#OFMD racism

[averyhollow]

Some people jump at the chance to reveal they think characters that are BIPOC lose their humanity if they behave in acceptable ways. The tiniest bit of deviation from the narrow path of righteousness, and POC become unfeeling brutes.

Any hint of violence and anger that isn’t in response to direct and immediate threat? Any reaction to something that might be perceived as a disproportionate? If a BIPOC does it, they’re a brute and a savage unfeeling animal that needs to be leashed and muzzled. Therefore, if the BIPOC on the show engage in the kind of violence and displays of anger that white pirates can revel in without remark because they’re seen as human by default, it must be explained away or mitigated because BIPOC can’t be both traditional pirates and people you root for or want happy endings for.

In that light, it makes sense the people in question don’t accuse Izzy of wanting Ed to be more like Calico Jack. They don’t say he wants Ed to be a typical pirate, or some archetypical party bro, or whatever. Nah. In wanting Ed to be the Ed he knew when they started, in wanting Ed to be Blackbeard, in wanting Ed to be the guy who sailed and had dalliances with Calico Jack, he must want Ed to be a beast, a savage, an unfeeling mindless killing machine. Calico Jack gets to be a jackass, a douchebro, fratbro Jack Sparrow, etc.

Ed? Ed must be a victim/survivor whose past violence is justifiable and/or exaggerated, and who wants nothing more than softness and serenity in the future. There’s an assumption made by some that to think of Ed otherwise, is to think of him as an animalistic stereotype.

And the people who think this and proudly say that it’s what they think, do so while claiming to be pushing back against racism. They’re trying to confine Ed’s humanity and the ways in which he can be viewed by the people who cheer for his happiness - on a show where Ed isn’t a token nonwhite character but part of an ensemble cast filled with BIPOC and therefore there’s no reason to project onto his portrayal the requirement of adhering to standards of respectability - and they’re doing it under the guise of antiracism in fandom. What’s scary is that I think they really believe it too.

Note: I’m not talking about when people express their interpretations and leave it at that. I’m talking about when people claim that disagreeing Izzy wants Ed to be a “savage” stereotype or claim thinking Ed is mercurial or violent - not especially so, but at all - is to ignore racism or to commit a microaggresion.

[three--rings]

Okay gonna put in an EARLY request here for OFMD fandom.

The character's name is Zhang Zheng Yi Sao. That's a real historical figure, very very awesome pirate queen. Her name isn't "Susan." That's what she went by when undercover selling soup.

I beg people to use her real name and not a fake one that may be easier for you to spell and pronounce. She doesn't introduce herself or tell anyone to call her Susan after her real identity is revealed and people in the show call her Zheng. Or Queen, I suppose.

So please, as someone from Chinese fandoms who has seen the amount of microagressions fandoms get up to when dealing with "weird and difficult" Chinese names...can we not?

If you're worried about spelling, ZYS would be how Chinese names are typically abbreviated in fandom. And Zheng isn't inherently any harder to type than Susan.

Trying to get ahead of things a little here, as a white American person who has learned things the hard way over the last few years.

EDIT: I got a letter wrong I even googled it blame the mead I'm drinking and the fact it's 5am for me. ZHENG Yi Sao!

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

ngl the "im white so i dont talk abt any characters' race ever bc im afraid of accidentally saying something racist" approach to fandom is like. very weak. imo.

like first of all: i get that "i dont incorporate race into my media analysis because i'm afraid of messing up" comes from a different place than "i don't incorporate race into my media analysis because I Don't See Race 😊 there is only The Human Race." but it has the same functional effect, right? that effect being that your analysis of [INSERT MEDIA HERE] ignores the very real way that race impacts people.

second of all: it feels kinda lazy! like ur saying "i dont know enough abt race to feel comfortable commenting on how race affects this show and i dont care enough to learn." the only way to become more comfortable discussing race is to actually practice discussing race. but when i see people saying this it feels like they're saying "i'm white, which means i don't know how to talk about race, and i don't have to know how to talk about race, and i don't ever have to know how to talk about race, so i'm choosing to never learn how to talk about race."

third of all: just because you don't openly talk about race doesn't mean you're any less likely to accidentally say or do something racist. implicit biases run deep, y'all. it's probably already there in your interpretation of the show. but the "i don't want to accidentally say something racist" implies that you are positive that your interpretation of the show isn't racist. and i'm not saying you're wrong. but i'm saying that if a person of color tells you that something you said about [INSERT MEDIA HERE] was racist, you better be prepared to actually listen and not just brush them off because "i can't be racist! i purposefully never talk about race just to make sure i'm not racist!"

which brings me to my final point: if you do accidentally say something racist... literally just apologize. if someone says you've been doing something racist, apologize and stop doing that thing. it's literally not that hard. i've done it. i've seen other people do it. "i'm scared of being called racist!" is such a weak excuse im tired of it. getting called racist is not the end of the fucking world. calm the fuck down and grow a spine. jesus.

[piratecaptainscaptainpirates]

Alright, so there's been a lot of chatter about some of the most common racist takes in the fandom lately, and I know most people aren't engaging in good faith but I'm gonna spell some things out anyway. Here's a handy-dandy White Fan's Intro to Racist Fanon 101

Why is it racist to depict Ed as uncontrollably violent?

Because he's not actually depicted that way in the show. OFMD goes out of its way to depict Ed's relationship with violence as complex and intensely traumatic for him. Because he has so many hangups around violence, Ed is one of the least violent characters in a show full of violent characters. He is always shown giving people many chances before they're able to push him into reacting with violence.

Even if you think you're just doing a character study on a guy who is really very complex and nuanced, please take the time to consider if you're assigning more weight to Ed's violent actions than those of other characters or assuming he's worse than he actually is (for example, Ed never physically hurt the crew during his kraken spiral, just Izzy. His crime was being a shitty boss, not going on mindlessly violent rampages).

What do other common fanon depictions of Ed that are racist look like?

The biggest ones are depicting Ed as untidy/messy, as illiterate, and as needing a white man (most often Izzy) to clean up after him. I hope I shouldn't have to spell out why these are racist, but please keep an eye out for them in the fanon you consume so you can be critical of how you respond when they pop up.

Are you saying that all Izzy fans are racist?

Liking a character is morally neutral. Insisting that the viewpoint of an antagonistic character is the lens through which the show should be understood, though, especially when that antagonistic character's whole deal in the first season of the show was trying to control the behavior of the brown lead so he could gain power for himself, however...

Just please consider - why do you find Izzy's tears more deserving of sympathy and compassion than Ed's?

But my hot take/fic/meta doesn't say anything about Ed's skin color!

It doesn't have to. Most of the racist takes/fic/meta out there don't mention Ed's skin color explicitly. Racism doesn't just look like saying "this character is a brown man so he's bad." Everyone who grows up in a racist society (that's everyone on the planet, btw, you included) has biases to unlearn, and those biases impact how you interact with the world around you, including with the media you consume.

The thing is, OFMD isn't a subtle show. It's very consistent with telling us who Ed is, how he responds to situations, and why he behaves the way he does. If you find it easier to throw all that aside in favor of believing what a white antagonistic character tells you about him, then you should really take a bit to examine that.

And here's the most important thing to keep in mind:

This is not about you.

Trust me, it has to be pretty damn bad for fans of color to call out racism in fandom. Every time we do, we know we're gonna harrassment and just some truly awful shit in our inboxes. But you, random white fan who Did A Racism? No one is out to get you. No one thinks you're an awful person for including a racist trope in your stuff, we just wish you'd examine it so we can make this fandom a better place for everyone.

I have had amazing discussions with white fans who saw my posts on fandom racism and wanted a sensitivity read or a check so they could fix an instance where they uncritically included a racist trope. But most people who make similar mistakes will just double down and insist they didn't do anything wrong, and that makes fandom a worse place for all of us.

Fans of color deserve to feel safe and included in this fandom, and we're just tired of feeling like we have to beg to get some circles to see poc as people. You can do your part by being critical of these tropes and your reactions to them when they pop up.

[naranjapetrificada]

if you plan to talk about Ed and Stede's bodies in fic look at this image first

so that I never have to read someone describe Ed as "several inches taller than [Stede] and at least a stone heavier" or anything like it again.

now where is that post about how with interracial couples fan artists twinkify white characters and depict their nonwhite partners as taller and larger than they are

[alexibeeart]

hey real quick while I'm eating breakfast, while we're out there doing allsorts to Save Our Flag Means Death what we're NOT going to do is visit irl Stede Bonnet's grave to take smiling selfies, have parties at Teach's hole, and so on and so on. we're not going to confuse and glorify slave owning rapists with fictional characters from a fictional show, especially with how hard the writers have worked to make this story inclusive and safe, especially not in front of a fandom of real actual poc and women. we've already been through this but I guess we need a refresher.

[transjudas]

bonus:

[glamaphonic]

people watching a romantic comedy about pirates, who are all murderers, full of slapstick violence and the presentation of said violence as a standard part of the job

yet somehow holding the indigenous male lead and only him to real world standards of morality so that they can paint him as an unstable abusive monster victimizing poor unsuspecting white men

but it's totally not bcs racism tho!!!!

k

[scarrletmoon]

you know, the more i think about s2 and izzy specifically , the more let down i feel and it’s not a good feeling bc i love this show so much

i think they really did try to do too much in one season with less time and it means that izzy got a spotlight that he didn’t really deserve

i feel like i’m digging through a massive stack of files to piece together a mystery and just getting “we decided that izzy is special” in return which

doesn’t feel good! as a POC and as someone who’s been shouted down, harassed and pushed out of fan spaces for trying to raise the issue of how white antagonists are given preferential treatment in fandom. because now the show is doing it too and it feels like i’m being told to just. accept that it’s happening? he’s really sorry about it (we assume) so can’t you just play nice? why are you trying to argue that no one deserves forgiveness unless they grovel first

(i didn’t say that)

well he FEELS REALLY BAD and LOST A LEG what more do you want??

(idk, the word “sorry” from his actual mouth?)

this is getting away from me bc i’m tired but im like. it feels like the luster is rubbing off and the potential is being wasted and it’s not a good feeling

[averyhollow]

The Difference Matters: In Service vs. Enslaved

Scope

My arguments and issues are specific to the HBOMax show Our Flag Means Death. I know my beliefs and arguments about euphemisms being used to establish false equivalencies in order to undermine the unique atrocities of chattel slavery may not apply to all languages or versions of English, or translations of the show.

In Service=/=Enslaved

I’ve noticed a trend in OFMD fanfic, headcanons, and meta, that I find incredibly disturbing: using in-service to mean enslaved.

In Service: employed as a servant (dated) - Oxford Languages

In traditional English contexts, such a person was said to be "in service". - (reference is for OED).

The term “in service” has long been used to refer to servants, especially in the case of domestic servants on large estates. To “enter service” meaning to go away and work for a family, often as a live-in servant.

Language matters. This should be especially clear to viewers in the U.S., where there’s long been a concerted effort to downplay the horrors of chattel slavery. Major parts of that effort have revolved around the language used to describe slavery, and efforts to equate chattel slavery to other forms of servitude.

Take the infamous Nottoway Plantation, which at one point on its website claimed “[Nottoway] knew that in order to maintain a willing workforce (emphasis added), it was necessary to provide not only for his slaves’ basic needs for housing, food and medicine, but to also offer additional compensation and rewards when their work was especially productive.” In the wake of increased scrutiny after Ani DiFranco showed her whole ass , the language was modified to “compliant workforce.” Exactly the kind of obfuscating language one would expect from a place that reportedly had “a gift shop stocked with books like Myths of Slavery and The South Was Right.”

The effort to soften the language of slavery doesn’t begin or end with euphemistic language on the websites of plantations that have been turned into resorts and reportedly boast gift shops selling pro-Confederacy books. Some of the more high profile examples in the U.S. center around Texas school curriculum changes that have been proposed to obfuscate the reality of chattel slavery and textbook “errors” that refer to enslaved people as “workers.”

I firmly believe that there is no difference between accepting “worker” or “workforce” as euphemisms for slavery, and accepting “in service” as a euphemism for being enslaved; and that even if the specifics of what “in service” is typically used to describe aren’t known to someone, the use of softening language should set off alarm bells.

In no way am I saying that I think using language that’s indirect or incorrect is always bad. There are any number of other ways a narrative can have characters use language that muddies the waters between enslaved people and servants, without it being something the narrative itself is doing. For example, in Alyssa Cole’s An Unconditional Freedom, the heroine reflects on how she was treated different from her father’s “servants” by virtue of being his child, but quickly corrects herself by pointing out that “servant” was a term that owners of enslaved people might use to be “polite”, but in reality they were slaves, not servants.

I don’t think OFMD did anything to set up a scenario where using an euphemism would make sense though. And if it were to go that route, and have it turn out that Frenchie was using in service to describe being enslaved for Stede’s benefit, or because that’s how he himself would rather frame it, then that’d leave the realm of fandom things that annoy me and enter the realm of things about the show itself that annoy me; and in this case, would make it unwatchable.

Selective Whitewashing

Depicting chattel slavery or making any of the Black characters enslaved would make the show irredeemable to me because it white washes the legacy of Stede Bonnet and Edward Teach. For the show to not only use obfuscating language to describe slavery, but paint over the involvement of the historical figures it uses as inspiration while subjecting original Black characters to enslavement, would be reprehensible to me.

Not that I doubt for a second that for some people, escapism can very much be a world where chattel slavery happens to Black people but isn’t done to Black people (at least not by the romantic leads). That’s not escapism to me though. It’s not realism either. It’s a perverse ode to white guilt, a rejection of responsibility, and erasure of culpability.

What If I’m Wrong And “In Service” Was Used As A Straightforward Euphemism For Enslavement?

Then fuck this show and all involved with that decision. I hope writers of meta and fic will still elect to create narratives that eschew such mealy-mouthed euphemisms and make it clear what they’re talking about isn’t service, but enslavement.

What If I’m Wrong And Black Characters Are Depicted As Former Or Current Slaves, But Stede and Ed Keep Their Whitewashed Histories?

Then fuck this show and all involved with that decision. I hope fan creators will balance the scales by creating narratives that don’t whitewash Ed and Stede’s contributions to, and enrichment by, chattel slavery. If doing that makes it impossible to consider them romantic leads, good. There’s a wonderful ensemble cast of characters not based on enslavers and traffickers, and whose backstories don’t necessitate shoddy and selective whitewashing.

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

This is a meta on Our Flag Means Death episode 5: The Best Revenge Is Dressing Well, Sir Godfrey Thornrose, The scene where he calls Ed a donkey, and so called "race science."

It has come to my attention that some of you apparently do not know what a phrenologist is.

*a note: I'm going to for the purposes of this assume that the guy played by Jeff Lorch is sir Godfrey Thornrose, I do not know this for certain but in my opinion even if he is not Thornrose the same principles still apply to him for reasons I will discuss in this meta.

So lets recap the scenes I want to touch on. At the beginning of episode 5 Stede is teaching Ed how to identify rich people cutlery like they're Barney Thompson and Vivian Ward in pretty woman. Stede bitches at Thornrose for not having enough spoons for Stede's liking. Thornrose responds "My apologies, I hadn't imagined we'd be hosting your kind."

Ed responds "My kind, what kind"

to which Godfrey responds "A rich donkey is still a donkey."

Ed then proceeds to scream at him and then orders Fang to skin him with a snail fork before throwing him overboard. To which Fang presumably responds by either skinning him with a normal skinning implement or forgoing the skinning step and just throwing him overboard, because who tf has time to skin a man with a snail fork.

I've seen some dogshit takes on this scene. I've seen it treated as evidence that Ed is exceptionally violent or abusive or has mood swings or anger issues or whatever bullshit. And I... Do Not Agree. You'll see why.

The next scene I want us to have in our back pocket is the first couple scenes with Gabriel and Antionette. When Gabriel and Antionette introduce themselves to Ed and Stede they reveal that Sir Godfrey Thornrose is a quote "Master Phrenologist." Stede is then expected to study Antionette's head. When he does he introduces his fake craft as "Phrenology, which is the study of the human head." He then takes a wild guess as to Antionette's heritage based on her skull lumps.

Content warning for like real old school racism ahead.

The reason Stede goes for the heritage is because Phrenology is a pseudoscience closely linked to other contemporary race science of the time. It was the idea that bumps on your head, thought to be caused by the pressure of the brain, could be used to identify your personality traits.

Phrenology gets really fucking racist, really fucking fast. Phrenology was used as proof that the white race was superior to other races, and as a justification for slavery and eugenics. Eugenics is the idea that you can improve society through breeding out "bad genes", which is almost universally popular among all types of racists, but the Nazis were big fans of it and there's a direct through line between the race scientists in the 1700s who were into phrenology and modern hate groups and neo nazis. I wanted to use an image here as an example of racist phrenology texts, but it's rough and I don't want to make a cut so I'm just going to link to the wordpress anthropology article I found the picture in, it's sourced and an alright place to start if you're into further reading.

With this information, I would like to use another example, that is relevant to the ethnicities in contention. A French physician who attracted huge crowds with his phrenology lectures, François-Joseph-Victor Broussais, once claimed that Maori people (as well as indigenous Australians) could never become civilized since he claimed they had no cerebral organ for producing great artists.

This is the context in which we need to understand the exchange between Ed and the French captain. I've seen some people claim it's about class and not about race, but Thornrose acknowledges Ed's wealth when he says a rich donkey is still a donkey. It doesn't matter to a man like Thornrose what Ed does or how rich he is or how well he can learn his fucking forks, he's still akin to an animal in this skull molesting freak's racist little mind. If a phrenologist, or even someone who's rubbing elbows with a phrenologist, calls a man of color a donkey they're clearly saying he's an uncivilized animal based on the shape of his face. That's how racists operate.

And Sir Godfrey Thornrose is not just any old racist, he's a racist spreading his ideology to other people, convincing them that people like Ed are inferior, that people like him should be subjugated by white people. He is clocking in for his shift at the racism factory creating more racists.

So basically what I'm saying is Ed should skin him, no quarter for genocidal maniacs. Basically I can tell you're either racist sympathetic or talking out of your ass if you think French captain was fucked up. It was antifascist direct action and I don't want to hear another word about it. I personally believe the only thing you can't come back from is death in terms of being a better person. I also believe that there are situations in which killing someone is more or less fine and you're never gonna catch me feeling bad for a fucking phrenologist when he compares an indigenous pirate to an animal and the pirate responds by doing what pirates do.

Killing Godfrey was based.

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

the second worst part of the “ed eats soap” joke is that it distracted the whole fandom from how funny it is that not only is ed upset that he isn’t given any of the ship’s fancy soap after breaking up with stede, he verbally expresses his disappointment about it. like, out loud. he says it like he’s hoping that maybe it was an accidental oversight and they just forgot to pack him some. like what did he think would happen, that lucius would just go “oh shit, my bad, i’ll be right back with that!” hello??????

[piratecaptainscaptainpirates]

Please don't tell me I've got people in the notes of one of my "please don't be racist about Ed's hair" posts insisting that it's "actually canon" that there are times Ed doesn't take care of his hair 😭

Like, okay. On the surface I get the impulse to insist that neglecting his hair was one of the ways Ed was neglecting himself at points. I get it, if someone struggles with that themselves it makes sense to project it onto a fictional character. Except the way we talk about poc hair matters, and Ed's never shown to actually do that. Like, I am struggling to think of a single instance where I'd get anywhere close to describing Ed's hair as messy or gd forbid "greasy."

The single (1) instance I'll admit Ed's hair was a bit messy? When he's chained to the railing in s2e4, but he obviously can't do shit about that, and it looked absolutely fine the rest of the episode! He doesn't have it up in its usual style but it's still very clean and neat.

In his blanket fort era? It's fine. It looks gorgeous, zero difference from his usual hair style.

Start of the kraken era? He's just wearing it down. It's maybe a bit frizzier than normal? It's fine.

It looks exactly the same as always deep in the Kraken era at the start of s2. And Red Flags, the episode where he's at his absolute lowest mentally? He literally went out of his way to put it up all special because it was apparently important to him to spend his last day with pretty hair.

There are ways that Ed neglected himself at his lowest points. He listed booze and drugs as things that he over-used to the point of upsetting him. He forced himself to act like a caricature of himself. He denied himself comforts and made his environment actively hostile to himself (by things like nailing caricatures of himself to the wall and allowing messes to build when we know he prefers a clean space. Ed can be self-destructive and actively deny himself things he wants when he's hurting - these are all canon.

But insisting that he neglected his hair...it kinda proves my point, that brown guys can wear our hair literally perfectly presentably 100% of the time, and we'll still have people calling us messy.

[naranjapetrificada]

No, you're not "secretly evil" if you write certain ships and tropes and with certain plot or genre conventions. Tag appropriately and play in the gd sandbox.

Thing is though.

If you uncritically (as in "critical thinking", not "you have to criticize the thing") write things into your fic that reinforce endemic problems in fandom (and society) like racism, it might reflect unexamined biases that reinforce external shit that makes fandom less safe for everyone.

This all goes back to that divide between people who take it as a personal moral failing or an indictment of their character when someone says they've behaved in a ____ist way and the people who understand ____ism words to relate to larger, structural dynamics that aren't about individual morality.

If you uncritically write an OFMD fic where Ed is uncontrollably violent or illiterate or unable to groom himself, a reader might take that to mean that you have some unexamined biases about race to unlearn.

If you uncritically sideline characters of color in favor of making white characters get together, a reader might take that to mean you have some unexamined biases about race to unlearn.

If you uncritically write an OFMD fic that celebrates Stede embracing the kind of traditional, toxic masculinity that characters like Izzy and the Badmintons represent, a reader might take that to mean that you have some unexamined biases about gender to unlearn.

And they could be right. That doesn't mean you're "secretly evil" because your moral character is not even the topic of conversation here. It just means that you're living in this same shitty fucking system as the rest of us, beset by constant social and political and physical reinforcement of the dynamics that system wants to perpetuate, and that there are behaviors that indicate you might be helping to perpetuate that system.

Not all objections are censorship or purity culture or anything else like that. It's not wrong for people to point issues out when they see them. Especially if they're not tagging you, or derailing the comments on the fic in question, or harassing you with unsolicited messages. Especially in their own spaces, whether those spaces are a public blog or a private chat.

And it will continue to feel necessary to me to make caveats like this to "don't like don't read" as long as people continue to be so reactive and defensive about this stuff. Because as many people as there are out there willing to (correctly) drop reminders that writers are real people and fictional characters are not, it would be nice to see someone say the same thing about readers. No, the situations you put that fictional character in aren't going to harm them (meaning the characters), but it's certainly possible to reinforce racism or misogyny or homophobia by perpetuating biases that turn fandom into a hostile place for people of color, women, queer people, people with disabilities, and so on.

[bougiebutchbitch]

I'm not in the ofmd fandom but I am intrigued by the drama. spill the tea?

OH GOD OKAY

Where do I begin lksdlgkfds

Okay so

There’s this nasty little gremlin-man in ofmd called Izzy Hands. He’s a sour, mean, skrunkly, disabled little cunt who is a firm believer in Respect and Discipline (in a very queer subby way).

This is to say: he is. Explicitly. Queer. He does drag on the show, and has a whole coming-out scene. He is a kinky masochist. He confesses his love for another man, and basically ruins his own life & everyone else's, because he is sooooo pathetically jealous about this man (his captain!) falling for some milquetoast loser white rich guy, when Izzy, a badass leather-wearing working-class sword-swinging swashbuckler, is right there making puppy-eyes at him.

He's wrong! He's horrid! He's a bastard, pickled in piss and vinegar! He's five-foot-nothing of spite and gay self-loathing! He's very fun to watch, and very, very queer.

People still insist that he’s straight. And racist. Despite there being 0 textural evidence to support this, and the creators of the show repeatedly saying that this is absolutely not what they wrote.

Why do people hate him so much? Simple! Because he ‘got in the way’ of the main ship.

Yup. It’s basically ‘bash the girl who gets in the way of our m/m otp’ only the girl is a grizzled 50-something year old pirate.

The main ship, btw, is between Ed Teach, an awesome complex flawed hopeful beautiful character of colour; and Stede Bonnet, another awesome complex flawed character. Who is a white guy. And who happens to be a rich plantation owner from the 1700s. Based on A LITERAL SLAVE OWNER. Who is explicitly shown to be a Problematic White Guy with fucked-up racist views.

Like. He’s not a perfect guy. The show makes this very, very clear - to the point where Stede pushes Ed into sex super-fast immediately after Ed says he wants to go slow, and this makes Ed run away and freak out.

But somehow, Certain Fans still insist that Izzy is to blame because :checks notes: he makes one cheeky, friendly joke about them finally getting together that is clearly given & received in good spirits.

Yeah.

There's a lot of this cognitive dissonance going on. And it's very, very wilful.

Basically: a certain subset of people who ship Ed and Stede refuse to exercise the slightest bit of critical thought of Stede’s views and actions (which are a representation of the white landed gentry!) but insist on maliciously twisting literally everything Izzy says or does to cast him as The Ultimate Villain. Whereas anyone watching the show can tell that he starts off as an antagonist-with-a-deeply-hidden-heart-of-gold, whose entire arc is about growth and redemption.

I think 99% of this is projection. Stede and Ed are not perfect by any means, but these people are so dead-set on shipping a Cute Fluffy Romance (when that. Really isn’t what the show gave us) that they have to create a villain out of Izzy and blame all of Stede and Ed’s fucked-up choices and actions on him, in the most contrived ways. Which has the added bonus of them deciding that Izzy, a white guy, is somehow responsible for literally ALL of Ed’s genuinely awful, abusive, and interesting choices in S2, where he went on his villain arc. Even though Izzy was the main victim of this villain arc. Rather than, y’know, giving Ed the agency to make his own damn decisions and acknowledging that he is a flawed and fascinating character who Hurts People but still deserves a happy ending, like literally every other main character on ofmd. Nope. Gotta infantalise that man of colour and pretend he has no control over his own life and his morality is goverened by the white men around him!

Then, they get to portray Stede as his white saviourTM who swoops in and saves Ed from ‘his own darkness’ with the power of love. 😊 because that’s not Problematique in the slightest 😊

It’s… fucked up, to put it plainly. But honestly, as much as there is a problem with their dogged insistence that Izzy is the root of all iniquity on the show, and that Ed and Stede are pure perfect angels who never did any wrong... what was worse was the relentless harassment enacted by that side of the fandom against anyone who dared show a liking for Izzy’s character. Like, it’s not the worst fandom out there by any means, but it really did make the fandom feel hostile to anyone who didn’t ship the main ship.

SO - yeah. That's the tea! OFMD was a fun show with lots of cool flawed characters. But the fandom was a cesspit, fuelled mostly by a Certain Group Of Fans' desperation to make their ship Perfect and Morally Pure - which resulted in them throwing an interesting, well-rounded, morally grey queer disabled character under the bus, and harrassing anyone who enjoyed him.

[electric-friend]

wait hang on 😭😭 are people seriously debating “he’s a complicated man” right now??

i agree that izzy’s an unreliable narrator, and i think that some of the things he’s said about ed aren’t necessarily true, much as many other things he’s said are also not necessarily true. he’s not really aware of the full picture the whole time, poor duck, as much as i adore him.

but like… besides the fact it really doesn’t have anything to do with wether or not you think izzy’s doing complex evil shit to ed on purpose, and people seem to be making it about that…

ed is VERY MUCH a complicated man. as someone who relates to ed probably more than stede or izzy… he’s absolutely a complicated man. ed can be violent, and suicidal, and he clearly experiences some form of emotional dysregulation, and he’s done things to people that weren’t justified. the crew was traumatised by ed’s behaviour and how much violence he placed them in a position to commit.

the way ed responds to rejection is so violent and out of proportion, his consecutive raids, his suicidal antagonism towards the crew… and for me and my personal issues, that’s extremely relatable… but it is NOT mentally well behaviour.

ed also exhibits patterns of disordered alcohol use, and his anger often causes him to lash out (yes, often at izzy who pushes his buttons, and yes, izzy’s behaviour is a factor in this. but it’s also worth noting ed has agency as a character and his violence is still violence, provoked or not) and one of his most integral traumas is how an act of violence saved him from the violent alcoholic who was his father.

there’s nothing about ed that’s not a complicated man. he’s done bad things that weren’t justified. that doesn’t make him a bad man. it makes him a complicated one. it’s very clear he knows how to be a better person. and that he can be. that the show left out a lot of that journey is really disappointing, but ed feels like he’s a monster and he does bad things to become the villain he thinks he deserves to be treated as, you know?

he is SUCH a complicated man. that doesn’t mean he’s irredeemable or bad, it doesn’t mean there’s a moral obligation to dislike him either. none of that’s the case. but izzy got it right when he called ed complicated. i think in some ways izzy had finally realised that he wasn’t always going to understand ed because ed wasn’t always going to think the way he did, but he was coming to accept that he didn’t need ed to be someone he could understand as long as ed was happy? does that make sense? i know that’s a sappy outlook on a canonically toxic relationship but i just cannot believe that there’s a genuinely widely accepted take going around which boils down to people thinking it’s wrong to call ed a complicated man. like, huh???? girl….