So This Is Me Basically Yapping About My Queen’s Complexity😊 Regina Mills They Could Never Make

“I miss him too.“

I'm reading this just now. I can't come back to that place. I'm over it. I was over it. Like...I'll never stop being a Swen, but I was resigned, somehow. Guess I'm digging up too many memories lately, which is not good for my sanity. But then I read analysis like this one, very beautiful and complete and explicative, and I just remember why I'll never really be over them or out of that place.

To tell it in modern terms: SwanQueen is my scar 😢

THE SWANQUEEN HUG

I completely understand why your upset Swen about this hug. Sur it was about the engagement, but it actually show us the dynamic between Emma and Regina. We know they are friends now…friends do hug.

Nevertheless, I agree that the scene was off. Entirely. First of all, Emma seems more embarrass than anything when her mother looks at her ring, and even more when Henry asks her how Hook proposed. We all know he didn’t really do it, Emma pushed him to. She could have said she found the ring and then explain how it turn out, but she chooses to tell:

“I kind of say yes before he had a chance to.”

While saying it, she forced a smile. Note that this conversation happen with Henry and more importantly Snow, the woman who represents the fairytale world and so the Savior’s title given to the blonde. The conversation feels rush, tense, like Emma doesn’t want to talk about it. Bravo for Henry ironic tone, by the way! Snow doesn’t even notice her daughter’s behavior, and the first thing she wants to do is planning the wedding. My bet, she would want for Emma to have the same kind of wedding they done in the Enchanted Forest. A fairy tale wedding. Instead of being happy, the blonde cuts her and tell her mother, the wedding had to wait.

“We’re going to wait a little while before we start planning…”

Did you notice the chill in Emma’s voice… She doesn’t want her mother to freak out at this news, but she seems more in touch with herself than before while saying they want to wait to get married. Saying yes is one thing. Marrying the man is another.

“OH why?”

Ok it’s because of the Gideon thing, but did you see Emma deflecting eyes? BOUM, downcast, like she was sad to disappoint her mother and then she brings Gideon justifying the delay.

After, we have Zelena and Regina entering the loft. Zelena is the one noticing the ring. Why that? When they enter the loft, we can see Emma going to place her hand in her jean’s pocket, as she doesn’t want other to know. Except that when you’re engaged to the person you love, you want the world to know. Emma’s hiding it to Regina. Zelena sees the ring and in a wicket smile exposes Emma to Regina.

“Is that an engagement ring?!”

Stop the video when Zelena pulls Emma’s ring to her eyes. Focus on Regina who is literally shocked to hear and see the news. The blonde is awkward in this moment and sad. She doesn’t even know how to respond. Emma’s attitude is worst than with Snow.  Zelena doesn’t say anything, not even congratulation. Nothing. Then we have this shot of Regina; open mouth, eyes cloud with tears. That’s not joy, that’s saddest.

“Hook proposed.”

Why saying this now instead of the conversation whit her mother?! The smile she gives is hypocrite, forced and a façade. So now Hook proposed. I thought she kind of say yes before he had a chance to… Way to go Emma. She chooses to say Hook proposed when Regina learns of the engagement. Really?!

“Oh… Emma…”

It sounds reprimanded no? Like she was going to add to this: “I thought I told you you’re too good for him…” Emma’s face after…Is she daring Regina to say something?! Chin held high, smugness. She is clearly daring her to say Something… and when the brunette says:

“I’m happy for you. I really am.”

It sounds like a goodbye. Regina is letting go. “Really” shows us Regina tries to convince herself. The hug was a way to feel each other close, one last time before letting go. Exactly as the conversation topic changes just after that. Remark Emma’s face in the hug. She is disappointed in the brunette, and sad that Regina didn’t say a word.

“That’s means a lot.”

Of course it does. For Emma, it means, Regina would not fight. But in reality, it means, the brunette cares so much about her that she rather watching the blonde marries a pirate than letting her know she has feeling for her. It means actions speaks louder than words. It means Regina is in love with Emma and chooses to sacrifice her happy ending in order for the blonde to have one. It means. Regina is Emma’s True Love.

Outcast, fallen angel, you are loved. You are forgiven. You are redeemed. You are loved. - The Exorcist [insp]

This aspect, at least for me, is definitely what did the magic. I mean, I don't think I'd be here talking about it if it hadn't included such an important theme (current for those times but still very current today too).

Probably is because I understand it personally , but also I think you don't necessarily have to experience something first hand in order to understand it and emphatize with it. So yes, I think there are also people foreign to this problem who can appreciate it.

Moreover, I heard also of a lot of people which are part of this problem on the other side, the one which causes it, that however enjoy very much the show, so I guess each one can find their own attractive aspect in it.

Just...don't know, maybe emphatize with it about this subject specifically makes the like for the show way more personal, in a way. But it's not necessarily the only way to like it.

I wonder what the cishet experience of Black Sails is like — or more accurately I suppose the experience of the show for people who have not known shame and who have not been made to feel like monsters, for one reason or another.

Because there is something so compelling to me about Flint's rage—and his ruthlessness. There is something so satisfying to the way he turns into a monster because that's what England tells him he is, and the way he lies and kills and believes in a better, different, impossible world and will stop at nothing to fight for it—even if the fight is doomed from the start. "This ends when England apologises to me," he says and all I can say in return is go off king.

I wonder what this show is like for the normies who never felt that rage—and that shame—burning under their skin and had to swallow it down.

"But I hear other voices. A chorus of voices. Multitudes. They reach back centuries. Men and women and children who lost their lives to men like you. Man and women and children forced to wear your chains. I must answer to them.

And this 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.”

I’d like to start from this beautiful speech from Madi to explain why I think Madi is the war itself. Why she was exactly what Flint needed to start fighting it and why she couldn’t be further away from Silver as a person.

Just because I rewatched the final ep. today and I feel the need to honor the one who lost part of herself in this and to reason about the dynamics among the two persons who might have changed the world and the one who kicked that hope back into the dark corner of the untold.

As always, Flint and Silver’s conversation at the end of ep.XXXVIII made me think A LOT. First time I guess I was overwhelmed by emotions, but this time, between the bitterness of the betrayal and the desperation of Flint's loss, I think I started to see exactly what Silver couldn’t get about the war. Which basically is its meaning.

But let me begin with Flint, because is the character I think I know better by now and because I need to start from a warrior who is not the war itself.

Flint started by fighting a war, another one, an easier one, alongside Thomas. He found himself in that period of time, but he lost that war and the one he loved the most with it. Then he started to fight another kind of war, twisted himself in order to fit into its lines. That war was never about liberation, even if that was what he had been telling himself all along and maybe what he hoped he could eventually accomplish by fighting it: it was just about revenge and something to grab in order to stay afloat. It took him to lost every hope of happiness he had left (Miranda), the last possible meaning of his life and of the person he felt he really was deep inside to see the chance for yet another kind of war. A wider one, a harder one, a most fundamental one. It took him to meet Madi. Knowing her, someone completely different from anyone he had known and fought along in the past, someone who was somehow closer to him as a person than anyone he had ever known (except maybe Eleonor, I’m talking mainly about the pirates. Thomas and Miranda were close to him but not very similar in character I’d say and maybe this is why they got along together so well), he finally had the chance to understand that he was not alone in his misery. She had the courage to be what Flint didn’t even know he could become, the fight not for the fight’s sake but for the outcome, as much as he reputed himself already excluded from it, because however he couldn’t ever be part of anything again, not in the way he had been with Thomas and Miranda. But there’s a difference between fighting just to kill and fighting to save who the one you are killing would have been willing to kill, and Madi represented that change for him.

And the war represented the only meaning he was still able to give to his life.

He is defined by his past, absolutely and mainly, and this makes him both someone with valid reasons to fight and someone with reasons to stop fighting.

In the previous episode we see how Silver instead refuses to be defined by his past, which could be a good or a bad thing, depending on how one let that past influence themselves, but that in this specific situation is basically what makes him unable (just my point of view of course) to get the general meaning of that war.

He chooses to erase his experience in favor of the moment, of the future maybe, and this makes him unable (as much as he likes to affirm the contrary, which I had never agreed upon) to understand the minds of the ones who let that experience shape them. And even more, it makes him unable to understand the minds of the ones who don’t need to have cruel experiences behind them in order to feel the fight. That is, Madi.

To link with my previous post ( https://www.tumblr.com/dragonsinthedarkness/758840316125216768/from-the-moment-he-started-speaking-i-couldnt?source=share ), in that infamous conversation in the last ep. Silver confesses he felt the war only (or especially, but I’d say only) when he lost Madi, because he felt the need to honor her sacrifice, avenge her lost and everything Flint had been doing for years, and the point is that that war was EXACTLY that. It was answering to the multitudes of voices who had undergone all that suffering and that demanded justice for it. It was trying to accomplish that as few others as possible could undergo that same fate.

And the point I want to make is that Madi was not only a warrior but the war itself because she felt those voices and the need to answer to them EVEN IF she had never personally experienced such tragedies. She was raised with the Guthries, then in the camp, she had probably even had the chance to be happy in her childhood, but this didn’t prevent her from developing the knowledge of that evil or the responsibility to fight it as leader of her community and as sisters of all the ones who had suffered before and may suffer again.

She wasn’t defined by her own past, but she brought on her shoulders the most painful and important legacy and decided to honor it.

And one may ask for justice for what happened in their own lifetime with a single chance of succeeding, that can make a great warrior of them, but those voices REACHED BACK CENTURIES, as she said. Her justice, their justice, would have been hopeless as long as something bigger as that war started to change things, and this is exactly what Silver couldn’t understand.

Now of course I know changes don’t happen overnight because “the world is too strong for that”, but I’m talking about their reality in that age right now and I think that as much as a war couldn’t have probably changed things, it would have been a beginning at least. A scream echoing in the night of their existences who would have maybe be heard, and as long as even a single person was able to gain goodness from it, it wouldn’t have been in vain.

As I believe all their efforts had not been in vain, despite the outcome.

For one hour, a month or a year (to improperly quote Silver) of freedom.

For one single moment of victory, of light in the dark.

Your Highness, I’ve always watched you.

“I understand your everything.”

“Your courage, your despair; your kindness, your pain;

your resentment, your hate; your intelligence, your foolishness.

“If I could, I would have you use me as your stepping stone, the bridge you take apart after crossing, the corpse bones you need to trample to climb up, the sinner who deserved the butchering of a million knives.

"But, I know you wouldn’t allow it.”

What does it means to be loved by Death?

No pain

(Anne Rice)

Sorry, this quote just lives rent free in my mind since I first read it and it's just perfect for Agatha, Nicky and Rio😢

Death's beloveds

Madi ✨👸🏿

— it’s not just men who are made great by the relentless pursuit of a better world. By being unwilling to give up that pursuit, because they don’t know how. And if we don’t, we, too, can be invincible.

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Well, what graphic description could be more accurate for my own reaction to the last ep?

Thank you for reminding me how haunting that was (it threw me out of balance for days and I'm still thinking about it).

I'll brace myself to go through all of this once again now that I'm reaching the end of my rewatch😢

Not to be unhelpful, but try going through season 4 knowing how it is going to end. Painful experience.

just finished black sails…..