towards her and turn it into hate, which does her character a disservice. While some people do hate on her, a lot of it holds valid reasons. Admitting that she has hurt many people isn't wrong because she has, it's been shown on throughout the show and the impacts it can have. From labeling Daphne as "unmarriageable" during her first season and events that followed, her labeling Eloise as being part of a group of rebels, the terms she used to describe Kate [and Simon]-- which carried racial undertones no matter how you try to spin it, who didn't even know personally at that point, what she did Marina. All of these were very harmful and to say that none of these characters should feel angry, that they should just forgive Penelope without any work put into it is very laughable (especially because she's still writing as Whistledown and put many, namely women, at risk during a time where reputation is everything--something in which Penelope herself faces). With this being said, criticizing her actions, at least for me, doesn't come from a complete place of hate but more so from believing that she can be better if she puts in the work. By ignoring all that she's done and having her get her happily ever after so easily in the end, to be honest, would ultimately feel lackluster. I feel like she still has room to grow, but it will take a lot of work and, I personally, think seeing her renavigate who she is with who she wants to be outside of Lady Whistledown would be very interesting.

[areseebee]

how do you like Thomas Hamilton and do you think the ending is real?

i was just thinking about this when falling asleep last night lol.

my thoughts are: i think silver killed flint on skeleton island, that it was premeditated and the story of flint in savannah was intentionally constructed by silver and jack to mitigate rebellion. i think that silver's re-telling of it to madi and how artificial it feels, and how silver relies on the semantics of "unmaking" flint to counter madi's accusation of killing flint reinforces this. i think madi, like the audience, chooses what to believe in order to move forward. and i think silver asking for her belief so that they can move forward together reifies that which he has just tried to kill in flint - asking for the belief of a lie to further a selfish (if sympathetic) end.

and yet! i keep going to back to the foundational logic of the show: if you don't see the body, then they're not dead. i would love to believe that's true for flint, but, in the context of flint's possible-but-unseen death, i see this less as proof that flint is alive more than i see it as the show using its own form and logic to introduce metatextual questions and, in a way, break the fourth wall: the story asking us to decide what we think is real, and then each of us creating our own meaning from that.

so, for me, ultimately there's what i want to be real (flint alive and kicking it with his boyfriend on a farm in savannah) and what i think is more likely real (flint dead and buried at sea, living on as legend instead of as a threat or a martyr). and, in the spirit of black sails, i'm not sure that what i want to be real and what i think is real are totally mutually exclusive. or, put a different way, i feel like i can hold both possible endings and find more truth and richness in both possibilities existing together.

do i think flint was reunited with thomas hamilton? yes, i think he was, i'm just not convinced it was while either of them were alive.

[astralleywright]

funny to see responses to the "many people's problems with c3 are with the premise not the structure," and especially "a lot of people wanted and would better understand a story more simple and straightforward than c3," postings, because like. i get it. but for me those were not intended as persuasive arguments but my way of saying i do not take a lot of people on here seriously lol

[buildarocketboys]

You ever think about how black sails is SO fucking GOOD?