Disability Black Sails

[frandroid]

So I'm out here making fun of Straight Black Sails but I'm not super picking up stuff when it comes to disability. This Twitter thread here admires the show for Long John Silver's journey:

silver as a disabled man is allowed complexity that is so often denied to disabled folks in media. he is traumatised and insecure. he is wrong in the decisions he makes. he is a fully fleshed out human being whose choices are affected by his trauma but not defined by it.

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Unrelated Dreamwidth tip:

"Casual HTML automatically formats line breaks and @user mentions"

!!! (I used the raw-code tag to show an un-interpreted @ mention, otherwise it's just showing it as user, as intended!!)

Comments

[ioplokon]

It's such a fascinating part of the show. I also think it's really interesting how they prefigure Silver's character arc through Randall even if they kind of seem to have gotten bored with that? (or maybe the actor wasn't available post-s2?) It's very much a CW move, where there are "two" of all the characters from the source property (famously there are two Jimmy Olsen's in Smallville, but also Lana doubles for Lois, etc.)

Anyway, it's an interesting juxtaposition between one character who uses other's expectations of him in order to shore up security and another who actively defies them to pursue his own ends. It's also something that speaks to the central conflict of the show, between security and freedom (and who gets either under different configurations of power). It's especially relevant given the story he tells Madi at the end, where he is asking her to choose love and security over the uncertain freedom of self-determination (which, ultimately, is the same choice Randall made).

[frandroid]

Damn.

[sabotabby]

Good take is good.

[ioplokon]

haha thanks - I sometimes feel like a bit of a buzzkill since everyone in the Black Sails fandom seems to be having so much fun and I'm like, "this show is an exploration of why revolutions fail and hierarchies endure." But, well. There's a reason my nickname in high school was "Daria," after all.

PS: mind if I add? I've seen you around a bit on friends' pages and seems like we have common interests. I don't post all that much, though.

[sabotabby]

haha thanks - I sometimes feel like a bit of a buzzkill since everyone in the Black Sails fandom seems to be having so much fun and I'm like, "this show is an exploration of why revolutions fail and hierarchies endure." But, well. There's a reason my nickname in high school was "Daria," after all.

LOL. I started watching it because FUN PIRATE SWASHBUCKLING SHOW YAY and then I realized it was about anarchism and anti-imperialism and increased my love of the thing.

You seem cool! Access granted. :)

[herself_nyc]

NICE meta.

[herself_nyc]

It's a SEXY FUN exploration of why revolutions fail, and empire, and history, and people suck, and so on and so forth.