#gonna find these writers gonna yell at them

this post made me want to swerve for a second from my current project to talk about two things that ofmd does that drive me wild: first, that they blow past using characters as 1:1 parallels and instead have a stringboard/giant wheel of fortune spinner they use to weave parallels between a bunch of characters over the course of the show. and second: the way the bar scene with stede and izzy telling ed he’s piiiiiiiiiining over his boyfriend draw the three of them into this wild narrative loop that fucking kills me.

when i was writing my bar meta, i kept thinking to myself: it’s fucking wild how i could be writing about izzy, if i strip the details and keep the emotions and motivations. then i kept thinking: well, fuck. it kinda fits for ed, too!

call it the idiot ball of PAIN.

so: when we start out the scene with stede and the guys, izzy and stede sit in firm parallel. stede wants to win the social game; izzy wants ed to stay in the sad world they built together and hurt each other until they die, because he’s been told the only version of love men like him are allowed to have is dealt out first and foremost through pain.

(and so has stede, and so has ed, in their very different ways: just… what do we mean when we say violence, you know?)

and then when the men in the bar first turn on stede, they trade the parallel hats around. like ed with izzy, he realizes: play the game, or they won’t love you. 

izzy then takes on the quiet part loud for the men in the bar: stede fuckin bonnet, if you won’t feed us the man you love to gain our approval for one useless second, we don’t even want you to exist.

(and he shares their quiet part kept quiet: if you tell me i’m wrong and you refuse to back down, i might have to consider everything i built my life and self-concept on was harmful to myself and others. i have made many, many mistakes, and i have a lot to make up for. 

so shut the fuck up or we will SHUT YOU UP. you are RUINING THIS FOR US. 

and then, even quieter: stay here. let’s hurt each other in different ways, in our silence and our violence, all the time forever. this is what it means to love; one above, and one below. the ones god loves most are no longer loved most if there is no one around god loves less than them.

we demand you define yourselves against us and we have the levers of power, this beat in the narrative says. it confesses for these men, for izzy and for everyone out there hurting and upholding the system: the ugly thing we can’t admit is that we only do that because we have no fucking idea who we are, if we aren’t defining ourselves against you.

that’s the part so quiet it’s an earthquake when you realize it, and then say it out loud: motherfucker, i don’t need you to know who i am. but you certainly seem to need me.)

then stede swaps back to joining up with izzy, for his split second of not remembering why none of this matters. izzy holds a picture of a bloodthirsty killer, born of the devil in ed’s face and says this is who you are; stede verbalizes it.

then they split up again, as stede wins and realizes: i fucking hate these people, this doesn’t feel like winning and i am somehow in more pain than i was when i lost.

and that aligns him with ed again, only when he goes home to mary she tries to murder him and sets him on the path to enlightenment, while ed… shoves lucius over the side in his moment to find similar catharsis, oops.

(because let’s be real: lucius would have said something like ‘that sad little man? you’re going to make a lot of major and, sorry to say, DEEPLY stupid life choices because a man who sold you out told you he thinks you’re already making bad choices and he had a hissy fit about it? we don’t take life advice from men who can’t even look at a dick pic without having three major identity crises and coronaries at the same TIME, this one is not something i should explain’ and allowed ed space to process if izzy is actually right about this or not.

and that’s probably part of why ed was like, yeah. can’t be having that! it’s spiral time, baby. where’s my fuckin mascara and kitchen scissors for my bangs.)

then we hop over to the toe scene, where the narrative hat goes flying around at lightning speed once again, only stede is the one just sort of… lingering there, in the subtext, forever.

ed is stede, when they start: he’s been reminded these are the rules of his actual life, according to the world, and he better start trying to win again. but he’s also playing the role of those men in the bar for izzy! because izzy doesn’t want to find out about life outside the cave, he’s comfortable and all his fuckin stuff is here so he’s trying to force ed to keep playing this role for him. 

similarly, izzy is stede in his own head but standing in for the bar assholes from ed’s angle of the storyline; then, once the toe eating hits, things go extra wild.

basically at that point, everybody is wearing the same fucking hat at once, a little bit.

ed is feeding izzy his own violent notions of love, but that means he’s echoing the terms he’s set; that’s what stede does in the bar, when they hand him ‘ed’s bloodthirsty’ and he repeats it back.

there’s this cool handoff here on the violence hat, too; stede and the assholes stay in the realm of verbal and subtext violence, while ed and izzy add physical violence to the mix while maintaining the kinds of violence that runs through the scene at the bar, as well.

and then izzy wins by losing/being penetrated via The Weird Vore which calls back to the duel and keeps up the thread of izzy being the personification of Area Man Fucks Around, Finds Out; if he’d listened to ed and backed off, no duel. if he’d listened to ed and backed off instead of pushing everything to the limit, no toe eating!

there’s SO MUCH MORE HERE but i should like. save it for later.

godDAMN this show.