#the anti handwringing about how many fans love the evil problematic guy is not rooted in reality. and filtering tags is easy as fuck

[ladyluscinia]

Who are all of these people who are drowning in pro-Izzy content to the exclusion of all other characters and have they been in a fandom that actually has a ridiculous overrepresentation of some shitty guy? I see posts like this:

And the problem sounds a lot more like they are objecting to any Izzy content. Because I certainly can't find this overwhelming dominance. So fine. Let's see how popular Izzy is...

There are 12072 OFMD works on AO3 as I type this.

"Israel Hands" is character tagged in 5393 of them. That's 44.7%. Lower than I would expect, seeing as that includes every fic where he's the choice of villain as well as simply present or a focus. 122 of those are tagged "Major Character Death" (out of 225 in the whole fandom), and I suspect that's undertagged by people who don't think Izzy's fate is that important.

Comparably we have Lucius at 3560 (29.5%), Jim at 2226 (18.4%), and Oluwande at 1935 (16%). Lower than Izzy, yeah, but how many of those Lucius fics have him tagged just to get violently killed off or verbally wrecked and sent away for everyone else's happy ending? How many times does the crew show up untagged individually? I'm guessing the numbers of positive fics are probably a lot more equal... But let's see if we can look at this another way.

How about ships?

Izzy's ship fics are probably more likely to be pro-Izzy / significant content, yeah? So I'll break those down.

The most popular ship in the "Israel Hands" character tag is - to no one's surprise - BlackBonnet at 3183 (so 59% of "Israel Hands" character tagged fics, and 26.4% of all OFMD fics are tagged BlackBonnet + "Israel Hands"). I'd guess that number includes a lot of the "villain Izzy getting defeated" stories. Ships that actually have Izzy in them go:

Edward/Izzy at 1287 under "Israel Hands", 1374 (11.4%) total

Stede/Edward/Izzy at 762 under "Israel Hands", 812 (6.7%, probably with a good amount of BlackHands overlap) total

Stede/Izzy at 482 under "Israel Hands", 509 (4.2%, with overlap again) total

Izzy/Lucius at 477 under "Israel Hands", 514 (4.3%) total.

Lucius/Pete btw? 746 under "Israel Hands", 1188 (9.8%) total. Oluwande/Jim has 579 under "Israel Hands" and 1023 (8.5%) total. They both outrank every non-Edward/Izzy ship inside Izzy's tag, and are not far behind Edward/Izzy in total.

Another consideration I can attest to as a BlackHands reader... a lot of those Edward/Izzy fics are labeled "one sided" in various ways (which gets tag wrangled as the ship). 107 are just plain tagged "Unrequited Love". 94 have "One-Sided Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Israel Hands". Or they are toxic / abusive with a different ship endgame - BlackBonnet (tagged on 656 of them, with 389 as SteddyHands) or Izzy/Lucius (tagged on 70) or a negligible ship like Izzy/Frenchie or Izzy/Sam Bellamy.

These numbers are just NOT an overwhelming surge of fan attention. Izzy is not a third protagonist, no, but he's the most developed antagonist with easily 3rd or 4th most screentime / characterization. Having maybe 1/5 or less of the fandom content that you could call "focused" on him is not much or unusual or proof of bias 🙄 (the tag "Israel Hands-centric" is on 341 fics, or 2.8% of OFMD fics, "POV Israel Hands" on 176 so 1.5%, "Soft Israel Hands" on 107 or 0.9%... These are not big numbers).

Do people want to know where all that attention they think is owed to Jim or Lucius or Frenchie or Ivan and Fang is going?

8705 works tagged as BlackBonnet. That's 72.1% of all OFMD fics. Running the "otp: true" search for BlackBonnet ONLY fics pulls up 5764 results, so still 47.7%! Almost half of this fandom's content is ship fic that only covers the OTP without even tagged background ships.

"Blackbeard | Edward Teach" is character tagged in 9698 OFMD fics at 80.3% and "Stede Bonnet" is next in 8889 at 73.6%.

In the 1188 Lucius/Pete fics, BlackBonnet is tagged in 936 of them. That's 78.8% of all Lucius/Pete.

In the 1023 Oluwande/Jim fics, BlackBonnet is tagged in 788 of them. That's 77% of all Oluwande/Jim.

Those BlackBonnet numbers are insane. Fucking Destiel - the biggest ship on AO3, in a show insanely hostile to side characters - is tagged in 107526 fics of 268568 in the Supernatural fandom. That's 40%. You read that right. Less than half. Maybe some more recent tumblr darlings?

Catra / Adora from She-Ra hit 10248 out of 16141, so 63.5%. And they are canon.

Newer, but I've seen Dream / Hob Gadling surging and it's at roughly 500 (the tags need wrangling) out of 1743 in the Sandman (TV 2022), hitting 28.7%

Never watched The Owl House, but Amity Blight / Luz Noceda is the top ship at 7650 of 16277, so 47%. Pretty sure that one is canon too.

Stranger Things has 51424 works, with top ships Steve/Eddie at 10266 (20%) and Billy/Steve at 9046 (17.6%). Again, I don't watch, but I'm pretty sure these are a lot more accurate examples of minor character takeover ships, and Billy especially is the shitty white guy breakout with barely any screentime. Who has been dead for multiple seasons. And it's still beating Edward/Izzy's percentage significantly.

I'm sorry that your fave isn't getting the content you want. It sucks. But this supposed unfair focus on Izzy just does not exist at any level that would actually be impacting other character content.

Anyone complaining about it is not making a complaint about fandom bias grounded in reality.

And anyone who is proposing "solutions" for this lack of content (a questionable proposition already) better have the bulk of their list as "More BlackBonnet writers need to try branching out" or they are just making up reasons to complain about minor content focused on a character or ship they don't like.

#our flag means death #ofmd meta #i could put a cut in this but idk where so you can all just admire my math #tldr izzy is probably a bit *lower* in popularity than i would expect because blackbonnet dominates too much #he's certainly not even remotely threatening the amount of pure uwu content that he keeps being accused of threatening 🙄 #if authors aren't writing enough lucius or jim content for you it's because they are on their 5th blackbonnet reunion fic #the anti handwringing about how many fans love the evil problematic guy is not rooted in reality. and filtering tags is easy as fuck #fandom culture #shipping #statistics are good and fun #izzy hands ofmd #ladyluscinia #my meta #ao3