#c2e2 panel

Izzy Aro?

I have now watched the chaos that was the Con/Nathan C2E2 panel, which I think was the first time Con has ever publicly spoken about playing Izzy? There were a few nuggets of new information, including Con's elaboration on how Izzy processes romantic relationships:

Con: "I'm not going to say I don't think Izzy will ever be able to have a relationship, I just don't think he thinks in those terms. He's not somebody who feels incomplete. His work is everything to him."

…. … .. .

Con: "I think he'd be a REALLY good shag, though."

This does make me wonder if Izzy is arospec. Con also acknowledged that part of Izzy's problem is being too emotionally immature to get a handle on what he's feeling for Blackbeard, but I could see Izzy being so unaccustomed to having romantic feelings at all that he genuinely doesn't have the context to process them when they do surface. So he's not all the way at the far end of the aromantic spectrum, but close enough to it that he might have only experienced romantic feelings a handful of times over the 16 years five-plus decades of his life. (Also, to be very clear, aro people can be fonts of emotional maturity, alloromantic people can be immature as all hell, so I would want to maintain a distinction there. Being arospec would not be The Thing that makes Izzy a mess, it's his immersion in a tox masc culture that discourages introspection.)

And then there's Con's assertion that Izzy probably fucks real good. I have to say, this tracks with how I would interpret the character based on the fact that swordfighting is a deliberate metaphor for sex in OFMD. If Izzy is supposed to be "the best swordsman in the world" (again, per Con, while talking about his sword training process for the role), then he is also one of the best lays on this or any ship. David Jenkins describes OFMD's genre as action rom com, so in order for Izzy to be a truly compelling antagonist, ideally he'd be intimidatingly good at something that hits both those angles. We know he can fight (action: check), and we know he is terrible at interpersonal interactions. Having him be phenomenal in bed (or down the docks, more realistically) would check the rom com box.