#James McGraw Thesis

[bring-it-all-down]

Much has been said about the Black Sails finale and its statement of the show’s themes, so I’d like to focus instead on the penultimate episode, specifically the following speech Jack gives as he’s headed back to Nassau with the goal of killing Flint:

The result ahead of us promises to be a victory of a different sort. A true victory. Freedom...in every sense of the word. How many men in the history of the world have ever known it? How remarkable a moment is this? How fortunate are we to be standing on the threshold of it?

I think this speech really gets to the heart of the show: it’s ultimately about what it means to be truly free. While this notion of freedom is discussed in Flint’s unparalleled final speech about dragons, it’s perhaps in 4.09 that we get the fullest exploration of freedom.

There has obviously been a lot written on the subject of freedom throughout human history, and rather than foolishly attempt to summarize thousands of years of philosophy, I’m going to refer to one of my favorite understandings, written by W.E.B. DuBois:

I dream of a world of infinitive and valuable variety; not in the laws of gravity or atomic weights, but in human variety in height and weight, color and skin, hair and nose and lip. But more especially and far above and beyond this, is a realm of true freedom: in thought and dream, fantasy and imagination; in gift, aptitude, and genius—all possible manner of difference, topped with freedom of soul to do and be, and freedom of thought to give to a world and build into it, all wealth of inborn individuality. Each effort to stop this freedom of being is a blow at democracy—that real democracy which is reservoir and opportunity” (The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History, pg. 165.)

DuBois here notes three central elements of freedom: the physical (“to do and be”), the mental (“thought and dream, fantasy and imagination”), and the generational (“give to a world and build into it”). The first two components of freedom are understood by much of Western political philosophy through the terms “negative liberty” and “positive liberty” (coined by Isaiah Berlin), freedom from external threats and freedom to engage in philosophic activity. To these conceptions, DuBois adds a third that all the white dudes who conceived of the other two wouldn’t be concerned with: central to achieving them is the recognition that every individual owes prior and future generations their efforts to maintain liberty, that liberty is not just a theoretical principle but an action.

Turning now to episode 4.09, I think we can begin to understand how each of these three types of freedom overlap.

To start, the conflict of the episode deals with negative liberty. Silver and Flint to some degree know that if one catches the other with the chest, there is a chance they will be killed, and Silver wants the chest to ensure that Woodes Rogers does not kill Madi. In short, they are fighting for their survival, their physical freedom.

Moving on to the flashbacks between Flint and Silver, we begin to see the connection between negative liberty and positive liberty. First, because Silver and Flint are equals without the same political obligations to each other as they have to the crew, the people who serve them and who they serve in turn, they can be honest with each other. Silver recognizes this in telling Flint: “The men...I have to manage how they see me...But for pride to be an issue between you and I, well, I think we’re playing past that by now.” Because they, at that point, have physical/negative liberty with each other, they are then allowed to pursue mental/positive liberty, that being the revelation of their true selves. 

However, Flint becomes aware that this physical liberty is an illusion because Silver is unwilling to meet him equally in their pursuit of positive liberty: 

You know my story. Thomas, Miranda, all of it. Know the role it played in motivating me to do the things that I've done, the things I will do. It has made me transparent to you. Not only that, but when I told you this story, you insinuated yourself into it. The latest in a line of ill-fated partners, situating yourself such that...were you and I ever to come to blows, I'd be forced to hesitate before doing you any harm.

Thus Silver actually has a physical advantage over Flint, negating any semblance of Flint’s physical liberty in their relationship. Through Silver’s attempts to kill Flint in this episode and in the finale, we see that without both physical/mental (or negative/positive) liberty present in any relationship, neither will exist; you cannot have one without the other.

This brings us to what I’ve decided to call generational freedom, though I suppose it could also be called communal freedom. In this episode, the concept of generational freedom is brought up in relation to both Jack and Madi. First, we see it in Jack’s conversation with the man he chose to navigate him to Skeleton Island:

Jack: You sailed with Avery.

Old man: Long time ago.

Jack: 20 years? More, even, maybe?

Old man: More, aye.

Jack: Mm-hmm. You do know where you're going, yes? No, seriously, I've got quite a lot riding on this.

Old man: One day, you'll leave the account. Take a wife, father children. See less and less of the sea until she becomes like a painting hanging on the wall, static and irrelevant to your daily existence. But she'll keep on calling you. And when she does, you'll step into that painting and feel the swell beneath your feet. It'll all come back as if it were like yesterday.

Jack: Is that so?

Old man: I've watched you and yours handle the account since I and mine left it. Accomplish things that no one I ever sailed with could dream of. From what I've overheard, if you reach Skeleton Island, might mean the end of the governor. Maybe keep the account alive a little while longer. Is that so?

Jack: That and more.

Old man: Then I'll take you to it. Hold on to this for as long as you can, for all of us who once had it...and walked away.

In this conversation, we see the generational connections within piracy. The old man sailed with Henry Avery, the person most responsible for establishing the current status of piracy in Nassau, and he is conversing with the person who will usher Nassau into a new era. He is careful to remind Jack of this link and of how unseverable it is; no matter how far away Jack gets from piracy, he will never be able to leave it fully behind. There is some sense of owing his existence in this world to Avery and all those who came before him, a debt he must repay with his actions (namely, removing Woodes Rogers and continuing the life of piracy in Nassau).

Immediately after this conversation, we get Woodes Rogers’ bargaining with Madi. He offers her an ultimatum: accept his treaty or he will kill Silver and all of Silver’s crew, which includes many of Madi’s people. Madi rejects his ultimatum with one of the most poignant speeches in the show:

The voice you hear in your head, I imagine I know who it sounds like, as I know Eleanor wanted those things. But I hear other voices. A chorus of voices. Multitudes. They reach back centuries. Men and women and children who'd lost their lives to men like you. Men and women and children forced to wear your chains. I must answer to them and this war, their war, Flint's war, my war, it will not be bargained away to avoid a fight, to save John Silver's life or his men's or mine. And you believe what you will, but it was neither I nor Flint, nor the Spanish raider who killed your wife. That, you did.

Because of her existence as a former slave who had lived in hiding for most of her life, Madi most fully understands generational freedom. She knows that the supposed freedom Rogers’ treaty offers her and her people is not actual freedom because it fails to address the unfreedom of her ancestors, of the rest of the enslaved people in the Caribbean, because she knows that freedom will never be achieved on the terms of the oppressor. She knows that she owes this war to every victim of England’s empire and that it is the only way to achieve what DuBois calls the opportunity to “give to a world and build into it.” 

This episode thus introduces the idea that “freedom every sense of the word” depends on one recognizing one’s duty to one’s community that consists of not just its current members, but its past and future members. Complete freedom is achieved when one begins to fight to protect the freedom of those who do not yet exist. Madi understands this about freedom, as does Flint, but despite Silver’s insistence that he and Flint are true friends and equals, he is incapable of grasping the generational component of freedom and he therefore ensures that physical and mental freedom, too, will fall outside of his grasp.

[theartthatleavesthemark]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Black Sails Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Miranda Barlow/Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton, Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton, Miranda Barlow/Captain Flint | James McGraw Characters: Miranda Barlow, Captain Flint | James McGraw, Thomas Hamilton, Miranda Hamilton Additional Tags: miranda writes a letter, sometime in s1 probably, or before, Miranda Barlow Deserves Better, Miranda Barlow Appreciation, Letters, Tragedy, because of the inevitability ok, Miranda gets to tell her side of the story, lots of emotions and character analysis, this is my Miranda Hamilton manifesto, the hamiltons - Freeform Summary:

Revelation is a dangerous game, especially when the stakes are a life.

Or, what if Miranda wrote a letter to James some time during the events of season 1 and then never gave it to him? This is that letter.

[captain-blackbird]

So I’ve been analyzing Black Sails and had a extremely depressing thought....

Miranda is the one to connect the dots of Ashe and the betrayal that befell them because of that clock but what if she made the connection earlier

Before they make port in Charles Town, Abigail tells them about why Peter had changed in regards to his stance on Piracy. The death of Lord Alfred Hamilton(may he rot in hell).

Now my thought is this: If only Miranda or Flint took a second to think ‘why would LAHs death, someone who to their understanding, Peter had no love for, change his views?’ Especially when Peter knew of far more monstrous things done by pirates to far more innocent people. If they had thought why would Peter essentially want revenge for AH instead of say the Gov.’s 9 yr old son that was murdered. What is so Goddamn depressing is that the events following could have been avoided if a revelation had been reached only a few hours earlier.

But then again that is a testament to the stupendous writing of this show. Because it is chalked full of moments that if only slightly changed would completely alter the fabric of the story. Black Sails is essentially a massive complex tapestry piece. Take even a single tread and it all unravels. Even if the taking of that thread would make it less painful.

[betweenheroesandvillains]

potc gave us a vaguely queer character whose traits were an ambiguous gender, flirty behaviour and a mix of effeminate movements and hypermasculine standing. the audience can read into jack sparrow whatever they want or need, and his queer moments are balanced by his explicitly stated heterosexuality through several relationships to women and the rejection of ELizabeth when he thinks she is a man. Black Sails meanwhile brought a character on screen who did not seem queer in the beginning but rather as an exemplary hypermasculine fantasy. yet over the course of the story arch, Flint's love to a man becomes the driving point for his actions and explains his character traits. while he does not present any ambiguity in his gender presentation or flirtatious behaviours, Flint's story is the story of a queer pirate, unlike Jack Sparrow's story which is an attempt to queer piracy for a heterosexual audience. in the following essay i will explore...

[keensers]

james flint for the character writing meme! :D

GOING RIGHT IN FOR THE KILL I SEE U CYNTHIA ok ok so uh i wrote you 1000 words of meta (sorry)

1. tbh i would be remiss if i didn’t start off with saying that if i had to choose ONE trait to define james flint, it would be love. i think this is a pretty common interpretation, but nonetheless - the catalyst for the entire show is his tragedy of loving too much, too hard, and ultimately with “too little shame” for a society that didn’t see that love as legitimate. in large part i’m basing this on what toby & steinberg/levine have said, but the notion of him “becoming himself” with thomas and BECAUSE OF thomas is fundamentally grounded in the fact that his love MAKES his character. that love is the reason he rages against an empire and the reason he wants so fiercely to make nassau in the image of that dream thomas had. it’s the reason that he goes with silver in the end! everything that happens in the show can be traced to that love. as has been previously yelled about by better writers than me, it’s his origin story. it’s also why, at the end of s4, he points out that he understands completely why silver does what silver does with the cache. “i don’t know if i would have done anything differently” because they both have those defining loves!!! and are also each other’s defining loves!!!

2. this is kind of a cheat, i guess, because it ties into #1, but i will also say that the notion of big, romantic love and trust being the same thing for flint is preeminent in my brain whenever i’m writing him. james flint, as far as we know, has had 3 huge, defining loves: thomas, miranda, and silver. all of these people are people he fundamentally trusts with everything about himself. with everything in him. even when miranda writes the letter in s1 and they have their yelling match, there’s no question that he trusts her and will continue to trust her for, uhhhh, forever, basically. she’s still the guiding voice in his dreams. with silver, once they get past 3.03 and silver “opens the door,” there’s yelling, there’s arguing, but would flint trust him with his life? yes. we see him do it again and again!!! we see him ASK for that trust in return in s4 repeatedly, we see him PERFECTLY WILLING to share power with silver or even cede it to him. the swordfight scene??? “it seems like you’re teaching me how to defeat you???” the fact that in the end he DOES go along with silver??? he wouldn’t kill silver in a million years, even though as we’ve seen, he’s the single best fighter/tactician on the show and COULD bring a sword to a gunfight AND WIN. but he doesn’t, because he can’t, because he still trusts silver! even after all the lies, the betrayal, the moderately active attempts at homicide! because he can’t un-trust someone once he loves them! now, i could bore you all with an entire thesis about this, but i’ll just say one more thing, this time re: gates. gates is flint’s best friend. in s1, gates is closer to flint than anyone except miranda. and flint STILL KILLS HIM. straight up fucking murder!!! imo, that only happens because there’s a component of trust that just isn’t present in that particular love. does gates know the story of thomas? does he know why flint wants so badly to get the gold? i don’t know, but i think if he did, that scene wouldn’t have gone down the way it did, because there would have been a further measure of understanding that wasn’t present there, UNLIKE in the finale scene where silver basically says the same thing to him. for me, the main reason that has a different outcome is because flint, at that point, has this absurd bone-deep trust of silver. he loves him so much that the idea of a true betrayal is unthinkable. it’s as miranda says to eleanor - she knows the names of flint’s demons. so does thomas, and so does silver. because those are the people who james flint trusts with his everything because he loves them THAT much.

3. james flint is a pragmatist. he’s not actually an idealist like thomas or madi - he can see that dream initially because he loves thomas and it’s his dream. he’s not a martyr because he thinks that dying for The Cause is glorious! he doesn’t think that! sure, he believes in The Cause but he’s willing to die for it because he thinks he’s got nothing left and because the idea of either making thomas’ dream a reality or dying in the attempt must be appealing. he’s a pragmatist who is, yes, occasionally somewhat delusional (”maybe we can even take boston” yeah, okay, buddy) but never THAT far off the mark? as previously mentioned, he’s a tactician! he’s a BRILLIANT strategist! he’s kind of an asshole! but he’s not willing to stray too far from the basics of “what are our strengths,” “who can we convince,” “what will it take to get x and y done.” did they have the strength to mount a fullscale revolutionary war from a homebase of nassau? probably not. was it THAT crazy a dream? also probably not, given that the us of a started its own little rebellion only 60 years after the BS timeline, but more relevantly to the whole “revolution against colonial rule on a small island in the caribbean” concept, the (also successful) haitian revolution began in 1791 - about 75 years later. just one generation later! it was never that crazy a concept, and i think that’s part of why flint gives himself over to it so completely. he really does think it’s feasible, and not just because he’s ~too blinded by love (and/or the rage borne of that love) to see reason~.

this is already stupidly long so im gonna stop there but honorable mentions for #4, #5 and #6 go to “the concept of james flint raising kids/being an adoptive father figure to like every wayward teen he meets/general dad-ness,” “the concept of james flint as odysseus,” and “the concept that the line between james flint and james mcgraw is, in fact, extremely hazy” respectively, which each deserve their own novellas but NOT TODAY anyway i hope u enjoyed this small thesis

if you want to hear me yell more about other characters or, you know what, let’s just go for it, yell about whatever, drop me an ask

[bring-it-all-down]

“They took everything from us! And then they called me a monster. The moment I sign that pardon, the moment I ask for one, I proclaim to the world that they were right. This ends when I grant them my forgiveness, not the other way around” (1.07).

I think the bolded line often gets neglected in this speech of James’s, which is a shame because it’s so important to understanding who he is. It’s easy to think of James’s arc as being split between pre-Maroons and post-Maroons, with the latter being the beginning of his shift toward actual revolution and fighting for something beyond the war itself. This conception of James is reiterated by Miranda in 2.05 when she says to him, “I think you are fighting for the sake of fighting. Because it's the only state in which you can function.” Billy reiterates this understanding of Flint in telling Silver, “how long ago was it that the two of us agreed...he would find ways of driving us over and over again into that storm till there was none of us left?” (4.04).

Now, this conception of Flint might have been true when he was suicidal following Miranda’s death and wanted to punish England for killing her, but it’s not the Flint we see for the vast majority of the show. Rather, Flint, for all of the awful things he does, is driven not by bloodlust and pure rage but by a desire to carve out a place where he is free to exist as a gay man. His objective is to show England that they were wrong to exile him and imprison Thomas. We see that when he says that the conflict ends “when I grant them my forgiveness.” He doesn’t want to destroy England in its totality as there must be something left of it for him to forgive. 

There are two possible roads to forgiveness, here, and I think both of them are hopeful. The first is England realizing the error of its ways and begging James for redemption. The second involves James reaching a place of inner peace in which he is able to forgive England without England’s recognition of its wrongs. Believing that either path might eventually be available to him seems at least partially naive, but it nonetheless illustrates James’s true motivations in contrast to the way those around him come to understand them.

[bring-it-all-down]

An incomplete but interesting thought:

The conflict between Achilles and Odysseus represents the conflict between McGraw and Flint. Much of the Iliad is concerned with whether the Achaeans should follow Achilles’s brute force or Odysseus’s cunning in attempting to defeat the Trojans. The two are continuously juxtaposed not just in the Iliad but also the Odyssey, with Achilles earning the title “best of the Achaeans” in the former and Odysseus in the latter. 

I think this relationship between the two is particularly interesting on a McGraw/Flint level when Odysseus journeys to the underworld. He tells Achilles that he is among the most blessed as when he was alive, the Achaeans worshipped him as a god (think of Silver repeatedly likening Flint to a god). Achilles disagrees, however, telling Odysseus:

No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus! 

By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man— 

some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive— 

than rule down here over all the breathless dead (xi.555-558).

While Odysseus believes Achilles’s life to be more desirable, Achilles laments his inability to trade places with Odysseus and live out a mundane life absent honor and glory. I think this tension is very relevant to McGraw/Flint.

[keensers]

guizmop replied to your post “i wouldn't mind reading a black sails thesis if you want to do one......”

wow i will probably die of Feels reading them, but if you have the time go for it !! and i know there is a lot of people in the fandom who just loooove reading meta and sharing thoughts so i think you would hit a target :3

i think i could literally write 10 pages about every topic i came up with BUT perhaps i will make my way through them..... very slowly........ or i really will make an ask meme and drag everyone into meta hell with me

hiddencait replied to your post “i wouldn't mind reading a black sails thesis if you want to do one......”

"30,000 word space pirates AU" ... um YES PLEASE  

I’M UHHH WORKING ON IT i have to finish and post the short madi-learns-to-swordfight fic first which is hopefully (?) happening tonight IT’S NEXT ON MY LIST THOUGH i can only promise that the space au is 1. happening 2. gonna feature some hardcore Abigail Ashe’s Adopted Space Pirate Dad James McGraw Flint and also 3. some I’m Giving (Space Pirate) John Silver a Tragic Backstory And Nobody Can Stop Me