#i'm so glad that we as a fandom have decided to latch onto this minor side character hes my favorite :) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

billowyy · 2 years

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Izzy Hands and how he's changed the culture of shipping, at least in my corner of the internet:

One of my absolute favorite things about this fandom is how us Izzy enjoyers love to ship Izzy with anyone and everyone. Stede, Lucius, Frenchie, Sam Bellamy… the list goes on and on. A lot of us also love to put him in poly relationships.

This level of multishipping is not something I've ever seen in my decade of being in fandom.

In almost all of the fandoms I've been involved in over the years, the fandom's focus has primarily been on a single ship, like Ian/Mickey from Shameless or Buck/Eddie from 911. There are always some side pairings and other ships, but they're definitely the minority. This is the type of shipping I've been engaging in, for the most part.

Enter Izzy Hands.

There's just something about this strange, little man. The show itself lends to a very easy platform to ship all of the characters in various ways. It's a casually queer show and we all know how much us queers love to latch onto and have fun with any queer character we get. Izzy is one of the most popular characters I've ever seen.

I'm not going to do a whole bunch of meta about why we all love Izzy so much because many others have already done a brilliant job at that. The point is, we love him and have latched onto him. We want to read about and talk about him in various relationships. And he's not even in any canon relationship! The closest thing to that is his presumably unrequited love for Ed, and that's not even something all of the watchers of the show have caught on to.

If he wasn't in the show, or if he was played by anyone other than Con, most of our focus would be on Ed and Stede and the other canon pairings. Because that's how fandom typically works.

But we've all looked at Izzy and have decided that multishipping is the way to proceed (for which we are correct). We love the main pairings on the show, we love them to death (not literal death, Luc, I promise), but all of us somehow realized there was so much fun to be had with Izzy.

This is the most fun I've had in fandom in years.

Like I said, before I watched this show I never really engaged in multishipping. I read fic sometimes for pairings outside of my main ships, but it was always rare. Now, though, most of my fic reading is for Izzy. I see this with a lot of y'all, as well.

This rise in multishipping that has come with this show is something that I'm so fucking happy to see. I see a lot of hate for it in other fandoms and the fact that it's so widespread and commonplace (even Con puts stuff on his Insta story about Izzy with other characters) is so beautiful. I don’t think a lot of y’all realize how not common it is, especially if you haven’t been in fandom that long. There’s a completely new wave of fandom and shipping culture with Our Flag Means Death.

It's incredibly refreshing.

I'm very glad there's so many of us who have just absolutely fallen in love with the many ways Izzy Hands can love and be loved.

#izzy hands #our flag means death #ofmd #izzy ofmd

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