When it cuts from “Strange pairs lieutenant,they can achieve the most unexpected things” to Flint and Silver

Fjdjfkrjsidhhs FOR REAL THOUGH.

a quiet moment.

Yassss

John Silver’s disability is central to his character and incredibly important in terms of representation in media.

Don’t be out here saying that he wouldn’t experience any ableism in universe “cos he’s badass” and “there were tonnes of disabled pirates”. He is; but once he loses his leg he has to work twice as hard to get people to take him seriously and keep his reputation. We see his fight to keep going even when he’s in incredible amounts of pain, and it’s seriously frustrating when this aspect of him is glossed over in fandom space, in favour of everything else about him.  John Silver is an amputee. He is powerful and influential, yes, but he is still disabled, and he knows that that is what people will see primarily so he has to make sure everything else about him speaks first. The iconic scene with Dufresne is a turning point for him in terms of repuation but it takes /that/ for people to stop underestimating him again. We hear the language used about him and the behaviour around him, and so it’s baffling to me when people say that him having one leg doesn’t have much impact because he keeps doing everything he was doing before. And that’s sort of the point. Carrying on when in intense amounts of pain, both physically and mentally is incredibly draining - and yet he manages to accomplish everything he does, in spite of all that. His disability has a huge impact on how he goes about things and to dismiss that is incredibly frustrating, to say the least. As for there being tonnes of disabled pirates, we don’t see much of that in show. The ones that we do see are relegated to much lower ranks - and Silver does not want that. When people say they’ll take care of him he is furious because he has just lost his leg and now he knows he’s going to lose everything else he’s built up too. Disability onset is never just the loss of some function or another. It’s the loss of aspects of, or sometimes the entirety of, a persons life. He doesn’t want to be belittled, he doesn’t want to be coddled, he doesn’t want to be sitting on the sidelines. He’s Flint’s right hand, damnit, and that’s not going to change if he has anything to do with it, least of all go back to being the cook. TLDR: John Silver’s disability is central to his character, character development and his place in contemporary media and culture. Ignoring it, brushing it aside or glossing over it should not be an option.

Jesus, the pain of this scene.

There are no legacies in this life, are there? No monuments, no history. Just the water. It pays us, and then it claims us. Swallows us whole as if we’d never been here at all.

Black Sails: Season 1

This. This is prime. 

You conspire with my father to sabotage our plans. You betray our trust. You cause almost irreparable damage as a result. And when Flint, the most feared captain in all creation, comes to confront you about it, you destroy him. Now I hear in the wind that in his absence you’ve begun to forge new alliances with his enemies. […] And I’m forced to wonder exactly what it is you hold over Flint that makes everything I’ve seen possible. You don’t know what you’ve seen.

John Silver in every episode: XIX.   This crew has spilled a great deal of blood to make your name what it is. It doesn’t belong to you. It’s a jointly held asset belonging to every man on this crew who sacrificed some part of himself to build it. They have a say about how it is managed, and I am the voice of it. It is clear to me that this raid was more dangerous than the last. They are adapting, and it is of some concern to me that you either cannot or will not acknowledge it. I understand this is all incredibly personal to you after the loss of Mrs. Barlow. And I understand the burden of playing the role you currently play must be taking a toll even you cannot fully comprehend.

Virginia Hall (1906-1982): The Most Dangerous Spy of All 

Book 2 available here. Full entry on the website - with footnotes and citations  - available right here. Art notes after the cut.

Keep reading

What a BEAST.

Guhhhhh

I wish lesbians were as easy to find in real life as they are on tumblr

11 FUCKING THOUSAND NOTES ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME WHERE ARE YOU ALL COME DATE ME

ok

update: we are dating

update: we are married

I love happy endings

*screams*

heres a really messy painting because I haven’t stopped thinking about this reunion since I watched the finale

Edit: Prints available here!

Gaaahhhh!!!! So. Good!!

Saw that it was Madi appreciation week, and got off my ass to do my first final piece Black Sails fan art. This is for my favorite relationship, obviously her and Silver. 

Share and/or reblog with your reactions if you enjoy!

Really love the story? Be sure to follow @unsettlingstories

a big fucking mood

THIS. IS LITERALLY. THE BEST. THING I HAVE YET TO READ ABOUT SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS.

Things were so much simpler before women started stealing all of my favorite things from me. I don’t care what anyone says. Women aren’t and will never be true fans of Doctor Who, Star Trek or any of that. You jumped in because you wanted attention. You became “fans” because suddenly liking sci-fi shows and fantasy became popular. You only want guys to drool over you because you’re girls who “like” geeky stuff. Kindly go jump in a lake and die.

A woman organized the letter-writing campaign to NBC to save Star Trek when it was on the verge of being cancelled after the first season, and thus enabled the show to continue on for three seasons allowing it to go into syndication and gain the following it did in reruns.

A woman organized the first ever Star Trek convention, and convinced NASA to donate a truckload full of stuff for said convention thus starting the tradition of Star Trek conventions featuring space for modern science.

A woman greenlit Star Trek while acting at the head of a major studio, and consistently fought pressure to cancel the show. This same woman was the person who greenlit Mission Impossible and was the first woman to head a major studio.

A woman wrote many of the most famous TOS episodes, and went on to write on to write episodes of The Animated Series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine.

Learn your history.

You think women stole your favorite things? If it weren’t for women, those things wouldn’t even exist, but you probably don’t even know the names of the women who made that possible.

So much for “infinite diversity in infinite combinations”…

Who is the fake now?

i’m just laughing so hard right now bc it’s hitting me that there are geek guys who think that women would actually pretend to like this stuff to cater to guys. like it never really occurred to me the depths of how absolutely fucking stupid that idea is.  ”we appear to have common interests but you still don’t like me so that must mean we don’t actually have common interests and you are not a real fan”. oh my god i just can’t right now. i want to feel offended by the fact that there is an idiot out there trying to tell me what i can and cannot like but i’m just too busy laughing.

Also, a lot of the current fandom terminology we take for granted originated in the Star Trek fandom, specifically Star Trek fanfic. And who were the major driving force behind Star Trek fanfic? Women.

Earliest spec fic texts in the English-speaking Western world were written by Thomas More (Utopia), Lady Margaret Cavendish (the Blazing World), and Mary Shelley (Frankenstein). Note that there are two women among those names.

I am so sick of these Fake Geek Guys who don’t even understand the history of the fandom they claim to want to protect.

Yeah, it’s always guys like this who believe the myth of the ‘fake geek girl.’  Guys so inept at human communication that they must cling to the idea that girls are SO DESPERATE for his attention that they devote days of their lives and a ton of money to cosplay/attend cons/staff cons/read comics/play MTG/play video games.

There’s cheaper and easier ways to meet guys a hell of a lot better than this doofus.  Assuming, of course, that you’re interested in meeting guys.  So many of the geeks I know aren’t…  Inclined in that direction.  

Trek was saved by women.  It was the fan conventions and the fan zines and the FANFIC AND FANART that convinced the studios to greenlight the movies.  That convinced them to greenlight the series.  Also, the original producer of Doctor Who was a woman as well.  We have always been there.  They just chose to believe our contributions were unimportant.

A woman also executive produced the first two seasons of Doctor Who, specifically selected by the show’s creator. She fought for the first Dalek script, which BBC management did not want to produce.

If it weren’t for Verity Lambert, Doctor Who would have lasted the thirteen weeks it was expected to, and OP would be TheOncomingAbsolutelyNothing.

Julie Gardner also executive produced Doctor Who for its return in 2005, which is where we got the ‘Oncoming Storm’ line. 

Truest fact about too many nerd boys:

I wonder how many times the OP has seen the name D.C. Fontana in the TOS end credits and has remained so incurious that he still doesn’t know “D.C.” stands for “Dorothy Catherine.”

I wonder if he knows that without Marcia Lucas’s editing work the movie now called Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope might have been almost incoherent and almost certainly would not have gone on to spawn eight and counting additional live-action films, two successful and critically acclaimed TV series, and a multimedia and merchandising empire that would make her ex-husband a fucking billionaire. And that was before he sold Lucasfilm to Disney for something like $4 billion. If ANH had had the kind of OK but unremarkable box office the studio expected, then the story of the Alan Dean Foster novel Splinter of the Mind’s Eye would have been the basis of the sequel (if a sequel even happened), and the Star Wars saga would have been confined to a couple of charmingly retro cult films and that would have been it.

But we live in the universe where Marcia Lucas edited George Lucas’s barely-enough-to-make-it-work footage into a film that captivated people such that there were people my dad knew who were going to see it three times a week.

Women did that. We have always been there.

The word went forth… any capital sentence served against a pirate would hear my answer. - Captain Flint, 3x01

This is literally such a tragic scene.