though in both cases, when she chose prosperity over their feelings/well-being, it seemed cruel to the viewers who felt more connected to vane and max respectively
IDK, admittedly I like both Max and Vane, but to me her betrayals of both of them were cruel, there's no way around that. In both cases, they were trying to protect her at risk to their own lives (Max admittedly doing it without Eleanor's knowledge, but with Vane she actually asked him to get into that very precarious position for her benefit), and in both cases she turned her back without hesitation when things changed, leaving them to what she knows will likely be painful deaths, without ever appearing to consider whether there might be a third way (and in both cases there would be, but she would have to pay). On this rewatch I actually noticed something, in the moments when Eleanor is persuading Abigail to leave with her: Abigail is confused, because Vane promised her that if she did as she was told and her father paid, she wouldn't be harmed. Eleanor says something along the lines of 'things have changed, you are now much more valuable to him in a different way', implying that he has broken his word, whereas in fact we know that his plans to ransom her remain what they always were, and it is actually Eleanor who now has a new use for Abigail and is changing things around.
As I've said before, I applaud the writers and Hannah for creating Eleanor, because in retrospect I completely understand how she got to become who she is, but that doesn't change the fact that, by the start of the show, she is really not a nice person, at all, and honestly I came out of both the Max and Vane relationships feeling for them and hoping that they would find someone capable of loving them back. (I disagree that Vane never got her at all, but certainly he never got her enough, so that's really just splitting hairs.)
Haha re Idelle, she just strikes me as someone who is able to love without taking any bullshit, which as we have seen is definitely something any lover of Eleanor's needs, as well as being intelligent, highly driven, pragmatic and loving without being cloying (that's one reason I could never quite get on the Maxanor ship, because as much as I think Max is adorable, I just can't see any version where Eleanor doesn't get few up with her caretaking and squish her poor sweet heart like a bug. Maybe it's because I'm more like Eleanor than anyone else on the show and it would personally drive me up the wall, but while I can see a healthy AU Eleanor working with a healthy AU Vane, or Anne, or Flint, or even Miranda, I can just never imagine a reality in which Eleanor at her core and Max at her core work in the long run. I'm sorry please don't hate me!)
what good is trying to protect someone who doesn't want to be protected though? that's the crux of my issue with the max/eleanor and vane/eleanor relationships and why i don't feel terrible sympathy for them putting their faith in someone who is faithless (or more specifically, faithful only to her goal of civilizing nassau at almost any cost -- "almost" because inviting spain to her shores seems to be where eleanor draws the line). it's cruel but eleanor never purported to be otherwise. i'm not saying eleanor is a good person by any stretch, or that she thinks things through and arrives at the best course of action when she makes a decision... because she clearly did not lmao. but vane thinking eleanor was a wild thing who wanted pirate anarchy and max thinking eleanor was a soft thing who wanted a quiet life away from nassau were both way off target.
no, i like this reasoning! i'm probably exactly the right person to admit you don't like maxanor to lmao. i totally see what you mean and buy that their ways of loving and being intimate were at their core, incompatible. i'm down with the eleanor/idelle theory. idelle isn't afraid to put anyone, even the scariest pirate, in their place either, and eleanor needed more than a bit of that. just not from flawed messengers who come with too much baggage and bite.
I kind of see where you're coming from with Max, because yes, Eleanor didn't ask for it, but with Vane she literally did. The only reason he has Abigail at all is that she explicitly told him to prove he cared about her well-being and how to do it. And we know that she knows that he's not just being stubborn in not giving up Abigail for free, because in the scene immediately before their fight about it, she berates him for not realising that Flint can't just hand the Urca over in trade, because 'it belongs to his crew, not to him'. So she's fully aware of the situation she has put him in, and that what she's asking is impossible for him to give, and when he can't magic up a way around that, she takes it anyway and leaves him to deal with the consequences. To me that was just beyond the pale.
But then she did make him choose between her and his father figure when he can't have been more than 21, purely as a show of her power, so we can't say he didn't know who she was...
Gah, it's embarrassing how much I care for/worry about all these long-dead fictional characters, even the ones I don't like. I don't usually get like this I swear!
yeah, she definitely played vane like a fiddle. i would argue that the circumstances were facilitated by both her cruelty and his blindness though. dude was projecting a grand love story onto their relationship when i just don't see it being there for her. she proved time and time again that he was only allowed to share her bed when he made himself convenient or useful, and that ultimately he was a tool for her to use. i think she cared deeply for him (that bumblebee necklace tbh), but as long as he was a hindrance to the road she could see ahead, she wasn't gonna ever stick her neck out for him.
the tragedy of vane/eleanor to me is that at some point, had she never been given up by hornigold, they might have ended up on the same side with the same goals. because up until the very end of season 2, vane was an obstinate shit who could not work with eleanor and flint, who did bad things himself (max was raped and brutalized under his watch). but season 3 vane with pre-season 3 eleanor alongside flint, madi, and silver and the rest of the pirate resistance would have been a superpower. and who knows what they could have worked out relationship-wise in that space.
please, that's just black sails, dude. it's gonna be a long time before i'm over this show or these characters!
Oh absolutely, he was a complete fool for her and was just a convenience for her (I remain uncertain how much she ever cared for him. There was fondness there, but beyond? Idk).
up until the very end of season 2, vane was an obstinate shit who could not work with eleanor and flint
Actually, that's one of my bugbears of the series, because I don't believe that's really true, or at least we don't know whether it is, because they never really try. At no point does Eleanor sit down with him, explain what they are doing and invite him to join their project. The first time they ever discuss it with him is when they need him to hand over Abigail, which is right after Flint has tried to blow him up and he has tried to kill Flint (i.e. maybe not the best time for a calm conversation?). At that point, they all just expect him to hand over his $250,000 prize and get angry with him when he doesn't immediately agree. I actually think if they had tried to bring him on board earlier, as more of an equal partner than a wayward child, he might have come around without too much trouble (that's been his thing throughout the show, he flares up quickly but it passes once he's made his point and then he gets reasonable). I actually blame Flint more for the end result: If he hadn't been too busy ranting about Vane being a madman and an animal (not that I'm disagreeing as such, but it's a bit rich coming from a man who just strangled his loyal friend with his bare hands), but had trusted Eleanor's judgement and sat down with her and Vane, the whole thing could have ended very differently. Like, at that moment in time, between them they had a fort, a warship, a fortune in gold and the daughter of the nearest scary pirate hunter. In that moment, they could all have gotten what they wanted, and Miranda could have lived. But this is a cruel show, and so they didn't get it. :(
that's giving him a LOT of credit where i don't think he necessarily deserves it. vane was exceedingly petulant in season 1 and i definitely understood why he was kept on the outside of their business venture. i think that's where we're at an impasse with regards to vane as a character/his journey, because i think the man he was in the end is a far cry from the brat he started out as, and he needed to do a lot of growing up between those two points. so i don't buy that he would have been a good and reasonable partner to them at any point before he finally, finally joined forces with flint in charles town. it took seeing civilization up close for him to understand what an immediate threat they were to pirates/nassau. before then, he was blowing it off and playing it down despite words of warning. could flint have been more diplomatic and played better with others in general? for damn sure. i'd say there's plenty blame to go around. the pirates always had to lose in the end, but it's especially painful as viewers following their story to see all the what if's and the opportunities to do and be better than their historical counterparts. alas!
Yeah that is also true. TBH that's what makes this show so difficult/fun to analyse, because since all the characters are so complex and flawed, it's hard to see where exactly in the complex-and-flawed tapestry that the weave together things went wrong, or how they could have gone if one character did that one thing differently. Because you're right, it's not till Vane sees the threat that he changes his mind, but I guess that's my point, that's the only thing that really changes it. He hasn't grown as a person or w/e over the first two seasons to put him in a position where he is now able to see in a way that he wasn't before, he just happens to be there, doing his selfish Vane thing, and comes upon it, which changes his mind almost immediately (with a little help from Billy). Therefore, I wonder whether his mind could have been changed earlier if someone had turned his head in the right direction, and if so how things would have turned out.
IDK IDK, so many possibilities, so many flawed characters foolishly screwing them up...
i feel ya. i think black sails is a show ripe for that question people in fandoms ask on tumblr, about what five things folks would change and why. there are so many little pieces on this show especially that if shifted just a tiny bit would mean victory for the characters we love. not saying their endings were all terrible, but man. they all came really close to changing things for the better.
i don't rly have much to add to your conversation bc you guys covered all bases and i haven't invested the same amount of time as you in the max/eleanor/vane relationships, i think, but i just wanted to say thanks a lot, it's rly good reading! lots of small things and perspectives i hadn't considered.
IDK, admittedly I like both Max and Vane, but to me her betrayals of both of them were cruel, there's no way around that. In both cases, they were trying to protect her at risk to their own lives (Max admittedly doing it without Eleanor's knowledge, but with Vane she actually asked him to get into that very precarious position for her benefit), and in both cases she turned her back without hesitation when things changed, leaving them to what she knows will likely be painful deaths, without ever appearing to consider whether there might be a third way (and in both cases there would be, but she would have to pay). On this rewatch I actually noticed something, in the moments when Eleanor is persuading Abigail to leave with her: Abigail is confused, because Vane promised her that if she did as she was told and her father paid, she wouldn't be harmed. Eleanor says something along the lines of 'things have changed, you are now much more valuable to him in a different way', implying that he has broken his word, whereas in fact we know that his plans to ransom her remain what they always were, and it is actually Eleanor who now has a new use for Abigail and is changing things around.
As I've said before, I applaud the writers and Hannah for creating Eleanor, because in retrospect I completely understand how she got to become who she is, but that doesn't change the fact that, by the start of the show, she is really not a nice person, at all, and honestly I came out of both the Max and Vane relationships feeling for them and hoping that they would find someone capable of loving them back. (I disagree that Vane never got her at all, but certainly he never got her enough, so that's really just splitting hairs.)
Haha re Idelle, she just strikes me as someone who is able to love without taking any bullshit, which as we have seen is definitely something any lover of Eleanor's needs, as well as being intelligent, highly driven, pragmatic and loving without being cloying (that's one reason I could never quite get on the Maxanor ship, because as much as I think Max is adorable, I just can't see any version where Eleanor doesn't get few up with her caretaking and squish her poor sweet heart like a bug. Maybe it's because I'm more like Eleanor than anyone else on the show and it would personally drive me up the wall, but while I can see a healthy AU Eleanor working with a healthy AU Vane, or Anne, or Flint, or even Miranda, I can just never imagine a reality in which Eleanor at her core and Max at her core work in the long run. I'm sorry please don't hate me!)
Wow that was looooong I'm sorry.
Reply
no, i like this reasoning! i'm probably exactly the right person to admit you don't like maxanor to lmao. i totally see what you mean and buy that their ways of loving and being intimate were at their core, incompatible. i'm down with the eleanor/idelle theory. idelle isn't afraid to put anyone, even the scariest pirate, in their place either, and eleanor needed more than a bit of that. just not from flawed messengers who come with too much baggage and bite.
Reply
But then she did make him choose between her and his father figure when he can't have been more than 21, purely as a show of her power, so we can't say he didn't know who she was...
Gah, it's embarrassing how much I care for/worry about all these long-dead fictional characters, even the ones I don't like. I don't usually get like this I swear!
Reply
the tragedy of vane/eleanor to me is that at some point, had she never been given up by hornigold, they might have ended up on the same side with the same goals. because up until the very end of season 2, vane was an obstinate shit who could not work with eleanor and flint, who did bad things himself (max was raped and brutalized under his watch). but season 3 vane with pre-season 3 eleanor alongside flint, madi, and silver and the rest of the pirate resistance would have been a superpower. and who knows what they could have worked out relationship-wise in that space.
please, that's just black sails, dude. it's gonna be a long time before i'm over this show or these characters!
Reply
up until the very end of season 2, vane was an obstinate shit who could not work with eleanor and flint
Actually, that's one of my bugbears of the series, because I don't believe that's really true, or at least we don't know whether it is, because they never really try. At no point does Eleanor sit down with him, explain what they are doing and invite him to join their project. The first time they ever discuss it with him is when they need him to hand over Abigail, which is right after Flint has tried to blow him up and he has tried to kill Flint (i.e. maybe not the best time for a calm conversation?). At that point, they all just expect him to hand over his $250,000 prize and get angry with him when he doesn't immediately agree. I actually think if they had tried to bring him on board earlier, as more of an equal partner than a wayward child, he might have come around without too much trouble (that's been his thing throughout the show, he flares up quickly but it passes once he's made his point and then he gets reasonable). I actually blame Flint more for the end result: If he hadn't been too busy ranting about Vane being a madman and an animal (not that I'm disagreeing as such, but it's a bit rich coming from a man who just strangled his loyal friend with his bare hands), but had trusted Eleanor's judgement and sat down with her and Vane, the whole thing could have ended very differently. Like, at that moment in time, between them they had a fort, a warship, a fortune in gold and the daughter of the nearest scary pirate hunter. In that moment, they could all have gotten what they wanted, and Miranda could have lived. But this is a cruel show, and so they didn't get it. :(
Reply
Reply
IDK IDK, so many possibilities, so many flawed characters foolishly screwing them up...
Reply
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment