#I know some of y'all are allergic to calling season 1 Izzy a villain or even an antagonist much less a villain

[naranjapetrificada]

The first thing I should ever have said about Izzy and the last thing I intend to say until at least October 26th.

[Although I am not Her strongest soldier, so who knows if I will stick the landing.]

So to start with, I was a "late" arrival to the show. I knew it existed of course, but I only occasionally saw things that reminded me it existed. The first time I saw a mention of "grumpy/sunshine" it was with a picture of Ed and Stede, so I guess on some level I knew there was shipping going on, but that was literally all I knew. I didn't even know it involved Blackbeard lol.

Which is all to say that I first approached and watched season 1 removed from basically anything anyone had to say about it. I think what actually got me to watch it wasn't anything anyone had to say either, it was from youtube recommendations? Like I think I had watched a couple Taika interviews or something and ofmd stuff started showing up? So after catching a few clips and intentionally spoiling the kiss for myself (life is too short to be queerbaited) I watched it in April/May 2023, and was Changed by it the way so many other people were. It grabbed me so hard I started looking for fics, and when fic grabbed me even harder I became a regular tumblr user for the first time ever in June 2023.

What I didn't do, before the second half of 2023, was care particularly much about Izzy Hands.

I remember describing him as psychologically fascinating to the first IRL friend I talked to about the show, and joking that he just needed a good dom. As much as his decision to call in the navy was a threat to Stede's and Ed's lives, I saw his actions as part of a thing needed for the story, and while I knew he was one of the season's villains there wasn't really any heat behind that assessment.

For me he was there to set things in motion, and to serve the narrative in certain ways, to be a foil, more storytelling tool than man. That doesn't mean I didn't think Con did an excellent job adding layers to him, he absolutely made Izzy take up space and feel more present and textured than he otherwise might have. But when I began to zoom out and consider things on meta level, Izzy existed to do a certain thing or occupy a certain place in relation to the narrative and other characters more than anything else. And that was fine.

Then I started reading meta here, and found myself surrounded by passionate conversations about Izzy from many directions occurring with an intensity that I couldn't wrap my brain around. I saw people tying themselves into knots to justify and excuse the behavior of a textual antagonist, and I was baffled and because I still saw Izzy for what his role in the narrative was, it literally made no sense to see his behavior explained away. In the framework I brought to the fandom when I first arrived, trying to explain away Izzy's behavior would be like looking at a forest fire and trying to explain away processes like combustion and oxidation. Or if you'll allow me to borrow another extended, nature-based metaphor from a fic in an entirely different fandom:

Again, because from where my head was at, it didn't make sense to look at Izzy's morality as a zero sum game because in this metaphor, he was functionally just a brackish body of water. I'm not saying the morality is brackish, I'm saying the morality was literally not the point because like an estuary, an antagonist "must exist" because antagonists exist for specific reasons directly related to storytelling goals.

So there was no real heat behind my feelings about him or his actions, beyond the natural emotional reactions we have to characters and their behaviors before we zoom out. I was of course upset with his treatment of Lucius, which was targeted compared to other members of the crew. I was annoyed with the way he talked to and about Ed. I laughed when his plans had the equal and opposite results of what he intended, which you could argue happened with every single plan he made for the entirety of season 1. And yes, especially as a Black person living in the US, I felt the fear and betrayal that comes from seeing someone call the cops (which given the show and its writers, it does not feel like a stretch to describe calling the navy that). I wondered if there was any coming back from a choice like that, which is a big overriding question for the series as a whole.

I'm not here to debate any of the points in the previous paragraph. I know how I feel and you feel how you feel and there's already been so much said about the morality of it all by people who have explained themselves well, so let them convince you or not. Instead I've been trying to talk about the two sides of my experience before and after getting into the fandom with Izzy.

Before: Izzy Hands, Narratively Useful Antagonist Portrayed Compellingly And Effectively by Con O'Neill.

After: Izzy Hands, Unfortunate Avatar Of The Sadly Common Tendency For Certain Fans To Hyperfocus On A White Antagonist Or Secondary Character When There Already Exists A Protagonist They're A Foil Of (And Also It Looks Bad TO Do That When The Protagonist Is Someone With A Marginalized Identity).

I'm not here to argue the merits of those assessments either, because that's not the point. The point is the vast gulf between them and how the latter does such an incredible disservice to the Izzy we were given and that so many people claim to love. The latter comes from a place where morality is the focus, which I'm sorry y'all, feels like it originates with people who refuse to countenance Izzy's role in the story as well as his characterization.

Viewers who were willing to see Izzy as an antagonist, who don't view the word "antagonist" as a value judgement in and of itself, who don't think that finding an antagonist charismatic or compelling means anything about their own morality, those people can look at the show we were given and take it for what it was made to be. I'm not saying that it's only the Izzy stans (not enjoyers, not jar people) who start fights or that people who understand that Izzy is an antagonist don't also have deep morality related feelings about him and his actions in the first season. What I am saying is that sanding off Izzy's rough edges and trying to make him into something he isn't poisons even the possibility of having a discussion about him because people enter the conversation with two completely different understandings of reality. If you cannot accept the job that season 1 Izzy was given to do to move the story along, well you might as well have watched a completely different show for how much that fanon Izzy has anything to do with the canon one.

This show deserves better than that. The writers deserve better than that. Con O'Neill deserves better than that. Israel Basilica Hands deserves better than that. We all do.

#I know some of y'all are allergic to calling season 1 Izzy a villain or even an antagonist much less a villain #but given how self aware this production is about tropes it's weird to pretend that's not literally his function #at least in season one #maybe there are changes to that on the horizon #but we won't have the complete picture until Oct. 26 so maybe chill if people have an antipathy toward him #especially because at least a third of that antipathy is rooted in how criticizing him AT ALL acts like a summoning ritual #and I have to wonder about the acrimony levels if people felt like they could offer critical opinions easily #anyway rip my notifications probably #ofmd #our flag means death spoilers #ofmd spoilers #ofmd speculation #ofmd meta #fandom meta #fandom fuckery #character meta #let izzy be izzy #izzy hands #izzy critical #the izcourse #and now to filter literally every Izzy tag until November so I can enjoy the season in peace #that's as close as I'll make it to the halcyon days of my season 1 watch #ofmd s2 #ofmd season 2 #ofmd season 2 spoilers #ofmd s2 spoilers #ofmd s2 speculation #ps I won't be responding to replies because look at the title of this post