#he did genuinely care ahout ed and tried his best to be loyal to what he perceived to be ed's true goals and principles

[plantsjustwannahavefun]

Why is nobody talking about the "retirement" conversation between Ed and Izzy and what it means? We get told all the time that Izzy doesn't care about Ed at all, he's just in it for "Blackbeard"... but when Ed told him he wanted to retire, Izzy didn't mind at all.

Now contrast that with Izzy's meltdown after Ed's public performance in ep 10 and all that talk about wanting to stop being a pirate and just do talent shows for the rest of his life. Why was Izzy's reaction so different when the outcome would have been the same?

Because he did actually care about Ed. Izzy was ready to let Ed go if that's what made Ed happy, even though it would have meant losing him, or at least losing his position as Blackbeard's first mate that he cherished so much. But it had to happen in a way that made Ed not just happy but safe too. Retiring as a rich man set for life, safe in his disguise as an aristocrat? That's practically an utopian end game in piracy, something so impossible that most pirates wouldn't even dream of it. Izzy hated everything that the mobility represented, but he still would have wanted Ed to have it because it meant safety and staying alive. Piracy isn't exactly something you can keep doing well into your senior years. Above all he just wanted Ed to live a long and healthy life, even if that meant abandoning all that glory of being Blackbeard.

What he saw Ed fling towards in ep 10 wasn't anything like that. It wasn't his genius boss quietly conspiring with him to enact a fuckery that would set him up for life, low risk with incredibly high reward and his dignity still relatively intact. It was a broken, desperate man baring his heart and showing all of his cards to a group of people Izzy didn't know well, didn't respect or consider to be competent, nothing that would make him trust them to keep Ed safe in that fragile, vulnerable state he was currently in.

He probably saw their conversation at the end of ep 10 as something akin to pushing someone off a cliff into the water to save them from a raging forest fire: painful and seemingly cruel when forcibly doing it to someone against their will, but ultimately necessary to save their life.