some more important addendums and these are the only words I will ever waste on izzy hands:
not the only human in a muppet movie. he’s the human villainin a muppet movie.
doesn’t just need to get laid. specifically needs to get dicked down.
post saying he’s in the incorrect genre, think’s he’s in Black Sails, wishes he was in Black Sails, is absolutely correct. it’s just that he would absolutely die immediately if he was in Black Sails.
what I’m saying is that he hates his life, hates that he’s in a comedy, hates these people, has no idea how lucky he is
One of the (many) things I really like about OFMD is the casual use of words like love and adore — from Izzy of all people. None of the others outright state whats going on between Ed and Stede - Lucius comes the closest when he tells Ed “that bizarre little man likes you very much,” but thats as close as anyone comes to outright saying what they’re all seeing– except for Izzy.
Izzy, who you would imagine would be the LAST one to put a name to what’s happening, straight up tells Stede “and [Blackbeard] adores you.” And later when he’s bitching to Spanish Jackie, its “Stede comes along like oh I love, I love the way you wear your hair,” or whatever it is he says.
The other characters all watch the developments with wide eyes but don’t ever describe it, and meanwhile Izzy is wandering around saying “Yeah Blackbeard absolutely adores that little shit of a man and I hate it” and “yeah that little shit of a man loves my fearsome captain and I want to slaughter him for it.”
He hates what he’s seeing, but he calls it what it is, and idk, i really like that they a) straight up use the word “adore” to describe Ed’s feelings for Stede but also b) that its Izzy, in all his furious indignation and disgust, that says it.
with evey rewatch, Izzy just becomes more and more heartbreaking to me as a character. where at first, I enjoyed to watch him squirm and suffer from the antics of Stede and Ed and the crew, I now become more and more aware of how deeply tragic his position is.
he is a man trapped in his narrative. in his world, there are very clear rules: who ever has the most violence has the control, and who ever has the most control can get anything they want. But want is also dangerous, because wanting things will make you lose power. it’s a constant struggle of balance - given the choice, Izzy would always choose control over his wants.
but here comes Stede, a man controlled by his wants, and according to everything Izzy has learned, that should mean Stede has to fail, at least in the pirate world. Which is why it’s so infuriating that Stede has way more luck than anyone deserves, and even worse, that Edward becomes interested in him. Edward, who even transcends the rules Izzy knows in that he doesn’t even need the violence anymore, he skips straight to control, gets pulled into Stede’s nonsensical world of wanting things, and Izzy can’t stand it.
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.
#GOD when you frame it this way there is something so desperately sad about his character(via@fuckyeahisawthat)
To be honest I think he’s possibly the most tragic character on the show.
Ed & Stede are going through it right now, and it’s bad bad, but their happy ending has been telegraphed: steal some identities & ride off into the sunset after faking their own deaths. I’m pretty certain they reconcile & get the happily ever after (& I’m equally sure that they can only do that if Lucius is alive). The rest of the crew are happy under the co captaincy, Jim has made peace with their past to some degree & has Olu as well, etc. And very importantly, even though Ed also comes from the same place as Izzy, he lucked out and got a guide to the new world in Stede. He is starting to escape Izzy’s fate & likely will succeed, all because he has Stede.
Izzy? Izzy is on the other side of a glass wall, he can see the gay romcom but he’s under strict orders to never mention his own homosexuality. The references to masochistic tendencies are all he’s allowed—and to add insult to injury, he’s not even allowed to enjoy and embrace that part of his existence, a part that is in no way inherently bad as long as you’re engaging in it sanely and consensually. It’s just yet another case of coding with no fruition that in any other media would let straight audiences know he’s a Bad Gay Man.
It’s why I’m hoping the show continues to defy convention & figures out a happy-ish ending for Izzy. Even after (maybe even especially because of) everything he’s done, it would be exceptionally tragic if he didn’t get some way out of this hell, & by extension didn’t get to be part of the LGBTQ community that’s on the other side of that glass wall, on a show that’s a deliberate statement that we can live, thrive, get happily ever afters, and that our flag doesn’t actually mean death no matter what has been done to us.
I think I may have solved a mystery that I didn’t even know was one.
So. In Peter Pan, the novel, this is the first mention of Captain Hook:
“Who is captain now?”
“Hook,” answered Peter, and his face became very stern as he said that hated word.
“Jas. Hook?”
“Ay.”
Then indeed Michael began to cry, and even John could speak in gulps only, for they knew Hook’s reputation.
“He was Blackbeard’s bo’sun,” John whispered huskily. “He is the worst of them all. He is the only man of whom Barbecue was afraid.”
Later, we learn this:
Hook was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in a blaze; but as those who read between the lines must already have guessed, he had been at a famous public school; and its traditions still clung to him like garments, with which indeed they are largely concerned.
“Barbecue” is Long John Silver from Treasure Island. Jas. is short for James, but in “Captain Hook at Eton,” he’s also called Jacobus. The biblical figure Jacob was renamed Israel.
Blackbeard’s historical boatswain, and also a character in Treasure Island, was Israel Hands.
I’m just saying, if I got a hand chopped off and my last name was Hands… I might want to change it.
Many kudos to OP, I’m still processing Captain Hook = Israel Hands. Because of this post, I stumbled upon this 2020 article. It is a fascinating and bittersweet read about Barrie, Stevenson, and the Peter Pan+Treasure Islandconnections.
Now, the letters of JM Barrie to Robert Louis Stevenson – presumed to be lost by several key Barrie biographers for over 70 years - will be published for the first time in a forthcoming book. The letters reveal how ardently the young Barrie both adored and admired Stevenson, who was an older and more established writer. A year into their friendship, which was initiated by Stevenson, Barrie wrote to him: “To be blunt I have discovered (have suspected it for some time) that I love you, and if you had been a woman…” He leaves the sentence unfinished.
and
Barrie has a real desire to incorporate Stevenson and his affection for Stevenson in his works, he believes. “I think what Barrie is saying is: if I can never meet Stevenson, because he has unfortunately died, then I want to create the opportunity for our characters to meet.
“I think he liked that idea that they could occupy the same world, and could potentially bump into each other.”
coming out of basically retiring just to stick my head in and say that izzy hands is not the sole human in the muppet movie that is our flag means death. izzy is the sam eagle role. sam eagle as izzy hands gasping furiously, monobrow just barely lifting, and protesting “it is not the way piracy is DONE, edward!”. sam eagle as izzy hands turning to the camera and grumbling “WEIRDOS.” in your heart you know this.
the only human is obviously lucius.
I think the flaw to the Only One Human approach is that people forget the Muppet Christmas Carol is the ONLY time it’s been One Human and all the other movies are full of humans being as muppety as the muppets.
so like. yeah lucius is a human (in a relationship with muppet pete). olu and jim are humans but in the “still get wild musical numbers and a subplot” sense of amy adams and jason segel in the 2011 movie. ed might be a human but STRICTLY in the way tim curry was a human muppet in muppet treasure island.
coming out of basically retiring just to stick my head in and say that izzy hands is not the sole human in the muppet movie that is our flag means death. izzy is the sam eagle role. sam eagle as izzy hands gasping furiously, monobrow just barely lifting, and protesting “it is not the way piracy is DONE, edward!”. sam eagle as izzy hands turning to the camera and grumbling “WEIRDOS.” in your heart you know this.
@esoteric-choleric said ofmd is the kinda of show to do a musical episode, and Izzy (who’s actor can sing) would be the only one weirded out by it. But As I rewatch ep 6 I couldn’t help thinking of an entire episode just like that but at the end of the episode we find out it was all in the swedes head due to a scurvy relapse and his love for singing (And we fit con O Neil singing into there as well)
has anyone done a gifset that’s just comparing izzy tearing up when ed chokes him/The Whole Toe thing?
i only ask because i need to stare at izzy ‘fuck you we were NOT MUPPETS YESTERDAY oh shit, oh fuuuuuck yes it’s happening, glory hallelujah my boyfriend captain is back, i’m done being gaslit by you wholesome felt twats’ hands experiencing the realignment of his fucked up little world on an endless loop.
I MEAN. if you think about it, izzy’s from the version of black sails Certain Oblivious People thought that show was before the “they’re gay pirates, harold, deal with it or be unable to watch this show because they’re getting their gay all over the main thrust of the narrative as we speak” beat dropped.
this means he is subtextually gay as shit for blackbeard in freaky/violent, public ways and even fucking gayer still for edward in …also freaky/violent, but softer and more private ways and all the while textually speaking, They’re Just Good Friends forever and ever amen.
izzy is from a world where there is a rule: you work out the way you wanna fuck the guy you spend all your time with by stabbing things together. other people, each other, all phallic imagery is allowed and indeed, encouraged, so long as you use objects that evoke “soooo, this is supposed to be a dick thing, right?” but never push it beyond the realm of subtext. izzy can have loyalty and shared power, and as long as he cashes in his tokens sparingly meaningful gazes and clasping arms or patting each other on the shoulder and letting the touch linger juuuuust long enough to make it kinda gay are all on the approved list. in izzy’s world you bleed for each other, you kill and die for each other, you are the most important people in each other’s lives—as long as the text retains plausible deniability it’s Not Like That.
maybe you can have a lil it’s not gay if it’s in a threeway (or a love triangle!) action as a treat and if somebody almost dies/is thought to be dead a hug is allowed, but your love better not even fucking think about speaking its name.
honestly, even if izzy felt like pushing that barrier, what would he say? the sacred texts to translate what izzy feels for the man who becomes edward when they’re alone don’t even exist where he’s from. they have words for what he might want do in bed and what the world thinks of men like him, but love’s just not applicable. the songs he sings are not ones of love because not to put too fine a point on it, but: in izzy’s world, love is for men who don’t have boners you can see from space for other men. he’s swallowed all the lies the world told him about love whole and made them part of his identity.
with all that in mind, let’s look at how if you tilt your head and squint, ofmd is not just a joyful and affirming celebration of finding your community of equally if not identically bizarre fellows, but also a deeply depressing pirate love story as experienced by izzy ‘the only non-muppet around and not okay with it’ hands.
before i get into the actual meat of the two scenes, i want to stop and marvel at one specific part of the leadup and why ed decides to try and introduce the front of izzy’s neck to the back. quote time!!!!
Not some namby-pamby in a silk gown, pining for his boyfriend.
like, CHRIST. fucking WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE. why are they so good? i gotta take a quick structural analysis break to handle the way the writers packed like… a whole fucking essay on izzy’s deeply toxic pirate masculinity and summed up a point i will spend this whole insane post trying to express in one tidy line. i ache to be this efficient a writer.
i’m gonna break it into pieces, because they all deserve attention.
we start out with what’s edging into a gentle slur, but is ultimately defanged by being nowhere close to on par with the uglier ways a modern audience knows he could phrase that. i think it’s worth spotlighting how izzy never quite says anything on its face hateful that i can think of? he’s not supportive, that’s for fucking certain, but unless i’ve forgotten something (very possible, often true) this is the closest he comes to fulfilling the homophobic gay trope in the content of his speech and not just how he says things/his vibes.
(though let us make no mistake here, his vibes are rock fucking hard homophobic gay. jesus christ with this one, bless his heart.)
i can’t tell if it’s a writer choice or character choice. my instinct says it’s both! anyway, either way i’m into it. could even be a subtle hint izzy’s closer to dragging the canon kicking and screaming into the dark where he feels more comfortable.
now we move over to izzy mocking edward’s dressing gown. this team HATES ME, because it’s not enough to just have him essentially say “take off that soft fancy shit and rub some dirt on it, real men don’t cry”. oh no, not for these absolute combopack monster/lighthouses! of course they have izzy leave off dressing and just say gown. of COURSE. we understand as an audience they don’t mean gown as in dress because the visuals fill that gap for us, but by deleting one word they effectively have izzy imply edward’s a big fucking girl without needing to have him actually say it.
i mean… come on. come ON.
pining and boyfriend are also excellent choices; pining implies weakness and fading from a former glory, and boyfriend is uh… boyfriend! what it says on the tin, but it also throws in tones of infantilization by leaning on ‘boy’ instead of a more adult-associated choice like lover.
anyway onto what i’m supposed to be doing: crying about how con is lowkey playing out a grand fucking greek tragedy in the background at literally every second he’s on-screen as izzy and i’ve gone down the rabbit hole about it. honestly they should give that man extra hazard pay, he could have hurt himself going this hard.
look at the way his face softens when edward chokes him. look at the tears in his eyes and the tremble in his hand when he reaches out, the un-fucking-bearable tenderness. the way he doesn’t fight ed’s violence, he encourages and leans into it. (because once upon a time in private, izzy was allowed to know that blackbeard could be edward; he was the only person who knew that, before stede rolled on up in his stupid fucking boat and his stupid fucking pants and unearthed edand ruined izzy’s whole fucking life.)
speaking of:
Blackbeard is my captain. I serve Blackbeard, not Edward. Edward better watch his fucking step.
the way i feel about ‘i serve blackbeard’ does not even need to be EXPLAINED. if you’re bothering to read this shit you know the face i made when that line entered my ears and lodged itself in my brain, never to leave, because you made it too. i won’t profane even this Most Unholy post with my feelings about the use of that particular verb there. it’s good. i like it. well done team, no notes and the end. nobody fucking perceive me.
more high mindedly: i love how izzy uses edward here, not ed. it reframes the “using edward is a privilege i am given by my captain” to “saying edward is a gift i can take back until you prove you’re my captain again”. as far as izzy is concerned, ed doesn’t even exist. blackbeard’s his captain and always has been and thus commands his loyalty, but edward’s in the doghouse until he thinks long and hard about what he’s done.
there’s also a beat there that i think stands as what izzy considers Having a Talk About Their Relationship.
(…well fuck. well, FUCK. izzy thought they were dating, didn’t he? he totally did. holy shit that’s perfect. they were subtextually dating and stede started actually dating ed and that’s just another level of his reality stede broke. oh my god, this little ratman. this fucking IDIOT. his life is the worst. it’s amazing and so funny and also no-jokes sad. SO GOOD.)
so i guess that means in izzy’s world, that was how you say “we might still have to work together, but you’re sleeping on the fucking couch until i sort out how i feel about your little fling”. blackbeard is his captain and he serves him; that’s business. edward is his Subtextual Boyfriend, and from izzy’s perspective edward has been really shitting the bed lately.
honestly: awww, look at him go! trying to communicate like a real boy. that’s one mangled ‘you tried’ star for izzy.
all that would be enough to make me want to fling myself into the sun, it really would. i would still be screaming about izzy and the way con makes sure izzy’s gaze always comes back to rest on ed in every scene they’re in together, no matter what else is going on, for the rest of my life.
but oh wait, it GETS WORSE. because here it comes: the toe scene. buckle up, get ready for this to Go Places because i am going full galaxy brain. let’s talk about love as consumption re: izzy’s feelings about doing the Weird Vore.
there’s the unavoidable jesus shit all up in this scene’s guts so i honestly could stop here and just scream WHY? WHY, WHY DO A FUCKING COMMUNION METAPHOR WITH HIS OWN TOE STANDING IN FOR THE HOLY HOST? YOU’RE SICK. YOU’RE SICK AND I LOVE IT!!! SIT AND THINK ABOUT YOUR CHOICES AND THEN NEVER EVER CHANGE, AND IF YOU FEEL LIKE IT: GO AHEAD AND GET WORSE for a couple hours instead of moving on, but i’ll get there eventually.
aka: if you ever thought to yourself ‘i wonder if anybody’s gonna talk way too long about the constant and super amazing queering and/or subversion of christian imagery and the religion itself in this show’ i got your back there, just you hold tight. ohhhhh baby i got so! many! thoughts! on! that!
for today though, i’m gonna stick with the way izzy processes love and his relationship with ed.
the way ed gets rid of lucius, layers his armor back on piece by piece, and then sees himself reflected in an implement of violence and names himself a monster, not a lighthouse, before he goes to visit izzy is… A Lot. i want to talk more later! but it felt worth mentioning here as his gateway between the new world he thinks stede denied him and the old world he used to share with izzy.
similarly, the way we get a shot of izzy’s bare, vulnerable feet and black loincloth thing-y before ed takes his toe makes me want to wade right into the proverbial sea!!! i hate this show.
the mix of tenderness and menace taika flips between here is just… like, i know this post is about con and izzy and i will GET THERE but because taika’s affect entirely changing here is important to izzy, i get to gush about it. he’s just so good.
anyway, izzy. izzy, who has a mouth full of his own toe and edward all up in his grill and thanks to the Weird Vore is having a religious and a sexual experience all at once. izzy, with a love song for broken men in his heart and tears in his eyes, because in this moment he is full of nothing but awe.
the way we use ‘awesome’ now is pretty casual; it means we like something. that something is good. my lunch was awesome, your hat is awesome, we had an awesome time. good, but not necessarily noteworthy. you forget awesome things that happen to you all the time.
in the bible, when something is worthy of awe, you drop to your knees and cry and beg for mercy because the glory and power of what you have just witnessed cannot be expressed by clumsy human tongues; to be in even an echo of the presence of god is to experience the overwhelming urge to absolutely shit yourself. edward’s hand around his throat gave him hope, but this clicks everything back into place for him because the violent, ugly evidence of edward’s love for him is working its way down his gullet. hurrah! life is good again, and by good izzy means horrifying.
so yeah, izzy is chock-full of awe. edward is the face of his god and real flesh his communion; this is a motherfucking religious experience. bow down bitches, because he is worshipping.
(also, he probably came in his pants.)
the thing that really takes me to “fuck it, i’m out, i can’t anymore” place is the way the method of consumption proves the lie of izzy’s ecstasy. edward isn’t providing him any real nourishment, ed is feeding izzy himself, shoving his own toxic notions of love down his throat and making sure he chews them real good first. he’s not consuming the man he loves, he’s eating his own fucking tail.
i just wanna talk to the person who came up with this idea. maybe i’ll beat them up in the parking lot of a denny’s, maybe i’ll cry on them forever. maybe i’ll buy them a fruit basket so expensive i will have to go into debt forever. who knows! i am both a monster and a lighthouse, myself.
the tatty scrap izzy clutches close to his chest and calls his heart might only exist in metaphor, but it’s just as red as ed’s and unlike our boy, the claret being spilled by izzy’s love most fucking certainly isn’t wine. violent and transactional, nasty brutish and short; these are the words izzy learned for the feelings in his chest. it’s like jack said before buttons took his ass out with what i can only assume is the power of having the most amazing facial expressions i have ever seen: pirates don’t have friends, and they don’t fall in love. they’re just in various stages of fucking each other over and in izzy’s sad, repressed world, they don’t even get to fuck each other in the bargain.
but that’s okay: he doesn’t need that. the story izzy lived in before stede ruined his life told him time and time again: it’s not aboutthat.
so this is good, and this is right. with edward looming over him, subtextually fucking the shit out of him but not making it gay in a way a straight audience would be unable to ignore, the world makes sense again. he’s got the taste of his own flesh in his mouth and blood on his teeth. he’s home.
so long to that muppet bullshit about ‘talking out our feelings’ and ‘giving each other hugs’ and ‘oh my FUCKING GOD get some therapy you leather-clad sad sack who is 1000000% going to die alone in a puddle of his own piss if he doesn’t get it together’. fuck emotional literacy right in the ear! who’s she? izzy’s proud to say he’s never met her.
all that joy, the glimpse into a world where love is a word that could ever apply izzy was all a bad dream, and now he’s awake. this is the real world: this is as close to a love song as men like izzy can ever hope to shape with their untrained tongues.
hey la, hey la, motherfuckers. his boyfriend’s back.
Remember how I said I’d write up some Izzy meta? Well here’s the short version. I have a google doc full of 10+ pages of notes and individual scene breakdowns for each episode, but I don’t know if I want to pull all that out and unpack everything with that level of detail just yet.
As a tribute to Con O’Neill, I’m going to stick to the top-level summaries of what I’ve noticed. His acting is brilliant! Go and rewatch OFMD and appreciate his performance, please.
The pure tragedy of Izzy Hands adds an extraordinary level of depth, contrast, and context to the romance between Edward Teach and Stede Bonnet – beyond mere antagonism! – that I’m still a bit overcome with inexpressible awe and admiration. I’ll do my best to stick to the outline to encourage you to go back and rewatch the show with a focus on Izzy’s perspective. :)
I also submit to you David’s tweet (pictured here) about the complexities of the relationship between Izzy and Edward and David’s polygon interview (skip to the end) as further motivation to do that rewatch.
I made myself unbearably sad about Izzy as a character while also accepting (and acknowledging) the sheer damage he’s doing to himself and his relationships – and now you can join me in a hell of Izzy’s own making, too! :D
Warning this is so fucking long you probably should be sitting down.
okay, so: we don’t talk a lot about toxic caretaking as a society. it’s a weird and uncomfortable topic to get into, because not all toxic caretaking is malicious despite being always harmful to both parties involved and we… sort of like our understanding of these things to stay simple, which that is very much not.
it’s also a trait we firmly associate with women! which complicates this even further, because of all our stupid sexist baggage.
which is why it’s veeeery very interesting that outside misty quigley, izzy might be the best example of a realistic toxic caretaker i’ve seen in media in a long time.
because if we look at what izzy says, it’s all very: ‘look how hard i WORK, does no one appreciate me, oh woe oh sorrow look at all i put up with, this place would be lost without me’. when we look at what he does… he’s not actually doing any of that!
he’s fairly regularly cruel, he’s a terrible communicator, and sort of worst of all he’s not even all that good at… managing people, i guess? if the ship was in good working order, it seems unlikely that it’s solely izzy doing things like grabbing fang by the beard and screaming FUCK YOU ALLLL, DO WHAT I TELL YOOOOOU that made it work.
could be, i guess! but it seems somewhat unlikely.
(insisting they are the only one who keeps everything moving and everybody would be lost without them: peak toxic caretaker.)
even beyond that, when ed says ‘hey: fucking knock it off, maybe?’, because he’s well aware Izzy Is Just Like This, izzy goes TWICE AS HARD. this man does not actually listen to a single no! all season! ed says izzy stop and izzy says go go go, and all that. he refuses to allow for any real boundaries to ever be set.
the juiciest part of all: the fact that izzy doesn’t see it that way is peakest of PEAK toxic caretakers.
he is this way because this is the only way he knows to express the mangled, fucked up ball of sadness in his chest, and because the world told him to channel his natural impulses into weird, violent channels or ELSE. ‘izzy thinks he’s doing xyz’ is almost always an indication the reality is a lot more fucked up and complicated than that.
and tbqh, that’s part of what makes him (and what he’s actually doing by rolling around pooping on every single party he can find) so fucking interesting.
the fucked up masochism/anger/tenderness junction where izzy chose his weird little s1 hill to die on is so good. so awful! so fuckin’ sad. LOVE IT.
But Izzy is right! He really is the only one fussed about maintenance, order, and other small details like how to keep everyone from dying. We never see Ed, or Stede, or anyone else take the initiative on these things, even when the ship is badly damaged after a fight and the Spanish are looming over the horizon. Izzy makes them do hard work and he’s a fucking dick about it, but it’s work that must be done because the consequences of NOT doing it range from inconvenient to hazardous to downright lethal. The only time he really does something pointless is when he makes the crew swab the deck again in ep 10, because he’s feeling useless in other ways - so he reverts to the only thing he knows he can still do, which is be a good ‘housewife’ and keep up appearances.
What Izzy fails to understand is that he’s not hated for being the bad guy spoiling everyone’s fun by making them perform essential tasks; he’s hated because he has zero people skills and zero interest in learning them. He’s the guy who sees clouds instead of sausages, because he never stops to consider that there could be another way of approaching a situation.
gonna disagree with you on this one! i can see why you take his word for it, but i want to point out you’re missing that we never see narrative consequences when people ignore his orders; so the show itself refutes your point. also i want to add that izzy never actually does any work himself—he tells other people to do work. (and he does it pretty horridly!)
the guy standing around yelling “get back to work, you useless fuckers” while never pitching in himself isn’t right, he’s just a dick. a dick i enjoy! but i think it’s important to notice izzy yells at other people to do things he will not do himself.
Gonna put this part of your tags here bc this!!!
My best friend noticed the first time she watched it and pointed it out to me, and i haven’t seen many people discussing it.
One other way that Izzy is a caretaker is by managing Ed’s moods/getting him out of his cabin/etc… But as another post pointed out, he only succeeds 23% of the time, bc he is rubbish at it.
The thing that makes Izzy and Ed so fun to analyze–and what I think makes their relationship the subject of such wildly different interpretations across the fandom–is that, like many things in OFMD, they are running on multiple layers of text and subtext, symbolism and metaphor at once. So textually they are first mate and captain which suggests one possible range of power dynamics, and certainly to hear Izzy tell it he is the long-suffering assistant to an increasingly erratic and distracted boss. But they are also (metaphorically) agent/manager and aging rockstar, which is a different power dynamic. AND Izzy is the metaphorical spouse that Ed is uncomfortable in a married state with and the metaphorical toxic ex that he goes back to after Stede breaks his heart. AND they are a white man and a Māori man with (probably?) similar class experiences but distinctly different racial experiences. Izzy calls Ed bossandBlackbeardandEdward and even Ed. He stands at almost-military attention in front of Ed’s desk and lies to his face about whether Stede knows who Ed is, and he seeks Ed out in private and offers to kill Stede for him, as an act of service and an offer to protect Ed’s reputation, because he knows Ed doesn’t kill people, and he flat-out ignores Ed’s no and tries to kill Stede later anyway and is completely confident that Ed won’t stop him even though by their official power dynamic Ed should be able to halt his sword hand with a word. They have a scene together that ends with Ed’s hand around Izzy’s throat and Izzy is in control of that scene the entire time. And it’s all happening at once! And I think which layer you focus on and which lens you see them through changes how you read their dynamic a lot! It’s just really rich and complex and layered writing and acting aaaaaaaaaaaaa!
the clever way they set up izzy the unreliable narrator is just… such good writing
i started making a complete list of “things other people agree izzy is good at” and “things only izzy says he’s good at” for brain distractions and on that first list is swordfighting
the second list is …everything else, i truly do find this little fucker so fun on a narrative level. he’s the textbook unreliable narrator: literally everything he says ends up directly contradicted by the people in question or the action, but he swaggers around yelling his version of events loudest! (and weirdest, lmfao.)
and honestly on a deeper level it makes us as an audience look at how we process things people tell us vs things people show us, and how those are often very much at odds.
the writing on this show is ridiculously good, you know?
Plus the show tells us he’s an unreliable narrator and a bit of a liar so early. Ed tells Izzy to ask Stede to meet him. But when Izzy does talk to Ed, he never mentions who his “boss” is. And when Izzy tells Ed, Ed seems to be immediately suspicious and asks, “and he knew who I was?” Like, Izzy, did you actually specific that Blackbeard wants to meet him? And Izzy’s response? “Seemed too”. No, Izzy, he did not seem to. He has no idea who his boss is. Cannot ever relay a message or tell a story faithfully
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.
#GOD when you frame it this way there is something so desperately sad about his character(via@fuckyeahisawthat)
To be honest I think he’s possibly the most tragic character on the show.
Ed & Stede are going through it right now, and it’s bad bad, but their happy ending has been telegraphed: steal some identities & ride off into the sunset after faking their own deaths. I’m pretty certain they reconcile & get the happily ever after (& I’m equally sure that they can only do that if Lucius is alive). The rest of the crew are happy under the co captaincy, Jim has made peace with their past to some degree & has Olu as well, etc. And very importantly, even though Ed also comes from the same place as Izzy, he lucked out and got a guide to the new world in Stede. He is starting to escape Izzy’s fate & likely will succeed, all because he has Stede.
Izzy? Izzy is on the other side of a glass wall, he can see the gay romcom but he’s under strict orders to never mention his own homosexuality. The references to masochistic tendencies are all he’s allowed—and to add insult to injury, he’s not even allowed to enjoy and embrace that part of his existence, a part that is in no way inherently bad as long as you’re engaging in it sanely and consensually. It’s just yet another case of coding with no fruition that in any other media would let straight audiences know he’s a Bad Gay Man.
It’s why I’m hoping the show continues to defy convention & figures out a happy-ish ending for Izzy. Even after (maybe even especially because of) everything he’s done, it would be exceptionally tragic if he didn’t get some way out of this hell, & by extension didn’t get to be part of the LGBTQ community that’s on the other side of that glass wall, on a show that’s a deliberate statement that we can live, thrive, get happily ever afters, and that our flag doesn’t actually mean death no matter what has been done to us.
