whatagrump:

There’re a couple really excellent reasons not to delve into John Silver’s backstory:

1. At a certain point, horrifying backstories are just misery porn, they’re spectacle for the audience. Do you really need to know the precise details of every character’s past, or do you just want to hear about something awful? 
2. By not sharing his past, Silver makes a very clear and very important distinction between himself and Flint, putting “daylight between them,” and effectively answering Flint’s real question (“I’ve shared myself with you, will you return the favor?”), even if it’s unsettling that he didn’t answer the literal question posed. So he did actually make himself vulnerable to Flint, but only if Flint is willing to see it that way, because…
3. …You learn more about Silver’s character through his refusal to share his past/his emotional repression/his opinion of personal narrative then you would from the actual truth. I don’t know if Flint really grasped how much information Silver had given him through his omission, because if he had, he probably would’ve seen what was coming. Silver doesn’t want to find meaning in tragedy, he doesn’t want to be motivated by the past, and he doesn’t care as much as Flint does about fitting into a larger story. So of course he’s not going to want some unknowable, possibly unwinnable war and its untold future costs, he literally said that he sees the world as “a place of unending horrors,” without coherence or sense, of course he has more difficulty then Flint divining some greater meaning out of all the losses they’d suffered. 

Anyway, I still really, really want to know what his backstory was.

Wonderful points, extremely helpful to actual and potential writers of Silverflint fic. Will print and stick on the notice-board above my computer.

sidewaystime:

you don’t know, because i am terrible, but i have tried writing an answer to this like six different times and failed every one of them.

so, the tldr answer is that I agree with Steinberg in that Flint never gets to leave the maze and (more importantly) I don’t think that’s a bad thing. If the labyrinth in this metaphor is about self discovery and if the monster at the heart of it is facing oneself and one’s capacities, then absolutely of all the characters who make it to s4, I think Flint is the one who went into that maze and faced himself and is fine with what he found in the dark. 

It is fascinating to me the ways in which we as a fandom embrace and reject the finale and none more so than the way we accept as a fairly unquestioned good thing that Silver says Flint was reorienting himself toward daylight. And I mean, it’s an utterly beautiful juxtaposition of gorgeous writing and delivery and visual and there is absolutely something resonant about watching Flint emerge from darkness and into the light of reunion with Thomas. And yet the tension of that narration – that it comes from Silver, that it is steeped in all this light imagery, that the reunion takes place on the shame farm – against Flint’s speech that equates the dark with freedom and discovery and light with the civilization that Flint explicitly rejects means that I also tend to read Silver’s narrative structuring of the labyrinth with monstrosity (and specifically with the casting of Flint as the monster and Silver’s identification with that after the tavern scene; Flint is more ambivalent about all of this, I think, because his narrative construction of this metaphor has changed in a way that I don’t think Silver’s ever does) with more of a side eye than I would otherwise. And i think that we as a fandom do this too and I think that the equation of the minotaur with monster is a civilization-centric read in the context of Black Sails. 

And I actually think this is fairly consistent with the way the show itself structured the dichotomy between Flint and Silver and the way that it structured the pirates vs civilization conflict. I think it’s telling that the sham of a trial in Charlestown happens in the daylight, that Woodes Rogers keelhauling of Teach happens in the light, that we see Billy Bones tortured on the beach in the light, etc. It’s not a perfect 1:1 correlation between things that happen in light and dark obviously, but I think there is a strong correlation between characters’ willingness to acknowledge their capacity for what civilization would certainly call monstrous and the way their actions play out in light and dark. (like, i also find it super telling that, as for example, Max’s work with Marion Guthrie to civilize Nassau happens during the day – the harbor scene – and that the rejection of marriage and return to Anne is a night based thing.)

So, anyway. I tend to buy in on the minotaur-as-self and not minotaur-as-monster which means that Flint never escapes from the labyrinth because he doesn’t need to and Silver rejects the labyrinth and loses himself in the process. 

So articulate and lucid.My own tendency is to see shades of grey and processes from darkness to light and back, but this is a very powerful argument. Totally agree re night scenes being moments of revelation and clarity (the encounters between Anne and Max in Season 2; the night in the cage; the dialogue by the buried treasure).

softpyrate:

AAAA first of all, ciao!! and also thank you SO MUCH!! I’ve always been
super self conscious about my english, bc I’ve learned most of it from fanfic
and tv shows and fandom etc…. I think italian is harder to master for not
native speakers bc there is just not as much interesting content to dive into and
get mindlessly obsessed over. I guess in some ways I’m just lucky that in italy
we don’t have shows like black sails….. ANYWAY, thank you again, I’m
blushing!!!!

From a native Italian speaker to another – how many of us are active in Black Sails fandom? And where are we? And why are so many of us so fluent in English? (In my case: I have lived in Australia since the end of 1979)

candlewinds:

I still cannot believe that there is an actual honest to god scene in black sails where, after listening to a really fantastic talk from madi about how difficult it must’ve been for him to become a leader when he was unprepared, and how in order to “wear a crown” one must make sure they are strong/healthy enough to bear it, john silver wakes up from a feverish sleep and the first thing he tells her is, “yeah, back to our convo from before…TRUE, I never expected to be a leader of a crew or anything, but it’s not the men or any of that other Pirate Stuff™ that’s keepin’ me up at night here, really. you wanna know what my burden is?!? you wanna know what – who – I really wasn’t prepared for?! JAMES FUCKING FLINT, THAT’S WHO 😡 him, what he wants, what he needs, being a partner to him and all that comes with it. all that other stuff?!? the blood, the fighting, the responsibility?!? not easy, but I can handle it. I’ve gotten used to all that. but then james flint…james fucking flint…”

did I make this scene up!!!! DID I MAKE THIS WHOLE SHOW UP!!!!