If someone just kissed Izzy ONCE when he does that creep move where he angrily pulls someone close and stares at their lips, I think a demon would fly out of his mouth and the curse would finally be broken.
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@punk-alice
If someone just kissed Izzy ONCE when he does that creep move where he angrily pulls someone close and stares at their lips, I think a demon would fly out of his mouth and the curse would finally be broken.
imagine if Ed grabbed the scissors and decided to cut his hair (instead of Izzy’s poor toe) as girls often do after break ups 👀
"the stench of hypocrisy oozes from your every pore" such a raw line you'd think it came from shakespeare but no it's from con o'neill replying angrily to tories on twitter on easter sunday
The best part about ofmd is that Stede clearly lives rent free in Izzy’s head since the day they met but Stede probably forgets Izzy is on board once he’s out of his line of sight.
mkay i'm kind of minorly obsessed with con o'neill as well
the way ofmd deals with masculinity is so fascinating. we have stede, who’s about the least masculine a character could possibly be in the traditional sense: he gets sad instead of angry, he refuses to engage in physical violence, he encourages talking about feelings, he likes fashion and interior design and romanticizes everything. he likes picking flowers. and he has been told for his whole life that he is worthless because of all of this. he has been bullied and taunted and abused for it, but that didn’t keep him from adding a secret closet to his ship (lmao) to keep his excess fineries. he is still outwardly himself.
then we have ed. ed who is the pinnacle of the idea of masculinity, part of why he was remembered as history’s greatest pirate in the first place. he’s violent, ruthless, quick to anger, hierarchical, and his name, blackbeard, even emphasizes a symbol of masculinity. he’s revered for his masculinity. his performance is so powerful that people surrender before he even shows up in person. but it’s not him. blackbeard is a character ed has played for as long as he could remember that served to protect him from harm. you can't get hurt if you're never vulnerable in the first place.
when he meets stede, he finds someone he doesn’t have to present as blackbeard for. he can indulge in the frilly colorful clothes, the dancing, the emotional honesty that stede treats as normal. ed lets stede hold his heart in his hands and stede calls it beautiful. and stede, for the first time, has met someone who doesn’t see those things as hateful or embarrassing. everything stede has been mocked for unequivocally delights ed. in the reverse, stede sees blackbeard as the man stede never was. the ideal of a pirate that he read about and romanticized before he became one himself. to stede, blackbeard is everything he could never bring himself to be.
when ed begins to outwardly become interested in stede’s way of life, izzy serves to try to force him back into that hypermasculine presentation of Blackbeard. izzy hates stede for all the same reasons stede has been hated his whole life, and he sees stede as poisoning edward with his embarrassing foppish behavior, emasculating him. this comes to a head when ed signs the act of grace, shaves his beard (the symbol of his performance of masculinity), and kisses stede. all of those go against traditional masculine norms and by extent, the idea of Blackbeard. but ed isn’t performing anymore. he smiles more after the kiss than he ever does in the rest of the show.
then, stede is held at gunpoint by chauncey, who calls stede a monster, a plague for ruining the greatest pirate in history. ruining through emasculation, which in countless other media has been presented as horrific. think about other media that puts masculine characters in prison or the army (the similarities are staggering)—the threat of beating the character down until they’re submissive and emasculated is ever-present. losing the appearance of masculinity is by and large seen as one of the worst things that could possibly happen, and is often paired thematically with the loss of autonomy.
so stede agrees. he’s horrified with himself. he himself was already not traditionally masculine, and he spread it to blackbeard like a disease. everything he (and, interestingly, the viewer) has ever been told is that ed’s shift throughout the show is something to be terrified of. ed shaving his beard, in stede’s mind, confirmed his worst fear: stede had made ed into everything stede hated about himself and wanted to change; he killed blackbeard. but what he and chauncey and izzy can’t see is that stede actually gave ed more autonomy, more freedom and comfort to be himself and do what makes ed happy.
so stede runs. he runs back to where he once performed masculinity as a father and husband (regaining his own beard, so to speak), now sure that blackbeard would have been better off not knowing him. on some level, stede does want parts of blackbeard’s edge to stay (he’s like izzy in that way) and is scared he’s somehow excised it permanently. ed doesn’t want to leave it all behind either, but he’s terrified that stede could never accept the side of him that still exists as blackbeard. i also think this is why ed didn't try to kiss stede until he was the least like blackbeard he could be; he saw it as being less likely to get rejected for the ugliness he saw in himself.
it's interesting that ed doesn't go back to being blackbeard immediately after stede abandons him. at first, he goes all-in on the emotional vulnerability, trying to hang on to the hope he had allowed himself to experience when stede had agreed to run away with him. hanging on by a thread. the thread snaps when izzy mocks him for pining after stede, for lacking the masculinity izzy required in order to maintain his respect. in quick succession ed was rejected by stede, whom he loved, and izzy, whose respect he'd had since before the show began. so he threw his walls back up. he painted his mask back on, closed himself off, and removed every reminder of when he had allowed himself to be vulnerable.
ed's return to masculinity is not presented as a good thing. it's a trauma response, a defense mechanism, and it's toxic. the show experiments with defining a line between toxic and non-toxic masculinity; izzy, calico jack, the kraken, stede's father, the admiral twins, they all represent the ways toxic masculinity enforces a culture of violence and punishes any emotion except anger. stede and his crew represent a healthier version of masculinity: emotional honesty, encouragement and care for others, kindness, and love. it's not an accident that as ed allows himself to love and be loved, he begins to leave behind the toxic aspects of masculinity he had before. i've used the word emasculated to refer to ed's transformation throughout the show, but in truth that's not entirely accurate. it lines up with how many people would view what happened to him, but in reality he did remain a man, he just became a healthier one.
Forever changed on a spiritual level by Lucius. He's just thotting and sketching across the seas with his neck scarf. He survived Jim's wrath and wound up thirsting in the end. Mans got slutshamed with a dash of homophobia by Blackbeard's first mate and just went "yeah that's my pirate polycule. want in, little man?" Fucking iconic.
ouroborosÂ
[ID: OFMD fanart of Ed strangling Izzy. Ed is on top, lit in red tones and wearing the red silk robe. Only one bright eye is visible as his shadowed face stares down at Izzy. One of his hands clenches around Izzy’s arm, and his hair flows out below him, with two tendrils curling like tentacles. A glowing white circle backs his head.
On the opposite side is Izzy, who is toned in cyan. Ed’s other hand has a snake tattoo that looks like it’s biting Izzy as it strangles him. Izzy’s eyes are bright red, as is the blood on his teeth, and he grins with a pleasured look as many dark tentacles surround him. Izzy is backed by a glowing white ouroboros. The two are visually divided by a cyan wave. End ID]
(ID by @spacecrafting, thank you!!)
the prophecy has been fulfilled etc etc
edit: since con deleted his tweet (rip), here's a link to the art!!
we just can’t seem to stop hurting each other, can we?
(Eta: there was an addition to this post that adds a bit more.)
I know the joke about Izzy is "human dropped into a muppets movie" but the tragedy is that he's a queer-coded character from some 1940s or 50s popcorn flick dropped into a pride parade in a floating gayborhood & he flat out has no idea how to deal with it. We learn he's a great swordsman in the most homoerotic way possible when he uses his skills to cut open a man's shirt. We see him react more openly and with less inner conflict when Ed slaps him on the back and says "I need you here" than when Ed implies to him, a minute earlier, that he could be a captain. When he's part of an overtly queer scene where other characters get the romance & he just gets the subtext, Con O'Neill's body language stands out even more—go back to the scene where Izzy tells Stede that Ed adores him, the way he strokes his fingers down the curtain dividing him from Stede. There is literally no straight explanation for this choice, but there is also no explicit acknowledgement that the character is queer; in a different, older show or movie, that body language would be the acknowledgment. He imbues the character with the looks and pauses that you would see in, like, Ben-Hur or something, where everyone knew a character was gay but nobody could say it out loud. Keep in mind that in the comedies where these characters would exist, the subtextually gay man would sometimes be best friends with a Strong Leading Man who got the girl in the end.
We hear him say outright that there's no retirement for people like Izzy & Ed, only death, which is itself a hugely loaded analogy next to the title statement "our flag means death" when you consider our history & our use of flags throughout. And Izzy's so focused on pure survival that he ends up nasty, manipulative, violent—the only way men like him can survive in his mind, or in the genre he's from, if they don't have a Strong Leading Man best friend like, say, a Blackbeard to protect him from the narrative. When Ed starts to live in Stede's world, Izzy is both losing his subtextual boyfriend and also acting as though Ed's going to get himself (and Izzy) killed if he keeps going down this path.
I will never be sane over this. Izzy is a Celluloid Closet case study who's been dropped into a Logo TV original, and so much of the conflict of his character comes from his trying to use the coping techniques from that world (including techniques used by queer coded villains! He's not healthy!) in a world where these techniques are actively harmful rather than a way to survive.
Our Flag Means Death Reductress headlines (1/?)
We stan a man who can make fun of his height
my most important izzy hands and Edward teach take
"Hello darkness, my old friend"
Izzy Hands as the only human in a muppets film is one of the best descriptions I've seen of a character's energy
Hi! Um, a question. I'm under the impression Izzy is literate, but I don't know where/if this is mentioned, and can't easily go and check. If he is, this adds another dimension to the class politics going on, since it suggests that he was in a position to receive at least that much education, either growing up or in later life.
So I have many theories re. Izzy and the biggest one sitting in my brain is that he was definitely involved with 'society' as a whole for a while. This comes from the fact that he knows what retirement is when Ed, who has been working class and piratical all his life, has never heard of the concept. It's like the rest of the crew when Stede suggests a vacation - this is something beyond the experience and knowledge of the working class people on his ship because only the poshos would Vacate to the country.
He definitely wasn't mixing with the upper echelons so my thinking is that he was either involved in the Navy or in one of the trading companies working the seas at the time. There were many and people from all classes would end up working on them. But especially lower-class people because it was one of the biggest businesses especially for cities in the north. Liverpool's port was one of the biggest in the north west of England at the time.
I'm mostly inclined to assume Navy because of some of his mannerisms and his behaviour. I don't think he was press-ganged into it, but I do think it would have been a job taken out of necessity and he would have started on the lowest rung of the ladder.
The trouble with being working class is that you can only get so far and no matter how far you go, the officers are almost always gentlemen and the show demonstrates what some of them are like. If they were so terrible to people of their own class, you can imagine how they would treat a Jolly-Jump-Up, if someone ever made it up through the ranks.
Literacy was a definite boundary for gaining ranks as well and while we see Izzy in Stede's library ("a perverse use of space") and flicking through his books in episode 10, I don't know if he can canonically read.
Another thing that supports my Naval theory. Yes, it's all in black, but he's also the only other member of either of the crews who is consistently dressed in more formal clothing: a collared shirt that fastens all the way up, a waistcoat, sleeve cuffs to add shape to his sleeves and most significantly, his neckerchief/cravat.
I've had a poke through some contemporary paintings and museum websites and a lot of the images show a lot of sailors with a black scarf or neckerchief. It makes me think he spent long enough in a place where he had to dress uniformly that it became habit and even when he became a pirate, it's a habit he didn't break.
It would also explain a lot about the way he runs Blackbeard's crew. He barks orders like a military officer. He demands to know logistics and tactical information. He expects orders to be obeyed. He has a very clear idea of how a victor is supposed to behave and how a subdued enemy is meant to behave.
I also have a whole sub-theory about his especial disdain for rich posh twats because of the ring he wears at his throat, looped around the knot of his neckerchief. Not least because when he's trying to persuade Ed to finish Stede off, he frames it like a mercy killing, to "end it quick", rather than "destroying yourself over that twat", "this is a humane way of ending it, it's quick, it's clean".
The fact he sells himself out to the British Navy? Absolutely the icing on the cake. He will sell himself to the empire he hates to save Ed from this one froofy little imbecile on his fancy twat ship. He even says to Ed “do you really want to lick the king’s boots?” when he has signed up to do exactly the same thing to get Bonnet safely dead and away from Ed.
Better this person is dead than... than what, Izzy? What happened? What did a posh twat do that hurt you so much that you want to see this posh twat dead, both for yourself and to save your beloved Captain from whatever you believe will destroy him? Why do you still wear a ring at your neck like a widow? Who was taken from you so cruelly that you still wear their ring? How much did it hurt you?
So in answer to your question... er. I don't know if he can read.