#it just baffles me bc the ship is legal and fine and shit. It's not even toxic. At least not anymore.

[electricfied-wolf]

you know...I think that if you dislike a ship. You shouldn't aggressively insult the people who ship it. Especially if it's a perfectly okay ship. Like I mean I have nothing against ppl who hate certain ships, I understand the fury, but when it's just....a normal ship that is causing no harm, it feels a bit rude to openly shame ppl for shipping them. Like you don't have to be an ass towards ppl because of a fictional couple.

[halflingkima]

ok i know i haven’t finished black sails yet but eleanor guthrie deserved better writing than to be married off as an ass-backwards ‘redemption arc’ and then fridged for the punishment of her new husband

oh god this got so long

i saw something about how the creators were talking abt how rogers was essentially her redemption arc for how she treated charles and how she betrayed basically everyone but like. Pirates. like. i know we’re positioning them as the “good guys” here but. Pirates.

[i don’t know how to find the source, but it was a quote from an interview where someone asked one of the creators basically ‘what’s the deal’ w the eleanor & rogers relationship (bc lbr it came tf outta Nowhere™) and the dude answered essentially ‘she wants to prove that she can be loyal and that she’s not an Entirely Shit Person and atone for her past betrayals’]

Flint fucking strangles his best friend to death; beats a crew member to death and proceeds to maim his body; lies to everyone because he refuses to trust them; is accused of throwing beloved Billy overboard; etc etc etc – and doesn’t need a redemption arc. A couple crew members try to lead a mutiny against Flint and are simply scared back into line. Billy leads his faction against Flint’s orders – putting huge numbers of black humans at life or death risk – and is just portrayed as a differing point of view in the main conflict with no redemption arc (up to 4.06). Silver’s entire personality is cunning, self-serving manipulation (until it turns into survival) and he needs no redemption arc. Max’s entire arc is revenge-fueled power-grabbing, relying wholly on manipulation and playing both sides and she needs no redemption. I could go off on every character and the endless betrayals bc get this – THEY’RE PIRATES.

Some may make the argument that Eleanor was not a pirate – which is incorrect. She may have maintained that she was not one, but she was the merchant power on the island who was originally in-line with Flint’s vision for the island. Everything she did in the early seasons was a calculated decision to gain her power and attain her vision. At the basest level, she facilitated acts of piracy for the entire island.

The only conclusion I’m able to come to about her arc after her capture at the end of season two is that the creators/writers didn’t know how she would fit into a narrative of the power shift between the free state and the Empire. 

Initially, I expected her to be manipulating Rogers to avoid sentencing/death, as she had shown prowess in manipulating Vane. But the quote from the interview showed that they were writing Eleanor’s alliance with Rogers as genuine and that was essentially baffling to me. How could Eleanor Guthrie – a woman whom Charles Vane saw at the very least as a worthy adversary if not as a genuine equal human, a woman who began a relationship with another woman (albeit monetarily compensated) and clearly demonstrated their certain shared experiences simply as women functioning in this society (though they were most certainly not socially equal in any other way) – be with a military man employed by the legal state of the British empire? No matter how socially conscious he was or how much he respected her, Rogers would never see Eleanor Guthrie as an equal – socially, politically, or any other way. Which is why I would never buy that she actually had feelings for him. (Potentially if there was a little more development in a conscious decision to abandon Nassau and retreat to a Domestic Life, as Flint did in his cottage scene, but that’s another post.)

Where was the creativity and character development (rather than character devolvement) in her narrative? Can there be only one queer woman manipulating both sides of the core conflict? Can there be only one man sexually and romantically manipulated by a woman?

And marrying her off to the enemy of her vision wasn’t enough; killing her off didn’t garner enough sympathy; killing her off while pregnant wasn’t effective enough – she had to be killed at the political orders of her husband, whom she [allegedly] genuinely loved.

First of all – pregnancy? Really? Was that necessary? If anything it’s a giant red flag that she was going to die; who would birth a child in that climate? who genuinely believe that the conflict would be over before the child was born? who truly believed that she would be able to raise her child peacefully in England at her husbands manor? Not Eleanor Guthrie. I don’t have any further thoughts on this bit besides it seemed to me like a p transparent grasp for sympathy that didn’t do its job. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There was a point that I would have actually been happy if the end of the trail for just about everyone was death. I’m perfectly fine with the fact that Eleanor died. I am not fine with the reason she died nor with the physicality of her death.

Admittedly, it could have been worse; it’s a low bar but I’m very thankful the writers didn’t resort to r*pe (again; which – again, it’s own post) and at the very least I’m satisfied that she died fighting. However – Flint’s entire ship is stranded in the doldrums and survives. Billy Bones falls overboard in the middle of a storm, is taken/tortured by the navy for an entire season, is beaten within an inch of his life by vengeful, newly freed people, and survives. Vane was declared dead, dumped in a pit, and buried in sand, and survives. Anne Bonny turns herself into a DIY Wolverine cosplay with some random glass lying around in stores of a ship and gets beaten/slashed half to death and survives. (I haven’t seen it yet but) Madi is trapped in a house as it burns down and survives?? Yet Eleanor gets one sword slash to the abdomen, is still conscious by the time Flint returns, and dies?? It’s either ridiculously lazy writing or a direct comment on the physical stamina of men vs women. (and let’s not forget a slash to the abdomen immediately reminds viewers that she’s pregnant).

Full disclosure: I have yet to watch far beyond Eleanor’s death for my own unrelated reasons. Still it is already apparent that Eleanor’s death was at least initially intended as further motivation/development for Rogers, whose own orders and narrowed vision of victory resulted in the death of his wife and unborn child (that he had yet to learn about). As far as I can see, that’s literally all that her death amounts to. Which is the definition of fridging – killing off a woman for the development of a male character. Which is even more tragic considering how strong, developed, humanized, and well-rounded of a character she was at the beginning.

Ultimately: Eleanor Guthrie deserved better. A better character arc. A better death. A better role. A better end.