#angry purse dog izzy needs to be properly socialized to humans

[thetardigrape]

What's Wrong with Izzy Hands?

There's so much Discourse™️ lately about Izzy and damn, battle lines have really been drawn. No matter which side of which line you stand on, though, one thing is clear: there's something wrong with Izzy.

This is clear because he spends the entirety of S1 furious and struggling, when no one else does. Everyone else has moments of struggle, sure, but they also have moments of other things, like love or friendship or success. Not Izzy. Izzy never wins.

The Doylist reason, I suspect, is that Izzy is Ed's antagonist and they need him to run counter to Ed at all times in order to move the story forward. But to do that, he needs a Watsonian reason to be failing all the damn time. And I think I've maybe figured it out?

He boils people down to archetypes, then treats them that way regardless of what they do.

Ed is not a man who can both love a good maim and fancy a fine fabric, he's Blackbeard, a legend and a monster. Stede is not a starry-eyed rich man who is catching on in How To Be A Pirate 101 surprisingly quickly, he's a namby-pamby who has seduced Blackbeard and ruined him. Lucius is not a scribe hired for his artistic and calligraphic skills who is also so charming he's gotten it on with half the crew, he's a work-averse slut who can't do a single job right. Ivan and Fang aren't emotionally rich crew members who support Izzy and each other, they're henchmen who ask too many questions.

Izzy never once treats anyone else as a whole person. He never sees nuance or subtlety, never accepts that a person can contain contradictions or hold conflicting desires, never believes that there's anything more than what there appears to be on the surface. So when the people around him do recognize those subtleties, when they treat each other as whole people in ways that don't agree with Izzy's stereotypes of them, he becomes outraged. Which is like, all the time, because all of those people are people and none of them will ever consistently be a single archetype.

And that, I think, is where his redemption will lie, if it happens. I think it will have to start with himself, because I think he sees himself the same way—first mate to Blackbeard and god as far as the crew are concerned. He thinks he has no purpose or desire outside of that box, even though we the audience (and many people on the ship) can see it very clearly. Once he sees that there's more to himself than a single archetype, he'll be forced to recognize that there's more to everyone else as well. Then and only then will he be able to start building actual relationships with people.

#ofmd #our flag means death #ofmd meta #listen i am NOT interested in getting into The Discourse #jfc has it not been talked to death already #also don't misunderstand me i love izzy #but i love him BECAUSE he's so fucked up #not because i think he's NOT fucked up #he's a fucking mess and he treats people very badly #that makes him such a meaty character #so much to work with #so much space for growth #angry purse dog izzy needs to be properly socialized to humans