pirateshelly:

zenyattasperceptrons:

one thing i love about black sails is something that’s, like, i didn’t really notice it at first because it’s something that’s absent which i think is summed up pretty well by this post’s Black Sails is ruining every other show I watch by having characters treat the people they love as human beings

because. yeah? like, most presently on my mind is thomas kissing james for the first time and just like, that hesitation and yeah, making sure james is okay with it before he does anything and i’m just sitting here like. how fucking wild is it that that’s something to be commended

and just throughout the entire show despite it being sort of, on some level, a tale of blood and war and adventure, it still spends a whole lot of time like. sitting down and giving traumatic experiences the space they deserve? and acknowledging the emotional turmoil that the characters go through? LIKE JUST. FLINT. SITTING DOWN AND TALKING TO SILVER AND BEING LIKE. HEY, ARE YOU OKAY? how are your emotions? because you’re my friend and i care about you?? instead of just using injuries/deaths as shock value or plot points and moving on with them the writers actually RECOGNIZE the sort of shit that happens to the human psyche when someone goes through that and for the most part they handle it all really well

and just. the entire. flints entire CHARACTER being based on the ‘my lover died and now i’m going to get revenge’ trope except 1. it’s gay so it’s automatically better 2. i feel like most stories use that to make the main character just like…angry and closed off and don’t comment on it any more? it’s framed as like, ‘okay yeah this happened so now he has the motivation to do this thing’ whereas with flint it’s like… ‘okay yeah this happened so now he goes and does this thing because he’s a broken shell of a man and this is the only meaning he can find in his life’ and like, it’s bad and it hurts him and he does absolutely horrific things that he knows are horrific and just

CHARACTERS HAVING EMOTIONS!!!!

Yes! And the fact that somewhere mid season 3 and into season 4 Flint starts to become so much more functional and balanced. Why? Because he starts letting people into his life and opening up and having friends and allies he actually tells shit about himself. Like, being a brooding closed off loner isn’t cool, it makes you barely able to function and the show acknowledges that! Flint is completely lost when he doesn’t have partners (especially when he doesn’t have female partners), and that goes for basically every other character too, as Max says “there are limits to what one can build alone”