#its gonna be real interesting to see these two interact again after the shitshow of their last conversation

[help-imanartistt]

SPOILERS RIPTIDE UP TO 115

I have so many thoughts about Lizzie and Jay's relationship oh my god.

But we need to start at Lizzie and Ava. Forbidden relationship between Navy an pirate. Lizzie then watched her lover murder her captain and be shot dead by her own people all while she is powerless to stop it.

Fast forward to Joaldo Island. Lizzie spies a Ferin on a Pirate safe island. She thinks Ava was the only good Ferin left, she's unable to believe another would want to be a pirate. She holds her at gun point desperate for an explanation. Jay explains as best she can but it's clear Lizzie is still suspicious. Then she finds out that Jay is part of Chip's crew and that she is going to have to learn to trust her. Lizzie needs to learn to trust someone who only reminds her of what she's lost, what she might consider her failures and she despises her for it.

Then Allport, Lizzie and Jay are drunk. They laugh and talk and divulge their secrets to one another. But is Lizzie thinking about Jay? Someone who previously reminded her of what she lost? In this intoxicated state maybe she truly believes Ava is back. Maybe in this moment Lizzie is living the life she always wanted. One where she and Ava don't need to hide, where they can be proud of their relationship and be happy together. Their relationships improves after this. They get closer, but it's unclear if Lizzie wants a friendship with Jay or if she's trying to fill the hole Ava left.

Then she's forced to confront Jay about Ava's death. This person who she started to see as her lost lover, as a friend. She is suddenly reminded of what their roles are. Navy against pirate and that's all she can see again when Jay's accusations begin. It's like she's losing Ava for a second time.

Now Jay has left the black sea to warn Lizzie of a possible traitor on her ship. Will Lizzie even be able to trust her? Will she just see more navy trying to sabotage her and her crew? Or will she be able to put their differences aside and look out for her crew? Maybe Jay will use an example of the Shadowskull massacre as reason for Lizzie to trust her. Maybe Lizzie won't listen and walk right into a trap. Only time will tell.

[sure-as-eggs]

can you tell more about ed’s (and oswald’s) ways of thinking? god i can listen to you going on about them forever

…Well since I don’t seem to be capable of shutting up about them, I’m thrilled you feel that way?? (I’m sorry this took so long… Honestly I kept putting it off because I was waiting to see how Defrosted!Ed would handle things on his own before I committed to a reading on him!)

Anyway:

Ed is a chess player.Oswald is an artist.

There are a finite number of variables Ed is interested in at any given moment, and he operates within a closed system of actions and responses. He also always has a predetermined Winning Condition: after all, there’s only one definition of ‘checkmate.’

The problem for Ed is that he’s not always a particularly good chess player, because he has blinders a mile wide that prevent him from seeing if he’s made a bad move or if he’s underestimated an opponent. And that happens quite a lot?? Because Ed has very poor social skills and a fascinating ego problem.

Rather than a narcissist (which is 100% Oswald’s issue), I’d almost call Ed a solipsist?? Solipsism is the philosophical idea that you can’t be sure if anything exists except your own mind, and between his hallucinations and his compulsions and his empathy issues and his social difficulties, Ed has very very few anchors in reality. He has to find a way to view the world in concrete terms if he’s going to interact with it, he has to know that he can process and catalogue and make sense of things. Riddles are a perfect expression of that: by framing things in questions he knows the answers to, he swaps places with the rest of the world temporarily, because HE’S the one who’s anchored and it’s EVERYBODY ELSE who’s on uncertain ground.

That’s why it breaks my heart when he gets those riddles wrong. It’s all tied up in his Riddler persona, this assurance that he’s real and knows who he is and what he’s meant to be doing, and it unwinds him. Oswald telling him his riddles don’t make sense is Oswald telling Ed that his grasp on reality is wrong, that his identity isn’t real and that he’s completely lost sight of the chessboard patterns and reasoning he held on to so tightly in the first three seasons. Of COURSE he accepts being frozen again.

“Fogginess of the mind,” “decreased capacity to think ten steps ahead,” and “inability to solve riddles” are all basically the same complaint. He can’t make sense of the chessboard anymore. He knows it’s all there, he knows there are patterns to follow and questions with answers, he just can’t see it.

And he doesn’t make any attempt to adapt or look at things differently, either?? (Not yet, anyway.) He manages to develop a complete plan, and when it falls through, he temporarily gives up, and then comes up with another one. (Make money -> Fix brain) 

Honestly, the quality of his plans has declined significantly from when he went up against Jim or orchestrated Oswald’s downfall, but I don’t think his mental cycle of futility and single-mindedness has changed at all from before being frozen??

Ed doesn’t adjust well to unexpected circumstances or reactions. He’s at his best and happiest when he’s protected, removed, when there’s a buffer between him and whatever he’s trying to do. He doesn’t tend to do well in the thick of things, because he can’t account for complicating variables or micromanage from the front lines, and because he has no time or space to develop alternate strategies when he feels like everything he’s planned is falling apart around him.

For example: Kristen wasn’t supposed to get mad at him over Dougherty. He doesn’t know what to DO with that, he didn’t plan for it and so he panics, he tries to get things back on track with such violent desperation that he kills her. He has absolutely no problem-solving skills in situations like that.

Compare it to literally the next time he wakes up, when he’s alone and can start to rationalize the situation and the stakes. Compare it to him trying to sabotage the investigation into Kristen’s death, where he absolutely expects Jim to be out to get him, but there’s no immediate danger; he has all the time in the world to come up with and commit to a course of action, and to handle it all cleanly and precisely.

Ed has plans, and then potentially back-up plans, and quite often they’re brilliant. But if they fall through and he’s not in a position to retreat and reassess… He’s screwed. (“I was arresting Jim!!”)

(He has the /capacity/ to improvise, and sometimes he’s even successful, but generally only when whoever he’s trying to manipulate doesn’t have a good reason to doubt or make things difficult for him. He lies to Lee several times, and to Kristen, but in all those situations they go out of their way to give him the benefit of the doubt. It’s the same thing when he tricks Oswald; Oswald doesn’t believe what’s happening even when Ed pulls his gun.)

Ed gives his stance on manipulation in Arkham, which is that people are just puzzles, and there’s a solution to them: give them what they want. Contrast that with Oswald’s perspective: “when you know what a man LOVES, you know what can kill him.”

Ed is thinking in terms of cause and effect, black and white, fixed identities and desires because that’s how he operates, that’s the only way he can anchor himself and create a strategy that gets him closer to some objective ideal of control over his own reality.

Oswald isn’t.

Oswald is entirely contextual. He’s not looking for truth or answers, he’s not interested in objectivity or what’s really going on, all he cares about are feelings and experiences. Even his big-picture view is in terms of his own relationship to Gotham: it’s not just a prize or a proving ground, it’s his home.

I love his relationship to Ed’s riddles, because the ones he solves are the ones that are wrapped up in an immediate experience. He’s brilliant, but he’s not interested in being smart for its own sake. He gets nothing out of solving puzzles which aren’t relevant to him.

“What I want, the poor have, the rich need, and if you eat it, you die.”…Who gives a shit? Literally, who gives a flying fuck? If you want to say something, say it. If you want to lie, then lie. He doesn’t understand what Ed gets out of knowing the answer to his own question, he doesn’t understand why you’d separate the fact that you know something from the thing that you actually know unless you’re going to USE that somehow.

“I can’t be bought, but I can be stolen with a glance. I’m worthless to one, but priceless to two.”He is so not interested in this while he’s pissed at Ed and trying to run a goddamn campaign, but, fascinatingly, he remembers it word for word. Because the scene where Ed tells him this riddle is Ed pulling out all the stops, every rational explanation and concrete example he can think of to communicate something to Oswald, and I think Oswald can tell. He shuts Ed down because love is such a huge insecurity for him, acknowledgement is such a weak point, and he doesn’t want to accept that he has any interest in what Ed’s trying to tell him.But he does.And when it turns out Ed’s right, Oswald proves that he totally subconsciously solved that riddle because he could FEEL it, not as a question with an answer but as a hope and a fear he was trying to pretend Ed hadn’t brought to light.

…That was a digression.

Anyway: Oswald is at his best when things are an absolute shitshow. In tense, high-stakes situations where everybody’s already burned through Plans A through F and nobody has a precedent for what to do next, or when he’s stuck with no resources and an impossible task, Oswald shines.

My favorite example of this is the Season One finale, where he’d planned to go quietly murder Falcone and instead ends up arrested and chained in a warehouse by his two OTHER worst enemies (one of whom he thought was dead) who are suddenly working together. There is no way in hell he even considered that this was how his day would go. In Ed’s chess metaphors, this would be like if halfway through the game somebody gave your opponent all their captured pieces back and then let them take several consecutive turns. This is a Problem in a proper noun sense of the word, and Oswald has absolutely nothing to work with.

…Except he does. Because he can feel the tension, he can feel Fish’s controlled fury and Maroni’s self-satisfaction, he has history and connections with both of them, and he channels it all through about three sentences. He reads the situation like a painting and changes the entire mood and meaning of the piece with three well-placed strokes.

He can do this most effectively when he only has to worry about himself, because whatever he creates is (by default) going to suit his own vision. The most extreme version of it manifests as one of my favorite Oswald Things: what a tremendously bad idea it is to let him go off screen.

If you let him out of your sight, you’ve given him free reign to choose his own relationship to whatever’s happening. You’ve given him total creative control, and by god he’s gonna use it.Some examples off the top of my head:-When everybody scatters in the Season One finale and he unhooks himself and disappears, he comes back minutes later with an assault rifle and takes over the city-When Jim and Harvey leave him downstairs at Loeb’s farm, he stages the escape of the captives he’s supposed to be guarding and later murders them at his club-Ed shoots him and puts him in the river and he survives and turns up as Ed’s roommate in the super secret Court of Owls dungeon(I like to think everybody is fully aware of this phenomenon by the time the hostage exchange rolls around, and it’s part of what’s going through Ed’s head while chasing him out of the warehouse: “If I let him get out that door, I am fucked.”And hey, what do you know.Oswald gets out the door about four seconds before Ed.And four seconds is all he needs.)

Oswald has his weaknesses too, obviously. He’s actually, generally speaking, pretty terrible at being in charge of things. (Remember what a piss poor job he did with Fish’s club before Butch showed up?? He made it too much about himself, took it too personally, disregarded too many things he wasn’t personally interested in, and it nearly flopped.) Being in a position of authority really doesn’t capitalize on his skills, because it restricts the perspectives he can take, it dictates his relationship to the city and its workings in a way that can undermine the things he wants and feels.

In that sense, the team up of Oswald as mayor and Ed as chief of staff really could not have been better for either of them: you got the sense that Oswald ranted and fumed about things and worked through to what he wanted, and Ed translated it all into itemized lists to be discretely handled after tea.Oswald was in a position to see and interpret everything, but he didn’t have to worry about micromanagement. Ed had a constant stream of ego-inflating tasks to optimize and complete, but he could do it all from a position of total security.

(…I have to bring up one last thing, which is part of why I picked chess player and artist as my metaphors for Ed and Oswald: 3x15. Oswald leaves behind an oil painting of the two of them together, layers and shades and impressions, and Ed leaves a huge question mark over it because he can’t PROCESS them that way. He goes to the chess tournament, one stage in a meticulously choreographed master plan, and hallucinates Oswald telling him he’s being absurd because Ed is coping by moving pieces around for their own sake, assembling a puzzle without any regard for whether it actually makes a picture in the end. It’s such a good contrast and such a good episode, I’m still not over it.)