it's canon izzy hours

(not on hiatus, just run by someone who is eepy sleepy x) you there! do you have opinions about canon izzy? is the threat of the canyon getting on your back stopping you posting? launder your takes here by sending them in to be posted anonymously

[canonizzyhours]

get in the jar you stinky little beast

hello. it's canon izzy hours

we love takes about canon izzy sent in by people who want to put him in a jar and observe him closely and also periodically shake him around like a little bug

we do not love takes about fanon izzy. he cannot go in the jar. he would contaminate the experiment and we'd have to start again

instructions

send your takes on anon (or not, if you like. but that would make me wonder why you're not just posting it as a post). they can be as long or short as you like and can be about any aspect of the canon version of the character izzy hands from hit gay pirate show our flag means death

don't send canyon-style takes about izzy being the true protagonist/victim/whatever

if you're replying to a take, it would be really helpful to include the number of the post you're referencing

read rule 2 again

stay groovy 🕺

[canonizzyhours]

why is someone sending videos of right wing podcasters to the canonizzyhours inbox. don't do that please. you're looking for rightwingpodcastervideohours

[canonizzyhours]

v annoying that mermen is my least favorite episode by far but i always feel like i can't say that because people think you're complaining about the best and coolest thing that happens in mermen. izzy dying was great the rest of the episode just sucked ass. for weeks afterward i walked around thinking "i hope that's not the last episode ever, but if it was, at least i have the comfort of knowing izzy's rotting in the ground"

#669.

[canonizzyhours]

#653 the petrified orange is a really good comparison IMO. Saying Izzy's season two arc was about disability is kind of like saying Stede had a season one arc about botany or nature. Like in a sense that's technically true in that the orange is literally a plant. But thematically it's not what the point of the orange was at all.

#668.

related posts: #653

[canonizzyhours]

re: 636 just a heads up wanted to let you know you phrased "izzy's abusive unrequited love shooting him" in a way that makes it sound like you think ed's the abusive one. which would be silly, right? what you mean is that izzy's years-long pattern of abusive behavior, motivated partly by his unrequited "love," led to his victim finally shooting him?

right?

#667.

related posts: #636

[canonizzyhours]

re: 649 hey #632 here. i don't really disagree with anything you're saying, i think it's totally in character izzy does what he does in the duel with zheng after the character arc he'd been through in season 2, it just proved to me that character arc had turned him from a character i used to find really entertaining into a boring regular guy who had no reason to be in the story anymore. they'd just gotten rid of everything that used to motivate him to do things that made the story more fun. it's not that the arc doesn't make sense, it's that it's the dullest thing you could possibly have done with a character who had all sorts of potential. the way they decided to make him get better makes sense but it still sucks, they should have made him get worse

#666 (👹)

related posts: #649, #632

[canonizzyhours]

I think it's funny the people who hate the father figure thing the most are the same people who've been insisting for years that Izzy and Ed have been working together since Hornigold's ship. If they met when Ed was a young teenager and Izzy was an adult in his 20's and bonded at that point wouldn't that make the father figure thing much stronger actually? Wouldn't it be kind of hard to avoid in fact, even if they're also family who fucked?

#665.

[canonizzyhours]

Anne Bonny never mentions Izzy. Mary Read talks about Ed's exes but what she says is that they're all "artsy outsiders" which could not possibly describe Izzy any less, and she never mentions Izzy. Hornigold never mentions Izzy even though he does bring up other people Ed knew during that time of his life, Felix and Calico Jack - and this is all happening inside Ed's brain, and we know he IS thinking about Izzy because Izzy shows up in a flashback, so it would make sense for his dream-Hornigold to bring up Izzy if he thought Hornigold knew who Izzy was. Calico Jack does mention Izzy but only in the context of having met with him recently and he refers to him by full first and last name like he's talking about a stranger. It's definitely not a normal way to talk about someone you and the person you're talking to both grew up with, especially not for CJ who loves dumb nicknames.

If Izzy were meant to have been around during the Hornigold days, at least ONE of those characters would have brought it up.

#664.

[canonizzyhours]

This fandom is incapable of saying anything useful about Izzy Hands because nobody who's active in fandom actually thinks of him as a character.

The canyon started out around summer '22 as jar guys, and then some black women wrote meta about racism in Izzy's plotline and they all decided that was a personal attack on them for being interested in the character. That's where it began. They started thinking of Izzy not as a character, but as their team mascot: anything negative you say about Izzy is actually an insult aimed at them. That's why they need him to be not just a guy who gradually develops some sympathetic qualities but the bestest and specialest and most important at all times, they're literally out here writing lengthy manifestos about how he's an allegory for Jesus Christ. They'll claim to believe he's got flaws but they never mean any flaw anyone is allowed to take seriously, because to suggest that he has any kind of REAL flaw is to insult them personally. You can go read canyon fic and meta - it never engages seriously with any but the most superficial of his canon character traits and instead substitutes elaborate fanon consisting entirely of the "basically Jesus" stuff. He no longer exists to them as a character in a story, only as a mascot for their faction of the fandom.

But then in response the gentlebeardies started doing this too! That's why nobody on the gb side can write good meta or fic about Izzy's redemption arc either and most people just avoid thinking about it. Because whenever the show frames Izzy as a sympathetic character they can't think about it AS a character arc, they just feel like the show is saying nice things about the mascot of a group of people who've been unbelievably obnoxious for years and ruined most of the general-fandom communities and discord servers you were in back in 2022-2023. When the narrative frames Izzy sympathetically it feels to them like the show is validating those people who started multiple harassment blogs aimed at individual black women who dared to write meta about fandom racism. Because he's a mascot, not a character; anything the show says about him can only be commentary on the faction of people he represents, not about the actual character within the world of the show.

Izzy Hands the fictional character actually died back in 2022. That's when he stopped being a character at all.

That's what all of it is really about. All of the Izcourse. It's not about the namby-pamby scene or selling Ed to the English or the toe stuff or disability arcs or whether Izzy Hands the actual fictional character deserved better or not because it's not about Izzy Hands AS a fictional character at all. It's about real people, it's about the canyon, and whether you think of them as a persecuted minority or as people who spent like two years being awful to you and your friends and the creators of the show itself, all of that projected onto Izzy as a symbol. Pretty much everything anyone in the fandom says about Izzy makes way more sense once you realize that.

And on the rare occasions someone in the fandom tries really hard to disentangle from all that and really fairly engage with the actual character who actually appears onscreen in the show no matter what they conclude they end up making both sides mad, because both sides can only interpret any statement about Izzy Hands as a coded statement about the canyon. (This is one reason why so many people who try to do that end up posting it here on canonizzyhours. You'll inevitably get in trouble if you do it anywhere else.)

They can't have done this on purpose, but the "new unicorn" note really was the most prescient thing the show could have done with him. Because they're right, that's what he really is: an inanimate symbolic figurehead.

#663.

[canonizzyhours]

reddit.com/r/whatisit/comments/1qs5l05/comment/o2t9ge7/

#662.

[canonizzyhours]

643 the thing is that it's not just the canyon doing it, SEASON 2 IZZY is basically just Con. At least early canyon liked him nasty.

#661.

related posts: #643

[canonizzyhours]

i think rizzy has real potential because my problem with most izzy ships is it's completely unclear what the other partner is getting out of the relationship and it usually feels like the author just wanted to assign izzy a boyfriend as some sort of reward for being the author's favorite character. however i know exactly what roach would get out of a relationship with izzy (he is canonically a sadist and would enjoy spending time with the caribbean's weirdest masochist) and he's too stable and well-adjusted in his chaotic way to let izzy manipulate him or verbally abuse him, if izzy started any bullshit he'd just end up eating rat poison and roach would walk away whistling

#660.

[canonizzyhours]

re: all the recent discussion of Izzy's nonexistent "disability arc" before anyone else tries to defend it I'm assigning the whole fandom to go read Cy Cyborg's essay on The Perfect Prosthetic as a trope:

https://www.tumblr.com/cripplecharacters/764893470773084160

Read the the whole thing. Go through all the parts about how you can avoid this trope and notice OFMD doesn't even try to do any of that stuff. And remember OFMD has much less excuse for this than most media because usually when you see this trope the prosthetic has some kind of sci-fi or fantasy magic or technology to handwave why it works so well. In Izzy's case all he has is a piece of wood cobbled together by some people who have no idea what they're doing and his leg still works so perfectly he can get in life-or-death swordfights after having it for like a day.

Like other people have said, this is a really really well known trope that's talked about a lot, and I cannot believe anyone who actually seriously cared about disability depictions in media could look at OFMD and fail to see this. If someone says Izzy's arc is only ableist because it was such a good and thoughtful disability arc up till he died I have to think they're not taking this seriously.

#659.

related posts: #636

[canonizzyhours]

re: 636 Hey, with all respect, it sounds like you might be the one who's a little confused about the definition of a metaphor. What I'm getting from your post is that you seem to think something's only a metaphor if it didn't actually literally happen in the world of the show. That's not how it works.

For instance, in season one Ed letting go of the red silk is a metaphor for letting go of his hope that he could ever be the kind of person who gets to have fine things like love and friendship. That's what the red silk represents. But it's also literally, physically, an actual piece of red silk, it's not imaginary. Within the world of the show it is definitely true that Ed was literally carrying around a physically real piece of fabric and he literally did let it be carried away by the wind. That literally happened. It's just also a metaphor.

Izzy's season two plotline is super obviously a metaphor where the Revenge heals the wound in his body the way the crew heals the wound in his soul. But people who point that out aren't saying he did not literally lose a leg and literally replace it with a prosthetic. When they say the plotline only functions as a metaphor, they aren't saying it didn't literally happen.

But they are saying that the storyline only really WORKS on the metaphorical level and it's a failure if you try to think of it as an attempt to actually say anything about disability in a realistic sense. Because, well, that's true. One of the main things about the arc is that the writing is completely uninterested in actually grappling with disability. Izzy's angst is never about the fact that he's permanently lost functionality in his body, because he DOESN'T actually permanently lose any real functionality, he gets a prosthetic that works like it's magic and immediately returns to his job which is doing a really dangerous physical activity that requires being able to constantly maintain perfect balance while moving around quickly on an unstable surface. This makes complete sense as a metaphor for the way the crew's acceptance restores him to wholeness, but if you try to engage with it on the literal level, if you look at it as an arc that is actually trying to say anything about the loss of a limb as a real world disability that many people actually face, the only conclusion you can possibly come to is that it's an offensively complete failure to actually engage in any kind of serious way with what limb loss really means to real people who experience it.

#658.

related posts: #636

[canonizzyhours]

I don't think anything's ever more clearly illustrated this fandom's priorities than when I noticed the OFMD Fandom wiki has an article for Izzy's noncanon imaginary ex-boyfriend Applejack (hypothetically played by a white guy, of course) and none for Auntie.

#657.

[canonizzyhours]

I never really considered myself an Izzy hater, I always expected Izzy to get some kind of redemption arc, and I thought I liked the one he got in season 2 just fine.

But on every rewatch over the last year I've felt more negative about it. And I think what changed is actually the Bluesky special. I keep thinking about that line where Ed thinks of Izzy as one of the only people to ever truly love him unconditionally.

I can forgive Izzy for saying mean things and trying to kill Stede and betraying the crew to the navy and all the stuff that he atoned for. But I cannot forgive that he apparently was successful in gaslighting Ed into still believing years later that that's what unconditional love is.

#656.

[canonizzyhours]

re: 639 you are a fascinating person and i want to study your brain.

i totally agree that izzy's death speech is very badly written and no one talks about this because the canyon are too furious about the fact that he apologized at all, and the gentlebeardies are too relieved about the fact that he apologized at all, for anyone to focus on the actual words. "i fed your darkness" is the most cringe chuunibyou way you could say it, took me right out of the scene, i literally almost laughed out loud. "egged him on?" that's what you call it, egging him on? what kind of phrasing is that? "you're surrounded by family" doesn't sound like how izzy would phrase that plus the line can't work considering this family voted ed out of it a couple episodes ago and because of all the cuts to season two they never actually resolved them re-embracing him. on ed's side of things i actually love the father figure stuff it makes total sense to me, and in theory i also like the parallel to jim calling nana "my only family," but i just do not believe "you're my only family" is a thing ed would ever say out loud to izzy even on his deathbed even though i do buy him feeling that way on some level. i don't really buy "please don't leave me" either, it's just cliche.

ed needs to be really sad and pleading for this not to happen because the scene is this whole symbolic catharsis where he's letting go of the kraken so he can just be ed from now and it's painful and scary even though that's what he needs etc. it's important izzy made it clear that he knew he was hurting ed for years pre-canon and regrets that now, and that he encouraged him to accept that he's loved by the crew after he all he did in season one to to stop ed from opening up to the crew, and that he gave ed permission to decide for himself who he is from now on. the high-level beats of what they're both saying in the scene are all good and right. but when you drill down to an actual basic word choice level all the dialogue is just bad. (imo while i love and admire david jenkins' writing overall and his episodes are among my favorites in the show, i think this is his single biggest flaw as a writer, he is always at his worst when he's doing big dramatic speeches and monologues that are supposed to sum up the culmination of an emotional arc. he sucks at those and he tends to fall back on vague trite cliches. sometimes the actors manage to carry them anyway and make it feel like it works but in this case it's so bad that neither one of the two best actors in the show could pull it off.)

but "there he is?" that is literally the one and only really great line and moment in the scene. that's the only place where they actually sum up what izzy wants and needs to apologize for in a meaningful affecting way. the rest of the apology doesn't work more than anything else because it's so vague, and without "there he is" i know this fandom would have come up with a bunch of idiotic reinterpretations of what exactly izzy is apologizing for, but that one line makes it impossible to get around what he's saying and what the show thinks he needs to atone for. i nearly cheered. the one place where the scene worked. would have been disastrous without it but that one line is so perfect they pulled it all together right at the end.

#655.

related posts: #639