Archive of Our Own

This might get a little fandom discoursey so bear with me but if y'all haven’t worked out I’m a little fandom discoursey by now idk where you’ve been.

There’s come a trend in fandom over the past decade or so where one ship is declared the “good” ship. It’s the pure, good, soft ship, where the characters who make up that ship are good and pure and soft uwu babies who never have done anything wrong in their lives. And on the flip side there is a “bad” other character who is often shipped with one (or both) of those soft babie uwu characters and that Bad character is villainized and made out to be The Worst. It usually starts with a character being accused of being a meanie/rude/a dick, then it amps up into abusive, then from there when fandom doesn’t disavow the ship, it becomes an incestuous or pedophilic ship.

But the core of it remains the same: the two in the ship are pure and good, the one on the outside is bad and evil, so why would you ship those characters when the uwu pure babies are right there?????

(I have a theory that a good chunk of this particular rhetoric comes from a combination of radfem and toxic leftist fields where one mistake once in your life (in radfem circles this can mean anything from being male (or seen as male) to having liked/supported a man once) means you are unforgivably and unendingly tainted, you can never recover nor improve from that mistake. I personally think this treatment of people is terrible, no matter how bad their sin might be (from “liked a bad character” up to “committed a real life crime”) because if you declare someone a write off, they have no reason to ever try to be better, and that continues the perpetual cycle of pain and suffering endlessly. If you tell someone who hurts other people they can never change, even if they want to, and they thusly do not try, people continue getting hurt.

But; it trickled down into the fandom = activism circles, where what you ship shows what you believe in real life. You think that gay ship is not great? Homophobic. You prefer a ship with two white people over a ship that includes a black person because the former has Spice and the latter is more bland and healthy? Racist. Etc etc. Your fictional preferences show who you are in real life, according to these ideals.)

To come back around to Ed and Izzy though: Blackbonnet is the Designated Soft Uwu Ship, which makes Izzy the abusive interloper. The way some people talk about Ed and Stede, you’d think they were watching a totally different show lmao

I saw a conversation on Twitter that was like, “Let’s not start romanticizing the real Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard! They were bad people, they were murderers and rapists and slave owners. They’re completely different from these characters!” And while, yes, I can see that point (although I would argue that Blackbeard has been endlessly romanticized for decades, much like we all romanticize being a pirate in general. I honestly forgot he was a real person until recently), and do appreciate that our Stede and Ed are not rapists* and are not slave owners or traders, I feel like the argument of, “The real Stede and Ed were bad,” has the underlying, incorrect, argument that our Stede and Ed are, in fact, not bad.

The thing is, Stede and Ed are not bad, no, but they’re not good either, and honestly they are down the darker end of the morally grey spectrum (further, I would argue, than Izzy Hands himself). Stede sets fire to the party boat and is smug about it, Ed’s list of crimes is very long and not just in an official Crimes Against The Crown capacity but in a real way: he’s maiming people as recently as Stede says in episode six that he has seen Edward maim people.

But Stede and Ed are framed as protagonists. They’re morally grey, deeply impure protagonists, but they are our protagonists. We root for them. When Stede and Ed sail away and leave a boat full of rich people to burn to death in the middle of the ocean, we root for them. When Stede runs away to become a (pillaging, looting, murdering, maiming) pirate, we root for him and even hope to see him achieve those things in the future.

The show aired and then fandom does what fandom (unfortunately) does best: while one half of it dissected all the canon and tried to interpret and make sense of the characters from what they say and what actions they take or don’t take on screen, the other half distilled everything down to: Izzy Bad, Stede and Ed Good.

(In fact, I received these tags on one of my metas earlier and it’s very true: #OP YOU GET IT#ofmd#it is always so confusing to see posts where its like omg other ppl actually watched this show and had like#thoughts based off of canonical moments that uses the characters actions and dialogue as a means of analysis#instead of just vibing off of ‘i dont like this chara so everything he does is bad’)

But the thing is, Stede and Ed do some shitty things, and to specifically talk of Ed in relation to this ask, Ed does some horrible shit in the finale. He’s stated to have done a lot of bad things before the show starts, and then he shows those bad things in the finale: he leaves six people to die on a tiny spit of an island (and surely tells Izzy how to trap them there via fake talent show, though this is conjecture), yeets Lucius off into the ocean to die (so that’s seven), and cuts off Izzy’s toe in a brutal and horribly framed moment that would make him downright irredeemable in many shows and to most of the “pure uwu ships for me only” people out there, and now, in fandom, to a lot of people, you can only like ships or characters that align with your morality.

(I saw an anon earlier (I don’t recall where, apologies) say they hate Izzy because they can only relate to characters whose actions they morally agree with, and honestly that made me do a double take because uh, anon that sent that particular message, are you going to be cutting off toes and burning people alive, bud? Can you let me know so I can keep out of your way, champ?)

So, what’s a “my shipping preferences are pure uwu and healthy” person to do?

Blame it on the Bad Guy.

Which brings us, yet again, back to this ask: Izzy is manipulative because Izzy has always been in Ed’s life, and thusly all of the bad things Ed has ever done can be written off as Izzy’s influence.

The black and white thinking means that anyone who shouts or makes another character scared or flinch is Bad, and Izzy shouts and is rude a lot. There’s no nuance, there is no value beneath the surface. When Izzy yells he’s being abusive. When Izzy yells at Edward he’s being racist. When Izzy gets angry and lashes out, he’s being, again, abusive.

When Izzy goes, “Ohhh, daddy,” he’s mocking gay men, not getting lost in his own attempt to be annoyed by their softness with each other and accidentally revealing too much of himself.

(And, honestly, the more I muse on that scene and all of the scenes around it, the less I read Izzy as, in any way, homophobic. He was pissed they were fucking around. He was maybe jealous they were canoodling and he couldn’t with the one he loves. He was angry that Lucius would cheat on Pete. All of those interactions were born more out of resentment and frustration than actual homophobia, and I stand by that. Not to mention that considering how Edward treats the guy who called him a donkey, and how he reacts to just about anyone who treats him or those around him with prejudice, and the fact Izzy knew Calico Jack well enough to send him after Edward, I find it very hard to believe that Edward would keep Izzy around if Izzy was homophobic or, for that matter, racist. People have commented that Jack calling Ed “Blackie” might be a racist nickname, but I wonder if, much like some people have called out shortening Oluwande to Olu as uncomfortable in the language the name comes from (something about Olu meaning God and it being not great to call Oluwande “God”? Something about it being disrespectful?), it was just one of those things that slipped through. Shortening Blackbeard to Blackie as a way of saying, “I’m still special. You get to call him Ed, but I get to nickname Blackbeard down to Blackie and he doesn’t kill me, I’m important too,” makes a lot of sense to me.)

By making everything Ed does Izzy’s fault, they’re absolving Ed of the responsibility he holds for every horrible thing he’s done in his life. Ed is responsible for the murder of his father (whether that father deserved it or not). Ed is responsible for the people he’s killed since then, whether “technically the [x] killed them” or not. Ed is fully responsible for marooning seven people on an island to die (and they would be dead if Stede didn’t find them, is the thing!! They would be dead!!) and killing Lucius, whether he managed to kill those seven people or not.

Here are a few of the things nasty anons have said about Izzy:

He’s not going to be around being a toxic abusive piece of shit forever. Quit trying to normalize & downplay the horrible way he treats other characters.

This one misses the point and makes me laugh because it downplays everything Ed does by implying Izzy is the only toxic and/or abusive person there (Ed! Cut! Off! His! Toe!)

He is unnecessarily violent in speech and behavior, particulary towards BIPOC. He is manipulative, he’s a liar, and he has tried to kill or threatened to kill multiple people on the crew.

The first part is patently untrue, actually. He’s loud and rude and angry but I don’t find much of his speech to be violent? Just coarse. He’s definitely not 'particularly towards BIPOC’, it’s just that his scenes are often framed with BIPOC around him because of how few white people are in the show (which is a definite good thing, but it means every time Izzy yells at someone he is, by virtue of the show being so diverse, yelling at someone who is a minority either in sexuality, disability, or color, unless he yells at Stede or Lucius, which uh. he does. a lot. he’s shown yelling at and being rough with Lucius and Pete more than anyone else).

As for manipulative and a liar, potentially he lied about telling Stede who his boss was, but even if that’s so, it just says a lot about how Izzy is The Bad Guy whereas Ed is Pure UwU. Ed is also manipulative, that’s shown a lot when he’s masking (see: party boat when he’s saying whatever) and when he comes up with the plot to kill Stede to keep Izzy on board. Ed also lies a lot. Like, a lot a lot. I’ve talked about this before. Most of what Ed says is a lie lmao. You have to read between most of Ed’s lies to find even a sliver of truth.

And then there’s the pièces de résistance of this particular comment: He has tried to kill or threatened to kill multiple people on the crew.

lmaaaaaaaaaao. Ed stranded six people who trusted him on an island, had Jim knocked out and, technically, kidnapped, and yeeted Lucius into the ocean!!! And maimed Izzy!!!!!

Just because YOU have decided to bend over backwards to justify Izzy’s abusive behavior doesn’t mean he’s not abusive. He is. And you are not only actively ignoring and denying that abuse (and BLAMING IT ON HIS VICTIMS) but you’re justifying it! […] He’s possessive, controlling, manipulative, a gaslighter.

I like this one too because the more I muse on it the more I realize a lot of this is more reflective of Ed? I don’t think Ed is abusive, don’t get me wrong (there is FAR MORE to abuse than just 'this guy is mean’ or 'they yell’), but the second Izzy stepped out of line, Ed maimed him. Izzy hurt him trying to protect him, Ed hit him. Ed let Izzy get cast off the boat after the dual.

When Izzy tried to leave of his own volition, Ed stopped him.

So, to boil this all down after I rambled for this long: Izzy is The Villain and a Bad Person because he is easy to hate. He’s short, old, angry and mean. He isn’t cute about anything (okay, I can’t say this one with a straight face. The wave at the start of 1x09 is adorable). As long as Izzy is a puppeteer, Ed can be a soft uwu baby and he can be safe to love and stan and whatever else.

Ed gets his guts ripped out, replaced by a fluffy interior because without Izzy he’s perfect, you see. Ed is a perfect soft baby who has never done anything wrong in his life, and thusly it’s safe to love him. You’re not a bad person for loving him! He’s never actually done anything, he would never actually hurt someone he loves (and, yes, he canonically loves Izzy in some way, there’s a long-standing depth of relationship and affection there that is very obvious in the way they are together and from the way (up until 1x10 when Ed is already broken and far too easy to snap) Ed puts up with Izzy’s tizzies. I somehow doubt Ed would put up with someone else calling him a twat and flipping him off and just go, “I need you here,” rather than telling them to fuck off) so he’d never hurt Stede and there’s nothing dark in him or their potential relationship, so it’s fine.

And Stede hasn’t ever actually done anything wrong either! Sure, he’s made some bad choices, but he was in shock so he’s absolved of running off on Ed (I do agree he was in shock and I am in no way picking on the person who meta’d that Stede was in medical shock at the end of 1x09 - I fully agree! - but I’ve seen some other people act like that absolves him of the harm he did to Ed, and it really does not) and he didn’t personally kill either Badminton, they both killed themselves, even Nigel who was unconscious when he fell on his sword due to Stede hitting him. That was all Nigel’s fault.

And those on the party boat set the boat on fire themselves and Stede had no part in it. He didn’t make them fight! That was all them, because they are Bad People, so they would, of course, do those things.

Bob’s your uncle, Sally’s your aunt: Stede and Ed are now a soft uwu ship who you can love without worrying about what it says about your moral fiber as a human being. They’re both good people! They’ve never done anything.

It was all Izzy’s fault all along.

Also, I want to make another point which I thought of while I was writing this: I don’t think Izzy expected Ed to go full Kraken. I was thinking about how he flipped out at him in 1x03, after the clothing swap. He tells him he’s an insane shell of a man and he’s pissed off and he’s leaving and he calls him a twat and storms off.

To which Ed responds with a sort of squinty-big-eye thing idk how Taika pulls that one off but he did, and lets Izzy fuck off and do his thing, because Izzy is just being Izzy and doesn’t mean any of it, really, and then after that, Ed is like, “You’re being silly. Blackbeard has had a plan all along re: Stede, here it is,” and Izzy is like “:o Oh okay! That’s nice. Okay, yes, good.”

So when 1x10 comes around, and Ed is, once again, dressed in Stede’s clothes and being him, Izzy once again lashes out and basically tells him, in his own way, to pull his shit together, because this isn’t the person Izzy serves.

The big issue here is that Ed is no longer the person he was even an episode before. Ed is a broken shell of a man who is just trying to pull his pieces back together.

Izzy doesn’t realize this. Izzy doesn’t have any way to know how Ed feels about Stede. Unless Ed bawled into Izzy’s lap in the pillow fort (which is a hilarious image I hope someone will draw now) about how they were going to run away to China (ouch for Izzy if so) and how romantic their kiss on the beach was, Izzy doesn’t know any of that. All Izzy knows is Ed had a bad time and now he’s sad and he’s mopey over the fact his boyfriend left him and it really sucks and this isn’t him (remember: David Jenkins says Ed has never been in love until Stede, so Izzy has never seen this happen to Ed before).

This isn’t Edward or Blackbeard, and it isn’t even Ed! And so Izzy lashes out expecting to jolt Edward back to some kind of reality, some kind of common ground they share where they can get stuff done and Izzy can serve someone he respects and have a captain that can, y'know, captain, instead of moping and putting on talent shows, like he did last time!

Instead, he accidentally shatters what’s left of Ed’s psyche because he jabs in just the wrong place (not knowing where the real weak spots are) and unleashes a monster not even Izzy has seen before.

And that’s actually really scary.

Thanks for the ask nonnie, I love musing on this shit lmao. Also, thanks for the comment about the meds. I’m so happy I might cry tbh.

(*the asterisks exists because we here on my Izzy Hands Enjoyer[tm] Blog Hot Spot have already discussed the framing of the toe scene and although Ed is not a rapist, the toe scene is beyond mildly questionable because of the framing, so our boy gets a lil asterisks)

(I think the first paragraph of this is referencing the person who said Izzy would get his comeuppance under one of my posts, that I replied to. If so, I want to clarify that they didn’t actually mean it that way, and came back to explain as such. It was just a matter of miswording.)

People who come into Izzy Enjoyers’ askboxes to bitch that he’s The Worst baffle me. The first time I received an abusive ask about him I had simply mentioned him in passing on a Blackbonnet post (along with Jim and Lucius and at least one other). The second time was the same thing. It was clear that I liked him, else I wouldn’t have included him, but I wasn’t feral about him yet. It was only once I told the anon how wrong they were and deep-dived on Izzy’s actual characterization in the show that I realized how much I loved him and how much he really didn’t deserve all the shit he gets.

Then again, the anons I got after that post, one of them told me they hoped I got shanked for liking him, and I thought that was downright hilarious because they were wishing a pretty nasty death on me and meanwhile Izzy’s (who they said was abusive and terrible) worst crime was he tried to get Stede mercifully executed. It was just very funny to me. They were acting like their perception of Izzy, which they deemed made me immoral because I like him. Makes me wonder what that says about them.

I think if the toe scene had been in Black Sails, it likely would have been a sexual assault (see: my comments on the framing of that scene) rather than the toe thing, which although wasn’t contextually played for laughs, it was somewhat used as a… muppety, over the top thing that Ed comments on having done in the past? Because it’s over the top and vaguely cartoonish, it becomes a lot less dire than what something like Black Sails would have done, and more fitting of the show. But even on something like Black Sails, what Izzy did receiving a punishment like that would have been something that– Well, a bad guy did. Someone who our protagonists were actively fighting against. (I do respect OFMD for being willing to push Edward down that morality scale, with the faith to bring him back up, actually)

Calico Jack fit a purpose but he really was deeply irritating, and it wasn’t helped at all by the fact I love Black Sails’ Calico Jack, who is, and I have said this before, the only Black Sails character who could flounce into OFMD and fit right in, right along with his stupid little sunglasses and mullet.

Originally posted by john-silvers

And no, Calico Jack definitely doesn’t deserve his toe cut off and fed to him for killing Karl (which was definitely deliberate. He did that on purpose. Whether he did it to push the crew to turn against Ed or whether he did it because he just enjoyed it, well, idk either way, but it was deliberate through and through).

I HOPE JACK IS ALIVE TOO ACTUALLY!! I want to see him and Izzy interact. More than that, I want to see him come back on board and Ed forgives him because eh, he forgave Izzy so he has to forgive Jack really, doesn’t he, and it’s all water under the bridge now isn’t it, so you just end up with Ed going full jack-ass again with Jack, and Izzy and Stede off to the side, bonding against their will over how much they hate Jack.

I can just see it in my head, you know?

Stede: mm, i wonder
Izzy: What
Stede: What? oh, i didnt know you were there. no, i was just talking to myself. last time jack was here he said his last two crews mutinied and tied him to an anchor and threw him overboard, and i was just wondering–
Izzy: If it was true? Oh I guarantee it was bloody true. Fucking git, I can’t stand him.
Stede: …
Izzy: …
Stede: … actually
Izzy: ?
Stede: I was actually wondering if our anchor could be spared for a night
Izzy: I’ll fetch the rope, you distract Edward

Plus, Stede being jealous of Jack is adorable and I love it, and him and Izzy recognizing jealousy in each other over it being pointed at someone else rather than each other? Nice.

But even if I wanted to see him tortured horribly and dead I still wouldn’t post that on his tag or go up to people who like him to tell them this in detail and they’re horrible for liking him?????

Right? It’s so fucking weird they’re like this!!!

It’s not even that they hate Izzy or want to imagine drawn out torture porn for him that’s like. Fine. Write it down and stick that up on ao3 with the correct tags im sure more people are into that.

Oh, no no no, they can’t do that. That would be wrong. Hurting a fictional character is the same as hurting a real person. Unlike spewing venom and death wishes into their inbox!

But to act like it’s the Moral and Good thing to want this to happen in canon and everyone who disagrees is glorifying abuse and not see the contradictions there is????????? Puritan logic is truly something else.

YESSSSSSS. Oh yes. And it’s weird to see people so vehemently arguing that something like the toe scene could ever be moral and good?? It’s weird. And they act like Izzy is abusive for yelling at Ed a bit, but Ed isn’t abusive for cutting his damn toe off without his consent!!

They get to the result first (hating a thing) then work the logic backwards (so the thing is morally impure and you not liking it is a sign of your virtue. Everyone who disagrees is evil) so the result is impossible to budge

This is precisely it, yeah. Idk if you saw this post but a nonnie asked why people try to say Izzy is so manipulative and I boiled it down to: if Izzy is Bad and Manipulative, Ed is free to be an uwu soft baby who has never done anything wrong himself, it’s all been Izzy.

I think it probably just starts with people seeing the fact that a lot of us love Ed and Izzy’s chemistry (and Izzy and Stede’s!) and would love to see more of that chemistry, and thusly want to explore or write about it, or root for more to come of it in canon (look, I would love to see Ed and Izzy have a furious make out scene, okay? give me that, show, please. even if it was a flashback or something) and they feel threatened and afraid that this ship that they don’t like might win out over their main ship.

I think a chunk of that fear comes from how accessible the writers are now? Back in Ye Olde Days if you wanted to tell David Jenkins how much you love Izzy, you’d have to write a letter or an email or something, and send that off as fanmail, and his secretary would probably read it, or his intern or whatever, and that intern or the studio execs or whatever would eventually be like, “You know, the fans really respond well to Izzy. It seems like having more Izzy and Con would be good for ratings.”

But nowadays, I can go onto Twitter, @ david Jenkins and start yelling about how much I love Izzy and Blackhands, and there’s a pretty good chance he’ll read it. Con spends half his life yelling at tories and the other half of his life retweeting spicy Izzy art, a lot of which includes Blackhands or Steddyhands or even Gentlehands. It’s very clear that the cast and crew and thusly also the writers are being exposed to this ship and its shippers, and I think that terrifies the kind of people who feel that those ships threaten their OTP’s canonity. (Is that a word? Canonness? Canananananofnsnks)

(I dont use twitter bc it’s a cesspit but Ive had to block so many morons on the Izzy Hands tag here bc they’re either fully malicious tagging the hate or cant be trusted to know that if you write his name on the post it’ll go to the tag anyway)

I use Twitter and it really is a cesspit. What’s funny though is on Twitter I’ve never been yelled at or sent abusive asks for daring to like a character, unlike here on Tumblr where I have received many, yet I feel much safer and more comfortable on Tumblr than I ever did on Twitter. Go figure.

Im not even going to send this on anon I dont care lol

tbh the izzy haters seem more intent on yelling at izzy-likers and izzy-neutrals that mention izzy in passing than yelling at izzy lovers like you and I

it’s truly a weird thing

Oh, I enjoy my Izzy rages!

Gonna reply to the end of this first, then swing back up: I have two asks from you in my box; Monday and Sunday. If there’s more, I don’t have more, I just have those two.

I promise I’m not ignoring them and you’re not annoying me or anything like that, I enjoy your daddy dom and related asks very much (even though I might not always have a long/deep reply for them, I’m not amazing at replies to more general things than meta) it’s just that yesterday was a high stress day for me. I spent the whole day knowing I had to make a phone call at the end of my day (I’m nocturnal, so 9am when places open is the end of my day) and not just any phone call, but I had to call a vet about my duck. Then there was also the incident with the AO3 comment, and I spent most of the day compiling my metas and word counting them (40k) so I could add them to my general word count for the year. With all that, I didn’t have a lot of time to reply to more than a few messages! But I’m going to get to your messages today!

And, I don’t know if you noticed, but I gave you your own tag on my blog! So I can keep you and your collection of daddies sub-categorized!

Right, moving on to the rest:

I can see what’s happening re: Izzy. First, they decided he’s homophobic because of the daddy scene and the ‘namby pamby’ comment (I’ve also seen people double down on that, despite Izzy being in love with Ed and thusly queer himself. And I do know that queer people can be homophobic and queerphobic, but it does deeply change the angle from which that homophobia or queerphobia is coming, and also I stand by my reasoning that if Izzy was homophobic, Ed would have punted him by now, because he would have shown it around Jack; his issues aren’t homophobia, they’re “you’re not being a proper pirate” or “you’re not doing your job”, and possibly a perpetuation of a cycle of abuse he received, that he isn’t looking at critically enough to realize he’s acting like a homophobe at Lucius).

So, the “he’s homophobic!” didn’t work at shaming fans into hating him, so they levelled it up: he’s a racist fetishizer. Another read that, although I can understand people having that read or being uncomfortable with how he acts, it’s been pointed out by a black fan, in fact (among others as well), that considering the effort OFMD puts into actively telling racists to go fuck themselves, it would be poor writing on OFMD’s part to let Izzy slide the way the show does. It’s also worth noting that being rude or abrasive to a person of color does not an instant racist make, it can just be a person-on-person issue. That is actually a thing. Furthermore, which is another thing said in that piece and what I am referencing, the idea that Izzy wants Edward to be violent because he’s a man of color, not because he’s a pirate is not only laughable but a downright daft read, because everyone on that ship is a pirate and violent. If Ed was the only person of color it might be problematic, but they’re all so diverse and such a wonderfully mixed bag it means that Ed being a person of color is not why Izzy wants him to be violent.

And we’ve discussed at length here why Izzy likely wants Ed to be violent (pirate! safety! protection! vulnerability!) so I won’t dig back in here.

When “racist!” and “homophobic!” didn’t work, they started saying he was abusive, to which most of us said, “He was a meanie pants and then Edward cut off his toe and fed it to him? That is not Izzy being abusive. If you want to pick someone in that sequence who is abusive, it is most certainly Ed, did we watch the same show? Ed cutting off his toe can’t even be labelled as reactive abuse (eg. the victim of abuse gets abused to such an extent they start to strike back, somewhat mimicking their abuser’s actions) because it’s such a massive escalation from nasty words to outright permanent physical violence.”

So now those three things don’t work because the arguments either don’t hold weight (abusive), would make the show infinitely less good and well put together than it is right now and undermine a lot of the messages (racist), or is undermined itself by Izzy being in love with another man (homophobic), they’ve moved on to saying he’s a fetishizer, because that makes sense, right? Telling us who love him that we’re fetishizers didn’t work, so they’ll tell us that he’s the fetishizer.

Lots of people have explained better than I ever could that the word 'fetishize’ is being misused at length, but the tl;dr is that fetishizing is very different to 'finding someone attractive’ or 'enjoying when they act a certain way’. A fetish is something that is attractive to a person that isn’t naturally supposed to be. Finding someone’s lips or tits hot isn’t a fetish, finding someone’s feet hot is, because it’s not really meant as a sexual thing. It also doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing, it’s just a term. Fetishizing and sexualizing are both ridiculous terms, especially when they’re being applied to one grown adult finding another grown adult attractive or sexy in some way.

It’s also weird to read Izzy cupping Ed’s cheek with tears in his eyes as sexual rather than romantic or just affectionate. Ed has been a mess for days, and considering Ed was actively discussing suicide in 1x04 when they first boarded the Revenge (something Izzy looks devastated about, by the way, and then tries very hard to put aside as, “Well that makes no fucking sense!” and ignore because how, how, how do you handle something like that? How do you instantly swallow down that the person you love most on this godforsaken Earth is considering dying as a good idea because of the mental instability you’ve been spending most of your energy trying to stabilize for what seems like it might be years?) and has spent 3 days crying in a blanket fort and seeming completely not himself (and I’ve seen people say what he’s doing is a healthy mechanism for getting over and through a breakup, and I don’t disagree, but I do think he’s also trying to become Stede and I’m not really sure that’s as healthy as the crying and songwriting and letting out his feelings) on top of being apathetic and lethargic and disinterested in everything before they boarded the Revenge, and finally there’s a spark, a hint of who he used to be, and Izzy is clutching desperately to it because he wants his person back!!!

Sure, maybe the chokeslam turned him on, but as we’ve discussed here before: physical reactions are not something we control. You can be turned on by something you are actively disgusted by and do not want in the slightest. Bodies are betrayers when it comes to things like this. Izzy potentially being turned on by being chokeslammed by the person he’s most attracted to and in love with isn’t shocking and doesn’t mean he was, in that moment, lusting after Ed and hoping that being mean to him would lead to them boning against the wall, it just doesn’t.

So now we’ve done racist, homophobic, abusive and fetishizing, I assume the next steps over the next couple of weeks will be firstly that Izzy and Edward have clearly been a twosome for many years, and thusly it’s incestuous because they’re brother-coded (rather than canonically framed as being married couple coded), and then either because Izzy is historically 16 (much like Stede is historically 29) or because he’s short (and frankly I do not know which one is worse), the argument will be we’re all horrible people for shipping them, not because Izzy could get hurt but because we’re turning Ed into a sex offender.

Can’t wait to see that unravel between now and s2!!!

Please continue to send me lots of daddy dom and Izzy asks, I love receiving them and waking up to asks about Izzy makes me unfathomably happy.

I got all your asks just now! I thought you’d confused Monday and Sunday and just pasted the wrong ones, but this makes more sense! Monday is officially Matt Bomer in my brain right now, and I still want the real…Sunday, if Monday is really the con artist?

I’d like to just clarify that having criticisms of Izzy isn’t a bad thing, it’s just the black-and-white mentality and the way they ignore the very deliberately written show to justify their takes as Inarguably Correct. Most of these people prefer to use buzzwords to argue that we’re all bad people for liking Izzy, rather than either talking about their own feelings about him and explaining why they feel those things, or, if that’s too much for them (which is also fair), blocking his name from their social medias.

If someone reads Izzy as a homophobic, racist fetishizer and he makes them uncomfortable and unhappy, I’m not one to tell them to go fuck themselves. I just get annoyed when they act like everyone else should agree, regardless of text (racists actively being dealt with the moment they’re shown as such) and word of god (izzy is in love with ed) and so on.

(I also think a lot of them forget that there are often Doylist reasons for scenes, such as Wee John sitting down because he has a back injury, not because in-universe Izzy let the white people sit, especially after it was the white guy (Lucius) Izzy spent all of 1x05 telling to  actually work god damnit , and he doesn’t punish nor scold Fang for letting Lucius off his chores to sketch his dick in the captain’s cabin. Which is  hysterical  when you frame it like that.

My headcanon is also that Wee John also has a back problem much like the guy who plays him, and Izzy was good about it, which is also why his punishment for being a little bitch is  no rations for a week  rather than something like labor. Izzy was on the ship working with the crew long enough he’d know those things.)

And yes! You are special! You can sign your asks with that if you’d like, so I know it’s you, if you’re not actively sending messages about Izzy’s daddy doms that day :)

Gonna start here because it’s applicable to the whole rest of my thoughts:

that’s what I find all of these reductive readings have in common actually - the depersonalization and dehumanisation of the individuals involved. They become empty shells you can slap a neat label on and move them around the board like game pieces

It isn’t just depersonalization and dehumanization of Izzy and Ed, either, it’s depersonalization and dehumanization of the people writing and participating in the show, too. I made the mistake of opening the Izzy Hands tag and I immediately found people arguing about racism from Izzy again and, like, saying why people should be “cautious” or “careful” about shipping him and Ed because of it, specifically talking about the scene where the people of color are moving the anchor and Wee John is sitting down (a scene Ed wasn’t even in, mind), and one of the writers had explained that scene? And why it was done that way? And their take was to comment on how things can slide past the writers so easily? And I was just like– but– the writers wrote it– I dunno. It feels very… “You can’t write deliberately, you can only write how we see it.”? I’m not sure I’m phrasing this right. It just seemed like a way of handwaving the reasons for the scene being the way it was because they wanted to keep seeing what they were seeing, I guess? I see a lot of that, in fandom, and they do the same thing re: Izzy being supposedly homophobic.

(I think if the entire cast bar like three people were white and Izzy was very specifically framed as cruel to those three people and the three people were doing hard labor and all the white people were seated and doing nothing, that…? would be different? but you have to frame the scene in question against 1x05 (Lucius) and against everything else Izzy has done so far? And it’s… a dishonest reading, in my opinion (and as I’ve said, the opinion of fans of color who can and should talk about this far more than I can or should), and it’s the kind of reading where they extract a singular scene from the entire show and then present it without context to say “Look! Bad!” and honestly you can do that with everything? You could extract the scene where Stede is bossing Roach around re: the hostages on the beach and show it without context and say how that is racist too, and how when Stede bosses Lucius around in the first few episodes he’s being homophobic, or the way Stede reads stories to the crew and you could crop only the people of color into it and say he was infantilizing them, and so on.

When you divorce scenes and clips from their context, you, well, lose context, and it strips not only the characters and writers of their agency but also the actors who consented to take part in those scenes and deliver those lines.)

But that just comes back down to the essay I keep referencing that said it does the show a disservice to badly contextualize in this way, and people seem to think everyone should be a hive-mind about everything else, be it whether a show or scene is homophobic/racist/sexist/whatever or whether a character is likeable or not, even though everyone will always have differing ideas, including in reference to their own marginalization.

By the same token, when you take something like ‘namby-pamby’ firstly out of context and secondly pretend it’s on the same level as the f-slur, you’re just being disingenuous as fuck.

It’s like that clip of some right-wing show I remember seeing, where the guy was like, “Is saying cracker as bad as saying the n-word?” and the overwhelming response was, “My dude, clearly the fuck not, since you said cracker and went with 'the n-word’ instead of saying that. You knew it wasn’t on the same level, or you would have said both equally and ya didn’t.”

So when they say, “Oh, well, Izzy said namby-pamby but we all know he was calling Ed a f***,” they’re being deliberately disingenuous to paint Izzy as worse than he is. You can do that for just about every line in the show if you want to, you can say, “Well, Stede said I’m your friend but we all know he was saying Please don’t kill me.”

Well, no, they mean different things. They are different words. Words mean things, and they are chosen deliberately, especially in a writing context! People choose words deliberately when they’re speaking (so, the characters in question), and writers choose words with even more deliberate care and attention while writing.

Izzy didn’t say the f-slur because the f-slur is not what he was saying.

Now, I know that the anachronisms in the show are a popular conversation to laugh about, so although you are absolutely right about namby-pamby not meaning what they imply it means, although it can be used in a homophobic manner as you say, but I’m willing to say that technically, they’re probably using it in a more modern manner.

That said, it’s still not equitable to the f-slur, and considering the use of 'donkey’ earlier in the show, which was very specifically used to show the character in question as racist and then that character was immediately dealt with in response to that racism, I find it hard to believe that the person who wrote this line (David Jenkins, I assume, since it’s 1x10) 'was actually meaning the f-slur’.

There’s also the context that a queer man using a queer slurs against another queer man is miles different to a straight dude using a queer slur. Reclamation and all of that. So even if Izzy had used the f-slur, it would still be different in context (him also being queer, which is frankly canon due to the scenes with Lucius and the face touch with Ed, even without David Jenkins’ word of god saying he’s in love with Ed) than just a guy using a slur.

The ponce one amuses me especially since it was used against Stede in 1x04 and I mean, yeah. I know our Stede isn’t a slave owner (thank god), but he’s a landowner and the class slant of looking at Izzy using 'ponce’ to refer to Stede in this manner is excellent to mull over.

Is David Jenkins using words that are really no different from f***** now

I meaaaaaaan, as I said above, if it really was no different to the f-slur, I think you would have simply written the f-slur out, much like you wrote out namby-pamby. Instinctively we all know it’s not the same.

is he using words that had a different more nuanced connotation then and play into the class issues and Izzy’s fear of softness

Far more likely. Far more likely. When Izzy said 'namby-pamby’, I heard it more as comparing Edward to a foot kicking teenage girl on his bed pining after his schoolgirl crush than picking on the fact his schoolgirl crush was the same gender as him. I also heard it more as a comment on the fact he was literally walking around in an undone silk robe with literally no armor at all and was exposing his squishy inner core for the world to see.

It also meaning 'gay’ did not occur to me, I think because although homophobia very clearly does exist in the OFMD universe, it doesn’t quite exist in the same way on the Revenge, because most of the cast on that ship are queer.

See also: Jim being revealed as a woman and then being revealed as not a woman but not a man either, and the issues the guys have with that is “women have crystals in their bodies” (Frenchie, when he still thought they were a woman), “Can I be Jim if you’re not Jim anymore?” (the Swede) and “Can I go back to being mute?” (jim). We were still in muppet comedy when Izzy did his namby-pamby thing, we hadn’t genre shifted yet, and the muppet comedy of the Revenge doesn’t have homophobia.

Yes, the show does. Yes, the show discusses it in its own way, but the crew of the Revenge does not. No one comments on Lucius and Pete, who are not subtle. Pete says that Lucius has naked-sketched most of the crew. Lucius outright hits on Fang to get him to let him draw him and off of barnacle duty without a single fear he’ll be hate crimed for it. Lucius hits on Izzy because he knows Izzy might punch him for hitting on him, but it won’t be because he’s a dude, it’ll be because he’s pushing his damn luck.

Is he using those words as an audience shortcut to “Izzy simply thinks 'ew, gay’”? I don’t see how, looking at the totality of the character and Con’s performance (and later scripts were written with Con’s performance in mind).

If he wanted a true audience shortcut, using a term that’s far less common would not be a shortcut. The f-slur would be the shortcut, imo.

Also worth noting that my search came up with this for namby-pamby:

Definition of namby-pamby
1 : lacking in character or substance : insipid. 2 : weak, indecisive.

and I mean– it’s not that far off of Ed in his red robe. It’s not a very nice word to call someone, but there’s far worse to use out there.

Is he using words that at first glance make us think “oh a homophobe” and if you don’t think about it any further than the words used Izzy’s story in S2 might be more of a surprise and if you do it might be more satisfying? I hope so.

I hope so too.