#ironically i've started enjoying them a lot more now that i've stopped engaging with fanworks of them

[laceratedlamiaceae]

A big part of the reason I've gravitated towards the Izzy Enjoyer side of the fandom, aside from the fact that I love him, is that Izzy fans actually seem to understand him. I used to be more into blackbonnet fanworks, but so much fic and meta gets them completely wrong. Obviously there's room for interpretation and I have nothing against people who see Ed and Stede differently than I do, but if I see another fic that portrays Stede as some paragon of moral purity and healthy masculinity (he's a bitch! he's inconsiderate! he's completely repressed!) or Ed as a helpless damsel-in-distress who hates violence (he's the greatest pirate captain in history! he loves a good maim! he wanted to retire because he got bored when he didn't have to fight anyone!) I'm gonna lose it.

I think the main reason for these interpretations is people conflating media consumption with morality (I can't find it but there's a good post that goes into this in a lot more detail). They need their favorite characters to be good people so they can think of themselves as good people, and it's easier to come up with a skewed interpretation of a character than it is to rethink a strongly-held principle so we end up with people who believe that Izzy made Ed maroon the crew, or that Ed was being honest when he said he hadn't killed anyone since his dad, or that Stede is exempt from toxic masculinity because he sometimes wears frilly clothes.

On the other hand, Izzy fans (in my experience, at least) are able to recognize that he's a complex character who does bad things for interesting reasons, just like Ed and Stede. I don't agree with everything my fellow Izzy lovers have said about him but most of it at least makes sense and doesn't blatantly contradict anything we see in the show. I imagine a lot of that is just because it's hard to portray the main antagonist as a good guy, but whatever the reason I wish Ed and Stede were allowed to have the same nuance by the fandom at large.