For those (like me before finding out) who are wondering which painting is presented here : It’s The Meeting on the Turret Stairs by Frederick William Burton ! I adore it.
Hi, yeah, do you want to yearn and ache some more because OOF
(taken from the National Gallery of Ireland website)
was chatting with @knowlesian and it really helped me crystalize that the reason i don’t care for most flavors of izzy/ed is because one of my favorite but rarely explored dynamics in fiction is “what happens when the devotion isn’t wanted? when it’s not asked for? when it’s not a one-sided love, but a one-sided obsession?”
and THAT’S the kind of content i’m interested in with izzy and ed and the story that ofmd seems to be partially telling, because while ed and izzy do have a toxic dynamic its very much not because ed doesn’t love izzy back, but because izzy continually forces his devotion on ed, even and especially when ed *doesn’t* want to receive it. ed’s last scenes all revolve around him succumbing to izzy’s obsession and suffering for it, because he ultimately doesn’t want or accept izzy’s devotion and the twisted up idea that izzy has of who he is, but he doesn’t see another way to exist now that his pathway to a brighter world (stede) has abandoned him.
a lot of izzy/ed content kinda like, validates izzy, sympathizes with his obsessive love for ed, presents it in a positive light, but it really ISN’T positive for ed at all. it’s a nightmare for ed, being lashed to this kind of perception and not given space to breathe, and izzy doesn’t care about those facts at all. he only cares about ed existing the way that izzy wants ed to exist.
I immediately nope out of anything that presents Izzy’s thing as anything but a one-sided obsession. I find it uncomfortable and gross, because it’s clearly so harmful and shitty and unwanted for Ed. Izzy’s controlling, abusive, and fetishizes Ed. He doesn’t care about what Ed wants or needs and indeed constantly actively works against Ed’s expressed desires. Then there’s the inescapably patriarchal/colonialist element to it: Izzy repeatedly insists that Ed is incapable of taking care of himself, of managing himself, of understanding or knowing what’s good for him, that Ed is insane and mentally incompetent and losing it and needs Izzy, and only Izzy can be trusted to Know How Ed Should Be.
Izzy’s little spech to Ed in Act of Grace is one of the most horrifying things in the show for me. Ed is distraught, terrified, watching the man he loves about to be killed and Izzy is there insisting to Ed that This Is How It Should Be, insisting that Ed ~knows that this is somehow good for him, when absolutely no one thinks or believes that, but Izzy. And let’s not even start on Whereever You Go There You Are when Izzy outright tells Ed that he’d rather Ed be dead than be anything other than the very specific (racist charicature of a) monster Izzy desires of him.
So yeah, when people (over-)sympathize with Izzy to the point that they start pretending this is just some tragic, unrequited yet pure selfless love or whatever and have a greek chorus of other characters wisely nodding their validation that Izzy’s Feelings Were True and entirely ignore the absolute fucking horror show that his fixation on Ed is for Ed I cannot be there.
YEAH, honestly this, all of this, right here, like, Izzy is paternalistic and condescending and rude to Ed, and the fact that so many fans look at him and say well, he said that’s how it is so that MUST be how it is, says a lot to me about the way that whiteness works that even against all evidence the word of a white man is enough to have fans looking at this Maori man like a monster, an invalid, someone incapable of self-control.
Nothing of Izzy’s love is healthy OR even desired, because unhealthy love could still be love desired, but Ed clearly, clearly, clearly, does not want Izzy’s love, or his goals. Izzy stomps over Ed’s desires on multiple occasions, culminating in Ed being put in a position to have to throw his whole career away because Izzy wouldn’t let it go, and somehow the blame for that STILL gets so often turned on Izzy.
Not to mention the just, wildly out of pocket way that I see fans insist that Ed is regularly and frequently violent towards Izzy, when we saw on screen exactly what amount of pressure it took for Ed to lash out to get Izzy away from him.
It’s entirely about sympathizing with a white man’s obsession more than caring about the way the target of that obsession feels. When people imply that Izzy was in anyway sympathetic or reasonable to do what he did? It’s instantly a hit that block button moment, I won’t even lie.
What it honestly tells me is that many of these people have either been fortunate enough to not experience the hell of a toxic friend or they are the toxic friend in their own lives.
All of this but especially THIS:
It’s entirely about sympathizing with a white man’s obsession more than caring about the way the target of that obsession feels.
“Etymologically, the noun nostos ‘homecoming’ indicates a ‘return’ or ‘coming-back’, derived from the verb-root *nes– ‘return, come back’. This root *nes-, as already noted, has a deeper meaning: ‘come to’, in the sense of ‘come back to consciousness’. The noun nostos itself, meaning ‘homecoming’, also has a deeper meaning: ‘coming back to light and life’. Etymologically related to the noun nostos in the sense of ‘coming back to light and life’ is the noun nóos ‘mind’, which has the deeper meaning of ‘coming to’ in the sense of ‘coming back to consciousness’”
Gregory Nagy, A Sampling of Comments on the Iliad and the Odyssey
