#bswank

This is gonna be all over the place and inarticulate af because I’ve lost my patience and I apologize in advance but… Can we just be adults and go ahead and admit that Flint abused the fuck out of Silver FIRST? And their relationship has ALWAYS been tumultuous and selfish and unhealthy and intense and frayed from BOTH ends and that THAT is basically the allure of their entire dynamic? What they grew to mean to each other? Their codependency? Their support? Their differences and how they worked together toward a common end DESPITE them? Can we all agree that there was some serious mental illness and emotional damage hindering BOTH characters and that THAT explained a whole hell of a lot of their dynamic to begin with? The fact that they could reach those places within each other that were locked away for years? The fact that two broken people could find even small measures of solace within, at the very least, the concept of each other? The fact that the complexity and growth and trials of their relationship mirror reality for so many? These two fucking people transformed each other, but y'all wanna sit here and be reductive as fuck and demonize their entire relationship and I’m so tired.

I mean… stripping Silver of any and all redemptive qualities while woobifying Flint is fucking beyond my comprehension tbh, but I'ma beat this dead horse anyway because fuck alladat! Yeah, everyone is entitled to their interpretation of the material. My only issue is the disrespect for the relationship that basically made the entire show.

I mean… There is not ONE relationship on Black Sails that is presented without involving some type of betrayal. Not. One. Except the PAST relationship that we got all of 15 collective minutes of: James/Thomas. So while I understand the purity standard here, let’s not forget what this show has tried to present regarding its relationships. They’re complicated. They’re strained and unhealthy because people are strained and unhealthy. But they have their redemptive moments. So if you can’t respect Silver and Flint then you can’t respect Max and Anne. You can’t respect Vane and Eleanor. You can’t respect Max and Eleanor. You can’t respect Jack and Anne. And you certainly can’t respect James and Thomas, because if you do not believe in the redemptive qualities of love, then there’s no fucking way in hell you can sit there and say Thomas forgave James for the fallout surrounding his own psychodrama. You can’t respect any relationship that has not been perfect cuddles and you’ve missed the point of the show entirely.

I’m not equating what anyone did to anyone here. I get it. It’s easy to make Flint the hero and Silver the villain. It’s easy to wage a war for righteousness. It’s easy to discount the lives of those on the wrong side of history. Fuck em. I feel the same tbh. But Silver is who most of us would be in that situation, like it or not. He is who Vane warned us about. He is the average man. The meek. The coward who would trade in their freedom for their protection. He is who a lot of us have been during these times of civil unrest and upheaval. And I get the categorical hate of him, but that doesn’t make the Silverflint relationship invalid. So what we NOT GON DO is sit up in here and act like Flint is perfect and never abused Silver, and Silver is simply a monster. Not on this blog.

Look, you don’t have to ship anything you don’t want to ship. You don’t have to like it. Shit, you ain’t even gotta understand it, my g. All I’m saying is that nobody on this show is innocent and none of the relationships we hold dear are without their abuses. (One could even argue that James killing Thomas’s father is a betrayal, revenge porn aside. We will never know how Thomas feels about that.) But if you’re going to hold the biggest ship on the show up to James/Thomas standards, hold all of them up to those. Why wouldn’t you?

I mean… it’s easy to shit on Silverflint because that’s where most of the material is. That’s where the stakes are the highest. That’s where there is the most fallout and that’s where you find the driving force of the show. But when you take away all the fallout, all the consequences placed upon people that never asked for them, all that pain and confusion and emotional instability and mental illness come to light. And I think that’s why people are so wildly defensive of John Silver. It isn’t condoning what he did. It isn’t excusing his actions. It’s affording him the same understanding that we afforded James when he burnt down a city, that we afforded Eleanor when she sacrificed Max for Nassau, that we afforded Jack, and Max, and Miranda when they betrayed the ones they loved.

If we were given Silver’s sob story, as we were given Flint’s, would we feel differently about him? All consequences aside? If we can extrapolate that James and Thomas loved each other based on fifteen collective minutes, and that James would WAGE a war against the very concept of civilisation as a result of that love, why then can we not understand that Silver would risk anything, and STOP a war that could go on forever for those he loves also, based on four seasons of character development? Why is he not held to the same standard?

Again, this is all over the place and I apologize as I’m tired and probably incoherent, but y'all are irritating af. I’m not gonna argue. This is just my catharsis. Block me. Vague post about it. Make your assumptions about me and what I support and condone and the kind of person I am as y'all love to do on here. Do whatchu gotta do. I said what I said.

honestly imho the wank is mostly on the side of the misogynistic/homophobic/racist ppl and not so much the ones “dragging male characters” bc tbh it’s not that surprising that in a show like this, which explicitly and repeatedly denounces bigotry, fans would get very annoyed at people who completely disregard that and even perpetuate the very tropes and attitudes the show tries to avoid

honestly, why is pointing out women’s flaws “criticism” and doing the same for men “dragging” - bc i’ve never seen someone wish death upon one of the men (not even on Vane) while the death wishes incessantly rain down on Eleanor and Max. i’ve never seen someone derail a positive post about Vane or Flint, for example, by listing all their flaws and all the bad things they’ve done. every single positive post about the women gets derailed by at least one person, and our anger is a reaction to that. The defensive attitude and pointing out of the men’s flaws by the feminist/queer/etc fans is a reaction to a highly aggressive part of the fandom, who remind us uncomfortably of irl people who wish bad things on us. 

This is not in any way a balanced/equal conversation. I do want the wank to end, but to me it’s clear that in this fandom, the wank is caused by (mostly) misogynists. if fans could go into the tag without seeing death threats against female characters literally every. single. day., they might be able to devote time and energy to other things than defending those characters, and might arrive to a more nuanced discussion of all characters in general. as it is, people relate to characters like them, and when they see those characters are the same way by the fandom as they or people like them are treated irl, they try to change those people’s minds, and when those people react aggressively or hypocritically, they get angry. that’s not surprising, and not reprehensible. 

and I’d like to point out that even when those fans try to create a separate space where they can hopefully combine positivity and nuance (such as the bsladies tag and the eleanor guthrie defence squad), misogynists still feel entitled to mocking or even invading those spaces. we’re doing it far away from them, where it won’t bother them, and where we’ll hopefully arrive at exactly what they tell us we should aim for - a nuanced, multi-faceted view and discussion of characters who are, indeed, flawed, if not any more flawed than any other character on the show - and yet they still spew negativity. it’s not very hard to reach the conclusion that those fans don’t really want nuance, they just jump on any argument to justify their hate for women.