nikki

OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH

and Ed just laughs and goes “You think he isn’t going easy?” and grabs his own sword and Izzy gets that manic little look in his eyes as he settles into a fighting stance and everyone looks a little nervous because yeah Izzy is good but that’s Blackbeard and they think he wouldn’t kill Izzy but it’s never a 0% chance

and Ed barely gives Izzy a second to breathe before he’s launching at him and it’s. it’s almost not even a sword fight the way they glance off of each other and flow from one movement into the next. their feet and elbows constantly just miss each other in a confident way that comes from years of dancing with the same person and their swords never touch skin, only metal and leather. the dance, because that’s what it is, is so beautifully distracting that the crew doesn’t notice Edward is losing until his weapon hits the ground and Izzy has him backed up against the mast, sword tip against his throat

he looks at edward with this look in his eyes, he is PLEADING with him, SCREAMING with his eyes like "you can't let this happen edward. you cannot possibly let this happen"

It's pure and utter disbelief. Not because he lost the duel, that was unfortunate and he didn't expect it, but it's the fact that ed is not intervening at all. No, he just gives izzy a look like "sorry mate, you did that to yourself" and it breaks his damn heart

Like you cannot tell me this isn't a look of pure heartbreak that his captain would just let him get banished, for a duel he clearly won even, against a man who edward said he wanted to get rid of.

It's betrayal, disbelief, heartbreak, pain.

And yet, he has to accept his fate. How would it make him look if he turned back now? Ed was the only one who could have said something. And he didn't.

He didn't say anything, so izzy had to leave. And I'm sure he didn't leave thinking about how that hurt, he probably left thinking about how he can get rid of stede. Who so clearly makes ed worse, right? Right??

Let’s look at this sequence of events.

We originally see Ed propose the idea of killing Stede to Izzy and promise to do it. The duel episode literally begins with Izzy narrating that he doubts Ed’s willingness to stick with that promise. He then brings along Ivan and Fang and essentially gives Ed a reminder of his promise. Izzy later approaches Ed alone and says, basically, “hey if you don’t want to do it I will.” Ed reiterates his promise but Izzy does doubt him more at this point. Izzy backs Ed into a corner circumstantially but the timely appearance of Lucius and Ed’s subsequent breakdown prevent him from following through.

So. Not that promising to kill someone is ever a good thing 🙄 but this is an instance of Ed breaking his promise to Izzy multiple times. Even when Izzy offered to do it for him. I forget who said it but there’s several fantastic metas about how Izzy seems to know that Ed dislikes killing and compensates for it.

At this point Izzy’s, rightfully so, rather pissed at Ed. But before we get to the duel itself I want to go back to Izzy’s narration.

Clearly Izzy does not like Stede. However, in his narration we get a look at so many moments of affection and bonding between Stede and Ed. That in combination with the words Izzy says about Ed being seduced by Stede, Izzy’s assumption that the stabbing scene is them having sex, and Izzy mentioning to Stede that Ed adores him shows that on some level Izzy is aware of how important Stede has become to Ed.

Ok, now to the duel itself. Izzy is two things at the beginning of the duel: angry at Ed and aware of how much Ed likes Stede.

Izzy challenges Stede, Stede accepts, Ed makes a rather halfhearted effort to stop them. Then, Izzy issues the ultimatum and I have to highlight how it is worded: “loser gets banished if they aren’t dead.” I’ve bolded if because it is the most important word in that sentence. It’s a conditional statement! It opens up the possibility of Stede losing the duel, and SURVIVING. Izzy is compromising big time because he knows that Ed would be devastated to lose Stede.

Then during the duel itself Izzy gives Stede multiple chances to survive. He issues a warning shot/slash that Stede comments on and although there’s no rule that he can’t kill Stede right then, he doesn’t.

When he gets Stede down on the ground he could kill him, but he doesn’t. Instead he says “yield or die.” Or! It’s another conditional statement. He’s offering choices where Stede lives!

And when he’s finally got Stede up against the mast he touches his sword to Stede’s heart. But then when the time comes to stab him, he stabs him through the gut instead! With proper treatment, that wouldn’t be a killing blow! Izzy has decided to spare Stede at this point for Ed’s sake! Lemme just emphasize that a little more because it made my head explode: IZZY HAS DECIDED TO LET STEDE LIVE!!!!

But of course Ed sees none of this. He doesn’t expect mercy from someone like Izzy because he’s relegated Izzy into the category of people who are emblematic of his past and therefore incapable of the softness Stede and his crew are.

And that’s the ultimate tragedy of this all. That Izzy was let down by Ed, but observed Stede’s importance to him, and was willing to let Stede live even if he didn’t want him around. So when Stede wins on a technicality Izzy expects/hopes that Ed realizes how he’s compromised so much for Ed’s broken promise but Ed just takes it in stride and lets Izzy walk away and out of his life with no complaint. This in direct contrast to when he first made Izzy stay when Izzy was going to leave. He’s abandoning Izzy because he doesn’t want to face the fact that if he can find softness inside himself that the softness might exist in everyone and might take more work to reveal. This isn’t to say Ed is lazy but he’s been slacking off on anything difficult for a while now so he just gives up Izzy as a lost cause rather than putting in the work to explain his actions.

i only ask because i need to stare at izzy ‘fuck you we were NOT MUPPETS YESTERDAY oh shit, oh fuuuuuck yes it’s happening, glory hallelujah my boyfriend captain is back, i’m done being gaslit by you wholesome felt twats’ hands experiencing the realignment of his fucked up little world on an endless loop.

I MEAN. if you think about it, izzy’s from the version of black sails Certain Oblivious People thought that show was before the “they’re gay pirates, harold, deal with it or be unable to watch this show because they’re getting their gay all over the main thrust of the narrative as we speak” beat dropped. 

this means he is subtextually gay as shit for blackbeard in freaky/violent, public ways and even fucking gayer still for edward in …also freaky/violent, but softer and more private ways and all the while textually speaking, They’re Just Good Friends forever and ever amen.

izzy is from a world where there is a rule: you work out the way you wanna fuck the guy you spend all your time with by stabbing things together. other people, each other, all phallic imagery is allowed and indeed, encouraged, so long as you use objects that evoke “soooo, this is supposed to be a dick thing, right?” but never push it beyond the realm of subtext. izzy can have loyalty and shared power, and as long as he cashes in his tokens sparingly meaningful gazes and clasping arms or patting each other on the shoulder and letting the touch linger juuuuust long enough to make it kinda gay are all on the approved list. in izzy’s world you bleed for each other, you kill and die for each other, you are the most important people in each other’s lives—as long as the text retains plausible deniability it’s Not Like That. 

maybe you can have a lil it’s not gay if it’s in a threeway (or a love triangle!) action as a treat and if somebody almost dies/is thought to be dead a hug is allowed, but your love better not even fucking think about speaking its name. 

honestly, even if izzy felt like pushing that barrier, what would he say? the sacred texts to translate what izzy feels for the man who becomes edward when they’re alone don’t even exist where he’s from. they have words for what he might want do in bed and what the world thinks of men like him, but love’s just not applicable. the songs he sings are not ones of love because not to put too fine a point on it, but: in izzy’s world, love is for men who don’t have boners you can see from space for other men. he’s swallowed all the lies the world told him about love whole and made them part of his identity.

with all that in mind, let’s look at how if you tilt your head and squint, ofmd is not just a joyful and affirming celebration of finding your community of equally if not identically bizarre fellows, but also a deeply depressing pirate love story as experienced by izzy ‘the only non-muppet around and not okay with it’ hands.

before i get into the actual meat of the two scenes, i want to stop and marvel at one specific part of the leadup and why ed decides to try and introduce the front of izzy’s neck to the back. quote time!!!!

Not some namby-pamby in a silk gown, pining for his boyfriend. 

like, CHRIST. fucking WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE. why are they so good? i gotta take a quick structural analysis break to handle the way the writers packed like… a whole fucking essay on izzy’s deeply toxic pirate masculinity and summed up a point i will spend this whole insane post trying to express in one tidy line. i ache to be this efficient a writer.

i’m gonna break it into pieces, because they all deserve attention.

we start out with what’s edging into a gentle slur, but is ultimately defanged by being nowhere close to on par with the uglier ways a modern audience knows he could phrase that. i think it’s worth spotlighting how izzy never quite says anything on its face hateful that i can think of? he’s not supportive, that’s for fucking certain, but unless i’ve forgotten something (very possible, often true) this is the closest he comes to fulfilling the homophobic gay trope in the content of his speech and not just how he says things/his vibes. 

(though let us make no mistake here, his vibes are rock fucking hard homophobic gay. jesus christ with this one, bless his heart.)

i can’t tell if it’s a writer choice or character choice. my instinct says it’s both! anyway, either way i’m into it. could even be a subtle hint izzy’s closer to dragging the canon kicking and screaming into the dark where he feels more comfortable. 

now we move over to izzy mocking edward’s dressing gown. this team HATES ME, because it’s not enough to just have him essentially say “take off that soft fancy shit and rub some dirt on it, real men don’t cry”. oh no, not for these absolute combopack monster/lighthouses! of course they have izzy leave off dressing and just say gown. of COURSE. we understand as an audience they don’t mean gown as in dress because the visuals fill that gap for us, but by deleting one word they effectively have izzy imply edward’s a big fucking girl without needing to have him actually say it.

i mean… come on. come ON.

pining and boyfriend are also excellent choices; pining implies weakness and fading from a former glory, and boyfriend is uh… boyfriend! what it says on the tin, but it also throws in tones of infantilization by leaning on ‘boy’ instead of a more adult-associated choice like lover. 

anyway onto what i’m supposed to be doing: crying about how con is lowkey playing out a grand fucking greek tragedy in the background at literally every second he’s on-screen as izzy and i’ve gone down the rabbit hole about it. honestly they should give that man extra hazard pay, he could have hurt himself going this hard.

look at the way his face softens when edward chokes him. look at the tears in his eyes and the tremble in his hand when he reaches out, the un-fucking-bearable tenderness. the way he doesn’t fight ed’s violence, he encourages and leans into it. (because once upon a time in private, izzy was allowed to know that blackbeard could be edward; he was the only person who knew that, before stede rolled on up in his stupid fucking boat and his stupid fucking pants and unearthed ed and ruined izzy’s whole fucking life.)

speaking of:

Blackbeard is my captain. I serve Blackbeard, not Edward. Edward better watch his fucking step.

the way i feel about ‘i serve blackbeard’ does not even need to be EXPLAINED. if you’re bothering to read this shit you know the face i made when that line entered my ears and lodged itself in my brain, never to leave, because you made it too. i won’t profane even this Most Unholy post with my feelings about the use of that particular verb there. it’s good. i like it. well done team, no notes and the end. nobody fucking perceive me.

more high mindedly: i love how izzy uses edward here, not ed. it reframes the “using edward is a privilege i am given by my captain” to “saying edward is a gift i can take back until you prove you’re my captain again”. as far as izzy is concerned, ed doesn’t even exist. blackbeard’s his captain and always has been and thus commands his loyalty, but edward’s in the doghouse until he thinks long and hard about what he’s done.

there’s also a beat there that i think stands as what izzy considers Having a Talk About Their Relationship.

(…well fuck. well, FUCK. izzy thought they were dating, didn’t he? he totally did. holy shit that’s perfect. they were subtextually dating and stede started actually dating ed and that’s just another level of his reality stede broke. oh my god, this little ratman. this fucking IDIOT. his life is the worst. it’s amazing and so funny and also no-jokes sad. SO GOOD.)

so i guess that means in izzy’s world, that was how you say “we might still have to work together, but you’re sleeping on the fucking couch until i sort out how i feel about your little fling”. blackbeard is his captain and he serves him; that’s business. edward is his Subtextual Boyfriend, and from izzy’s perspective edward has been really shitting the bed lately.

honestly: awww, look at him go! trying to communicate like a real boy. that’s one mangled ‘you tried’ star for izzy.

all that would be enough to make me want to fling myself into the sun, it really would. i would still be screaming about izzy and the way con makes sure izzy’s gaze always comes back to rest on ed in every scene they’re in together, no matter what else is going on, for the rest of my life.

but oh wait, it GETS WORSE. because here it comes: the toe scene. buckle up, get ready for this to Go Places because i am going full galaxy brain. let’s talk about love as consumption re: izzy’s feelings about doing the Weird Vore.

there’s the unavoidable jesus shit all up in this scene’s guts so i honestly could stop here and just scream WHY? WHY, WHY DO A FUCKING COMMUNION METAPHOR WITH HIS OWN TOE STANDING IN FOR THE HOLY HOST? YOU’RE SICK. YOU’RE SICK AND I LOVE IT!!! SIT AND THINK ABOUT YOUR CHOICES AND THEN NEVER EVER CHANGE, AND IF YOU FEEL LIKE IT: GO AHEAD AND GET WORSE for a couple hours instead of moving on, but i’ll get there eventually. 

aka: if you ever thought to yourself ‘i wonder if anybody’s gonna talk way too long about the constant and super amazing queering and/or subversion of christian imagery and the religion itself in this show’ i got your back there, just you hold tight. ohhhhh baby i got so! many! thoughts! on! that!

for today though, i’m gonna stick with the way izzy processes love and his relationship with ed.

the way ed gets rid of lucius, layers his armor back on piece by piece, and then sees himself reflected in an implement of violence and names himself a monster, not a lighthouse, before he goes to visit izzy is… A Lot. i want to talk more later! but it felt worth mentioning here as his gateway between the new world he thinks stede denied him and the old world he used to share with izzy. 

similarly, the way we get a shot of izzy’s bare, vulnerable feet and black loincloth thing-y before ed takes his toe makes me want to wade right into the proverbial sea!!! i hate this show.

the mix of tenderness and menace taika flips between here is just… like, i know this post is about con and izzy and i will GET THERE but because taika’s affect entirely changing here is important to izzy, i get to gush about it. he’s just so good. 

anyway, izzy. izzy, who has a mouth full of his own toe and edward all up in his grill and thanks to the Weird Vore is having a religious and a sexual experience all at once. izzy, with a love song for broken men in his heart and tears in his eyes, because in this moment he is full of nothing but awe.

the way we use ‘awesome’ now is pretty casual; it means we like something. that something is good. my lunch was awesome, your hat is awesome, we had an awesome time. good, but not necessarily noteworthy. you forget awesome things that happen to you all the time.

in the bible, when something is worthy of awe, you drop to your knees and cry and beg for mercy because the glory and power of what you have just witnessed cannot be expressed by clumsy human tongues; to be in even an echo of the presence of god is to experience the overwhelming urge to absolutely shit yourself. edward’s hand around his throat gave him hope, but this clicks everything back into place for him because the violent, ugly evidence of edward’s love for him is working its way down his gullet. hurrah! life is good again, and by good izzy means horrifying.

so yeah, izzy is chock-full of awe. edward is the face of his god and real flesh his communion; this is a motherfucking religious experience. bow down bitches, because he is worshipping.

(also, he probably came in his pants.)

the thing that really takes me to “fuck it, i’m out, i can’t anymore” place is the way the method of consumption proves the lie of izzy’s ecstasy. edward isn’t providing him any real nourishment, ed is feeding izzy himself, shoving his own toxic notions of love down his throat and making sure he chews them real good first. he’s not consuming the man he loves, he’s eating his own fucking tail.

i just wanna talk to the person who came up with this idea. maybe i’ll beat them up in the parking lot of a denny’s, maybe i’ll cry on them forever. maybe i’ll buy them a fruit basket so expensive i will have to go into debt forever. who knows! i am both a monster and a lighthouse, myself.

the tatty scrap izzy clutches close to his chest and calls his heart might only exist in metaphor, but it’s just as red as ed’s and unlike our boy, the claret being spilled by izzy’s love most fucking certainly isn’t wine. violent and transactional, nasty brutish and short; these are the words izzy learned for the feelings in his chest. it’s like jack said before buttons took his ass out with what i can only assume is the power of having the most amazing facial expressions i have ever seen: pirates don’t have friends, and they don’t fall in love. they’re just in various stages of fucking each other over and in izzy’s sad, repressed world, they don’t even get to fuck each other in the bargain.

but that’s okay: he doesn’t need that. the story izzy lived in before stede ruined his life told him time and time again: it’s not about that. 

so this is good, and this is right. with edward looming over him, subtextually fucking the shit out of him but not making it gay in a way a straight audience would be unable to ignore, the world makes sense again. he’s got the taste of his own flesh in his mouth and blood on his teeth. he’s home. 

so long to that muppet bullshit about ‘talking out our feelings’ and ‘giving each other hugs’ and ‘oh my FUCKING GOD get some therapy you leather-clad sad sack who is 1000000% going to die alone in a puddle of his own piss if he doesn’t get it together’. fuck emotional literacy right in the ear! who’s she? izzy’s proud to say he’s never met her. 

all that joy, the glimpse into a world where love is a word that could ever apply izzy was all a bad dream, and now he’s awake. this is the real world: this is as close to a love song as men like izzy can ever hope to shape with their untrained tongues. 

hey la, hey la, motherfuckers. his boyfriend’s back.