#i don't know or care what side of whatever discourse op is on. they're right about this specific thing.

[torchickentacos]

I never do this, but reblogs were off and I want to shout this at everyone. stealing this post.

more thoughts under read more. I know it's a popular saying and I never look down on people who say things like this before knowing the impact they have (or even after to an extent, I have too much benefit of the doubt to go around), as we all have things we say and do that have negative impacts, and sometimes you never know to change that until someone points it out. So this is NOT a call out post or whatever, this is my rambling emotional thoughts on a topic.

I think first and foremost, I'm bothered by the ableism of course. But secondary to that is my annoyance at seeing people act high and mighty about fandom discourse. Like, if you want to talk to adults with jobs, go to linkedin or something, not tumblr, where we do care about things, and where we do discuss things.

And I GET thinking some discourse is stupid. I DO! because guess what. some discourse is stupid skjfhsdjkjfhsdjfhkdjs. I've joked about the poke/amour stuff before. I'll clown on some things, and maybe that makes me a hypocrite, but I feel like a step is taken when you take it from 'making fun of the discourse', something we all do to an extent (which dare I say is a form of participating in it) to 'making fun of the people who engage in such discourse'. We are FREE to talk about how silly the voltron stuff was. We are FREE to be snarky about things because human nature is to be a bit of a hater sometimes. but do it in a way that jabs at the topic and not the people.

But I think a lot of it also hinges on how we see human value on a larger scale. People make fun of people who work retail, people who don't have jobs, people whose jobs are considered extra or undesirable like sex workers, et cetera, despite these jobs being IMPORTANT. It's disheartening to me to see people lean on these types of jabs, and I think it tends to paint human value as something purely based on what you can give out to the world. It leans on this sort of input-output based system of determining how valuable or worthy someone is. And if they don't meet that standard value of 'adult with job', then their opinions are moot as jobless losers in their mom's basements or whatever the fuck. I think the whole thing leans into the conservative 'special snowflake' attitude, which isn't something I think we should be leaning on in arguments or discussion.

And I think that the intent is usually not to be ableist. Most people don't start their day wondering how they can insult disabled people, I'd hope. But intent and impact are often detached, and good intent (avoiding discourse) can have a bad impact (making fun of people in the name of pointing out issues with disocurse). I also think race could be a component, given how racial discrimination in hiring is still a very real thing and is a real factor preventing people from getting 'GoOd ReAl JoBs', but I'll leave that side of the discussion to someone who is more qualified to talk on it than I am. Feel free to chime in with any insight on that side of the coin if you want!!! I imagine the same also goes for visibly queer people but I'm not going to get into the straight/cis passing stuff right now.

And maybe I'm looking too far into it. Maybe I'm just thinking about it too much, maybe it's just a funny little saying that TOTALLY doesn't affect actual people in any way. After all, I'm just some jobless disabled loser in my parent's house talking about discourse on tumblr, aren't I?

[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.)