#bsmeta

eleanor guthrie lost her mother to nassau.

eleanor guthrie was told that madi, whom she considered a sister, was dead.

eleanor guthrie never really had her father’s love.

eleanor guthrie was left behind to rule an island of pirates on her own at 17 (i.e. was forced to face such a danger alone) .

eleanor guthrie probably had to endure all the insults and mocks said pirates threw her way).

still when she gained control of the island, she was never really respected for it.

eleanor guthrie was used and betrayed by many people in her life (mr. scott, her father, woodes…).

eleanor guthrie gave up her name, something very important to her, by marrying woodes to ensure her survival.

eleanor guthrie gave up her pirate clothes (which represented her authority and all she had accomplished in nassau) and had to settle for some feminine, even courtesan, clothing.

eleanor guthrie gave up her authority, something she had long fought to have, to woodes. she remained knitting in the shadows and sometimes even ignored as an advisor because that was just the way women should behave. even her husband’s men disrespected her and did not take her seriously.

and ultimately, eleanor guthrie gave up her life for it.

I would argue that the importance and arc of Charles Vane’s role as a martyr for the cause has it’s roots, not in his actual death in 3x09, but at Flint’s trial in 2x10. 

Flint’s trial is when we see the beginning of Charles Vane the Freedom Fighter, when he piggy backs off of Flint’s earlier statement:

I regret ever coming to this place with the assumption that reconciliation could be found, that reason could be a bridge between us. Everyone is a monster to someone. Since you are so convinced that I am yours, I will be it.

(2x10)

But Vane argues something different. He draws a line between the people and their rulers:

These men convinced you that they speak for you. The power you’ve given them is used in your interests. That the prisoner before you is your enemy, and they your friends. For those of you who live to see tomorrow, know that you had a choice to see the truth and you let yourselves be convinced otherwise. 

(2x10)

He states that the rulers are the enemy of the people. They are the ones who have stolen and manipulated and become corrupt. That they are the ones who are the villains. But they could only do this because the people gave them the power to do so. 

And in this moment, we see the birth of Charles Vane the Freedom Fighter. A act that ultimately culminates in Vane’s own death scene, where he takes what he comments on here, the power of the people, and propels it into action.

This is foreshadowed by his conversation with the pastor, when the Pastor asks if he would like to repent or confess anything before the Lord and Vane refuses. But more than that, he is the opposite of everything the Pastor says he will be. He isn’t frightened, or overwhelmed. He is calm and clear headed, and we see this in their conversation:

“In this moment, you have the opportunity to enter into that moment with a clear conscious. I can help you do that. To repent.”

“I have nothing to repent for, with you.”

[...]

Whatever remorse I do or do not have is my own. That I choose not to share it with you, says more about you than it does me.”

“Me? I am a shepherd. Sent to help you find a path to God’s forgiveness.”

“A shepherd? You are the sheep.”

(3x09)

It is telling, because it becomes clear that Vane has no regrets about what he has done. He knows that he is going to die, yet he is completely calm. He absolutely solid in his beliefs and knows he is doing the right thing. His voice remains steady, and his body is still as he is driven to the gallows. The sounds of the crows screaming and jeering are muffled, almost mute, then we have the speech given my the crier:

When our Lord Governor arrived here, he promised you things. Order, prosperity. [...] Men who are not men at all, but beasts governed by base instinct, incapable of anything but the most primal behaviors. A constant threat to every decent, God-fearing citizen among us. As long as those men roam free, strife will endure, fear will abound, and progress will elude us. Today marks the silencing of the most disruptive of those voices, and a step toward the return of civilization in Nassau. But we must always remember, however strong the need for the removal of these traitors, these relics of a more savage age, there is no relish in this moment. But there is righteousness. [...] And that God’s Will will be done again in Nassau!

All this is is a whole bunch of pathos, really. The Governor has given good things, “order and prosperity”, to the good people, “the decent and God-fearing citizens”. He then uses strong, animalistic language to describe the pirates and Vane. He paints them as good and bad and no in between.

But this is the exact opposite of what we see from the pirates.

Billy has organized a solid, sensible plan to rescue Vane that relies on language and not violence. No one is going to get hurt, no one is going to die. Vane is calm and composed in the face of the crowds frenzy. He is quiet, waiting for his chance to speak.

And when he catches Billy’s eye, he shakes his head. He does so calmly, and Billy stops. And as the noose goes around Vane’s head he realizes that Vane wants to die. So he calls off his men. 

And Vane stands there, head up and shoulders relaxed. And he speaks:

These men who brought me here today, didn’t do it because they fear me. They brought me here because they fear you.

And the crows goes silent. He doesn’t raise his voice, doesn’t shout or scream. He simply speaks. And they are so surprised by his statement that they are struck quiet. Because he isn’t making this about himself. He is making it about them. He is handing the power and punishment back to them, saying this is yours.

Because they know my voice, a voice that refuses to be enslaved, once lived in you. And may yet still.

He is reminding them that they are on the same side. That he is one of them, and that he knows they still feel the way he does. That that fight is still in them.

They brought me here today to show you death, and use it to frighten you into ignoring that voice.

He is telling them, reminding them, that they are being controlled by the Governor and his men, because they are frightened of the people. And Vane reminds the people why:

But know this: we are many, they are few. To fear death is a choice. And they can’t hang us all.

He reminds them of the power of the people, how they hold all the power, and there isn’t anything the government can do about that. But then he proves it! 

He turns to the hangman, says get on with it motherfucker, and then walks off the edge of the cart of his own volition. And when he does this, when he hangs himself, when he looks Eleanor and the officials in the eye as he does it?

He takes all the power away from the Governor’s men. 

He chooses to die. It’s an active choice, and the crowd sees that. He walks off the cart, he shakes his head at Billy, he makes his peace with his decisions. He doesn’t tremble or cower before the crowd or the soldiers. He doesn’t plead or beg or make it about him. He doesn’t fight back. He takes control of his end. He uses it to make a final statement to the people, reminding them of their power. 

And what do the people do?

They don’t make a sound. They don’t cheer or holler or celebrate. They don’t throw rotten food at him. They look horrified and upset. They turn away from his swinging body. They cry. They shake their heads. They look towards the soldiers and officials and there is bitterness and disquiet in their eyes. 

And just like that, the resistance in Nassau is now underway.

Because that’s what it was all about, that’s what Billy sees when he says, look at them. The power of the people. The power of the people to control their government and to control themselves. That’s what Vane was counting on, what Thomas Hamilton was counting on, what Flint was counting on. What Nassau is ultimately a symbol of.

warning: if you love jack and don’t want to see anything said about him other than positive things, it’s probably better for you to skip this. i’m not saying this to be mean, and this is not really a hate piece, but it shines a different light on jack that may not always be favorable or good. so, if you want to avoid negativity, which is perfectly understandable, please don’t read this. because a) i don’t want to upset anyone, and b) quite frankly, as much as i love to talk to people about these things, i’m also not in the mood to deal with defensive fans who refuse to see him as anything other than a saint.

now that that’s out of the way, let’s get down to business. let me start by asking something of you: mentally describe jack in 5 words or less. what are his major characteristics/personality traits? you see, i guarantee you that most people, when confronted with this question, would probably have “smart” or “intelligent” somewhere in those 5 words. maybe you did too. it’s the 1st thing you think off when you think about jack: he’s smart and funny. he describes himself as such. “my only assets are my wits”, right? jack is supposed to be the archetype of the dude who’s not physically capable, but that makes up for it with his smarts and humor. except that this is not true.

at the risk of sounding annoying and condescending, i’ll ask something else: what has jack accomplished on the show that has been done so through his own merit? because the answer is, not much, if anything at all. jack consistently is only able to achieve something through either the help of someone (and by help, i mean getting carried there by them, pretty much) or through simply using someone else to prop himself up by throwing them under the bus.

i’m going to give you a rundown of jack’s major successes and general most important achievements and plot points:

1. getting the brothel? vane is responsible for that, since he was the one who killed noonan. jack’s only merit is getting mrs. mapleton on their side, and he basically only had to offer her more money.

2. backtracking a little bit here (sorry for that, but this is very important), how is jack even alive and well at this point, having suffered no major consequence after his colossal fuck up with losing all that money? max is suffering the consequences for him. which he has no problem with btw, even though he’s really the one to blame.

3. getting back to chronological order, what about actually running the brothel in an efficient manner and actually making profit? max’s there for that too, and she’s the sole responsible for this tbh, because jack, for all his talk of how smart he is, cannot seem to accomplish anything here (spoiler alert: this is a pattern). anne herself says, "ain't you always the one telling everyone how fucking clever you are? figure it out." except he never does, really. max comes along and solves all of his problems for him.

4. getting his captainship and a ship back after vane “disowns” him? max again! hurray, isn’t she awesome? he also achieves this by throwing anne under the bus, when she would have been just as legitimate a choice for a captain as he was. it’s not like you can tell me he’d be more competent.

5. getting the gold? max! AGAIN. fantastic.

6. getting an important position in running the island in s3? well, he’s sure not there because he’s good at it, that’s for sure. he’s there because of the gold, which in turn only exists because of max. also possibly because vane and him are buddies.

6.1. now, this is not an achievement per se. or an achievement at all, because it is disgusting. but it is a prime example of jack using and abusing others to make something of himself or fixing his own messes, and that’s rebuilding the fort. so, like, think on this: this man goes on and on about how smart he is, right? anne attested to that, as previously mentioned. and what’s the best idea he can think of to deal with his own incompetence? slave labor! i mean, it sucks, but, hey, at least he feels bad about it!

7. being able to come out of this whole mess with a shitload of money and the prospect of a peaceful future when england takes nassau? max, our always reliable friend, is there for that too. of course, jack threw all of that into the trash can because of his own hubris and self-centered crap, and his absolute need to have people remembering his name somehow. but we don’t talk about that. no, really. we don’t talk about it. but we sure do talk about how max didn’t risk her life to save him from his own ignorance, all the time! jack is still a child, you see! he can’t be held accountable for his actions, that he is well aware will endanger his life.

8. and, finally, becoming buddy buddy with blackbeard and apparently commanding with/beside him? yeah, that’s on vane. who died. oopsy. i guess we really are emotional beings after all and not even the almighty blackbeard escapes sentimentality. because he sure as hell did not give a single fuck about rackham before that.

so, there, let’s make a headcount to summarize:

max helped out/literally did everything for him/was brutally abused to save his ass: 6 times

anne was fucked over: 1 time

vane killed people/died/bros before throwing my buddy out for being an incompetent fuck: 3 times

slave labor is the way to go!!1!: 1 time

so, i think i made my point. all the major things jack was able to achieve were done mostly on the backs of other people. in fact, when left to his own devices, self-proclaimed “smart as hell” guy, is hilariously incompetent. and i really mean the hilarious part, because, at this point, the funny part of jack’s character doesn’t come from us laughing with him or what he says (making him funny), but from us laughing at him. at how utterly incapable he can be.

even prior to the show there are suggestions that it was pretty much the same. anne says, "i've put a lot of bodies in the ground for you, haven't i? [...] watched your back. cleaned up your messes. carried out your plans. i didn't always understand. didn't always agree. but i did it. some fucked-up, awful shit 'cause i knew you needed it done." i think it’s pretty self-explanatory.

you could say that this inconsistency with what jack says and what he actually is like is bad writing. and maybe it is. maybe the writers really want me to believe jack is smart by making him fail miserably repeatedly, but i don’t think that’s their goal at all. and even if it is, it doesn’t matter, because what they show me works in a completely different way. you think jack is supposed to be the smart and funny and less athletic stereotype, but in reality it’s far more complex than that. 

personally speaking, i think jack is deeply insecure. i mean this has been proven this season already (s4). he knows he’s never going to be like vane, for example, he’s never going to be able to fight like him or be feared or worshipped for the same reasons (which is okay, obviously. why would anyone want to be like vane tbh.), so he feels he has something to prove. 

and he thinks he can accomplish this through his smarts. and that by loudly shouting at the world how smart he is, people will believe it.(and apparently it works because a lot of the audience eats it up.) this in and of itself should tell us something. the fact that he needs to even proclaim and assert it. 

you know that scene in 1.02, where he says that he has slit men’s throats in their sleep without remorse, so the sex workers can’t hope to con him, or whatever? and it’s all bullshit, obviously. that’s what jack claiming to be so smart feels to me.

max, silver and flint are some of the smartest people on the show, and, most importantly, they are able to use their smarts to understand and manipulate the situations and people around them in the very way jack claims (and the fandom thinks) he can do. but they don’t brag about how smart they are. they don’t have to. 

so, jack, to me, works as a foil to these characters. they are what he wished he could be, but will ultimately never achieve. and that’s the ironic and somewhat sad thing about jack. what he really is all about to me. he’s is always trying so hard, too hard, but he’ll always fail to accomplish it, precisely because of that. he wants to make history, he wants to be remembered so badly, and while we know he somewhat succeeds, he will never be a flint, or a silver, people who will undoubtedly become legends in the world of black sails.

i’m going to end this here somewhat awkwardly, because i feel i’ve said my piece. like i mentioned, this is not supposed to be about hate. it’s something that i’ve been thinking about for a while and that has been bothering me. 

i also know there will be people that will be like, “well, but max needed jack too!” and yes, she did. but it doesn’t change the fact that she’s essentially the driving force behind everything jack accomplishes. it doesn’t change the times in which she literally does everything for him. max needs jack the way a captain needs a crew. you can remove jack from the equation very easily tbh, she could get the help of any other pirate (and probably not have had to deal with so much shit.) but max is the source. it all revolves around her. you cannot remove her.

because i don’t see this about any other character. i don’t see people asking for silver to go back to the fumbling little shit he was before, even when you could argue that his character development wasn’t that positive either. i don’t think silver losing his shit and bashing in dufresne’s head is very positive. but that’s okay, because we all hated dufresne at that point and we wanted him dead anyway, right? what if he bashed billy’s head in instead? what if he did it to one of your faves? would your opinion on it change?

i don’t see people asking for flint to go back to who he was before, even though he is definitely in a much worse place at the moment. he’s given up on thomas’ dream (i hope people understand that if flint is fighting for something rn, it’s not for what it was before, he’s no longer trying to fulfill their dream. if anything, he’s fighting for revenge, but mostly i think he’s “fighting for the sake of fighting”, like miranda once said. ironically, eleanor is the one  still fighting for that dream.) and he’s one step away from falling back into the pit he was in after miranda’s death.

i don’t see people asking this for billy either. innocent billy, who was honorable and good and who’s going to fall so badly in the future.

people don’t ask this of them because they understand that they got there for a reason. that they’ve gone through things that made them this way. that they’ve suffered and struggled on the path here. so they’ve changed, because who wouldn’t change after all of that, right?

apparently, for eleanor the answer is “wrong”. eleanor should remain the same. she should stagnate as a character and not develop. EVER. because that clearly makes for great writing.

eleanor lost her dad; she was kidnapped and held captive by england; she went to trial and was there for god knows how long, with the certainty of death; she was then sent to nassau to help with its recovery, still under death threats; she was treated like shit by the pirates her whole life in nassau, let us be real here... but she should still be the same somehow. the fandom’s general thought process regarding eleanor is, “i don’t like where and how eleanor is now, so clearly this means she must regress back to a time when i did.”

i’ve lost count of the amount of times i’ve seen people complain about eleanor being badly written since season 3. since i don’t believe this is true in any way and everything eleanor does makes perfect sense to me in the context of her journey, this complaint feels more like, “i don’t like where they took eleanor”, and less of, “the writing is bad”. because that’s what’s really the matter here. people don’t like that eleanor is with england now, they don’t like that she married rogers, they don’t like- they don’t like it...

and that’s okay. i’m not saying you have to like it. i don’t agree with everything either. i’m not happy that eleanor has to play this role of submission to please the people either. but i understand why she does it. you may not, and that’s okay. you may feel like it’s a regression for her, from who she was, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad writing. negative character development does NOT equal bad writing, ffs.

people always associate “character development” with the positive progression of a character, but that’s not what it means, at least, not to me. anakin skywalker falling into the dark side and becoming darth vader is, most definitely, negative character development. this, however, doesn’t make it bad writing. fuck, james’ journey from “mcgraw” to “flint” and who he became is negative character development, but i challenge anyone to say he’s been badly written.

hello! it’s no problem, you are not bothering me at all. and thank you! :)

regarding eleanor, i honestly only hope she is alive and well at the end of the series. i don’t think she’ll kill rogers, mostly because i doubt they’ll kill him at all.

i’m always rooting for eleanor, and unless she does something truly horrendous, i’ll continue to do so. ideally, i’d want her to give up on nassau and run away with max. but i also know that nassau is an incredibly important part of eleanor’s identity. it defines her completely. you can’t have eleanor guthrie without nassau. max once said, “i suppose i should have seen this, that somehow your grip on this place would be too strong to be denied by a king, his laws, or even your death”, and she’s right.

now, idk what the fandom’s opinion on the eleanor/woodes marriage and the whole “submissive wife” role is (and honestly i don’t think i want to know), but personally, tho she obviously cares for him as well, i believe a large part of the reason she is willing to fulfill said role is because of nassau. 

eleanor is always doing what she believes is the best for that place. every time. and in this case, that comes through woodes rogers. rogers is the best bet to achieve a peaceful and “civilized” state on the island, so she does what she must to keep him in the good graces of the people and help maintain his authority, because if he falls, then the whole thing falls with him. it’s a sacrifice she makes for nassau, one of many she has had to make through the show. 

sorry for the mini meta, but the bottom line is, i don’t think eleanor will ever give up on nassau, so my ideal future for her is unlikely. realistically, it could either be her downfall and something happens to her, or she lives as woodes’ wife, with whatever it may entail. i just don’t ever see her leaving, not willingly.

nassau gives eleanor purpose, for me. an eleanor without nassau is like a flint without thomas and miranda. taking on max’s words once again, she’d be adrift.

Alright look I just wanna get my own first impressions down before looking at the meta in the tag, so be warned: someone has probably already posted this in a much more concise way than I’m about to. ANYWAY.

So many things happened during this episode, I can’t put them into words.

The battle scenes on the beach were absolutely amazing, same for the ones in the woods.

I loved how they kept going back and forth between Flint and Silver’s conversation the night before the battle and the battle itself. 

And THAT conversation. Flint told him about Thomas, there are no more secrets between them now. I don’t know how things are gonna go from there, but man... Flint really is not alone anymore, someone *knows* him, truly: past and present. Flint and Mcgraw.

Jack’s face when Teach told him about Charles, both their faces were hard to look at. So heartbroken. And Anne is simply a queen.