#now more than ever queer folks need to be louder and prouder to show that we won’t be discouraged from living life

[jack-crow-lantern]

Mourning is over! Time to fag it up more than ever before.

[jaelijn]

Thoughts on The Thing in the OFMD finale under the cut because I need to articulate this somewhere and I haven't seen anything similar expressed, though at this point I'm not going into the tags anymore. Spoilers obviously.

And because Tumblr no longer lets you effectively keep things out of the tags/search even though I would rather no one but my followers saw this: If you hated the finale, move on. This post is not for you.

I feel like people are forgetting that this isn't primarily an escapist realistically historically pirate show, it's a queer narrative.

And Izzy's queer storyline isn't and has never been "discover sexuality, achieve key to self and life happily ever after" (that's Ed's and Stede's), it's "it's never too late". It's never too late to experience queer joy. Even if you're 95 and one foot in the grave, you can still discover the queer community. Even if you spent your whole life hiding it so far, you can still have it now. Even if you die of AIDS tomorrow you can still go to pride today. Even if some bastard might gun you down tomorrow for no fucking reason other than hating queer folks, you can still have this: queer joy and queer community. It is never too late for queer joy.

And the response to one of our own dying isn't to crawl into a hole and be afraid. It's to be even more aggressivley and life-affirmingly queer. It's new starts and weddings and parties. It's a fuck you to every time one of our own dies brutally. When we lose people of our own, the best thing we can do is to celebrate life. Queer life and queer joy and the queer community. This is what queer pride IS.

Does it suck when someone dies? Yes! Yes! It sucks majorly. But it's a part and a reality of queer lifes. Sometimes one of us dies way before their time. Most of the time it's unfair. Sometimes one of us only finds us when it's already late. Sometimes we can't have a full and happy queer life. It sucks. It's tragic. But it's a part of the story that needs to be told, because the worst thing we can do is pretend tragedy doesn't exist in queerness, to erase the tragedy from memory and thought and with it the people we owe most to remember because they are no longer with us. And while we need queer joy, we also need tragedy: If only to remind us to be even louder, even prouder, even queerer! And a show where there is queer characters who continue that queer joy is a place to tell this story - this is not a show where one queer death erases all queerness from the narrative, this is a show where EVERYTHING is queer.

And narratively: I knew Izzy was dead from the moment of the Pinocchio joke. The villain wasn't going to let him get away; it was happening. (Incidentally, it is foreshadowed exactly like Lucius's 'death' was: a life-threatening loss of limb early in the series.). But while Lucius's 'death' was sharp and brutal and unwarranted and unmourned AND caused by one of our own, Izzy's death doesn't come before Izzy can complete his arc, it comes at its culmination and it comes by a villain. It's not supposed to be something to be celebrated, of course not - it's death! It's tragic! But Izzy dies after having let go of his own toxicity, after having experienced the most happiness of his life and while being confident that the people he loves are safe. He can let them go on without him. The fact that it is heartwrenching is the point, but it's in no shape or form a death that is Bad Writing (tm).

And it's cathartic. That's what death is supposed to be. That the crew are able to move on isn't that they don't care - it's that Izzy left them with the legacy of celebrating their community ESPECIALLY WHEN they might die the next day.

I see a lot of people saying that the other characters don't seem to care. I don't understand what show those people have watched. I can only assume they have their heads so far up their arses in the generalised "MCD is Evil" that they can't accept that sometimes a character death is narrative catharsis and that that rage completely blinds them to subtle emotion (and also not subtle emotions: This is Ed "hide in his cabin to have a cry" Teach openly sobbing on the deck of the ship for the love of everything!). They obviously haven't watched anyone's face in the scenes of Izzy dying - nor during the funeral either:

Anyway - yes, the death hurts. It's supposed to hurt. But it makes narrative sense, it concludes Izzy's arc logically and powerfully and his legacy is, to me, a very very important queer story.

I, too, hope to never have a queer friend die, but if it happens, I hope that I'll have the strength to honour their death and their life by LIVING more proudly, more queerly in their memory, not by denying that they have died. Or by denying that I, too, might die at any time.