The Problem of Pirate Protagonists

 It is Easter! So that means I am back on Tumblr, if you care about these things.

I am writing about pirates this week for Reasons. I am flashing back to the line “good, honest pirates” from one of the Castaways of the Flying Dutchmen books, but I haven’t read it in ages, so I don’t feel comfortable bringing up in the Note.

The Problem of Pirate Protagonists

Something I thought about the last time I watched the Pirates of the Caribbean movies is that it’s a bit weird that we’re rooting for the pirates. Isn’t? The whole threat in the third movie is that the bad guys are planning to wipe out piracy forever, and this is bad because…well, it’s not. Objectively speaking, it’s not. Piracy is bad. I don’t know how else to put this, but when a bunch of people sail up and demand you hand over your valuables while waving guns or swords in your faces, those are the bad guys!

So how do you do a pirate protagonist?

Well, Gene Wolfe decided to go the route of, ‘Yeah, pirates are bastards, and you’ve got to deal with it.’ The protagonist of Pirate Freedom engages in pillaging, slavery, and oversees his men murdering, torturing and raping as they go through their quest for more treasure. The man’s very clear that these are all very bad things, and doesn’t even try to excuse them, but it makes for grisly reading. Most fiction isn’t that grim.

In the opposite direction, we have Pirates of the Caribbean, which has this weird thing where we don’t actually see our pirate protagonists do any pirating. They’re not quite the Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything, but it’s close. It’s a point of contention between Jack and his crew at the beginning of Dead Man’s Chest, actually. They’re broke because they haven’t robbed anyone, instead indulging in Jack’s quest to be free of Davy Jones. The rest of the movies, they’re busy with Plot. 

I think they easily could have done something with the villains of these movies. The East India Company wants to eliminate pirates, not for the justice of the act, but because they want to rule the seas in their place. It wouldn’t take a lot of screentime to point out that the East India Company ruling the seas would be far from benevolent in their reign. Yeah, pirates are one evil, but they’re not imperialism, right? Instead the movies shout, “FREEDOM!” and hope you don’t notice that their definition of “freedom” means sea muggings.

[There’s also not really a clear reason why the Brethren Court or the Pirate Code even exist, considering how often it’s just brought up when the Plot needs it. The novel Price of Freedom fixes this, by the statement that the pirates follow the Code in order to limit themselves. It’s not because it’s the right thing to do as much as, “Oh snap, if we go too far and cross too many lines, the empires of the world will bulldoze us without a second thought.”]

I think a good medium path is what we see in Assassin’s of the Caribbe–I mean, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag; at least, when it comes to the storyline. The gameplay of being a pirate is loads of fun, but throughout the story characters are constantly telling Edward Kenway, the protagonist, how he’s an awful person. He has sympathetic motivations, but this is undermined because he’s constantly chasing after get-rich-quick schemes and will ditch his friends to do so. He’s not that much of a backstabber to his companions, but he isn’t particularly helpful to be around, either because his help is often undercut by his own search for wealth and power.

Yes, he’s an active pirate, and yes, he’s sympathetic–he ultimately wants to get enough wealth to be able to go back to his wife and raise their social standing. But his wife is fine with their low status and he hasn’t seen or written to her in years because his chase for wealth is going in circles for like a decade. By the time he actually writes to her, and gets a letter back, we find out that she’s been trying to reach him for decades and has passed away–though their daughter he didn’t know they had is still alive.

Show your pirate actually doing piracy, for starters. But don’t take it too far if you want your readers to have any sympathy for them. It’s also fairly necessary that you don’t glorify it, or ignore the part of these characters lives where they actually kill people for a living. Okay, look, there are scholars who think maybe Blackbeard never killed anyone, but he still showed up with the threat of violence to rob people on the high scenes. That’s far from benevolent.

Piracy is bad! That doesn’t exclude it from being a protagonist’s occupation, but keep in mind that you need to write that into the story.

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