#maxanor

if you think about it, SilverFlint (as a platonic dynamic, not romantic if you read them in this way) start in the very episode on which Maxanor ends (not narratively or even platonically given s4, but at least definitively romantically)….

And in the first conversation we hear between them, Eleanor is trying to explain how she is feeling the control of the island slipping through her fingers… and in their second conversation (their break-up) Max is begging Eleanor to leave the island because it is just sand, it cannot love her back… but now is Eleanor who isn’t listen…

(And one day when Max will have taste the control on this island, and how the feeling of dread at the sand slipping away, she will understand. Despite herself, she will understand. And she will makes the same choice, almost, even if Eleanor doing that choice broke her hearth and her last illusion of safety- that it can even comes from love, not just control and pile of money and golden sand.)

And thinking about how the reason why the dynamic and rivalry and proximity between Silver and Flint happen in the first place is that Silver stole a page from a book Flint wanted… the book in which all his dreams for a future, born from a desire to placate a ghost from the past, were…

Thinking about how Flint is initially presented as this charismatic manipulator who sell his stories to everyone around him to reach his goal but he can’t write his own story in the way he had dreamed for so long because a unsospectable nobody like Silver take the only important page that Flint needed to live through the story he has put all his hopes into… and how this page only exhist in Silver’s mind now… and how it’s the real map of Treasure Island, the book the whole show is based upon and exhists as a prequel to…

Thinking about how Silver is the first main character we meet and Flint is the second in the first five minutes but the first we have heard of.

Thinking about Max and Eleanor are the first important female characters with lines we meet in episode one.

Thinking about how we meet Max (but not Eleanor) when Silver meets her, and how we are introduced to her when Silver is expecting to see the famous Blackbeard (the man who once had control over the island… before Eleanor took it from him), when she is pretending to be someone else (like a thief pretending to be a cook), to have another man (like… a certain person we know) as a jest or a game or a mockery of what men believe, of where they think the control lies.

Thinking about how Silver doesn’t have such a big part in season one, even if he is one thanks to whom all events happen, but for sure he is not as much of a protagonist and the centre of the show like Flint is. And yet we only start knowing Nassau through his eyes. Thinking about how the show start with the chaotic circumstance in which Silver meet Flint but they will not actually talk to each others or see each others in the eyes for another episode, because Flint is on a place of power in the ship from which Silver seems so unimportant, and that’s why Silver manage to steal what Flint wanted to stole first.

Thinking about the first thing anyone says to Flint is what the captain of the ship, a fews seconds before Flint will kill him, tell him: “you have no control on your men, you know that?” Thinking that he is right. Thinking who else in the future WILL have control over them, with the same weapons that Flint now uses: storytelling, a bit of fear, and self-mythologizing. But especially half-truth. Thinking about the first vulnerable thing we hear Eleanor says, to Max, is “I can feel it slipping away”. And she is speaking of control, too. Not on the men or on the sea but on Nassau.

Thinking that Max will manage to hold this sand without letting it slip away completely, maybe because differently than Eleanor she always knew one day would have done it so she is able to clinge to it without losing all of herself and ending up being buried in it.

Thinking about how Silver succeed in getting the influence on Flint’s and his men that Flint never really had because he managed to make himself WELL-LIKED by them, something that Flint never succeed in doing, even when he was and still is feared and respected. Because Silver is treated by the men and the sailors as “one of them”, for better or worse, Flint is the aloof and too well-educated leader who doesn’t shares his plan or what is in his mind, so the respect for him will never not be tainted by mistrust.

Thinking about Eleanor and her journey are often a metaphor for Nassau and her journey, in season two (during the feud for the fort) and in season four in particular, she loses her identity and previous indipendent woman role when she chose to marry the man who is ending Nassau’s indipendency, to the point that she dies and so does her unborn child when Nassau get invaded and the future of the island slowly destroyed, but Max is right when she says “I AM Nassau”, because Max, while still having enemies like anyone in power, is not hated by the people of Nassau like Eleanor was and still is, because Max is not holding her new found power over theirs head with a sense of superiority and open manifestation of strenght. And because Eleanor in a way will always be the privileged daughter of the rich merchant who yes, helped making men rich, but also made himself more and more powerful from a chair by selling the products the pirates fought and risked theirs lives to steal, so even if it is after all a mutual benefitting relationship there is always resentement and an air of superiority from the Guthrie that makes it impossible for them to really *connect* with the people they are making business with or, in Eleanor’s case, ruling over. While Max is someone with a similar self-made story to many people in Nassau, she is someone who is virtually without past and who made her future by scratch like many others people in the island do, so even as she sits in Eleanor’s same old chair she can have a connection with the people she looks down from that chair.

Black Sails is a story about many things, it’s about queer rage and colonialism and Resistance and opportunism and love and anger and about both the brutality and necessity of violence and war, and it’s about many characters and many dynamics (mostly throuples btw which is cool) but the quiet leift motif through the seasons, from the very first episodes to the climax of the last season,

are two women who are in a silent fight against each others and themselves for the control of an island made of sands, an island that like a haunted gothic place that will swallow and possess whoever would try to control it

still I think of her when the sun goes down never goes away, but it all works out

Someone please now explain me why it happened

Why am I doing this to myself once again

Years, it's been YEARS since I last watched this goddamn show

I arrived at that forsaken point in which Max tells Eleanor that she will never, EVER leave her, that she loves her, desperately asking her to leave together to start a new life far away from that wretched place

And there I was, delusional idiot I am, knowing perfectly what Eleanor is going to reply and how it's going to go, pleading her over and over to say YES with tears in my eyes

Max & Eleanor // I told you things

You were all at once 'til the fade to black 'Til the yellow glow, turned a little sad You were in my hands, but you're good at leaving...