@fishfingersandscarves art is so incredibly beautiful! I confess I had an image in my head ever since writing the Naxos arc of a landscape painting of Dream and Hob walking along the beach with this sort of Renaissance/Rembrandt landscape color palette and I was so overjoyed when fishy agreed to accept the commission and overcome by how beautiful the art is!
Right, the lack of literary analysis on this website is kind of astounding. And I understand most people on here are young still or didn’t have the opportunity to study complex writing at a university level so let’s just take a second to review why everyone might be overreacting, and while sad, this was an excellent and moving ending for Izzy and the season.
Was it rushed? Yes, but that wasn’t the writing staff at fault. They did the best they could in so little time and still made it meaningful despite time restrictions.
Did Izzy have to die? Yes, he says so himself. Ed isn’t Blackbeard, in case you all missed that. Blackbeard is just “a good pirates tale” that is Izzy and Ed TOGETHER. Izzy can’t be Blackbeard without Ed because Ed is the face of Blackbeard. Ed can’t be Blackbeard without Izzy because Izzy is the personality of Blackbeard. As long as they’re both alive and together, Blackbeard will always exist. We get a little taste of this in season 1 when Ed is arrested, but without Ed’s softness, Izzy isn’t a good captain and without Izzy’s constant reality checks, Ed was going full manic pixie dream girl. You need both for Blackbeard.
Is Izzy a father figure to Ed? Yes, because you need to replace father figure here with creator. It’s just a literary stand in term. Izzy made Blackbeard to protect Ed because Ed is soft. You can see the same relationship reflected in Zheng and Auntie. Auntie is the brains of the operation and makes Zheng harder because she’s worried about her softness getting her hurt the same way Izzy sees it as Ed’s weakness. You can also think of it as Izzy=Auntie/Oluande=Stede/Zheng=Ed and the story probably makes a little more sense. It doesn’t matter if Izzy is in love with Ed, Frenchie, wee John, or any of the others, he is still Blackbeard’s creator and protector and therefore the “father figure” he has to learn to carry on without.
Why is Izzy’s redemption so meaningful? Because they switched places and suddenly he was the softness of Blackbeard and Ed was the harshness. Izzy finally saw why living life this way was so important to Ed, and he finally understood what he was keeping Ed from by forcing Blackbeard to stay alive. He finally understood that feeling of family and belonging that Ed was chasing all of these years. He finally understood Ed. Unfortunately, though, the prince doesn’t get to stay a pauper forever. Eventually he has to go back and apply the lessons he learned to real life, and for Izzy that was realizing for either of them to be happy, Blackbeard has to die. So he sacrifices himself to let Ed go free because he loves him. Izzy understands Ed’s unhappiness is because of Blackbeard and that was the whole plan anyway, to kill Blackbeard. It’s why Izzy was even on the revenge in the first place. So Izzy did what any good “father figure” would do and gives his life so Ed could live. We’ve seen people on this show survive worse, and I believe if he wanted to, he could have, but he didn’t want to survive. He even says “I want to go.” He made the choice. That single choice to put others first was the culmination of his redemption.
Couldn’t Izzy have just captained the ship and Ed still retired to his inn? No. The show has proven time and time again, only Blackbeard can lead a pirate ship. Ed and Izzy are crap doing it alone.
I know it’s just a silly little pirate show, but the writing is excellent, and if you just put a little thought into it, you can understand that Izzy dying was such an astounding and beautiful act of selfless love for everyone on that crew. He did his job as the new unicorn and set every single one of them free from Blackbeard.
This is going to be a controversial post, but I find it very “interesting” how people are taking Ed’s storyline this season and projecting it onto Izzy. ED was the one who was suicidal. ED was the one who believed he was unlovable and unloved, and that he had to be something he didn’t want to be just to be a little bit accepted. ED was actively trying to die and get people to kill him because he was too scared to do it himself. ED was the one who was working through years of trauma to find a way to be happy with himself and learn that he is capable of being loved for who he is.
And yeah, Izzy has some of that as well. Though genuinely, that could be said for most of the characters. But it’s SO STRANGE how many people I see saying “Oh well I guess the message of the story is that if you’re suicidal then you should die.”
Like, please, learn some media literacy. Ed and his arc are RIGHT THERE. I feel like I’m living in an alternate reality where we all watched a different show. Why are you unable to relate to Ed? I’ve literally seen people say “Oh well I just don’t care about Ed.” Truly, why are you only able to relate to that storyline when it’s through the perspective of a white man?
I’m not trying to be antagonistic, but this is really bothering me.
Tumblr shows that the best way to get queer people to like your show is to not put any explicitly queer people in it. So long as nothing is canon, they will ‘Candle Cove’ up a whole entire show with EXCELLENT queer representation out of nothing. If you put actual canon queer representation into it, you’ll get ripped to shreds for being problematic about it.
i do not at all mean this in a perjorative manner, but i do think it’s important to be able to consume a piece of media and go, “i’m not the audience for this” and be able to just walk away
there doesn’t have to be something wrong or “problematic” about something for a person to not like it. personal taste is personal taste. but something not doing it for you doesn’t mean it automatically has to be wrong or bad. it’s just not for you.
There’s been several times when I’ve watched a thing and been like, they clearly did what they intended to do, and did it well, and I don’t want any part of it. This is a high quality and deeply unpleasant piece of art.
“This is a high quality and deeply unpleasant piece of art” is a wonderful line, I love it, I feel it in my soul
too good a take to be left in the tags
Recently, my son said to me after seeing a ballet on television: “It’s beautiful but I don’t like it.” And I thought, Are many grown-ups capable of such a distinction? It’s beautiful, but I don’t like it. Usually, our grown-up thinking is more along the lines of: I don’t like it, so it’s not beautiful. What would it meant to separate those two impressions for art making and for art criticism?
- Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write
Dom Hob or Dom Morpheus is OUT I am putting my two cents in on:
they’re both versatile switches. The difference is that Hob KNOWS this and is comfortable with it. Dream, for all that he is aware of every iteration of fantasy, doesn’t seem to comprehend that “bottoming isn’t the same as submitting” also applies to him.
And boy is he gonna learn that important difference when Hob scruffs him like a hissing kitten and tells him to SHUSH.
Christ, I can’t even imagine what the takes would be if, like, “Titanic” came out today. “What did Jack do to deserve to die?” “Why was the narrative punishing Jack by making him die?” “The story is clearly problematic because Jack died instead of Cal.”
Like holy shit, sometimes characters die because it’s tragic. Because the creators are trying to make you feel something. Because fiction isn’t always about some Calvinist view of a character deserving their fate because all stories are meant to be one big religious passion play about who deserves to go to heaven and be redeemed or whatever and who we’re allowed to stone to death.
Sometimes it’s narratively unjust because you’re meant to be pained and outraged and feel a gaping hole in your heart wherein resides emotions you might never experience in day to day life because the whole point of fiction is to take you outside your everyday experience.
(And for the record, I’m sure those takes on Titanic would have existed if it corresponded with the existence of Twitter but thankfully I was blissfully unaware of all that because I was ten years old. Still. Dear lord, people.)
the way people cannot take any negative thing happening in tv shows these days is genuinely frightening and incredibly tiring. sometimes characters die. sometimes bad things happen for the story to move along. unwillingness to deal with anything upsetting in the realm of FICTION (and by upsetting i don’t even mean difficult themes but just basic storytelling stuff like a character dying) is how you get incredibly watered-down cookie cutter media that doesn’t make you feel anything. “ooooh but escapism” you cannot avoid everything bad forever. and if a character death is something that will send you spiralling that is something with your mental health and not with the piece of media being made. from the bottom of my heart: grow up
Honestly, I kinda hope that OFMD breaks its own metaphysics in a theoretical Season 3 and allows magic to actually exist just so that Actual Sea Witch Buttons resurrects Izzy (who knows, maybe to symbolically represent Ed returning to being Blackbeard for a One Last Ride-style plot where they take on the British Navy or something) just so that the corner of the fandom being vicious little monsters to the show creators about Izzy being dead will look that much more ridiculous
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