#which hits on the working class struggle to survive AND clever use of comedy violence to play with in universe severity

[ladyluscinia]

I've already expressed that I think people who read Izzy as a clearly racist / homophobic villain are setting themselves up for disappointment - doubly so if they are throwing around "irredeemable" or expecting he'll be harshly punished somehow - because the show is simply... not that kind of show.

But I've also decided they are just plain missing out on good writing.

Just in general, do you know what standard straight romcom couples pretty much never have to deal with? Extreme bigotry as a major obstacle to their relationship. It's not a normal thing to, say, set up an interracial couple and then have one particular character constantly around spouting segregation era views because that's a slap in the face you don't need in a romcom. If a story does go that way it's pretty much exclusively a brief, "oh shit did they just go there?" moment, kills the lighthearted tone immediately, and leads directly to a huge climactic explosion because, again, slap in the face.

So why should Stede and Edward have to face seasons of explicit homophobia and racism (without even a cathartic explosion up front) for the crime of being a non-standard romcom couple? They shouldn't! Canon gay couples deserve to get the romance and the lighthearted tone without having to run through a required Homophobia Exists obstacle course. At the same time, though, that can be kinda difficult writing-wise because homophobia does exist.

And the OFMD writers were actually really fucking smart about it!

Like, as people have pointed out around Izzy, any character being hostile to a gay couple is going to ping homophobia radars, because in reality that is a likely explanation. Same for insulting gay characters based on their appearance or manner (so... the basis of most insults?). This means you probably can't just copy the obstacle characters from a straight romcom and play them out the same way - they would just read as homophobic without ever saying it out loud - but also you need obstacle characters for a lot of the romcom beats. So instead of doing that, they wrote Izzy reasons for his behavior that make sense.

Setting up one of Stede's primary character flaws (and a major theme of the show) as his unconscious class privilege, and then dropping in an aggressively working class guy as the main onscreen antagonist? That's brilliant. Izzy can insult and despise his clothes, his manners, his very existence in the world, and not only does it work, but it's also sympathetic and fixable and crucially based on a real flaw of Stede's. Making him hate Stede for something Stede has actually "done wrong" makes it more difficult to slip into a mindset where a neutral reason (like finding him annoying or something) is just disguising a bigoted one. And then making him hate the relationship because Stede, who he hates, is stealing Edward, who he is in love with? Classic romcom trope AND another clever sidestep of more serious and less sympathetic motivations.

The show is fantastically pulling off getting a man to hate a gay man and a gay romance for realistic, messy, straight out of a romcom reasons entirely unrelated to them being gay, and a bunch of people are STILL obsessed with proving that, no, it's definitely irredeemable, awful, "I'll kill you for being yourself" violent homophobia at work. Why not just consider the alternative?

#our flag means death #and this is all before we even get into the cycles of abuse and toxic defense methods against emotional vulnerability #which hits on the working class struggle to survive AND clever use of comedy violence to play with in universe severity #just... how are the same people putting the show on the highest pedestal i've ever seen the ones also ignoring good rep writing? #izzy hands ofmd #stede bonnet ofmd #blackbeard ofmd #homophobia #racism #ladyluscinia #(disclaimer - i don't actually watch romcoms very often but i'm pretty sure everything i've said here applies)