My rambling essay on Ed Nygma, Oswald Cobblepot, autism and emotional intelligence:
Disclaimer that I enjoy different headcanons of both characters, their minds and their identities! This is just my musings as a queer autistic guy who relates to Ed a lot. And I use queerphobia as a slightly broader umbrella term.
I'm also not going into the Riddler persona here, because the question of his being an alter or an extreme personification of Ed's own impulses is down to your personal interpretation. I lean more towards the latter.
1. Firstly, I can and do make jokes that both of these men are dumb in different scenarios - because they are. Gotham is a wild, inconsistent ride of a show, and Ed and Oswald's relationship itself is wholesome and toxic and gorgeous and ridiculous.
But his various moments of social awkwardness or denial doesn't strictly equate to Ed being emotionally unintelligent, and jokes about Ed being dumb in general can sometimes risk toeing the line into territory of mocking an autistic character for not handing emotions the way allistic characters do.
When Ed is seen as oblivious or cold by other characters or viewers, that doesn't mean he is those things. His brain processes emotions more internally compared to Oswald's external style - hence why Ed is quiet and controlled in many instances, and Oswald is dramatically expressive.
2. Secondly, with Ed, I think he's competent at handling his own feelings to an extent, but denial pops up to complicate things when those feelings are stigmatized (like his violent impulses, or his growing attraction to Oswald). Ed manages to accept the violent tendencies early on, but the denial around his own queerness was more persistent.
I agree that Ed's emotions are a strong driving factor for him throughout the show, however misdirected they were. Oswald tells him in 3.22 that instead of emotion he's driven by "a desperate, compulsive need to complete what you've started in exacting fashion," but that need is an emotional one for Ed, something Oswald can't automatically relate to because of their differing processing styles.
I do think he began to comprehend Ed more accurately as the show progressed from this scene, however. I've said before that Oswald understood Ed better than he understood himself, and knew more about how his brain worked than anyone else in Gotham. I still think that's true. But that was just because Oswald loved him, and therefore spent a lot of time puzzling out the difference between Ed's 'cold' or 'oblivious' exterior and his emotionally-driven actions - I wouldn't say he knew Ed perfectly from the start. It was a journey.
3. Thirdly, I feel that the biggest factor in Ed's denial about Oswald (and therefore his reaction to the Isabella debacle, and his subsequent clumsy relationship with Lee) is internalized queerphobia rather than his being emotionally inept.
In early S3 Ed's internalized queerphobic framework wouldn't permit him to accept a man falling in love with him (or a man he was already in love with returning those feelings, forcing him to confront his own desires). Once he found out Oswald loved him, Oswald had already killed Isabella and that provided Ed an easy excuse to paint over his own love for Oswald with hatred and revenge - enough for him to shoot Oswald, though he was visibly emotionally conflicted throughout his 'revenge'.
His obsessive spiralling, vivid hallucinations and drug abuse following Oswald's supposed death speaks for itself about the level of denial he was under. Ed loved him as more than just a friend and mentor, but he still couldn't admit that, so he left it at "we were best friends, I cared for him and I miss him," and leaned into his new life as the Riddler.
When Oswald showed back up, Ed defaulted to the enemies mindset again - but I would love to know if he would've actually gone through with shooting Oswald for a second time (had Oswald not outfoxed him first).
Because Ed's characterization is all over the place in S4 (like many other characters in the later seasons), I think it's fair to interpret that his continued internalized denial about Oswald is responsible for most of his emotional actions in that season.
He pivoted from half-heartedly intending to kill Oswald for freezing him to instead languishing in the Narrows, after Oswald showed him total rejection: that he wasn't even worth the label of rival anymore. Ed then latched onto Lee (a woman incredibly similar to Oswald in almost every way) in another attempt to prove to himself and others that he was straight, and not emotionally linked to Oswald except as an enemy.
Later in S4, Ed/Riddler persisted in nonsensical attempts to convince Lee to drop one of the few things that set her apart from Oswald - her compassion for the poor of the Narrows and towards others in general. If she'd gone along with that, Ed felt like he could finally possess a female version of the man he'd spent years trying not to love, something that he hoped would be 'close enough' to pacify his own queerness.
And that ended the way it was always going to - Ed and Lee stabbing each other. Oswald then proved again that he was the one person who genuinely loved Ed by saving him, and that he accepted that it might never be returned by deciding to have Strange save Lee too.
Looking at S5, it comes to my mind that Ed has a track record for making foolish decisions when he feels he loves someone. He showed Kristen proof of his killing her former boyfriend, he nearly dropped his entire life to pursue Isabella despite her being suspicious af, and he did multiple stupid things to try and convince himself that he and Lee were anything other than convenient tools for each other to use.
It was only in S5 after becoming allies again with Oswald that Ed finally started to break down his longstanding denial, accept his own sexuality and follow his emotions to make the ultimate foolish decision out of genuine love: staying in Gotham just because he loved Oswald and could not accept leaving him to die, and Oswald wasn't willing to sail away with him.
TL;DR:
1) my take on Ed being in denial about Oswald for so long is that it was more down to internalized queerphobia, rather than him just having poor overall emotional intelligence.
2) Ed being viewed as emotionally unintelligent in all situations, and/or his reduced affect being taken as a lack of emotional intelligence can be problematic, because he's autistic and his processing of emotions may not always fit conventional expectations.
3) I adore both of these fools-for-love, their dumbness and their messy relationship.
