While we like to joke about Izzy being in the wrong genre, I would argue that there are in fact at least five distinct genre universes in the world of Our Flag Means Death, and all of them have different rules.
Stede Bonnet, and his crew when they’re around him, live in a Muppet movie. I didn’t come up with this analogy but it’s so accurate. Insane physical comedy and comedy-action where no one really gets hurt. Mild peril but you know everything is gonna work out. Terrible puns and sight gags, but room for sweet, genuine emotional moments too. The rules of time, space, probability and logic will bend for a good joke.
Izzy Hands is in a grimdark action/drama where if someone gets stabbed in the gut they will behave normally and fucking die. (Probably slowly and painfully, of sepsis.) Crucially I think Izzy also lives in a genre where you can only be subtextually queer, and violence (done for or with or to each other) is the only acceptable form of intimacy between men. This is why being forcibly dragged into Stede’s world, where everyone is busy having silly low-stakes misadventures and being gay and emotionally available all over the main text–and seeing his Subtextual Boyfriend go into this world and love it–sends him round the twist.
The British, Spanish and other imperialist militaries are in a Master and Commander-style naval adventure where they’re the heroes. This is why they all take it completely seriously when Stede (unintentionally) kills Badminton and takes hostages, even though we can see that he bumbled his way into it ass-backwards. This is also why Stede is so shocked to get actually for real stabbed aboard the Spanish ship. (“Did you mean to do that?”) He didn’t realize until that moment that he’d stepped into a different genre. The stabbing is one of the first Surprise Genre Switch moments we get and in retrospect it’s very important for setting up that in this world, the threat of getting hurt or killed is very real–which we need to understand to know that there are real stakes much later, when Stede almost gets executed by the British.
Izzy Hands is so mad and has his knickers in a twist cause he had intricate kink fantasies about hyper dom Blackbeard rearranging his guts in the most bdsm way possible but had those dreams absolutely obliterated by a blond capybara in a human suit when Blackbeard turns out to be a soft bottom simping hard for the worlds most incompetent pirate twink
Ed and Izzy are hard for me because I don’t know enough of their past to know what I’m seeing. Were they ever good to each other, or for each other? Have they ever understood each other at all? Did they get hurt together, turn into pirates together? Were they friends first before the brutality of their life killed that? Or has Izzy only ever been attached to a myth whose power he loved and whose heart he’d never seen?
I don’t like Izzy’s “loyalty.” It’s greedy, not goodhearted. He does seem to believe that brutality is just realism, but he’s actively feeding the horror. He encourages Ed to trust no one else; is exasperated, not sympathetic, with his increasing misery; tells him the crew would mutiny if not for him, claims he’s the one holding everything together (maybe true, maybe exaggerated).
When Ed wants to meet Stede, he tries to set up a misunderstanding that will get Stede killed instead of taking the message Ed asked him to (has he stopped Ed getting to know anyone else?). When that fails he threatens to leave; when he realizes Ed’s not really set on killing Stede, he tries to kill him against Ed’s will (claiming it’s what’s best and Ed needs Izzy to rescue him from himself!).
Finally he betrays them. Izzy refuses to become a willing member of the Revenge crew like the others. Izzy wants to be First Mate Hands or God. And Izzy gets that power from Ed, and he only has power over Ed when he’s volatile and miserable and unable to manage alone.
He can’t sustain that if Ed feels safe. He can’t convince him their life should stay the same if Ed’s got something better. He doesn’t want to change and grow too; he wants Ed to stay who he’s been, unless he really will murder Stede and let Izzy have it all. Then maybe Izzy would let him go. It’s the only thing that gives him pause. He isn’t hesitating for Ed’s happiness, and he doesn’t think twice about destroying it in the end. He can’t bear to see him genuinely happy, because if he’s really happy he won’t need Izzy anymore.
It shocks me that Ed lets him back on the ship after his betrayal. But for a long time Ed has let Izzy do what he does. Izzy takes care of business for him; he makes his life easier; he bolsters his reputation, and as a pirate who secretly can’t kill anyone directly, Ed really needs that bolstering. He likes how Izzy makes him look. After everything, he doesn’t know how to survive the world without Stede’s gentle courage making him feel safe, or Izzy’s brutality making him feel shielded. Ed telling Izzy that he’s still Blackbeard, and Izzy saying no, he’s not? That he can’t command Izzy’s respect or his protection? That rattles him.
If Izzy doesn’t see him as Blackbeard any more, he won’t help the men see that; he won’t help the world see that. And then Ed will be really alone. Easy pickings. And he’s spent so long as Blackbeard; it has to feel unfair to lose that, too. For all he was sick of it, and trapped in it, his reputation is all he has left.
The closest parallel I can see to Ed and Izzy in the show is Stede and Mary. Neither of them are good for each other. They actively bring out the worst in each other—half by selfishness, half by not really understanding who each other could become, given the chance. But for a long time they rely on each other for stability, anyway. I don’t think they’ve imagined yet who they could be, at the start. But even if they have, Mary needs Stede’s last name and Stede needs her heterosexuality, in the world they live in; polite society would eat them up if she became a bohemian artist with a lover, or he became an adventurer and loved a man. So they go on until he can’t bear it (and then try again until she can’t).
It’s not that they’re helpless. All of them have agency in what they’re doing—Stede chooses not to talk about his misery with Mary when she invites him to (I think I’ve heard you crying? Alone?) and never asks her if he can go. Mary gives up on communication thoroughly enough to try murder as her final out (objectively fucked up even if it’s played as funny). Meanwhile Ed chooses to yank Izzy’s hopes around (you’ll be captain!), lets him do the dirty work, and later maims him to force his respect; Izzy chooses to betray who Ed loves and threaten and belittle him until he goes cold again.
None of them are good to each other. But Stede and Mary find a way to release each other in the end, even if they dodge the social consequences via fuckery; Ed could only manage to passively watch Izzy sent off with Stede there, and then takes him straight back after Stede is gone. Ed chooses to use Izzy’s need to be needed, and Izzy refuses to let him grow. It’s going to have to end in crisis, somehow. They can’t let each other go.
Excellent meta, no notes, just wanted to add as supporting evidence that Izzy considers himself god’s gift to any crew but the minute he’s given an inch of unmitigated power, he goes completely mad with it. He’s an enforcer, not a leader.
But the chilling beat in light of this meta is the moment Ed comes back and asks for tea in his room. He doesn’t notice that Izzy’s about to be tossed overboard in a mutiny. It’s played as a comedic moment but with your meta pointing out that Ed thinks that he needs Izzy, thinks that Izzy is what allows him to be Blackbeard, it shows an absolutely chilling alternate side that Ed doesn’t see, can’t see that Izzy is bad at the job.
So so so good. This leads me to the idea that (I’ve seen bits of floating around) that Blackbeard isn’t actually some aspect of Ed’s personality where he compartmentalizes all his trauma and toxic traits. Blackbeard is a creation of BOTH Ed AND Izzy and therefore cannot exist one without the other. Ed provides the charisma, the creativity, the showmanship. Izzy is the taskmaster, the intimidator, the stage manager. Ed by himself is a ticking time bomb and Izzy by himself is a dictator. Together they are the most feared pirate captain on the high seas.
Ed, when he first meets Stede, says something along the lines of, “haven’t thought about it that way before but yeah, I work for Blackbeard.” And Izzy says that he “serves” Blackbeard. In spite of this, neither of them actually understand that Blackbeard and Ed are not one in the same. As soon as Ed starts to realize this, his and Izzy’s relationship starts to break down, and Izzy goes to extreme measures at great cost to get it back.
I can’t really support this next statement with evidence, just vibes, but I think Blackbeard died when Stede and Ed said “co-captains” at the same time. They complement each other. They’re curious about each other. They like each other and they love each other. But Ed and Izzy can’t have that same dynamic with Blackbeard between them. Captain and first mate is the closest they can get. And Izzy probably thought he was content with being Blackbeard’s right hand, because it never occurred to him to think he could be Ed’s co-captain. But then…
I’m slightly tempted to go back and find every instance of someone in OFMD talking about what Blackbeard/Ed was like before we meet him. The show is just littered with references like, “He’d kill you if you called him Ed,” or listing the atrocities he committed like burning a ship full of people alive or feeding people their own toes, and even casual cruelties like telling Fang to put his dog down if he wants to join the crew…
… and the thing is, Ed is so lovely that we kind of dismiss all these statements the same way Stede does? They’re treated like comedy beats or tall tales at most. We’re kind of asked to forget and ignore them as being inaccurate—despite the fact they’re often coming from people who know Ed VERY WELL, much better than Stede knows him and for much, much longer— and we’re still being told to ignore them aaaalllll the way up until Ed’s heel turn back into the Kraken (a form of Blackbeard that might arguably turn out to be a way worse version than even the hair-raising rumors we’ve heard before this point).
I want to compile them because I think they may have all been true. And not just true but actually blazing neon signposts for what we can expect to see from Ed in S2. Sure, I think he’ll be redeemed, and yes I think his actions will be tempered by his regrets and the pain he’s in and the fact that maybe he still doesn’t really want to be doing all this anymore. But I think before we can get a proper healing arc for Ed like the one we got for Stede we have to see just how bad he really was and guys, I think it was really bad and that we’ve been told this outright the whole time.
Not exactly on topic but this just makes me think about how OFMD creates tension by butting genres up against each other that have different expectations surrounding the consequences of actions and extent of harm caused by violent acts.
What I see OP talking about here is how we have two genres in conflict: the gritty pirate semi-realistic world, where harsh reality forces people into making horrible choices and everyone is deeply traumatized and violence is extremely normalized, vs. the muppet world, where slapstick rules and no one actually dies and if you cut off your finger your boyfriend will just whittle you a new one and you can take a sword through your guts as long as goes through the right spot. In the gritty pirate world, we acknowledge that the horrible things people do to each other are horrible, but everything is pretty horrible so do we really care? Plus, we can probably find a way to excuse these actions if they can be rationalized somehow. In the muppet world, the horrible things people do to each other aren’t actually horrible for…muppet reasons. The only “people” who die are the ones who deserve it, and any disability can be accommodated with a bit of creativity, and if what they did really was that horrible, then just chalk it up to them being quirky and move on.
Anyway, so we have Ed, who originates in the gritty pirate world, and Stede, who originates in a period drama, there together on the Revenge, which is the locus of the muppet world. The deaths and maimings that Ed was responsible for happened in the gritty pirate world, but for the most part, we’re talking about it in the muppet world. The best example of this is when Calico Jack is talking about Ed burning the ship with all the crew inside. Jack describes it in great detail, down to the skin melting off the victims’ faces. Stede appears pretty disturbed by the telling and Ed seems somewhat ashamed. In the pirate world, we’ll accept a good excuse, but Ed doesn’t provide rationale for these actions. Instead he tries to brush it off, saying, “Well technically, the fire killed those guys,” which is a very funny muppety line.
So here I ask the question: Am I supposed to frame Ed’s actions described here as “horrible things that are inexcusable even in the pirate world” or as “something Ed did when he was feeling quirky back in the day, and it doesn’t matter anyway because the victims are muppet-people for whom death is not necessarily the final consequence”? I’m not sure, and I love that. That Calico Jack is pretty muppety compared to the other pirates we’ve seen (Izzy particularly, and Blackbeard & Ivan & Fang in the scenes prior to them being on the Revenge) doesn’t really help me come to a solid conclusion.
Later, when the English capture the Revenge, the muppet world breaks down, at least for Stede and Ed. Stede then tries to go back to his period drama, but Mary has created her own muppet world that he’s not a part of. In a period drama, the presumed-dead husband would likely be greeted with, if not fanfare, then at least some measure of joy or drama, not your wife vomiting at the sight of you when you interrupt her gathering of happy widows. Stede is not the right kind of muppet for Mary’s muppet world, and he ends up bringing some gritty pirate drama to her art show when he nearly stabs Doug. It’s shocking, but it’s Mary’s muppet world, so after a round of attempted murder on Mary’s part, they’re even and all is forgiven.
Meanwhile, Ed is bringing the gritty pirate world to the Revenge–Izzy never entered the muppet world after all, so it makes sense that he was the catalyst for Ed to lose his footing and fail to maintain his place in the muppet world there. Luckily, it seems that the muppet world is actually a state of mind, so the crew who are marooned are rescued almost immediately. Lucius, who got too close to Blackbeard, and Frenchie and Jim, who have darker backstories (Jim definitely, and you can probably make an argument from what we know about Frenchie) are not so lucky.
Because of Mary’s arc in particular, I think endgame here is for everyone to get themselves back into the muppet world, where happiness has a sort of ease to it and all harm can heal without too much time or effort and anything bad that happens off screen wasn’t that bad, actually. How that will happen, who can say?
In the past 10 years or so, I’ve seen a lot more commentary/critique of media that involves victims of violence where death and injury is either played for laughs (hard to think of a specific example because it’s so pervasive in comedy) or not acknowledged at all (mass casualties in war/alien invasion/etc.). So there’s a greater consciousness around “hey, that guy he killed was a person!” or when Ed says, “Maiming’s different. Love a good maim,” and I think, “lol what a funny thing to say…that’s really fucked up, though, isn’t it?” And I think this consciousness is what allows the juxtaposition of these genres to add some really interesting layers to the storytelling.
I don’t think Lucius is dead. I think he’s living in the fucking walls. I think he’s found Stede’s emergency tea room and is dressing in his summer linens to pass the time. I think he’s alternating between pretending to haunt Ed but also nudge him into self care. I think Jim knows and shares knowing glances with the walls now. I think he moves Ed’s furniture 3 inches to the left every now and then but leaves him a glass of water too. Hear me out please
I definitely don’t think he’s dead, and on rewatch, I noticed that Stede says he’s had “several” secret passages built into the ship, but we only see the clothes closet. So Lucius could very well be hiding out in those.
[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]
