#then why is he fucking Izzy

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

Original

[varyathevillain]

thinking about how the scene where Izzy shoots himself and misses isn't actually just about "haha, see, he's not dead, he just missed", it's about how it is about Izzy Hands dying. it's about how old Izzy Hands, the toxic, tragic image of a golden age pirate, is dead; it's about how he had to kill the part that was perpetuating the horrors and the abuse to save the crew.

had he not done that, Izzy Hands wouldn't have been able to get up on the deck, because old Izzy Hands would have to abide by the rules of common sense and reality. he'd have to die tragically at the hands of the man he loves. he'd have to rot for what he's done. but he does the one thing that he wouldn't in season 1: he becomes part of the crew, and that crew never abided by real life logic. Izzy Hands climbs to the deck on one leg with a poorly treated festering stump and stands as tall as he can, in the most unrealistic fashion, and he lives.

[electric-friend]

wait hang on 😭😭 are people seriously debating “he’s a complicated man” right now??

i agree that izzy’s an unreliable narrator, and i think that some of the things he’s said about ed aren’t necessarily true, much as many other things he’s said are also not necessarily true. he’s not really aware of the full picture the whole time, poor duck, as much as i adore him.

but like… besides the fact it really doesn’t have anything to do with wether or not you think izzy’s doing complex evil shit to ed on purpose, and people seem to be making it about that…

ed is VERY MUCH a complicated man. as someone who relates to ed probably more than stede or izzy… he’s absolutely a complicated man. ed can be violent, and suicidal, and he clearly experiences some form of emotional dysregulation, and he’s done things to people that weren’t justified. the crew was traumatised by ed’s behaviour and how much violence he placed them in a position to commit.

the way ed responds to rejection is so violent and out of proportion, his consecutive raids, his suicidal antagonism towards the crew… and for me and my personal issues, that’s extremely relatable… but it is NOT mentally well behaviour.

ed also exhibits patterns of disordered alcohol use, and his anger often causes him to lash out (yes, often at izzy who pushes his buttons, and yes, izzy’s behaviour is a factor in this. but it’s also worth noting ed has agency as a character and his violence is still violence, provoked or not) and one of his most integral traumas is how an act of violence saved him from the violent alcoholic who was his father.

there’s nothing about ed that’s not a complicated man. he’s done bad things that weren’t justified. that doesn’t make him a bad man. it makes him a complicated one. it’s very clear he knows how to be a better person. and that he can be. that the show left out a lot of that journey is really disappointing, but ed feels like he’s a monster and he does bad things to become the villain he thinks he deserves to be treated as, you know?

he is SUCH a complicated man. that doesn’t mean he’s irredeemable or bad, it doesn’t mean there’s a moral obligation to dislike him either. none of that’s the case. but izzy got it right when he called ed complicated. i think in some ways izzy had finally realised that he wasn’t always going to understand ed because ed wasn’t always going to think the way he did, but he was coming to accept that he didn’t need ed to be someone he could understand as long as ed was happy? does that make sense? i know that’s a sappy outlook on a canonically toxic relationship but i just cannot believe that there’s a genuinely widely accepted take going around which boils down to people thinking it’s wrong to call ed a complicated man. like, huh???? girl….

[paleode-ology]

so this IS how steddyhands can still win

[arsenicflame]

thinking about Izzy walking around the whole ship pulling out every other candle from the hallways, from the rooms, especially from stede's fancy candle stashes, just for his dramatic 'relearning the basics' moment

[sunnibits]

literally fucking sobbing screaming tearing my hair out shitting bricks looking at this image bc it hurts me SO fucking bad now that we’ve seen izzy in s2. look how fucking devoted and in love he is even THEN when they were ALREADY fucked up and falling apart. he was still so in love. he was still so fucking happy to serve. so sure that everything was gonna work out his way. that they could be happy (or as happy as pirates can be). and now it has actually gone so far that IZZY FUCKING HANDS OF ALL PEOPLE is fucking broken and can’t take it anymore. izzy fucking hands is crying because of how hurt he is. izzy fucking hands is going to leave edward teach. the man who was still in love even after he was fed his own severed toe. they have fucked up that fucking badly. it’s over.

[wolfpoets]

"izzy was happy once. but then he got broken - and he has no desire to be vulnerable again. and in order to be happy you have to be vulnerable." oh, okay! officially boarding the Izzy Did Nothing Wrong, Izzy Has Never Done Anything Wrong, Izzy Is Not Capable Of Doing Wrong train. every mean spirited thing he has ever done is warranted and valid.

[starryluminary]

Ridonculous Race but Noah is friends with Owen part 5: You can count on me, like 1, 2, 3, I’ll be there.

“Hmm… Let’s see… Oh! I know! Nothing!!” You’ve never kissed a girl. Not once in your life. The closest you got was some geeks ear when you were 16. Owen was in a relationship for three straight seasons. Please dear God put your pride aside and accept the help

Transcript:

Image 1 Noah: I’m just trying to get to know her so I can ask her out. Owen: What can I do to help?

Image 2 Noah: Nothing. I’ve got this aaallll figured out. Owen: Oh. Are you sure?

Image 3 Noah: Mm hmm. Owen: …Really? Are you really sure? Noah: Yup. Owen: Are you Noah, Interrupting Owen: Yes.

Image 4 Owen: If you say so. But… Yknow… If you ever DO need any help…

Image 5 Noah: You’ll be the first guy I ask. Owen: Good.

[softestepilogue]

full offense but fandoms are unbearable because y’all are unlikable. y’all are so weird and i will die on that hill.

this is like the third time i’ve been in a fandom where a white male SIDE character is heavily favored by the fandom and they start jumping through hoops, and grabbing reasons out their asses, to prove why the main poc character is a terrible person. they will also ignore any wrongdoing of the side white male character.

it’s so fucking weird and exhausting.

[naranjapetrificada]

I was having a WIP chat with one of my betas (@epersonae) earlier and one thing she said is there's probably a universe where people who understood what the show was trying to do with Izzy are able to joyfully dig into his character because there's no canyon and I'm currently feeling very jealous. I've already been having to think about him lately and ironically my other beta (@sabra-n) said something yesterday in a completely different context that's got me turning him over in my mind no matter how much I'd rather think about anything else.

I've mentioned before that it always feels like the Ed POV sections take the longest to feel right, and yesterday sabra was like "what if it's because your Ed's so different from canon?" So when I sat down to get some work done with that in mind, I started thinking about how it's probably going to continue to be tough to write this Ed when he a) didn't have the abusive father of canon, b) has two older sisters who love him and c) has a social position where Izzy's influence can't look the way it did in canon.

Deep in my braindump document for this fic there are plans for and half-written scenes about violence, legacy, performing masculinity, daddy issues, trauma, and other themes from the show, but in order to get into stuff like that that will help put Ed as a character in more familiar territory, I'll have to come at it sideways. And Izzy could be a really great vector for that here, even if it doesn't look the way the show did, and that means I'm stuck thinking deeper about that greasy little rat (affectionate? nah, not quite) more than I've ever wanted to.

I figured out a way to make him useful in this way, but it's going to require giving him a level of interiority I don't want to. In that other universe, where you don't feel like you have to be on your guard to defend yourself from canyon takes, giving Izzy interiority could be a really fun writing challenge! But with the miasma of just...everything that's happened in our version of the fandom that's harder, because in our reality we've had to think about him even when we didn't feel like it, just because we were trying to wrap our minds around all ass-backwards canyon takes.

I hope there's a version of me in that universe writing this fic. If there is, she's probably already posted chapter 3 because she had a lower barrier for entry with accepting the amount of thinking about Izzy that's been required. She's also probably less worried about accidentally making him sympathetic, so she doesn't have to confront her lack of experience writing unreliable narrators. That bitch is so lucky.

(another thing I said to Elaine earlier about writing Izzy is that at least we're both miserable, which should probably be its own tag. At least I have the consolation of knowing that he's definitely having a worse time living the story than I am writing it.)

[thym3y]

hornigold's legacy

[harrylovesspaezle]

hey guys! some characters do horrible things when they feel threatened or are in a bad mental state, and in a lot of cases it's very hard to apologize. not because they don't feel sorry, but because apologizing it makes the fact that you hurt people more real. its scary. characters don't always fix their shit, they don't always become angels. they don't need to, got it? people suck sometimes. and they still deserve respect and love and a chance to heal.

[something-about-sunflowers]

The fact that some people seem to think Ed was genuinely healing during the breakup-robe era and that Izzy is what made him swing so hard into the Kraken is literally driving me insane.

Was he trying? Maybe. More likely he was in denial and repressing the worst of it. Which is why, when it did all explode, it hit more like a nuke than a firework.

But like. If he was healing at all, he wasn’t nearly at the stage some people seem to think he was. He wouldn’t have been capable of becoming the Kraken if he had been, regardless of how ‘mean’ Izzy was being (’mean’, god this is fucking ridiculous, they’re pirates, they’re all mean Izzy’s just blunt).

No, Izzy didn’t help. He threatened to leave, he reminded Ed of the necessity of Blackbeard (no -- shut the fuck up -- listen to me, Blackbeard is important. Izzy doesn’t just want him back because he’s horny for violence not opening that can of worms but god is that read twenty types of wrong too. Blackbeard is their meal-ticket, he’s their armor. At this point, nobody wants to risk going up against Blackbeard, and there’s safety in that. In such an dangerous profession, whatever safety you can get is absolute necessity.), he brought up the one thing that was hurting him the most, in a particularly painful way.

But he didn’t make him do anything. Ed has his own agency. For the love of christ please stop infantilizing Ed for the sake of demonizing Izzy. And just. In general. He’s not, and has never been, a precious uwu baby who has never hurt people or wanted to. He’s fucking Blackbeard and you don’t get to be Blackbeard if you don’t ‘love a good maim’.

It does such a disservice to the character to pin all his faults on Izzy. It flattens them both (and Stede too, since, if it’s all Izzy’s doing, he doesn’t have to reckon with Ed’s fucked choices and how he feels about them).

[gay-baby-brig]

I know it's only ableist normie neurotypical assholes coming in here going "I can't believe your favorite hyperfixation died and you're upset that so cringe, you don't deserve respect" because if other neurodivergent people came into actual fandom spaces with their art prints and shaker keychains and tattoos of their own hyperfixation characters and were absolutely infuriated that not only do people have other viewpoints and tastes as them but that they don't deserve to express them, and then proceed to invalidate tf out of them, maybe you're not covered under the tolerance contract. Maybe we don't want you in neurodivergent spaces until you stop acting like a skinwalker.

Nds shitting on other nds when the world already shits on us is literally the most fucked up thing. Hope you never have nd kids, guys. Something will definitely get lost in translation. And if you're offended by this personally, lol. Then yeah it was targeted directly at you cuz you definitely don't get it. Cool people do.

[arsenicflame]

the thing is, right, if izzy WAS evil i would still absolutely love him. hes a fictional character, i don't care about his morals if hes compelling.

but the frustrating thing is that hes not evil, hes not even the antagonist anymore by a long stretch, hes arguably more liked by the crew than ed at the moment, but people still insist that we are reading the text of the show wrong and its going to completely 180 and turn him into a cartoon villain when there is absolutely no sign of that in the show, from the cast and crew, anything!!!

its so ridiculously annoying that i feel i have to defend my stance on a character because some people are so determined to cast him into the roll of a villain he is not, and think that we are the wrong ones for simply reading what the show is putting out

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

genuine question @ ppl who think izzy is poor/ lower class:

why

fr tho im not trying to start a fight here i just want to know where this take is coming from. i've seen people state that izzy is poor/working class like this is an immutable fact of canon, but from what i can see, izzy might have a poor background, but we don't know enough about his past to say for sure. and he's definitely not poor now, during the events of season 1. he's not a wealthy aristocrat like stede, but he's definitely made a comfortable living working with ed. (financially comfortable, at least. i imagine life on a 1717 pirate ship is physically uncomfortable no matter how successful a pirate you are)

like if anyone knows why this take is so common let me know but i DO want to talk specifically with the people who believe this abt izzy. i honestly do not want to start discourse i just want to Understand