#(that plus how much i dislike the implication of edward being close to someone bigoted against him means i just don't see it)

[ladyluscinia]

As someone who is nebulously in the “Izzy is a bad person/ not an Izzy fan” camp, your posts have helped me realize something pretty important. A big part of why I hold those opinions is because I view Izzy through the lens of symbol and allegory rather than complex personhood. Maybe that’ll change in season 2 as we learn more about him, but as of now I think that’s a big reason why I and many others are quick to judge and excuse wrong doing against him. For some it’s simply difficult to connect with him as a character, and much more accessible to see him as a reminder of hypocrisy within the queer community. Hell even a reminder of that one old friend who for whatever reason just CANNOT let the fact that you’re growing as a person go.

I don’t know, what do you think about the concept of there being a difference between analyzing characters as people and analyzing them as representations of larger societal issues?

Interesting question...

I mean, I am a big proponent of "characters aren't real people and that's important to remember when discussing them", which does dovetail nicely with a lot of discussion on "What is this character in the story?" And a character being a symbol or representation of something else abstract or systemic is a perfectly valid option. Nigel Badminton, for example, has a twin brother who loved him, but absolutely none of us give a shit about how his death affected Chauncey emotionally because both of them are really just symbols of oppressive societal power / Stede's childhood trauma / bullies in general / etc. The show only cares about their deaths insomuch as it affects Stede, and Stede literally admits he doesn't even feel bad about it.

They are such straightforward examples of narrative tools all the way down to their deaths, which are pure symbolism via black humor. Like, Nigel falls on his own sword because he can't stop mocking Stede to take him seriously for two seconds, and Chauncey shoots himself in the head the moment he fulfills his role in Stede's story because it's a hilariously dark joke that this happened to Stede twice.

To take this to Izzy however... Ok, so three major questions once you think a character is representing something:

What is this character representing?

What is the story trying to say about it?

How direct is the represention? Or to put it another way: How much of a person are they vs just a symbol?

Because most characters with any decent amount of screentime are going to naturally become more "people" than "symbol". It's not an either/or situation. OFMD creators have been very open about how the show is looking at toxic masculinity, for example, so I think it's pretty safe to say Izzy is the character on screen most pushing that mindset via the abusive pirate culture he's firmly planted in. I also think the show has a lot to say about classism, and Stede is pretty obviously the designated character for that. (I also think Lucius is, because he's kinda picking up the furthest extreme of Stede's version of piracy just like Izzy is Edward's, but that's a meta a little to the left of what you asked.)

But Stede is a lot more than just "rich guy", and despite the fact you don't exactly root for the rich guys in classism narratives, we are supposed to root for Stede. His arc is about learning. The show's message is broadly not upper class positive - look at the French partiers - but Stede can escape it in a way they can't because he's also a character in his own right, and the show's overriding theme is about growth.

I think Izzy is certainly complex enough to be a character, unlike the other antagonists who are kept mostly offscreen. He has a major connection to one of the mains, which tends to automatically convey a level of depth. He also just... doesn't function effectively as a pure symbol of oppression, because he's not bad enough. There's so many writing decisions where it would have been so easy to make him worse. More aggressive. More textually bigoted. More directly harmful. And they didn't. (...Fuck it. Linking to that time I said this and got immediately blocked.)

An example that's been getting me recently: In his very first episode, why didn't Izzy steal the hostages? That's like basic antagonist setup. Especially for people that think overt racism is at play here at all (I very much do not) it would be the simplest thing in the world to have him steal them from the natives for some stupidly easy early work on that front, and establish it with a line of dialogue. Instead the line we get is "Oh, we sold them to some guys." They had him pay for them.

And all of this I think ties back into that second question of "what is the show trying to say," because I do not think the answer is "Izzy is just our stand in for bad people and we do not care about him." Especially not if he's the designated representation of toxic masculinity, because I think Izzy-as-a-character is clearly suffering under toxic masculinity. He's specifically also a victim of the system, and it's kind of a fucked up and pessimistic message to say victims of a shitty system deserve to be written off as a comedic punching bag and die unhappy. Isn't it better thematically if he's a person like Stede who can learn to be better???

We're in a world where Edward's backslide into the toxic masculinity aligned system starts with 7 attempted murders + mutilation and abduction, and we're going to forgive this and give him a happy ending. At this point the show's message is approaching incoherent if Izzy is irredeemably evil and deserves to suffer.