I Write Gay Shit On Occasion

She’s fantastic.

Which on one hand, sweet.

AND NOW

I had to fucking track the Bellweather family tree because Abigail said both grandmothers are dead in the first episode, but Minerva Bellweather is right fucking there!?!?!

Can someone explain this to me!?!??

Like Anacostia, Izadora is just Sergeant ranked but somehow does all sorts of higher ranked activities unremarked. What even is US witch military hierarchy lol

I mean, seriously, why is a Necro sergeant considered an adequate substitute for a Colonel? (Why is a colonel teaching a Basic class in the first place????)

Like, if Helen Graves is actually a lieutenant then she outranks Izadora within Necro. (And I'm not the only person to notice that, you can search "Izadora rank" on Tumblr and immediately find other posts about this. Sidebar: both Gregorio and Channing Grafton lack stripes entirely. Even the Witchfather's coat doesn't have stripes. M has sergeant stripes? But also, Willa was a lieutenant like Helen Graves somehow?????? Is Lieutenant not an officer rank in MFS???????)

I had a whole paragraph here about the weirdness of a non-officer doing scientific research, as obviously getting a degree is an "attend college" thing, but a quick search turns up this case of a master sergeant doing that, getting a PhD and becoming a West Point professor. So that can be a path for Izadora.

Since we excuse most of this kind of hierarchial weirdness for Anacostia through her close relationship with Alder, one could possibly infer the same for Izadora. She could have also been a fosterling that Alder took a personal interest in. We don't see Izadora attending a meal with Alder the way Anacostia did, but that could have been Izadora's personal preference, as she was shown doing night time drinks in Alder's office instead. Also as with Anacostia, we don't appear to see Izadora under pressure from the Imperative to handfast and reproduce. (Given the Imperative's lack of presence in S1, perhaps that is reserved for officers and prospective officers only, so Izadora as just a sergeant is therefore beneath their notice.)

I am a little curious about Scylla's apparent animosity against her, somehow responding to learning about the Witchbomb with feeling schadenfreude about Izadora for some reason. As Izadora is a character deeply loyal to the military (something noted by Izadora's actor herself), that would seem to stem from Scylla's Spree mentality. It also indicates that Izadora expressed that deep sense of loyalty to Scylla at some point, probably to a whole class as a Necro instructor. But as we saw Izadora privately counsel Raelle a few times, it's also not out of the question for her to have given Scylla some personal attention, as well.

This part of Izadora's personality would mean that she would adhere to certain rules even more strongly than Anacostia. She absolutely does not deploy non-Canon Work against anyone, unlike how Anacostia would eventually adopt Spree techniques. Until she slips the Witchplague into Hearst's drink at the very end, anyways.

Izadora serving Penelope curry is actually an interesting action, as we saw that the US witch military has been pretty strongly culturally assimilationist. But I suppose food has never been a part of that. Still, with the very notable lack of Latine presence, are tacos/burritos/etc. ever on the menu? And yet, the word "curry" itself is a term developed from British colonizers generalizing about Indian cuisine and then applying it to the adopted fusion versions developed for British tastes. (i.e. "authentic" dishes use a different set of more specific names). For Izadora to serve something that she calls curry indicates that the timeline divergence (potential early destruction of the British and Spanish colonial empires) did not change the globalisation of "curry", particularly the spread of the term and concept to East and Southeast Asia.

In this scene, Izadora also plays a French record. Identifying this song is beyond my skill right now (if someone could transcribe the French lyrics that would probably go a long way!) Izadora is apparently privileged enough to be allowed this gramophone and record collection in her office. But was this love for music and ownership of these records something that came from her own parents, or from Alder?

Meanwhile, there are alt-history implications to Izadora evidently having a French colonial heritage, because in our world the first French colonial empire (up through 1814) did not expand further east than India. It was the post-1830 second French empire where they established East and Southeast Asian colonies (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, parts of China, Burma). Decolonization of these areas occurred after WW2. Meanwhile, it seems that along with curry, it's not a part of the military's cultural assimilation to oppose French music. Per my suspicions that in the MFS timeline that the witch military didn't become a formal globalized concept until World War or after, perhaps before then witches fled colonial empires to the US, which is how the US gained so many immigrant matrilines from Asia. Or, given St. Dominique, maybe US-French allyship included some exchanges/gifting of matrilines. (As with Izadora's actor, there's also the case of immigration from Asia to Canada, learning the French cultural elements from there, and then from Canada to the US.)

FYI the wiki says "Izadora Dart" but the character's surname is never said in canon. "Dart" came from a misreading of subtitles.