Izzy Hands’ inability to get a single fucking win in any given situation has captivated me. He’s so SAD. Brother literally cannot catch a break for the life (or death) of him. I wanna be silly about him, but he’s such a sad goddamn character that I just can’t. It just feels wrong. Like, who am I to kick at someone who is already down? And who pretty much has been down since ep 2 at BEST? Sigh.
I adore inner conflict in a character, I eat that shit UP. Outer conflict is nice too, but ohhh. Love me a good worst-enemy-is-oneself trope. Realistically, that’s more so Ed than Izzy, but still. I think it’s the contrast that does it, too.
Izzy is so terribly loyal it hurts. He just has so much bottled up for the entirety of the first season, so many things that he’s repressed that all feeds into his bitterness. That, within itself, is really interesting in a character. Let’s start with his feelings of Ed. He starts of the series smug, confident. He looks up to Ed, as pretty much everyone do. He’s the one person he doesn’t mind being “inferior” to. He’s built up this image of Blackbeard in his mind (which is precisely what Ed struggled with the most part. The way his reputation has outgrown him in a multitude of ways) which he puts on such a high pedestal. Working together with the mighty Blackbeard is an honour. He adores him, and he’s very much pleased with the role he’s serving beside him.
Then in comes Stede, who is everything Blackbeard and Izzy is not. Or at least so it seems, until his whole fucking world has been turned upside down and everything he treasured has been snatched right out of his grasp. Then, to make matters worse, when Stede finally is out of the picture and things should be able to go back the way they were, they don’t. For a while, he could at least hold onto the idea that there was hope, that time would work its magic and things would revert back to normalcy. But it only gets worse, and worse, until it’s undeniably so much worse than it was at the former worst moment.
And the barriers start to melt away. Izzy isn’t dumb, he’s always quite aware of the situation he finds himself in. Even he, the former worst enabler of Blackbeards pirate shenanigans, knows when it’s time to stop. And so he takes on a somewhat more caring role, because he cares. He cares more about Ed than most, and he knows him better than most. Even when he’s unpredictable, and when Izzy himself thinks of him as a stranger. He still knows him better than most of the crew, to the extent in which Ed has allowed it. There is a lot of Ed that Izzy doesn’t know, but I’d imagine he knows the way he functions off by heart. The way his brain works, the way he plans, his mannerisms, stuff like that. Stuff you learn by paying close attention to someone as you spend every day together for years. And stuff you need to learn to survive in an abusive relationship, or in a relationship with someone unstable, in order to keep the water’s calm.
Izzy cares. It comes naturally to him, at least it probably did once. And now, after all that has happened all of him that has been broken down, it shines through again. It seeps out of the cracks of his crushed self, where every part of him is on display in a way he can’t or doesn’t bother to control anymore.
Despite everything, he shows mercy to Ed.
Despite everything, he teaches Stede how to survive (when it wouldn’t have been unexpected of him to want him dead at this point, again).
Despite everything, he lies about the ruined portrait to protect Stede’s perception of Ed.
Despite everything, he tries to move on and move forth.
Despite everything, he helps. He tries to make amends about things that were or weren’t his fault.
And despite everything, despite how much he pushes it away and tries to act like he doesn’t, he wants nothing as much as he wants something gentle. Something kind. He has gotten so much harm done to him by people he trusts, people he trusted and people he doesn’t trust at all. Every touch he’s ever received, to our eyes, has been one with the means of harm.
In season one I enjoyed seeing his homophobic homosexual messiness unfold, and his misery was all good fun. This season? I just wanna lay him to be cozy in a bed somewhere and give him some soup and a kiss on the forehead and tell him it’s gonna be okay. What the hell man.
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curious to know why you dislike juline?
tbh i had no opinion at all of her and then about a year ago there was a poll on which member of the collective was the best. and the tiergan lovers website let tiergan down. in favor of her. /hj
in seriousness, dislike was a bit strong. im still mostly neutral on her. she does sort of feel like just another sparkly girlboss in the series which. admittedly is a trope in kotlc thats started to piss me off a bit bc it seems like every adult woman falls into it.
juline is like. the final evolution of that sparkly girlbossery. she has no real relationship damage for more than 2 minutes after revealing shes been lying to her family for years and was part of the organization that grady thought killed his daughter.
in general! it doesnt seem like she ever faces any consequences for lying to her family or pushing them to the side a bit in favor of the black swan.
idk maybe there were problems (specifically with dex) and we never saw them bc theyre not sophies problem but. whatever.
also what is her "official job." was she passing off as a stay at home mom? does she work in the nobility? idk
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ok so. i already told you about the task gimmick for secret life smp, and the lives gimmick for the whole series, right. the episodes from recording session 7 came out yesterday and im so normal about it
the session starts out pretty normal, pretty casual. everything seems fine. sure, some people are acting a little off, but this is the “people being secretive and acting weird” series, so most people just brush it off.
and then people start dying. and then they start hanging out with the people who killed them, and don’t seem that upset about it. and then those victims start hunting down other players as well.
about halfway through the session, the players start figuring out what’s going on: someone got a task telling them to essentially start a zombie apocalypse. the remaining survivors (about half of the server) band together and hole up at probably the most defensible base on the server, belonging to the Roomies faction
(the Roomies being the players ZombieCleo (yeah, ironic), Etho, and Grian) (i don’t think that’s their official faction name but i also don’t think they have one) (also, all three of them are at that point uninfected)
the zombies attack, and grian attempts to trick them into looking at an enderman. this backfires, and directly leads to etho’s death and subsequent conversion to a “zombie”. (they’re actually called “Boogeymen” after a mechanic from some of the previous seasons, but i like zombie better)
during his whole time on Team Zombie (not the official name), etho did not attack grian or cleo, his factionmates, once, several times risking his own life to cover for them and sabotage the zombies’ efforts to kill them (sometimes subtly, sometimes not so much)
after you die and join the apocalypse, your task changes to become “infect all non-infected.” etho chose to actively fail his own task rather than attack his team.
about a quarter into etho’s episode, he had a chat with bdubs (the first player to be “turned,” and who was infected at that time), where they talked about the game (note: bdubs and etho have been friends for over a decade, and within the life series have a really weird gay thing going on). bdubs confidently declares that he’d choose to fail a task if it involved killing etho, and etho said he probably wouldn’t go that far for bdubs.
but he did for cleo and grian. do you understand how insane i am abt this
in the end, both cleo and grian survived the apocalypse without becoming zombies, and while im not sure how much etho’s actions specifically had to do with it (there was one point at the end of the session where he Definitely saved their lives), it’s just. he tried. he failed in his task but he succeeded in his goal.
(also, right after etho got infected, he went back to the Roomies base/survivor hq (don’t remember why), and cleo warned etho that she Would kill him too. except in their episode, she has a little subtitle that pops up on the screen when they say that, and it says “I won’t.” like even if he turns on her, she wont follow through on that threat and do the same. these block people make me go crazy)
they had a zombie au episode 🥺🥺🥺
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