#Stede and Izzy are basically the only two people in the world that ed cares about

[mossiestpiglet]

I can’t stop thinking about how Ed needed Izzy to die first before he tried to kill himself. No one else actually mattered to him at all; Frenchie, Jim, Fang, it’s debatable if he even knows Archie’s name- they’re just accessories to his own death. But Izzy’s death mattered enough that he had to intimidate Frenchie into revealing Izzy’s location just so that Ed could go and leave Izzy with a gun knowing exactly what he would do when left alone with it. He needed Izzy to die first because he knew Izzy would try to stop him. He needed Izzy to die first because he needed everyone who loved him to be gone. He needed Izzy to die first because no matter how much he could hurt Izzy, could walk him right up to the very edge of death, Ed could never be the one to actually kill Izzy himself. If Ed was going to take them all down at the end of the day, Izzy had to already be dead by his own hand because Ed couldn’t do it. Not to Izzy.

[bemusedlybespectacled]

Question: I enjoyed s1 OF OFMD, but for various reasons I never actually got around to watching s2 (pick up most of the plot from tumblr tho). What exactly went wrong in s2 that got so many people upset?

Oh, boy. Very long rant incoming.

So, for context, S2 had a significantly smaller budget, which necessitated moving the filming location to union-unfriendly New Zealand, reducing the number of actors/number of appearances of established actors, and cutting down the number of episodes from 10 to 8. In a show where each episode is only about half an hour long, that last one alone was enough to seriously hamper any character development or plot. I am very comfortable putting the vast majority of the blame on HBO because of these financial decisions.

The short version is that Jenkins et. al. needed to address and build on the problems left hanging in S1 while also getting the characters to the end of their character trajectories in case there was no S3 while also leaving room for additional episodes in case there was a S3, in a grand total of four hours, and failed.

The long version is that there were a bunch of what I'd consider small problems in isolation that came together and exploded in the S2 finale.

The reduced cast necessitated breaking up the crew (ex: having Swede marry Jackie and stay on land with her, so they don't need to pay Nat Faxon for all eight episodes) and not spending as much time on their relationships as S1 did.

The reduced time meant that the entire season was rushed (in contrast to S1, which takes place over at least several weeks if not months, most of S2 takes place in roughly five days), leading both to a lot of telling rather than showing (because they don't have time to show you), including vital character and relationship development.

This includes:

Having the Kraken half of the crew beat Ed to death after months of being abused by him – abuse that is clearly shown to have given them PTSD and a well-justified fear and hatred of him – only for them to be okay with him two in-universe days later;

On that note, having Stede dismiss the crew's concerns about Ed because he loves him and also we only have three more episodes left to fit in everything so we need to get over it really fast, even though Stede is supposed to be well-meaning and caring (even if he's not good at it all the time);

Resolving the issue of Stede abandoning Ed in one day, then having them "go slowly" in their relationship for two days and then have some spur-of-the-moment sex, and then the next afternoon have them break up over their diverging career aspirations, and then the day after that resolve that problem and retire on land while the rest of the crew sails off into the sunset;

Stede becoming a fantastic pirate captain over the course of one day, becoming wildly popular in the piracy world two days later, and then deciding the day after that to never be a captain again because he is retiring with Ed;

Having Ed and Stede decide to retire together as what is implied to be the end point of their relationship arc, when none of Stede's issues from S1, like his poor self-esteem, have been so much as mentioned by anyone, implying that he's either magically gotten over them or they don't matter all that much, actually, even though they were the catalyst for basically everything he did in S1;

Ed having two separate character crises – "I am an unlovable person" and "I want to do something with my life other than piracy" – not spending a lot of time on either one, having moments that clearly indicate he is still working on both problems and they have not been resolved, and then apparently having them both be resolved in the final episode despite nothing occurring to actually make that happen, and in regards to the latter, despite the story actively undermining it by repeatedly showing he can't do anything other than piracy;

Related to the above, Ed ending the series as allegedly being loved by the crew as a family (thus solving Crisis #1) despite this never actually being shown, demonstrated, or even fucking alluded to onscreen. If anything, it shows the exact opposite.

This last point is especially galling to me because of what is probably the most divisive issue in the fandom right now: killing off Izzy Hands after giving him seven episodes of character development.

The show begins with the Kraken crew clearly trying to use the skills they learned as part of Stede's crew to cope with their incredibly shitty situation and care for each other, which includes Izzy. Izzy, on his end, tries to protect the crew and speak up for them, which results in him being repeatedly hurt (both implicitly, as Ed at one point says "that's another toe" in response to Izzy advocating for the crew and we later see he's missing more than one toe already, and explicitly, as Ed shoots him in the fucking leg in front of the crew when he stands up for them).

This camaraderie is shown again and again and again. Frenchie, Jim, and Archie take care of Izzy while his leg is infected, at risk to their own lives. Izzy's misery over losing his leg is what unites the PTSD-ridden Kraken crew and the well-meaning-but-ignorant-of-PTSD marooned crew, who are initially at odds, to make him a new prosthetic leg. Izzy gives Lucius advice about forgiving Ed. Izzy is introduced to drag and opens up enough to sing at a crew party, and the whole crew is having fun together while Ed and Stede are in their cabin having sex for the first time. Izzy gives Stede pirate captain lessons and bonds with him when Ed leaves him. Izzy provokes the season's villain into focusing on him and then gives a big speech about how piracy is about belonging to something, giving the rest of the crew time to try to escape.

Recall that Season 1 had some pretty well-established universe rules, one of which was that it runs on Muppet physics/magical realism. People can jump off yardarms, hit the side on the way down, and be perfectly fine. People can get stabbed in the liver and it's totally okay because it's probably not that important, and even can stay pinned to a mast all night that way with only mild discomfort. Buttons can talk to birds and see long distances without a spyglass and put hexes on people. Good people can be hurt (Stede is stabbed repeatedly), bad people can die (the Badmintons, Geraldo), but no one we care about is ever killed.

This is repeated in Season 2: Ed is beaten into a coma with a cannonball and wakes up like Sleeping Beauty after a spirit journey, with no injuries to his face or body. Buttons turns into a seagull after spending an episode doing a magic ritual and is never seen again (because they couldn't keep paying Ewen Bremner due to the budget cuts). Jackie microdoses her husbands with poison to build up their immunity, so that she can later pull a Dread Pirate Westley and poison the British with shared drinks.

So: in the finale, the villain of the season is taken hostage by the pirates (for reasons? unclear how that fits in the plan), happens to have a gun on him (no one checked??), shoots Izzy on the right side and then leaves with no repercussions. The entire crew stands around silently doing nothing while Ed cries over Izzy and tells him that he's his only family.

And Izzy fucking Hands, the guy who just spent eight episodes bonding with and protecting everyone, uses his last words to reassure Ed that him becoming Blackbeard/the Kraken was Izzy's fault and that the crew is Ed's family and they all love him. No one else says anything to Izzy or tries to comfort him or help him in any way.

I repeat: in a show predicated on the idea that bullies and bigots die stupid deaths while queer people and POC are basically magic, a show that was praised for being kind to queer people by not making them worry about their faves suffering or dying, a show founded on the strength of the relationships between the characters, the guy who went through a season-long arc of learning to embrace his pirate found family and his own queerness is shot for stupid reasons on the side we're told isn't important and dies while everyone just stands there. His last words are about the whole crew loving Ed when the only person that the whole crew has loved all season is him.

Anyway, never mind all that, let's cut to Lucius and Pete getting married and Stede and Ed retiring!

Complicating all this is that people who liked Izzy (or even said anything insufficiently mean about Izzy) were harassed for months in between seasons with insults, slurs, and actual fucking death threats. Izzy's growth was kind of a vindication for liking him: it meant that, despite all the harassment, we were right to like him and care about him as a character. Even people who didn't like him initially started to like him during Season 2.

And then he dies, and now there's a bunch of people saying that Izzy fans are big whiny babies who can't handle fictional death, and actually his death was so meaningful and beautiful and the only logical end to his arc, and it can't be bad writing because people die in real life all the time, and also he admitted he fed Ed's darkness so actually he was a terrible person all along anyway and they were right to hate him (and his fans)!

So, yeah, there are a lot of reasons why it's so hated, and I'm probably only addressing the problems of the pro-Izzy people (from what I can tell, BlackBonnet shippers who don't like Izzy think Ed and Stede's relationship is fine and dandy, but I'm sure that there are other criticisms they have that I have not addressed). I'm not even addressing the issues with Jim and Oluwande's relationship this season (and whooo boy are there issues).

It wasn't a universally bad season. There were episodes I really loved and still do. But the finale was a train wreck, and because it was a train wreck, a lot of people are looking back at what happened before the wreck and realizing that, oh, the train lost its brakes and steering because of the budget cuts and the engineers kept throwing fuel in the engine to make it go faster, and huh, now that I think of it, that part earlier in the trip was really wobbly but I didn't pay much attention to it at the time because I was sure the engineers had everything covered.

[autisticwriterblog]

Izzy, Ed and abuse

okay, so I’ve seen a few people talking about Izzy and Ed, and it genuinely disturbs me that I’ve seen people deny that Izzy is a victim of abuse. By most definitions, physical abuse is categorised as causing physical harm to another person’s body with intent to hurt them. Some things, like punching Izzy for selling Stede out, or choking him for saying hateful stuff when Ed was at his lowest, whilst not acceptable in the real world, are perfectly normal reactions for a pirate to have toward a member of his crew, so I’m not talking about things like that.

But the toe scene and the early parts of season 2 are clearly abusive, and only by sheer character bias (framing Ed as someone who could never do anything wrong) can you look at the way Ed treats Izzy and not consider Izzy a victim. Izzy and Ed have had a mutually toxic relationship for a long time, judging by their interactions, but I personally only see abusive behaviour starting with the toe scene. And the abusive one is Ed. Which shouldn’t be a controversial thing to say, considering what we see on screen, and yet…

Even at the end of season one, we saw Ed cut Izzy’s toe off and force him to eat it, and it is confirmed in season 2 that he took two more toes. He is even about to take a fourth toe when Izzy reports that the crew refused to throw their treasure overboard, and Izzy doesn’t argue, much unlike in season 1, when he often bitched at Ed for his decisions. Now, Izzy just takes the punishment.

Things between them come to a head when Ed shoots Izzy in the leg, leading to infection, and the amputation of his leg. He even puts a gun in Izzy’s hand, directly leading to Izzy’s suicide attempt. And in the end, all Izzy gets is a mumbled apology and that's that.

I know many people don’t like Izzy, but do they not sympathise with him? I’ll be first to admit that I don’t like Ed and Stede (I used to, but season 2 made me dislike them more and more for reasons too complicated to go into now), but I feel bad for them when bad things happen to them. I got bullied as a child, so I sympathise with Stede in the flashbacks to his childhood, and I was horrified when I learned what Ed's father was like. I don't particularly like either of them, but I feel bad for them when they're suffering. Which is why I found it so strange and appalling that people who dislike Izzy seemed to find it funny when Izzy was crawling along the floor, or died a painful death.

Even ignoring Ed's treatment of Izzy, the way he treats the crew is abusive too. He overworks them, pushing them into three months of consecutive raids (assuming they did one raid a day), leaving them all so stressed that Fang seems to always be crying. He forces Jim and Archie to fight to the death for no reason other than he said so. He expects Frenchie to kill Izzy, and it is clear how terrified Frenchie is the entire time he lies to Ed. The whole crew walk on eggshells around Ed because they don't know when he'll explode again. Basically, even if Izzy isn't being mentioned (and he should for the record, because he got the worst treatment - and he didn't deserve it, despite that some people seem to think being mutilated is a fair punishment for yelling at Ed), Ed was still abusive towards the crew. During that time period, Ed is incredibly unstable. He wants the world to burn and doesn't care who gets hurt along with him. Which is why the crew still show signs of trauma after Stede returns. Because they are traumatised by Ed's behaviour.

I know that Ed is a victim of abuse, and I have seen people bring this up when his abusive behaviour is mentioned. The thing is, it's perfectly possible for a victim to become an abuser themself, because they're a human being and are capable of doing bad things. Yes, survivors don't have to become abusive (see: my mum, who was smacked as a child but never raised a hand to her own children, because she didn't turn out like her parents), but it can happen. And that is what happened with Ed. There is even a direct parallel between Ed's dad throwing a plate against the wall, scaring Ed's mother, and the scene where Ed throws a chair against the wall, making Stede visibly flinched. If you want someone to be annoyed with about this comparison, don't pick the fans who are just noticing something in canon - blame the show for writing Ed doing the same thing his abusive father did.

In conclusion, Izzy fans aren't just making things up. We're pointing out things that canon showed onscreen and how Ed's behaviour toward Izzy is abusive. I wanted to like Ed this season, but the way the show wrote him made it impossible for me to tolerate him, because he treated everyone badly and they were expected to just move on. I understand that Ed is a romantic lead, but perhaps it wasn't a good idea to make your romantic lead act so abusive toward his subordinates and then never show any real consequences of that.

[amuseoffyre]

One day I will run out of stuff to write about this show. Not today, but one day. But specifically, was watching the Jackie and Ed scenes in 2x07 and went oooooo again.

When we start episode 5 with Ed on probation, he's awkwardly trying to make amends on the ship, but clearly has zero experience of doing it and tells Stede he never apologised for anything. It takes Fang teaching Ed how to sit with himself and think about the stuff he's done. Ed realises the impact of his actions and genuinely apologises for the first time for his past behaviour.

This also leads to him realising he needs to take some time, which is when he tells Stede he wants to take things slow. It's something new for him and he's trying hard to make a change in his patterns of behaviour, the so-called whim-prone tendencies. There's also one of his many metaphors: you can't catch a fish unless it wants to be caught. He's not quite ready to be where they are yet and expresses it instead of just diving in head first.

Thanks to the speed-run of the season, we cut to the next day at the beginning of episode 6: Ed is sitting with himself and thinking about the big things that he feels remorse about.

His dad, the storm incident, cutting off Izzy's toes, killing people during the raid spree, shooting Izzy, the storm incident again and driving his employees to kill him.

He also apologises directly for the second time in his career. Not the greatest apology in the world, it must be said, but a definite leap ahead from the awkward ukelele apology Stede wrote for him the day before. And, let's be honest, also probably the only kind of apology Izzy would tolerate from anyone, prickly little cactus man that he is :D

It's such a tiny moment, but the set up of "there's a storm coming, I just can't see it" is aaaaa.

In the basket, Hornighost said "you move on or you blow your brains out". Ed's been living on the run from his memories his whole life. He's never consciously sat with them before, not until Stede and all the bleak stuff bubbled up from under the surface when he was pushed to kill someone he cared about. And after that's when he tried the blow-your-brains-out approach by proxy. (He always outsources the big job, after all)

This is first time trying something that isn't either of those two things. As Buttons said, it's about change and now, with the experience of the basket behind him, he is trying to do things differently. To give himself proverbial soup as well - taking care of himself. Getting some nutrients into him, even though it feels like poison.

He's trying to process all this guilt and decades of trauma by himself and, just as before, he falls back into water metaphors. The storm isn't about the sea. The storm isn't about the weather. The storm is about him and his emotions. Sunshine one minutes, cataracts the next. The panic and anxiety is there bubbling away like an emotional storm front moving in.

He's already got this going on when the Ned stuff happens and then he has the equivalent of Stede's conversation with Chauncey: Jackie pointing out that Stede is now successful and "the fucking man" and basically is emulating and apparently enjoying the life and lifestyle Ed has come to hate and it happened because of Ed. If Ed hadn't goaded Ned by beating his record, Ned would never have come after them and if he hadn't come after them, Stede would never have killed him. ("You're a monster, a plague, you defile beautiful things")

The emotional storm has hit and he's not handling, to the point that he's withdrawing more and more from everything and everyone, sitting quietly out of sight. And like Stede did in 1x09, he decides leaving is the best option.

Our lads are both messy disasters, but they're both trying to do so much work on themselves, trying to figure themselves out. I wanna see an S3 where they get to do some more.

[izzyspussy]

Soulmate au time babeyyy!!! How long does it take Stede and Izzy to not only accept to themselves that they are soulmates, but to also admit it to each other? What does it take for them to do this? Does Ed factor into these decisions? ~ blackhannet anon

unpopular opinion, but i really think that Denial is not izzy's style - and even if he wanted to do it he'd be. so so bad at it kaslfks. he accepts that stede is his soulmate right away, really, he just Decides the universe can't tell him what to do (up to and including reaching his full potential for fulfillment and contentedness). that sign can't stop him. he totally can read, but the sign can't stop him regardless. harumph.

ed knows that stede and izzy are soulmates before stede does. he says hey izzy stede asked to see my bird tattoo and seemed lowkey sad about it. kind of like how you got lowkey sad the first time you saw it clearly? anything you wanna tell me about that bud. and izzy says get fucked. and ed says okay! you asked for this! and fucks stede.

and izzy totally gets jealous and then has a brief crisis because - as far as he's been told! - he's not supposed to want sex from stede anyway! they're supposed to be cosmically assigned BFFs! but he does want sex from stede, and he wants (has always kind of wanted) sex from ed, and one of them is his soulmate and he wishes they weren't, and the other one isn't his soulmate and he wishes they were, and they are having sex with EACH OTHER, WITHOUT HIM.

so anyway he has sex about it with someone unrelated to the Dynamic. probably lucius. (and lucius is Special to izzy in this au also, just because he's willing to have sex with izzy and also to be his friend, both without any care whatsoever to the fact that izzy has a soulmate and is therefore obviously Weird about sex and friendship. lucius is like well honey i am also Weird about sex and friendship, no soulmate required, so like. lol. izzy's like shut up god you're so annoying i can't believe i'm going to be devoted to you now too this is the fucking Worst take your pants off.)

stede is only the vaguest bit jealous about izzy fucking lucius. he has the background awareness that he wants to fuck izzy, but his main focus is still like. izzy basically gave him the worst negging of all time, and stede wants to impress him kajslfkjksjlasfjks. anyway, so ed is like :3 time to make him worse.

so ed manipulates stede into being very jealous over izzy, actually. works him up into a full possessive froth. izzy's like what are you doing you absolute nutcase. and ed's like i'm having the time of my life what a stupid question.

meanwhile everyone on the crew, including stede and izzy, are bonding normally via living a relatively confined life with each other. that's just what happens. and stede and izzy happen to be two very well matched people, as the universe did make note. so they do become very close friends, despite still being hm. como se dice... ah, "contentious"? with each other lwjfkhsflks. this is just. naturally occurring.

and eventually stede gets so jealous over izzy that they have pseudo hate sex. stede is enraged and horny, and unfamiliar with being horny tbh. and izzy is chagrined to find that having sex with stede after bonding with him like this first, and with the way they seem to Fit like puzzle pieces, is actually world's better than even the already very good sex he's had before.

but. the thing is. stede is so enraged and horny and unfamiliar with being horny that. he. he doesn't. take. he doesn't take izzy's shirt off. he doesn't see izzy's tattoo. he doesn't Know. he has fucked izzy so good and ruined him for other men, he has verbally claimed him, he's done It All.

but he doesn't Know.