i think the early stages of izzy and stede’s relationship is sorta an overlooked area for analysis and shenanigans
for example izzy would be a fairly quiet person in his downtime— really can’t imagine him enjoying small talk— but i think stede has a hard time sitting in silence, because he associates it with mary’s annoyance with him (ironically bc i think she too is someone who enjoys silence and stede unknowingly would her rob her of that) so when they’re in a room together without ed stede automatically starts talking to izzy like he would ed and sometimes this is ok bc i do think they would have some shared interests (i like to think that with more access to books izzy would actually really like reading and stede is thrilled to finally have someone to discuss literature with) but a lot of times izzy is just letting stede talk at him (which he enjoys) and stede thinks he’s being ignored
i just think their communication styles are vastly different, which is made even harder by the fact that stede is used to communicating everything to ed vs izzy who’s used to just intrinsically being understood/ understanding ed
stede would also have a hard time recognizing when izzy is annoyed with him in their usual playful way vs actually upset with him which would lead to overstepping (the pitfall of a bitch4bitch relationship) but also izzy bottling things up and expecting stede to just understand how he fucked up
unfortunately stede is also someone who has a very hard time understanding things from a different perspective so he would accidentally overstep by forcing izzy to do certain things bc in his mind he’s helping but izzy sees it as stede trying to change him
