#the notion that it is weird and suspicious for a minority section of the fandom to enjoy content about an antagonist is batshit

[ladyluscinia]

So @brigdh has some great tags:

#agreed #I also think there's a simplification in this debate by constantly framing the two sides as pro- and anti-Izzy when it's really about Ed #like. I'm an Ed/Stede OTP'er and I still think Ed in eps 9 & 10 was not in a great place. That's not (yet) his happy end #it's easy to blame Izzy fans for being racist because they like the white character too much #but that's a straw man #Izzy crit fans also tend to like a white character (Stede) #it's really about interpretations of Ed and not who you ship him with #excellent meta #our flag means death

This is a VERY good point.

People have been commenting for ages on how weird it is that OFMD fans who hate Izzy spend so much time in the Izzy tag posting about him and writing meta about him and getting all worked up about other people's views on him when they could just not do that. They could go have fun with characters they like! But it's not really about Izzy most of the time, is it? Usually it's about making sure to loudly repeat that Izzy is wrong about Edward.

It's in the litigation of 1x04 to argue Edward was trying to teach and Izzy was just too stupid to listen, or that Edward was right all along and Izzy sabotaged a perfectly good plan by lying to Edward's face about tides and making him doubt it. (Remember that one? I do.) It's in criticizing Izzy in 1x06 where somehow the entire conflict caused by Edward's plan to murder Stede - that he deliberately kept Izzy around for - falls entirely on Izzy to the point he might just be making up the whole thing from one idly floated suggestion.

And yeah, it's all over the place in 1x09 and 1x10 meta. Their preferred version of Ed never would have done anything like this if he'd had a choice and Izzy hadn't threatened his life, so all the bad stuff is really on Izzy for trying to force him into being this "evil" character they don't recognize. And if they're feeling particularly extra then Edward might even have set the whole thing up as a fuckery just to save his new friends from Izzy!

...I'm being excessively bitter, aren't I? Moving back to the topic:

It is about Edward. It's practically always about Edward, and how they think we like the wrong things about him. Izzy is our main (but not only!) window into who Edward was just before the romance started and they don't like what he implies, so Izzy must be malicious, delusional, so incompetent that Stede can run circles around him in a duel, so awful he can personify every bad thing Edward isn't, and, crucially, he must be entirely wrong about everything.

(It's honestly a pretty clever way to invalidate Edward takes - if one that almost certainly developed more organically than intentionally. Someone decides that Izzy holds X belief about Edward that's obviously wrong, works backwards based on disliking vibes to an indisputably wrong reason he would hold this belief - like racism or homophobia - and they get people reading their meta to hate a guy they don't care about anyway for said reason. Then when he's brought up as a meta interpretation character witness by someone else suddenly it's "Are we going to listen to what the racist says about who our POC blorbo is? Of course not. In fact Izzy believing X proves that the reality is Y." They double down and repeat the cycle, convinced they are definitely interpreting what the writers intended, with Izzy getting worse every time.)

Whereas if you do think Edward's backstory and characterization as Blackbeard is interesting for more than just contrasting the tragedy of it against your idyllic retirement endgame, then you probably tend to think Izzy is pretty interesting too. And maybe that understanding where he's coming from could give some insight on Edward that you won't be dismissing immediately. Liking or hating Izzy has become a fairly good barometer for which aspects of Edward's characterization you are interested in exploring along the route to his happy romcom ending.

Basically we all watched OFMD, turned to tumblr, and then I found their version of Edward to be an exceptionally boring read on one of my faves while they decided my takes made their same fave too mean or something. Now months later we've got whatever the hell toxic mess this counts as, all still rooted in the same, entirely unremarkable differences of opinion about 5 hours of a silly pirate show. I don't know if it's something about the blend of genres or the rep attracting a wider audience, or hell - maybe it's just a bunch of toxic fandom trends we've been aware of (ex: anti-"problematic" ship / fan harassment) hitting a new peak simultaneously, but the OFMD fandom has some Problems™ and they aren't people liking Izzy.

Izzy likers are just easy to target, and even easier to frame as deserving it in the same breath.

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Oh, and just because it bugs me every time I see it mentioned:

We don't actually have a notably unusual percentage of people who like Izzy in the first place?

Like I did this statistics comparison a while back, and it still holds fairly true (ex: now at 17,000 works, 68.8% are tagged BlackBonnet vs 11.7% BlackHands). If Izzy was just some random asshole then his numbers might be a sign of an unusually large group of fans gravitating to him, but he's not. He's the most developed antagonist, 3rd or 4th most developed character easily, and he lives on their boat. No shit he shows up in a reasonable cross section of fan content.

People having fun with antagonists in fandom is not new behavior or a symptom of uncontrolled shitty white guy stanning. It's a character type that is popular, which Izzy happens to fill in OFMD.

Not going to put this directly on the long discussion chain that prompted it because it’s somewhat topic adjacent at best and I have no intention of derailing a discussion of fandom racism, but - while reading some of the “Izzy critical” responses that @bromelads got - I did see mention of one thing that I have both passionate feelings about and a near constant desire to elaborate some oft ignored context for. So.

One of the things mentioned as a source of discomfort in fandom for “Izzy critical” poc was posts rejecting that Edward was growing or healing in 1x09 and 1x10, suggesting that it mostly serves to empathize with Izzy over Ed and to make Izzy’s actions look better at the expense of Ed’s character / softness. The same person who gave this example later agreed that there’s some truth in the idea that Izzy crits’ misinterpretation of Izzy fan meta has something to do with the (very baffling) perception that we all don’t like Ed or think he’s the simplified villain of Izzy’s story or something, which I just want to a) appreciate for a second because I do actually adore Edward so much, and b) mention specifically because I think the whole Ed healing debate is a great example of that.

I’m not going to argue why I am staunchly in the “Ed wasn’t healing” / ��Kraken was inevitable” camp because I’ve done it before, but I do want to point out some related thoughts around that argument that I’ve picked up on each time it loops back around.

I feel like a lot of the people who strongly disagree with or get mad about that take frame it as though we are minimizing or rejecting the existence of Edward’s softness entirely. It’s like… Ok, so there is a distinct sequence of moments where Edward is displaying emotional vulnerability or a draw toward fine things that fans noticed, and then they interpreted the pink robe Ed’s “healing” as all that starting to pay off in his character development (before being interrupted by an external obstacle: Izzy). A very straightforward A -> B. Only when I push back against B and say “hold on I don’t see any healing in 1x10,” then I feel like people hear me rejecting that all the moments of A meant anything at all. If I see the shadow of the Kraken as an internally motivated obstacle being built in earlier episodes, then I must think that’s the dark and violent payoff, and the evidence of softness was a diversion or manipulation or just not going anywhere significant in character terms.

Which is very frustrating to me because Edward is a romcom protagonist.

Yes, this is very obvious to everyone. But it matters in this debate because protagonist status comes with very significant guarantees - namely, Edward is going to grow / heal / get his happy ending, etc. We’ve even got Stede’s S1 arc (which remember is still unfinished too) as a good example of structure and focus on internalized character flaws framed by plot hurdles. There is no version of this story arc where Edward ends as the Kraken, and I have never seen anybody suggest he’s not currently on a character arc toward growth and healing and a circle of true companions in Stede’s crew who love him for who he is.

So when I or anyone else says he’s not there yet, it’s almost exclusively because we are arguing about where he is on this character arc in 1x10. Of course the appreciation for fancy clothes and slow mornings with overly sugared tea is going to pay off! Of course he’s going to become friends with the crew (I’m rooting for Frenchie S2 bonding)! Of course he’s going to get to beat back that self loathing he’s carried since his dad! But people get defensive and angry like you are personally targeting them and declaring their blorbo an irredeemable asshole because you suggest character development major enough to drive a character driven show probably takes more than a few weeks of easygoing vacation to reach final form. That’s not what I’m saying at all!

Interpretations upsetting or offending people even when written with a complete lack of malice is nothing new, but it really seems like making up a whole army of guys to get mad at for takes is happening more and more. (And I’ll admit I’m probably getting more and more guilty of this myself as my understanding of what exactly people are arguing in different fandom city states gets more and more fractured. Meta builds off of meta, and if you randomly see one post by one blog you already disagree with, you might be missing a lot of context to clarify what they actually mean vs “of course that’s the awful take you would have”.)