#which transience I suppose is not inherently a bad thing but

[nattikay]

wow…after drawing all my major ships from over the years recently I started thinking about the various hyperfixations/special interests from which they came…I had estimates for when each one was and how long it lasted, but out of curiosity I just went through to actually check some of the dates on when I was posting about them and some of my estimates were off, two in particular: Inuyasha and Trollhunters.

I’d estimated Inuyasha at lasting about five years. It actually lasted nearly six and a half.

I’d estimated Trollhunters at lasting just under five years, coming close to (my estimate of) Inuyasha but not quite beating it. It was actually just under three years, less than half Inuyasha’s actual number (this left me lowkey flabbergasted ngl, I could’ve sworn this one lasted at least 4 years?? but apparently not…)

Fwiw, Miraculous was the shortest of the bunch, lasting a little under two years (which was about in line with my estimate); while ATLA (the oldest of the ones I looked at (even older ones exist but would be much more difficult to track since that’s getting into my pre-internet days)) lasted a little under three, roughly the same as Trollhunters.

Avatar (blue people) is of course still ongoing, and will reach the 2 year mark in May…assuming, of course, my fixation doesn’t switch in that time…gosh darnit I hope it doesn’t, I hope it lasts a long time like Inuyasha did…not because of anything special about Avatar in particular, but because I’m simply tired of having it change every 2-3 years…hey brain how do I have a long one again…what is the secret…give me some consistency plz I beg…

[abigailnussbaum]

Thoughts on Black Sails

Overall, I really liked it, though perhaps not exactly for the same reasons that the fandom (or at least the parts of it that keep showing up on my tumblr dash) does.  This might seem like a strange thing to say, but I think the thing that caught my interest, quite early on, was the fact that this is a workplace show, even if that workplace is a pirate stronghold in the Caribbean in 1715.  And by workplace show I mean not what anglophone TV usually produces when it makes workplace shows - soap operas where the main focus is who hates who and who is sleeping with who - but a story where the work, and how the personalities involved combine to accomplish it, is what’s paramount.  The ur-example of this type of story (and I realize this will seem like a weird comparison point, but I really did end up thinking about it quite a lot while watching) is Mad Men, though The Good Wife is also relevant.  They’re all shows where what really matters to the characters is the work - whether that’s landing a Coca Cola account or securing a shipwrecked Spanish treasure galleon.  As in Mad Men, in Black Sails sometimes you have to work with people you dislike because they have the skills you need.  Sometimes you end up liking people you thought you wouldn’t because you work well together.  Sometimes people you thought of as friends become unbearable because they’re focused on their own project or actively undermining yours.  And ultimately, loyalty is impossible, because when people get too old or too distracted to give their all, you have to leave them behind.  A true workplace show recognizes the inherent transience of that place, and I think Black Sails does that too.

I think I’m less invested in Flint than a lot of the fandom.  Not that I don’t like him - he’s a great character and a great performance - but he feels more like the engine of the story than the protagonist of it.  I’m more interested in the characters that change over the course of the show, like Silver or Max, or even the characters who don’t change but do learn, like Eleanor or Jack.  Flint, in comparison, feels like he keeps going in circles, repeating the same dynamic with different people.  To bring this back to Mad Men, he feels like a very Don Draper sort of character - someone of incredible intelligence and sensitivity who is so damaged by the tragedies that have happened to him, and the things he’s had to do to survive those tragedies, that he’s fundamentally incapable of growing beyond them.  Especially in the later seasons, how the other characters related to Flint reminded me a great deal of Don’s fall from grace in the later seasons of Mad Men, with everyone in his vicinity collectively coming to the conclusion that, yes, we love this guy; yes, he’s better at what he does than anyone else; but the emotional and practical toll of dealing with his bullshit is more than we’re willing to put up with anymore.

To continue the Mad Men analogy: Silver starts out as Pete and becomes Peggy.  Billy starts out as Joan and becomes Harry.  Poor Eleanor starts out as late-season Peggy and becomes early-season Joan.  Max is Shirley the secretary politely telling Roger Sterling to fuck off.

All this said, I think one of the things I like about Black Sails is that it isn’t a straightforward antihero show (and not just because everyone in it is an antihero, or even a straight-up villain whom we’re expected to care about).  It’s not about a single rebellious person in a generally functional environment whose chaotic behavior threatens to overturn it.  Here, it’s the environment that is chaotic, and the fact that so many of the characters are forced to behave like villains is a direct response to that.  And what most of them are doing, throughout the course of the show, is trying to make something more orderly out of their environment so that they can maybe live a more conformist (and even more just) life within it.  That’s not something that a lot of TV shows, antihero stories or otherwise, are concerned with - trying to make a better world.  And while I have reservations about how well the show achieves this, it’s definitely worth celebrating.

Another thing I really like is the plotting, and how it refuses to gloss over, and even relies on, the difficulty of achieving the characters’ goals, and the complications that emerge along the way.  The first two seasons are all about trying to orchestrate a single score.  The second two are driven in large part by the difficulties that emerge once you have that treasure, and the need to secure it and convert it into spendable cash.  This is not a show that is afraid of complications - every time a character, even a mastermind with a great deal of power and control, comes up with a plan, someone or something throws a spanner in the works, whether it’s a clash of personalities, or someone you trusted deciding to strike out for themselves, or even just the weather (I really like how this show uses storms to get in the way of the characters’ schemes; it’s the ultimate “men plan, god laughs”).  The only other show I can think of that is this concerned with the practical considerations of how things get done - in how information travels, how people get from one place to another, who has which resources - is Better Call Saul (and before it, Breaking Bad).  It’s nice to find another show that cares about that sort of thing.

I do not get the point of Charles Vane.  Like Flint, he moves the plot along, though without anything resembling the character complexity.  And I suppose he serves a purpose in that he’s the only character who isn’t trying to order his environment, who is perfectly happy with chaos as a way of life.  But guys, that’s a garnish, not a main dish.  Why we needed to spend so much time with the guy I have no idea.  (It really doesn’t help that alongside some pretty impressive 18th century costuming and styling, Zach McGowan looks like a stoked 21st century beach bum who wandered on to the set; in fairness, this is also a problem with Jessica Parker Kennedy, but Max is a much more interesting character so I’m willing to overlook it.)

I really dislike what the show does with Eleanor in the last two seasons.  In principle, I can see the writers deciding that she’s reached the end of her tether at Nassau and needs to make a change (and I can see Eleanor coming to that realization too).  But the way that she sublimates herself and her ambition to Woodes Rogers is really tough to watch - and especially because, unlike with Charles Vane, she never seems to realize that she’s tied herself to a psychopath.  It’s really striking how much more interesting she becomes in the few episodes in S4 when she gets to operate out from under his shadow, to once again make her own decisions and plans.  But even then, what she wants isn’t what she used to want, to build something lasting, but to escape with her family.  That’s not a unique choice - Silver ends up making the same sort of decision - but it means something else when a woman goes from having grand ambitions to having domestic ones, and I’m not sure the writers realize this.

I really don’t know how I feel about the way the show handles slavery.  I can accept that for the characters, even the ones who are supposedly radicals, slavery might be part of the background of their lives, an evil they sometimes ignore, sometimes make small stabs against, and sometimes participate in.  (Though even then, that feels only partially excusable; you can’t tell me that Thomas Hamilton was a freethinking reformer and in the same breath reveal that his only objection to how English colonies in the Caribbean were run was the treatment of pirates.)  But it often feels like the blind spot belongs to the show more than the characters.  Like, take the way that slavery is so often filtered through the experiences of white people.  The only main character who is a former slave, and allowed to feel angst about that, is Charles Vane.  And even as a free man, the suffering of other, black slaves is used as a way of jumpstarting his inner turmoil (while Mr. Scott has to be philosophical about it).  Or look at the way the show talks about slave rebellions, like when it tells us that the British soldiers captured by the free Maroons had their ears cut off and sent to their commander, or when it focuses on slave-owner Underhill’s wife and daughter during the attack on his plantation.  These are clichés of the slave rebellion narrative, designed to prioritize one kind of suffering over another, and I’m not entirely convinced the show realizes it’s indulging in them, much less does enough work to counteract them.

In theory, the fact that the final arc of the story involves our heroes participating in a slave rebellion should address all these issues, but again I’m not sure the show truly puts its money where its mouth is.  The fact that Flint incorporates emancipation into his revolutionary mindset (after, again, decades in which he seemed not to care about it at all) feels more like a way of moving the story along than something the writers expect us to care about.  The leaders of the slave rebellion don’t get to be characters on the same level as Flint, Silver, or Max, and the one exception, Madi, has a really powerful personality but doesn’t actually get to do that much, spending most of the second half of S4 being acted upon by white men.  By the end of the show, the three people whose feelings about the slave rebellion are meant to matter to us are Flint, who claims to care about it but who is probably, as Silver argues, just projecting his rage and need for revenge on a new target; Silver, who doesn’t care about it that much, and certainly not above his own desires; and Madi, who cares about it a great deal but doesn’t get to make any of the important decisions, except the one to forgive Silver for selling out her life’s ambition.  I get that this is part of the story’s conclusion - that when individuals try to fight empires, the result is rarely favorable, and the best choice possible might be to carve out a tiny bit of the world for yourself and just try to survive as long as you can.  But there’s a huge difference between accepting that your society victimizes the underclass, and accepting that your society designates some people as subhuman, which I’m not sure the show realizes.  And, you know, sixty years down the line, a rebellion against the British crown is going to succeed.  Twenty years after that, there’s going to be a successful slave rebellion.  Empires are tough, but history shows that they’re not unbeatable, and when talking about slavery, it may not be fair to conclude that the fight isn’t worth it.

I’m pretty dubious about the decision to end the show on a reunion between Flint and Thomas.  For one thing, I find Thomas’s survival pretty implausible - a New World plantation where the workers are white and upper class and which functions as a humane prison?  Really?  (I’m being inconsistent here, because Madi’s survival is, if anything, even more implausible and I don’t mind it at all, but given how much this institution dovetails with the show’s themes of how society treats the underclass, this feels a little more important.)  But more importantly, I just don’t buy that this is a happy ending, or even an ending at all.  If the show wanted me to believe that Flint can give up the persona he’s constructed in the years since losing Thomas, even as a result of learning that Thomas was still alive, it should have done the work of showing me this.  Telling it isn’t convincing, and I’m left with the belief that after the joy of reunion wears off, Flint will still be the same person we knew throughout the show (and that’s leaving aside who Thomas has become after ten years of imprisonment and hard labor, not to mention the news of Miranda’s death).  Best case, I think he orchestrates an escape and he and Thomas live out their lives in the woods; worst (and more likely) case, he never stops running and fighting, and Thomas becomes just one more person who gets eaten up in the attempt to protect Flint from himself.  But James Flint (or McGraw) agreeing to spend his life in prison?  No way.

Not unrelatedly, I feel like the decision not to feature a m/m romance in the main storyline of the show (that is, not including the flashbacks that introduce the James/Thomas romance, or the coda in which they are reunited) was a copout.  This is a show with tremendous LGBT rep and it deserves recognition for that, but every single same-sex romance that happens in the main story is between women.  Especially given how unbothered Silver and Madi are when they find out that Flint loved Thomas, would it have killed the writers to reveal that, say, Hornigold and de Groot have a semi-serious thing going on?  Or that Dufresne swings both ways?  It feels like a missed opportunity in a show that clearly cared very much about getting this sort of thing right.

Having said that, there’s no denying that the most important relationship in the show’s final season is a romance between men, albeit one that happens to be platonic.  Not only do Flint and Silver grow closer than almost any other relationship on the show in this season, but the terms in which they address each other and describe their relationship are the sort of thing you’d expect from a romance.  They talk about their feelings, about how they feel about each other, about their fears that their newfound trust and friendship won’t last.  Even in shows where same-sex attraction is never acknowledged, you rarely see this kind of emotional openness between male friends.  And it’s honestly nice that in a story in which m/m romance can and has happened, you can also acknowledge the possibility of close platonic friendship between men, even when one of them is bisexual, without any sort of “gay panic” on the part of the other (one assumes that the extreme romanticism with which Silver’s relationship with Madi is depicted was intended as a bulwark against this, but still).

In conclusion: good show; lots to think about; some problems; glad I watched.