#(not really but hopefully anyone who wants to brawl has that blacklisted)

[suffersinfandom]

This is a somewhat-hingeless rant about disability and OFMD/Izzy takes.

Tumblr handed me a "recommended" post that made me so mad I ended up deleting a moderately unhinged reply and walking away for a bit. It's still eating at me, so I'm just gonna reply to it indirectly.

(I know this is cowardly, but anything I say will just lead to fighting and I'm tired. If anyone wants to discourse about whatever I post, please do me a favor and don't rant at me directly. Take caps and scream into the void like a gentleperson.)

First: I am physically disabled and I often use visible disability aids (just establishing my credentials so I'm allowed to not support this take uncritically). I also have mental health issues and less visible physical issues that honestly cripple me more.

Second: the title alone, man. My main issue with this whole thing is the disability gatekeeping, but that interpretation... hngh. I don't think OFMD was trying to meet a disability quota, you know? It's not "we have three disabled people so we can kill one off."

"Izzy shouldn't have died because he's the most clearly, visibly disabled" is a weird take because it conflates two unrelated things: Izzy's disability and Izzy's death. It's okay to be upset that Izzy died because his specific disability was something you related to. It hurts to have representation taken away! But his death had a narrative purpose. It had nothing to do with his status as an amputee.

And yeah, people are disabled in different ways, but is acknowledging that really an invitation to dismiss some disabilities as invalid? Sure, let's gatekeep disability. Let's decide that some people aren't disabled, actually. Lucius, Black Pete, Wee John, Spanish Jackie, and Ed aren't disabled in a way that's huge and traumatic and life-changing, so throw them out.

Except Ed is one of our protagonists, and I'd argue that his issues are way more important to the narrative than Izzy's. Ed's bad knee is technically fanon (fanon that I love because I too have bad joints and a shit knee), but I would argue that Ed is absolutely canonically disabled. Are we really supposed to disregard his crippling mental health issues because they're not visible? We're just going to shrug off the suicidal despair that drove a huge chunk of the plot? Wild that something so central to the story just doesn't matter because it's not the right kind of disabled.

That was a tangent, sorry. Back to Izzy and the injury that was "thrust upon him."

Yes, his injury is life-changing and traumatic. I'm sympathetic -- but not as sympathetic as I would be if he hadn't played a significant part in the events that led to the loss of his leg.

"That's victim blaming!"

It's a statement of fact. As Izzy himself admitted, he drove the darkness in Ed. He dangled his leg over the side of the ship and a shark bit it off. The injury wasn't thrust upon him so much as actively courted.

Izzy tried to shoot himself in the head at his lowest moment. If I may misquote OP: if you cannot see that there is a WORLD of difference between Ed's multi-episode suicidal arc and Izzy impulsively seeking an out, I honestly do not know what to say to you.

But the big thing about Izzy is that he is a secondary character in a story. If you take off the Izzy blinders, you can see that it's not all about him. His go at suicide killed the symbol of toxic masculinity that he had been up to that point so his story could progress. When he crawled along the floor whining pathetically, his sheer levels of wet cat-ness brought the crew together. The crew rallying around him and giving him the love and forgiveness that he did not ask for? That was about the crew and their growth, not Izzy.

Izzy did not have some deep-seated care for the crew before he was shot. He didn't throw himself in front of a bullet for them. He was not the crew's protector. Izzy's growth began when Ed essentially fired him, and the real changes happened post leg removal.

But here's something super important: Izzy was not suicidal when he told Ed he was ready to go.

Because yeah, I agree, it'd suck if a character who attempted suicide spent a few episodes being rehabilitated and accepting love and who he is turned around and decided that he wanted to die. It's a good thing that's not what happened.

This is what made me decide not to reply directly. Yeah, clearly a lot of disabled queer people are upset. And you know what? That's fine! I always support feeling what you're feeling, even if that feeling is negative. I'm sorry that other queer disabled people are hurting, and I don't want to add to that hurt by being directly confrontational.

Then OP said the last part and I was riled all over again. I was prepared to reblog since I meet their criteria (or maybe I don't -- I might not be the right kind of disabled), but what's the point? How miserable do I want to be? How much do I want to make them miserable?

I know I ranted a lot here, but what I'm getting at is this: Izzy DID NOT "go from wanting to die after a hugely traumatic disabling life event" to "wanting to die after finding acceptance and happiness." If he had, I'd totally understand why OP is upset and I'd think, yeah, maybe they should've run that by a few more people.

Izzy didn't want to die. He accepted his death as the inevitability it was -- inevitable not just because the wound was fatal, but because his death was important to the larger story and, importantly, Ed's story.

Izzy is piracy. Izzy is toxic masculinity personified. Izzy is anchoring Ed to Blackbeard. Izzy is not a character who overcame great obstacles and found acceptance just to decide that, actually, he'd like to be dead instead. He's not David Jenkins and company telling people who relate to Izzy that they should just die. He's not proof that recovery and joy are impossible for broken people.

Look at Ed. He went from wanting to die to wanting to live and do better. He's still working for his acceptance and happiness, and Izzy's last words are insistence to him that he'll get there.

Lucius said that some people are just broken, and this season does everything it can to refute that. One of the clearest themes is no one is broken beyond repair. People can change and they can heal and they can be forgiven by the people they hurt. This theme is so clear that I don't understand how anyone can overlook it.

I've been typing for ages and I'm honestly so sorry to anyone who takes me seriously enough to read this. It's a lot of negativity, and we have more than enough of that.

(And if you're disabled, hurt by Izzy's death, and also somehow still here, I sincerely hope that you feel better about it soon. I hope you'll come across meta that puts things into perspective in a way that lets you appreciate OFMD's positive messages and make peace with or move past season two. Barring that, I hope you find a new show to latch onto that gives you everything you want.)