The Role of Women in Black Sails

Scaly Llama

The women's roles in the Black Sails trailers fit interestingly within the concept of the scaly llama. The scaly llama, as described by Hurley (2013) refers to the cliches to which women (and others) are ascribed in popular fiction. They occupy stock roles, devoid of substance, and they do so for the most part because those are the roles that the audience understands. The first trailer for Black Sails is rife with cliched characters and scenarios. The female roles are notably hackneyed, but the male roles are pretty thin as well from the looks of the trailer. What the first trailer shows about the scaly llama narrative is that the characters are exactly as you would expect them to be. The male pirates are these sort of kinless scumbag types. The females are almost a non-factor in the trailer, barely even appearing. The first appearance of a female in the trailer is when two women are in bed together, which is actually going beyond the typical stock character trope stuff into the offensive characterization of women as worthy of no attention unless they are having sex.

The one instance of a female character doing anything in the first trailer other than having sex is the one wife character who is naturally upset at whatever it is her man has gotten them into. This is the classic "women, cattle and slaves" character -- the strongest female protagonist is little more than a nag whose role is to get upset at her man's doings and transpirings. This role is classic scaly llama -- the character has been written this way because that is what all female characters of this archetype are like. At best, this is a Lady Macbeth, at worst a Marge Simpson who flips tables. Either way, the character is written according to a cliched stereotype that fits with audience expectations. And the other females are here for titillation apparently, also feeding into audience expectations.

In a television show, the passage of many episodes and seasons usually allows for characters to become more fully developed. The Season Three trailer shows improvement in particular in the female characters, or at least the way that the trailer presents them. They are more active, less directly sexual, and play important roles. Where the one wife in the Season One trailer is a behind-the-scenes player, a couple of the females in the season three trailer appear to be more active in taking their role as stakeholders in their own lives. This represents the other side of the scaly llama argument. The characters are not as overtly conventional, and do not pander to the lowest of audience expectations. It is hard to give full credit to the writers, in the sense that all characters by Season Three should be more fully developed, but the active nature of the women in their interactions with the male power figures like the British admiral/governor character are at least a step in the right direction.

Even among the females that feature in the trailer, there are still lazy cliches, such as the seductress-type character, which is and old favorite of male-dominated fiction. Such a character serves to characterize female sexual power as a threat to men's interests, but ultimately this is a stock character that the audience surely expects to see.

That said, females still are woefully in short supply in the trailer, which remains a male-dominated affair. This again fits with audience expectations of the times, as the setting is a frontier culture and the pirates versus soldiers theme would be expected to be male-dominated. This is why the writers can only get partial credit for the advances that they made with the female characters -- while one or two may play a bigger role, overall they are still hard to find, and remain in supporting roles.