#i wrote out script for a scene where izzy and ed are talking

[asneakyfox]

somehow we're talking again about the anchor-raising scene in s1 and what alex sherman said about it and how it should play into our understanding of izzy and racism so you know what i'm going to finally post this thing i wrote about it in 2022 and have had sitting in drafts this entire time

i think the amount of focus this fandom has put on the anchor-raising scene is wildly disproportionate to its importance to how we should understand the relevance or lack thereof of racism to izzy's arc. if racism is important to understanding izzy the place where it matters is how it affects his relationship with ed. whatever's going on in the anchor-raising scene it's just sort of background flavor; the other thing is central to the plot.

asking alex sherman about the scene was weird because the blocking of that scene never would have been the writers' decision in the first place? i assume everyone's seen tv and movie scripts before, how often have you seen a scene with 9 people present where the script specifies exactly where every character is standing and what they're doing, unless it's a crucial plot point? that decision would be made by the director. if you want to know about creator intent on this you'd have to ask bert & bertie.

we don't know what they'd answer. but my guess is having the characters of color doing hard labor was intentional - it's directors' job to think about the implications of the visuals, it's a failure if they didn't! - BUT it wasn't intended to be something izzy did on purpose, or even something he did subconsciously, it's a visual metaphor that's part of the narrative generally aligning izzy "friend of the crown" hands with systems of oppression.

(this circles back to a point i made all the way back in one of my first meta posts in this fandom, about how "is izzy personally motivated by racist and/or homophobic beliefs inside his fictional heart, whether consciously or not" and "are racism and/or homophobia important to understanding the role izzy plays in this narrative" are two different questions, and while the first one can be interesting if you're writing fic about izzy or whatever i personally care a lot more about the second one)

however we still really don't know what the directors were going for with the blocking! "izzy did this on purpose because he's consciously overtly racist" is i think unlikely, but "izzy did this but not on purpose because he's subconsciously racist" and "we considered the implications of having only the characters of color doing hard labor and it wasn't ideal but there were other reasons to block the scene that way" and "we actually fucked up and didn't think about it at all" are all possible as director intent.

alex says "the overt racism aspect" is not meant to be there, and the word overt does a lot of work in that sentence. he's ruling out deliberate fully conscious racial animus as being the intention of the writing team for izzy's motivation; he is not ruling out the writers intending us to understand racism as playing into the situation in more subtle or less conscious ways. in fact i would suggest he's specifically leaving that open; there's no reason for "overt" to be in that sentence at all unless you are specifically trying not to address the possibility of less overt kinds of racism being a factor.

all the focus on whether alex sherman has officially cleared izzy of racism charges has led to people weirdly ignoring a lot of other interesting stuff in that dm. for instance he tells us something the writers DID intend to convey about izzy that seems to have been lost on a lot of the fandom: the fact that he deeply craves power and genuinely wants to be captain instead of ed very badly but cannot actually lead because he lacks any respect for people working under him. he says this was originally not just a plot point in ep 9 but a major running theme for izzy's arc throughout the whole season, and the writers decided to cut all but two scenes about it since the point had already been made. people occasionally remember this but i very rarely see fan content that treats ambition and the desire to wield power over others as core character traits of izzy's. the alex sherman dm is super clear about that being one of the most important things the writers' room was trying to convey about him! yet i still run across meta insisting that izzy actually never wants ed to retire so he can be captain at all. (i mean if you want to go death of the author on this that's fine, but then you don't get to appeal to alex on the racism thing either.)

(this brings up another thing that annoys me about this whole conversation, which is that it's nearly always framed as a thing where if izzy can simply beat the allegations of racism and homophobia then everyone should have to acknowledge that he is a sympathetic character from the start. this is wild. izzy does lots of very bad things for bad reasons and this remains true whether or not bigotry is among those reasons. the question of whether he's racist or homophobic is not about whether he's a bad guy or even really how much of a bad guy he is so much as how exactly we should understand his bad guy role and its interactions with the themes of the narrative. like, alex's answer in the dm more or less amounts to "we intended to emphasize these other classically villainous traits instead of racism," despite the fact that he's responding to a question that's clearly framed around begging him to say izzy is intentionally sympathetic.)

(this is also all completely orthogonal to issues of whether fandom racism is a factor in why this white guy gets such disproportionate focus compared to his role in canon and how ed tends to be demonized and/or infantilized in fic and headcanons so that people can position izzy as a good guy relative to him. people conflate the two issues of "is izzy hands the fictional character personally racist" and "is there racism at play in how the fandom reacts to izzy" all the time but those two questions are largely unrelated.)

personally i do not think of izzy as holding or being motivated by overtly racist beliefs, at least not any moreso than any other white character from 1717 including stede.

i do think that izzy is a white man who's obsessed with making his indigenous boss conform to a persona that's based around a racialized caricature, because that benefits izzy and because it satisfies his personal fetishes and because he sees this indigenous man as capable of performing hypermasculinity to a degree that he himself a white guy cannot, and he's willing to ally with empire to make this happen, and i think it is worth noticing the racial implications of all that and taking it into account in understanding izzy's role in this narrative.

[darkfire359]

the way Ed's plot was written in season 2 felt like a fanfic that I'd start to read but stop halfway through because I thought his character felt too different compared to what we know about Ed from season 1. So many missed opportunities and scenes played the wrong way. They wanted a lovely romance between two main characters who we love and instead turned a lot of people against them for various understandable reasons. I don't personally hate ed now but his character did rub me the wrong way in scenes, like I was expecting more of the type of person he was in season 1, but with some progress or hope of progress to his character and state of being after he'd regressed to the depressed state he was in. Instead he felt too different in certain aspects that were so important and understood during the first season. Was it that so much progress was as skipped over and done off screen? Maybe that's part of it. But if so there was a lot of very important work done off screen. I think it just didn't happen, really, and that's worse. While I think everyone moving on and repressing what happened is fine, it should still be addressed as a big issue that needs some resolving. Ed feeling awful about what he'd done was played way too insignificant. He had one talk with Fang and that's really it. If Ed feels so bad and doesn't want to be a pirate because he dislikes the life it leads, we should SEE that like we did in season 1. We should see guilt and shame and a want to become better and not immediately come back to the crew with a scripted speech for the funnies and barely show his remorse throughout the rest of the show. It's like there was too much to address and so little time, but I have doubts that they would have addressed it given more time. I think they wrote the season as they wanted it and it just so happened that it was in a way that was really disappointing to me.

Agreed. I think they could have kept the flippancy of the response to the Kraken era if they would have dialed down the impact of the Kraken era—not having Ed take the extra toes and shoot Izzy, not having Lucius end up on ships that assaulted him, not having the crewmembers have literal PTSD flashbacks, etc. Plenty of people wrote post-S1 fanfic where they skipped right over it and magically had everyone hanging out happily as a crew again, because sometimes that's just what you want to focus on. And they could have kept the intensity of the kraken era if they similarly focused on the aftereffects of the kraken era.

Instead they mixed the two and it just feels dissonant.

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

recently i've figured out that writing the intro chunk to a bigger piece BEFORE i start outlining the whole story usually works out better for me, so i get a better feel for how the story is gonna flow and stuff and i get excited early about where it's going.

so now that the first chapter of the amnesia fic is posted i'm plotting out what's going to happen and oh boy. Oh Fuckign Boy.