#still a s2 defender till i die of course! i don't think any of this was their fault and i adore s2 with my whole chest

[piratecaptainscaptainpirates]

I've been thinking a lot about this today, but I think I've nailed down what my biggest lingering issue with s2 was - it's that I wanted Ed to get more explicit sympathy, and I don't blame the story for not doing it because I can see why they thought they wouldn't have to.

As you know if you were around as s2 was airing, one of the big frustrations was that a certain subset of the fandom thought the narrative was vindicating a read of Ed as irredeemable and Izzy as blameless. Because of this, I often found myself wishing that there were more scenes where the crew explicitly sympathized with Ed's struggles and told him outright that they still loved him. Even though the narrative was so sympathetic towards Ed, I knew how a lot of this season would be read so I wanted it to be said so clearly it would be impossible to miss.

The thing is, of course, that the writers wouldn't have assumed that necessary. Now, I do wish we'd had more Ed/crew scenes (another place I blame the budget cuts and not the writers). But they show us the crew feeling extreme guilt over mutinying on Ed and accepting him back very quickly.

They (reasonably) assumed that the audience would be able to fill in the gaps because Ed is a very likeable, sympathetic character and they (reasonably) expect their audience to like and sympathize with him. The only problem is that vocal subset of the fandom who love to villify Ed and thought their interpretation was being validated by the story up until like the last ten minutes of the finale, which was frustrating to the rest of us. The other thing is the writers (reasonably) assumed they would need to put in the work to make the audience like Izzy, so they devote a lot of time to making him more likeable, which, to those same people, came across as absolving him of any blame. It could too easily come across as an abuser (Izzy) turning the narrative against the man he abused (Ed).

I know it's because of the fandom atmosphere that I so strongly miss scenes where Ed got some of the sympathy that was afforded to the character who triggered his spiral into such a dark and self-destructive mindset in the first place. The writers couldn't have expected this and I think they made the best decisions they could with what they had. But dear lord does it make me want to write a bunch of fics about Ed getting pampered and fussed over by the crew.