charles vane is not beautiful but i can understand why people find him sexy, max is one of the most beautiful people in the world… so i have no idea why eleanor likes that man, i don’t know his name
The pirates of New Providence Island are about to become more powerful than they have ever been before at a time when they would be less restrained than they have ever been before.
☙ Odysseus, on his journey home to Ithaca, was visited by a ghost. The ghost tells him that once he reaches his home, once he slays all his enemies and sets his house in order, he must do one last thing before he can rest. The ghost tells him to pick up an oar and walk inland and keep walking until someone mistakes that oar for a shovel. For that would be the place that no man had ever been troubled by the sea. And that’s where he’d find peace.
In the end, that’s all I want. To walk away from the sea and find some peace. ❧
the way that black sails is like. actually sometimes it IS right to burn it all down. sometimes the world condemns you and instead of showing them how wrong them are, sometimes you need to show them that their fear was right. you call me unnatural? i’ll show you unnatural.
if the phrase “the enemy of my enemy is friend” holds true for black sails (and I think it does) then Flint and Max should have been friends in some universe. both of them care about Eleanor and both of them dislike Charles, not just because of who he is as a person, but also because of his toxic hold over Eleanor. both of them have a bone to pick with Charles, both of them are gay and full of rage. i am once again mad that there was never a single Flint/Max scene
“Put a man on an island, give him power over other men, and it won’t be long before he realizes that the limits of that power are nowhere to be seen. And no man, given that kind of influence, will remain honest for very long” is THEE thesis statement for Black Sails/Nassau in general and goes hand-in-hand with Jack’s, “we’re all villains here. Don’t think that just because you’re new you’re different.” But now, thinking about Jack, I am (as the non-practicing Jack/Charles shipper and ruefully fond of Charles person that I am) am thinking about how these concepts apply to Charles himself. At first glance, and for most of the first 2 seasons, Charles fits this bill completely. He goes and finds himself a group of men that will follow him, overruns the fort, and sets himself up with the absolute intention of being handed limitless power; but by the time 3.09 arrives, Charles being a selfish asshole obsessed with power and indifferent to the opinions and plight of the people under him couldn’t be further from the truth. He leaves Nassau, the only place that has ever been home to him, only to discover that the world is a much bigger place than he thought it was. That ocean that separated him from London and the New World and everywhere else had created this illusion of power that he *thought* he had when he was sitting up in the fort. He realizes that the true power rests with the people and those most affected by the issues of injustice and prejudice. I think that Charles has some kind of leg up on everyone else who has ever tried to change Nassau in that he had never known life elsewhere. Because it was his whole world, he was willing to die for it. Show me one other man in all of Black Sails for whom that would hold true. (maaaybe Flint but that’s a whole other discussion and also hinges on how one reads the ending of the show itself.) Show me another man in all of Black Sails who, by the end of the show, is remembered by everyone he knew as “a good man” despite what the world would like to believe. The power certainly did corrupt but Charles has perhaps the most beautiful redemption arc that I have ever seen. He’s the only person who managed to escape the 100 years or so of history and dishonest men lording over Nassau.
Started watching OFMD for real and while as a Show About Gay Pirates I knew it would inevitably be in conversation with Black Sails, I was delighted to find out just how loud and gleeful that conversation is
Long John Silver’s story is a hard one to know. The men who believed most deeply in it were ultimately destroyed by it. And those who stood to benefit most from it were the most eager to leave it all behind. Until all that remains of any of it are stories bearing only a passing resemblance to the world the rest of us lived in. A world we survived. A world that is no more.
