#insane behaviour etho!!! thank you!

[laddertek]

Etho to Tango: "I'll sacrifice one of [my shards] if it'll get you running."

Bruh. Etho just spent 8 crowns to get another shard. He has five left. And he voluntarily wanted to give one to Tango so Tango can run. (Tango who has stacks of these in his inventory.)

[jeff-the-accountant]

agreed. first i'll add this comprehensive analysis of the abusive behaviours of izzy towards ed.

tell me, how do people extend that ed was habitually and continuously torturing the crew throughout the years as a captain? even izzy doesn'T say ed have been doing it continuously as a captain, but puts it into his framing of kraken ed (uh huh how did he get there, interesting) "behaving like a mad dog" when lying talking to stede.

ik the counterargument is this weird lil speech izzy gave ed in 1x04 about "massaging this crew when they were worried about ed's judgement".

lol well ok, i will not extrapolate izzy's style of "massaging" from 1x02 ("the man is half insane. no one asked you to fuckin think") but i WILL take the fact the very moment izzy became a captain, he continued acting like a bag of dicks (well, he didn't have to anymore, right? since he wasn't anymore under the cruel ed?) and got almost in an instant mutinied.

congrats boy, i've heard you are a fuckin rockstar of mutiny prevention, tell me about that, what happened?

his behaviour then honestly made me doubting his speech about the crew later in 2x08. but right, then i understood, thanks to some meta, that izzy is just so self-righteous, white, mean prick and thinks He Is The Only One Who Sees The Truth And Does The Job, that he believed getting them by the short and curlies was just some "tough love". the only type of love izzy understands.

it is izzy who is the mean, wicked part of blackbeard. and it is him who is mediocre sailor and shitty leader. but it also happens it is him who is white. (more on that in this amazing meta)

TW: in the next paragraph talking about abusive, controlling family behaviours

in 2x08 we learn one more thing. izzy thinks of the crew as a family. but what he thinks a family is for, is to kill for. read any person talking about an experience of being raised in a "strong family ethos" abusive family. or you can read me. there are families that don't focus on supporting each other or in general other members' needs. they will focus on controlling the "clan" and "protecting it" from the outer world. they will work as a siege - feeling constantly under siege and threatened; the amount of contact with outside world is strictly limited, if not physically then by manipulative framing of the outside to always be percieved as a threat. it is hard to get in, but you know what? it is hard to get out as well. this is what i hear, when izzy says that piracy is "about finding the family to kill for when yours are long dead".

and ok, i acknowledge there is more to this scene and that there are different readings of this; that this being my main reading is affected by my past. but i will still hear it and i will still see it in izzy's behaviours. even if i have sympathy for him for absolutely different reasons. welcome to fuckin nuance, izzy apologists of the tumblr.

posts going around saying it's an interpretation and not canon that izzy emotionally abused ed into staying blackbeard for years when izzy stared right into the camera and explicitly said on his deathbed that

he has been "terrible" to ed

he "fed [ed's] darkness" and "egged [blackbeard] on" even though he knew ed had "outgrown" the blackbeard persona (he is very explicit that he knew this at the time; it's not that he hadn't realized it)

this was going on "for years" (i.e. it is not something that started in season 1 but a pattern that was ongoing long before that)

he did this ultimately for his own benefit, because it was izzy who needed ed to stay blackbeard

he then touches ed's face and says "there he is" in a clear callback to the scene from 1x10 where he did the same thing and triggered ed's deepest trauma in a deliberate attempt to get him to start acting like blackbeard again, framing that scene as the culmination of the years-long pattern of behavior on izzy's part that he is apologizing for

in order to interpret the scene as not telling the viewer that izzy had been emotionally abusive toward ed in order to pressure him into staying blackbeard for years you have to assume that either

izzy is lying, for some reason, on his deathbed

izzy is not deliberately lying but we are meant to think he is wrong about some or all of this (which parts? how did he get to have incorrect beliefs about his own actions and intentions and motivations? most importantly, in that case what is the narrative purpose of having him say this stuff?)

izzy is telling the truth, but while he did treat ed terribly for years in order to get ed to live his life in a way that benefited izzy while hurting ed, it does not technically meet the definition of abuse (personally i have a difficult time imagining behavior that involves deliberately pressuring or manipulating someone else to live in a way that you know makes them miserable over a period of multiple years for your own benefit, and that can be fairly described as "terrible," but not as "abusive;" i guess definitions are subjective but that seems to me like it would be not a very useful way to define abuse)

the first two reads are pretty obviously in the category of interpretations that do not technically outright contradict canon but are clearly reading against the text. the third is the usual fandom habit of quibbling over semantics and doesn't change the material facts of what happened.

now i think it would be fair to say that while the narrative is definitely telling us izzy has emotionally abused ed into staying blackbeard for years you personally do not find that convincing, because the narrative portrayal of izzy's behavior toward ed up to that point read differently to you. or to say that while izzy treated ed very badly for years, ed's eventual response was sufficiently disproportionate that you feel it is misleading to focus on izzy's wrongdoings. or that you just really hate this development. if any of those things are what you think then i disagree very strongly, but it's in principle a valid reaction. but just denying that this is in fact how the narrative framed the scene is frankly silly.

prior to 2x08 i thought there was genuine ambiguity about this but then the writers really went out of their way to make it absolutely clear. the facts on the ground are that izzy spent years trying to pressure ed to cling to the blackbeard persona long before stede was ever in the picture; that he knew at the time this was not good for ed, but he did it anyway for selfish reasons; and that post-redemption-arc, he came to see his own previous behavior toward ed as having been terrible. how we should react to all this is something we can debate, but it's really not unclear what happened.

[teacupsandcyanide]

Thank you for tagging me!! This is brilliant. I hope you don’t mind me adding my own rambles. My headcanons around “does Farah is holistic powers” change every other day and are the sort of thing I have about three different not-necessarily-conflicting headcanons for, and alllll the above is very much a yes. I struggle to put it all into words and this clarified things for me a bit more.

I don’t think Farah has the same relationship with causality that Dirk, Bart, Todd, or even Ken have, but often because of that she plays a vital role in the events that shape the story. Farah is a more diegetic character than the four above are, but that doesn’t necessarily mean having no abilities or not being significant. I would say Amanda is also a more diegetic character because even though she can see visions of the future, she does so in a way that is fairly typical to the genre, rather than interacting with the story in an almost meta capacity in the way the causality characters do.

As you outline very excellently above, the thing Farah brings to the table is an ability to balance the often life-endangering insanity of Dirk and Todd. She uses diegetic skills to protect them, and actually helps them survive the genre they’re in partially because she is not genre savvy and does not expect help to fall from the heavens at the last minute. Farah IS that help, quite often. As a character this makes her an amazing foil for Dirk-and-Todd, and I think in-universe it’s something that she’s conscious of in a diegetic way. Where Todd says “I’m not your Watson, asshole”, Farah begs Todd to stop engaging in risk-taking behaviour because she’s terrified and exhausted by being the only person grounded in reality. From a writing perspective there’s a lot of room there for some really interesting angst tbh.

So when we ask “does Farah is holistic”, you absolutely could still argue that Farah is holistic. Holistically-non-holistic, because as you said, someone has to worry about the details, so she was assigned detail-freak at birth.

You could also argue that if the Universe has specific people created to make things happen, then there must be people who are the people things happen to/around/with, and while I don’t think the passive-active dichotomy of that is 100% sympatico with the ethos of the show, there is scope within that argument to flesh it out into basically “there has to be some kind of balance between holistic and non-holistic for the Universe to function”.

Or, you could go even deeper down the iceberg and reason that, although for obvious shorthand reasons in fandom we often call any character who has powers/abilities ‘holistic’, holisticness is a paradigm that Dirk constructed to conceptualise how his specific abilities work - and his abilities are causality-related. We see a perfect mirror of that paradigm in Bart, who also says to Ken something like “everything is constantly turning inward, always mirroring itself”. Mona also uses the holistic paradigm to describe herself, but Mona is one of the few Blackwing subjects we know was allowed to socialise with Dirk, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she got it from him (I think this would tie into the way she mimics things but doesn’t seem to invent new things; she’s an actress, not a writer (also we don’t know the scope of Mona’s powers and it’s possible that she also has some level of causality power)).

So you think, okay, defining “holistic” as “causality related and non/semi/pan-diegetic”, then are the Rowdies holistic? Is Amanda, though she obviously has supernatural powers? Characters who don’t have observable powers but have moments of meta clarity, like Freidkin asking if he’s one of the bad guys, are they technically holistic?

And that’s where the line really starts to blur and you start to think that maybe the Universe isn’t divided into ‘holistics’ and ‘non-holistics’. If everything and everyone is connected, then there cannot be any such thing as a piece or a person that has zero significance to the pan-dimensional Cat’s Cradle that is reality. There is no neat black and white, there’s just a bell curve, and yes, for sanity’s sake you need to make a decision about what you specifically are going to rate as high enough on that bell curve to be significant, but it will still be a bell curve.

And the bell curve itself isn’t static; it wanes and waxes and shifts and it can exist in multiple different expressions of itself at the same time, and if you are one of the tiny little dots clinging to that bell curve there will be times when, to put it most simply, you will experience an acceleration of strangeness in your life. Outside the Universe, in the one where you’re a fictional character on a TV show, that acceleration of strangeness tugging you up the bell curve is the moment when you become a relevant to the narrative.

Which leads to a point I like to think of as both the deepest and surface level of the iceberg (the iceberg is also pan-dimensional), which is obviously where we started except now it tastes slightly different and can be squinted at side on in either a Watsonian or Doyleist way.

Watsonian: Farah is selected by the Universe to be strictly non-holistic, and that in itself inextricably links her with causality, which means that she is holistic. Doyleist: Farah is a character who diegetically grounds the others and stops them from flinging themselves bodily through the fourth wall, but that function in itself can only be observed from a meta-meta-textual perspective, and that’s why she’s just as meta-textually sexy as Dirk and Todd.

For Dirk and Todd, “take your control of your life” means taking control of your narrative by acknowledging that you are in a narrative, can engage with said narrative, and even possibly rewrite said narrative. For Farah, it means taking control of her life from within the narrative, in much the same way that any protagonist would - in the same way a real person would. The weird thing that makes Dirk a freak is that he regularly swing dances with causality; the thing that makes Todd a freak is that he decides to join Dirk in said swing dancing. Farah is a freak because she somehow escaped containment from an introspective procedural drama and wandered into the DGHDA universe and then had the gall to stand there and go “I’m the normal one!”

Thinking about how Farah is kind of removed from the weird universe shit in a way. Not all the weird shit, mind you, just the truly, incomprehensibly bizarre stuff. She doesn't time travel in s1, she doesn't get to go to Wendimoor in s2, etc. She's back in reality shooting cultists and mages.

I mean she literally saves the world in s2. The other two saved the Wendimoor dimension, yeah, but Farah saved the ACTUAL WORLD.

A lot of ppl have been theorizing lately about how Todd has holistic 'powers'/a universal purpose that's a cosmic compliment to Dirk's powers-- inadvertently boiling down all the crazy into the right questions, subconsciously picking up on the blind spots that Dirk misses, etc. As an extension of that, I think Farah's function is to be the grounding element of the trio and that she has 'powers' that reflect that-- they're just powers that she's dedicated her whole life to cultivating the hard way. Her universe-assigned role is to handle all of the elements of cases that get overlooked in order to make way for the weird shit.

The universe saw the other two chasing rabbits and falling into pocket dimensions and said "hm, someone needs to balance the scales."

I'm a big fan of @teacupsandcyanide's "My commiserations, Todd Brotzman, but the Universe assigned you Watson at birth" quote (hi, sorry, I hope you don't mind me tagging you, but credit where credit is due: it's a great quote). I think that the corresponding thing for Farah is that the Universe assigned her Anxiety/General Neurodivergence at birth because SOMEONE has to worry about the not-so-little details that everyone else forgets about when shit gets weird.

Anyways, Farah is essential and the other two simply would not be able to function without her <3 much love