I am of course fascinated by pirates and as Problematic as it is, Peter Lamborn Wilson's Pirate Utopias was one of those works that sparked an obsession for me. I think it's overly idealistic in that it very much glosses over the racial dynamics in favour of the "pirate ships were anarchist spaces" thesis but it's a foundation for reimagining pirates as closer to mutual aid societies than the rollicking libertarian thieves of popular imagination.
The obvious antecedent is Black Sails, which, show of my heart. To quote another shitpost, "Black Sails walked so that Our Flag Means Death could frolic in the fields." And in many ways they are such similar shows, not just that they are shows about gay pirates but in that they are very queer shows about gay pirates that spend a lot of time interrogating masculinity and sexuality and actually going much farther than Wilson did in examining the dynamics of race and colonialism. I joke about how OFMD is just Black Sails with the last vestiges of heterosexuality removed, but I can still remember how utterly shocking and subversive the second and last seasons of Black Sails were. Like here is a show with Michael Bay as an executive producer, ffs, and they had two poly relationships amongst the main cast, the macho antihero lead was bisexual, he was motivated to go to war with the British Empire to avenge his dead male lover, with the support of said lover's wife. And if that wasn't enough, they pulled the rug out a second time and very deliberate un-buried the gay and gave all the surviving queer characters a happy ending in a genre where that basically never happens. While, at the same time, portraying Maroons and workers' revolts in fairly historically accurate ways. It was bonkers. I still can't believe they did that.
So, it's just the same show with a different tone.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2022-04-05 08:57 pm (UTC)The obvious antecedent is Black Sails, which, show of my heart. To quote another shitpost, "Black Sails walked so that Our Flag Means Death could frolic in the fields." And in many ways they are such similar shows, not just that they are shows about gay pirates but in that they are very queer shows about gay pirates that spend a lot of time interrogating masculinity and sexuality and actually going much farther than Wilson did in examining the dynamics of race and colonialism. I joke about how OFMD is just Black Sails with the last vestiges of heterosexuality removed, but I can still remember how utterly shocking and subversive the second and last seasons of Black Sails were. Like here is a show with Michael Bay as an executive producer, ffs, and they had two poly relationships amongst the main cast, the macho antihero lead was bisexual, he was motivated to go to war with the British Empire to avenge his dead male lover, with the support of said lover's wife. And if that wasn't enough, they pulled the rug out a second time and very deliberate un-buried the gay and gave all the surviving queer characters a happy ending in a genre where that basically never happens. While, at the same time, portraying Maroons and workers' revolts in fairly historically accurate ways. It was bonkers. I still can't believe they did that.
So, it's just the same show with a different tone.