this show...

s2 silver is sooo sinister he's my favourite. sorry you forgot to recalibrate the skin-suit diva, your guysona is slipping. like ooh good try, buddy. that was almost the sort of thing a real human would say!

About to say something quite sick so brace yourself. 310 Flint being like "it is natural for men new to power to assume that it has no limits, trust me, it does" -- You could replace power with something else and it would make complete sense as a line again in 410

when taking in a redeemed villain, it's important to give them lots of monologuing opportunities. a few will eventually settle out of that habit, but for the vast majority, it continues to be their most important social behavior, and even a major form of stress relief. it's also completely harmless, unlike some other behaviors that they may struggle to drop, so be sure to encourage them by presenting them with either large audiences (digital is ok — they love to be on screens), or potentially, a more intimate, one-on-one monologuing opportunity with a trusted confidant, depending on their prior villainous preferences. they may show signs of aggression during their monologue, but remember that it's just a performance — and if you play along in kind, your redeemed villain will develop a burning desire to protect you at any cost before you know it <3

black sails season 2 is the best season of television ever made. in a single episode you have civil war breaking out among the pirates and politics being reinvented by people who’ve divorced themselves from civilization. the b plot is polyamory drama not dissimilar to the kind that can be found on bravo tv and features crazy lesbian sex but also some guy is there. interspersed in all of this are flashbacks of one of the most beautiful and tragic queer love stories you’ve ever seen. and to top it all off, billy bones comes back from the dead. the perfect show in every way

i think black sails does get exponentially better every rewatch but there's something so good about the bait and switch they do with charles for the first time viewer. i don't care much for this charles vane guy you say as you characterize him as the necessary game of thrones era fuckboy only to get hit by the absolute character that is charles vane with the force of an 18 wheeler. and i would do a lot of things to be able to experience that for the first time again.

i actually think the reason they didnt have max and silver interact too much is it wouldve broken the ethos of silver's character which is that he can't confront himself. the mask slips too much around her like even before the cliff scene even before it's explicitly said that he's constitutionally incapable of introspection you can See when he's around her his persona looks so stupid and awkward and slips around so much that you can see there's literally nothing underneath it

characters can have a tragic backstory so long it requires days of scrolling on their wiki to read and they still won't come close to long john silver's single line, "you know of me all i can bear to be known."

seriously the fact that silver DOESN'T seduce flint to manipulate him. doesn't even consider it. not even as a failsafe or a backup just in case. flint literally says "if we ever came to blows I would be forced to hesitate before doing you any harm" bc silver knows him so thoroughly and silver doesn't even THINK "he is vulnerable to me and I should lean into this as hard as I possibly can in case I need to exploit it for leverage someday." instead he just. apologizes for not being able to give that same vulnerability back. oh my g-d. like. "I can't even think about fucking him because it would make me vulnerable to him in return" bitch you're already vulnerable to him bc if you weren't you'd be actively fucking him right this instant without fear or shame at all