I'm Trying To Get Back Into The Groove Of Things. I Am Currently Diving Headfirst Into One Of My Oldest

REBLOG IF THIS RELATES TO YOU:

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

So beautiful and hearwarming! It would be amazing if Madi went freeing them, I think the three of them would make a great squad.

They deserve that freedom and the happiness which comes with it. Sometimes is useful to read things like this. It makes one feel better, even if I can hardly imagine it coming true.

Happy Thomas Resurrection Day

I wrote a little short thing in celebration. All prompts to be handled shortly - I’m in a writing mood!

It has been a long time since Thomas Hamilton had the luxury of caring about smells. He recalls his first night in Bethlem Royal Hospital all too well for so many reasons, but high on the list is the appalling stench of the place. He recalls retching over and over again that first night - soiling the rough uniform they had forced him into and earning himself a qualification as a messy patient, something which he had come to regret in later months as he sat in his cell, dressed in little more than rags, huddling in the straw. He has long since learnt to disregard any and all smells that might have disturbed him in his former life - and so it takes him quite by surprise when the scent of the sea, complete with its faint edge of the dead things that have washed up overnight but without the heavy reek of the Thames, strikes him all at once. He breathes it in, and feels something in him ease- as if it had taken this to assure him at last that he is still breathing, still here -

Still tangible and alive.

“Thomas?” James asks, and Thomas shakes his head, struck speechless as he stands on the shore for the first time in years, staring at the ship that is going to take them away from this shore - away from all that they have both suffered and into a new life.

“Forgive me,” he croaks, and swallows hard. “Forgive me,” he repeats. “I - had no idea not smelling tilled earth any longer would affect me this way.”

James blinks.

“There’s - a strange sort of symbolism in that, I suppose,” he acknowledges, and Thomas stands, dumbstruck for a moment at the eloquence of his husband’s statement.

He has been dead to the world for ten years. He has smelled earth - worked it, been covered in it for so long. His fingernails have been crusted with it, his hands turned black and brown as it’s been ground into his skin. He’s been buried - buried before his time, before the breath has left him, with no coffin, even, to shield him, and he suddenly feels as if he has just, finally, burst free of his premature grave only to find himself not thirty feet from freedom such as he has only dreamt of in his fitful, disturbed coma. He turns, and kneels, allowing the sea water to run over his fingertips, then raises them to his nose. He is alive, and he suddenly wants to splash out into the swell, bathe himself in the ocean, allow it to wash the past ten years off his beleaguered, dirt-encrusted skin and his battered psyche.

“Do you think,” he asks, taking a deep breath, “that there’s time for a bath, before we leave?”

James looks at him, and then at the water.

“That’s going to be colder than you think it is,” he warns, but doesn’t sound like he has any real expectation of dissuading Thomas from his goal. In fact, he’s looking at the water speculatively himself, and then at Thomas, who grins at him.

“I might need supervision,” he says. “I think you should come and make certain I don’t drown.”

“We have a few hours before nightfall,” James agrees, and Thomas feels a thrill of possibility run through him - even as he recalls that they are not entirely alone.

The ship in the bay, after all, will not surrender itself to two men. Thomas turns toward their ragged crew of escaped convicts, and the stronger men that Madi has brought with her to their rescue. He looks to Madi herself, who stands, one eyebrow raised in amusement.

“I will take the men further up the inlet,” she says to both of them. “Do not make me come looking for you in the dark.”

James blushes - actually blushes, and then the princess turns, and walks away, and Thomas’ grin widens.

“Shall we?” he asks, and James gives a huff of helpless laughter, and then they are both laughing, stripping their shirts off and going splashing into the water. There will be grime in their hair tomorrow and they will both need a new set of breeches, but for now, they are joyful, cleansed with the salt, renewed, refreshed -

Resurrected.

"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.

My translation of Chapter 1 of Mo Dao Zu Shi's Japanese manga, which released yesterday (the 17th of August 2024)

Also loaded to the internet archive as a pdf (pretty big file size though)

You can support the official Japanese release and buy the Japanese manga at cmoa.jp

it's pretty inexpensive, only around $2 per chapter!

Chapter - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4

Mangadex link

Pre-sfx version is still available at the archive.org website

Edit: I originally wasn't going to make any further edits but felt bad that someone could come across my initial rough translation and miss some details or nuance because of it. Made some changes, a changelog detailing everything and why is here. (I think) this is the final version

SCREAM THAT!

I still can’t get over the fact that Aubrey Plaza got Kathryn Hahn pregnant on a Disney Plus show. This year has been wild.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/64803721/chapters/166533523

(Link also in comment)

My attempt at AgathaRio's backstory + Rio character study, inspired by mexican folklore, views of Death in literature, a lot of songs and my love for these two women.

Hope you'll like it.

Oh my, gimme them back😭😭

They are so beautiful, my favourite ship from this show❤

These two ruined my life and I just want them to be happy. 

I don't think I will ever recover

If you ask me, the three of them deserve a whole show just for themselves. Like...only fragments in only five episodes? Absolutely not enough.

RUPERT PENRY-JONES as Thomas Hamilton, LOUISE BARNES as Miranda Barlow, and TOBY STEPHENS as James McGraw in Black Sails, Chapter XI.

Rio and Agatha - Star Crossed Lovers