#sagemasterofsass

OH MY GOD, I KNOW?? He’s such a little shit, and I’m not sure he’s physically capable of stopping himself from being a little shit. Flint has his hands full with that one for sure.

man I’m replying to this late cos I was at school. I have no advice because I am shit at advice woops soRRY (you’re probably not writing anymore anyway ehehe)

idk the only thing that really gets me in the mood to write any particular theme or atmosphere is just

finding the wright right music

God bless. I love this. (Also bi Vane??? Yes, please, and thank you.)

We have both Word of Writers and Word of Actor on Flint’s sexuality. I’ve talked a little bit before about this, but the main argument that always seems to come up when people try to ascribe bisexuality to Flint’s character is that he had sex with Miranda and also they made out on screen. But reducing people’s sexuality to the sex acts they participate in is not correct in any sense, and saying that Flint must be sexually attracted to women because he and Miranda did the do completely ignores a huge chunk of queer history:

Marrying or having sex with the opposite sex to “pass” as straight was literally life-saving for many queer individuals historically.

Let’s not forget that James’s superior in the Navy told him that he would be hanged if he ever returned to England. That was the legal punishment for sodomy at that time, no exaggeration. Now, there’s quite a bit of hypocrisy in how it was handled, since homosexuality was fairly common among Naval officers (to the point that people still make homophobic jokes about sailors to this day). Usually, nothing happened to men who had sex with men unless they stepped wrong and gave the wrong superior an ax to grind. Which is exactly what happened to James. He had a middling career, owing to his lack of formal education and the lower class of his family compared to most of his fellow officers. This predisposed not a few of his peers to look down on him, as he tells Thomas when they first meet. He had a prominent officer take him under his wing, and considered himself favored by the Admiralty. None of what happened to Thomas and James was their fault, but it’s possible that if James hadn’t criticized Lord Hamilton and thrown him out of his own home, nobody with enough power to bring consequences to bear would have found out about his affair with Thomas. Miranda wasn’t wrong when she warned James against drawing attention to himself.

So James’s physical affair with Miranda in the flashbacks, which is incredibly awkward in comparison to the sweet, comfortable moments we get between James and Thomas, was more than likely an attempt to do what was expected of him by society. Later, on Nassau when he and Miranda have sex, it’s more like he’s letting her use him to get off. He just lies there and doesn’t touch her at all. There’s no visual indication that he got off on it. They immediately go back to the strained tension that was between them from the first time we saw Miranda on screen.