Jon Steinberg on John Silver II

[stele3]

“We were able to kind of strangely name something you didn’t think you were looking for a name for. Which is the space between them and not, you know, specifically who did what to Silver when he was a kid.”

“When I watch it the clear implication is that [Silver’s past] is awful. Which I think if the story is going out of its way to suggest it’s unspeakable, considering the things we have spoken about, I as an audience am willing to take its word for it I guess is a way of putting it, that if you are invested in that character and you understand where all of the norms are set for the show, for someone to say, ‘I can’t say it out loud’, suggests that it really is awful. […] [it] was so terrible that it broke his ability to exist within a story.”

“It was not credible that [Silver] didn’t have a story. There’s a hint that wherever he comes from is pretty dark. It felt right to not put words to it. It was so awful, it was something he couldn’t speak about. That that’s all you need to know.”

— Johnathan E. Steinberg, Co-Creator of Black Sails on Silver’s traumatic past

Comments

[stele3]

All of which is incredibly true to children who have survived trauma, particularly sexual trauma. Frequently they lose the ability to think of themselves in a past tense; they think of their experiences as happening to someone else, a different person, who they have left behind to die. They create a different, new self who is free from what they experienced before. In that light, what happened to John Silver in the past is entirely without meaning, because it holds no meaning to who he is now; but John Silver is not just who he is now. Coping mechanisms like that only get you so far before you royally fuck over your own ability to relate to other people or yourself, which is exactly what happens at the end of the series.

[rydra_wong]

um hi I'm not on Tumblr but yours is one of the Black Sails Tumblrs I check into on there and I'm a fan of the Tether series so hi

ETA: here via content search, hope that's not weird, etc.

[stele3]

Hail and well met, my friend!