#treesofgreen

Omg my god are you KIDDING MEEEE

So Ed and Stede spend all their time creeping around eavesdropping and spying and bitching to each other (like Stede spying on Jack and Ed) and discussing What Must Be Done About This and planning a fuckery to Get Izzy Back and they don't even notice that Izzy and Sam just, like, went off to get (re)married.

I would pay to be able to read a fic like this, I really would. I've only run into a couple of fics where Izzy moves onto a new love interest and Ed actually has to deal with that rather than somehow winning him back. (Granted, this is probably because outside the SteddyHands circle of ships, I only read Izzy/OC and Izzy/Other Historical or Famous Fictional Pirate. Maybe it happens a lot in Izzy/Actual Character in the Show fics.) The concept of a fic where it seems like a textbook SteddyHands set-up, only for Izzy to choose the third option and especially for it to be Sam is fucking delectable. And infinite bonus points for Lucius at his wit's end because if Ed and Stede had arrived at whatever-this-is MONTHS AGO maybe things would have gone a lot smoother. But as it is he's team Izzy/Not This Bullshit now and playing look-out while they take a dinghy to elope or whatever. And Ed and Stede being so caught up in their own drama together even when it's nominally focused on someone else that they don't actually notice what's happening with that someone is perfectly on-brand.

God, there are so many good possibilities for how Stede and Sam might interact. I feel like Sam's a nice guy who'd be all "Same hat!" at Stede, especially post-character development Stede who's given up all his inherited wealth and is gaining his new riches in the proper pirate-y and looking good doing it. Which just makes it funnier if Stede gets all snitty about it. God forbid anyone stresses that Sam is called the Prince of Pirates, therefore outranking the Gentleman Pirate at least by technical definition. And there's historical precedent for an Ed-Sam grudge with irl Sam mutinying against Hornigold and being voted captain while Ed stayed loyal to the old man. And I wouldn't want Sam to be the wholly innocent party here either. Like, I can see him sincerely trying to get along and be a gentleman at first, but when he's getting passive aggression and Kraken death glares for his troubles, he decides it's no fun to be the bigger man. He should get to be a bitch, too. It's also funnier if Izzy is the most mature person in all of this after Lucius.

What's funny is that in my personal AU, Sam and Stede got started on the whole romance novel cover pirate thing about the same time. Sam's been sailing and ship-hopping and treasure-hunting his whole life, but there was a huge gap in his piracy career between Hornigold's cabin boy and the Robin Hood of the seas. This is so I can have him be as historically inaccurately middle-aged as the others while keeping his whirlwind success when he does seriously try his hand at piracy while still having it be plausible that his old friends don't even know he's still alive. He and Stede get along well enough that Stede's all giddy about Izzy being smitten with him. Ed is... getting better at the whole "Izzy is allowed to have other friends" thing, but this is a potential boyfriend and it's Sam who Ed's been butting heads with since puberty, so he doesn't take it as gracefully as Stede when it's pointed out to him. And Sam is trying to play nice with Ed because he's got a lot to answer for for letting everyone think he was dead, but like. He is eventually going to ask why Izzy is missing a toe and eventually someone is going to give him the honest answer.

Ponce? Wasn't used to mean "male homosexual" until the 1930s. Before that, in British slang, it meant a pimp, as in a man supported by immoral earnings. Unknown origin but possibly from the French pensionnaire - a person living without working.

Is David Jenkins using words that are really no different from f***** now, or is he using words that had a different more nuanced connotation then and play into the class issues and Izzy's fear of softness (not femininity and god I wish people would stop equating luxury with feminine). I have no idea.

Is he using those words as an audience shortcut to "Izzy simply thinks 'ew, gay'"? I don't see how, looking at the totality of the character and Con's performance (and later scripts were written with Con's performance in mind).

Is he using words that at first glance make us think "oh a homophobe" and if you don't think about it any further than the words used Izzy's story in S2 might be more of a surprise and if you do it might be more satisfying? I hope so.

Gonna start here because it's applicable to the whole rest of my thoughts:

that's what I find all of these reductive readings have in common actually - the depersonalization and dehumanisation of the individuals involved. They become empty shells you can slap a neat label on and move them around the board like game pieces

It isn't just depersonalization and dehumanization of Izzy and Ed, either, it's depersonalization and dehumanization of the people writing and participating in the show, too. I made the mistake of opening the Izzy Hands tag and I immediately found people arguing about racism from Izzy again and, like, saying why people should be "cautious" or "careful" about shipping him and Ed because of it, specifically talking about the scene where the people of color are moving the anchor and Wee John is sitting down (a scene Ed wasn't even in, mind), and one of the writers had explained that scene? And why it was done that way? And their take was to comment on how things can slide past the writers so easily? And I was just like-- but-- the writers wrote it-- I dunno. It feels very... "You can't write deliberately, you can only write how we see it."? I'm not sure I'm phrasing this right. It just seemed like a way of handwaving the reasons for the scene being the way it was because they wanted to keep seeing what they were seeing, I guess? I see a lot of that, in fandom, and they do the same thing re: Izzy being supposedly homophobic.

(I think if the entire cast bar like three people were white and Izzy was very specifically framed as cruel to those three people and the three people were doing hard labor and all the white people were seated and doing nothing, that...? would be different? but you have to frame the scene in question against 1x05 (Lucius) and against everything else Izzy has done so far? And it's... a dishonest reading, in my opinion (and as I've said, the opinion of fans of color who can and should talk about this far more than I can or should), and it's the kind of reading where they extract a singular scene from the entire show and then present it without context to say "Look! Bad!" and honestly you can do that with everything? You could extract the scene where Stede is bossing Roach around re: the hostages on the beach and show it without context and say how that is racist too, and how when Stede bosses Lucius around in the first few episodes he's being homophobic, or the way Stede reads stories to the crew and you could crop only the people of color into it and say he was infantilizing them, and so on.

When you divorce scenes and clips from their context, you, well, lose context, and it strips not only the characters and writers of their agency but also the actors who consented to take part in those scenes and deliver those lines.)

But that just comes back down to the essay I keep referencing that said it does the show a disservice to badly contextualize in this way, and people seem to think everyone should be a hive-mind about everything else, be it whether a show or scene is homophobic/racist/sexist/whatever or whether a character is likeable or not, even though everyone will always have differing ideas, including in reference to their own marginalization.

By the same token, when you take something like 'namby-pamby' firstly out of context and secondly pretend it's on the same level as the f-slur, you're just being disingenuous as fuck.

It's like that clip of some right-wing show I remember seeing, where the guy was like, "Is saying cracker as bad as saying the n-word?" and the overwhelming response was, "My dude, clearly the fuck not, since you said cracker and went with 'the n-word' instead of saying that. You knew it wasn't on the same level, or you would have said both equally and ya didn't."

So when they say, "Oh, well, Izzy said namby-pamby but we all know he was calling Ed a f***," they're being deliberately disingenuous to paint Izzy as worse than he is. You can do that for just about every line in the show if you want to, you can say, "Well, Stede said I'm your friend but we all know he was saying Please don't kill me."

Well, no, they mean different things. They are different words. Words mean things, and they are chosen deliberately, especially in a writing context! People choose words deliberately when they're speaking (so, the characters in question), and writers choose words with even more deliberate care and attention while writing.

Izzy didn't say the f-slur because the f-slur is not what he was saying.

Now, I know that the anachronisms in the show are a popular conversation to laugh about, so although you are absolutely right about namby-pamby not meaning what they imply it means, although it can be used in a homophobic manner as you say, but I'm willing to say that technically, they're probably using it in a more modern manner.

That said, it's still not equitable to the f-slur, and considering the use of 'donkey' earlier in the show, which was very specifically used to show the character in question as racist and then that character was immediately dealt with in response to that racism, I find it hard to believe that the person who wrote this line (David Jenkins, I assume, since it's 1x10) 'was actually meaning the f-slur'.

There's also the context that a queer man using a queer slurs against another queer man is miles different to a straight dude using a queer slur. Reclamation and all of that. So even if Izzy had used the f-slur, it would still be different in context (him also being queer, which is frankly canon due to the scenes with Lucius and the face touch with Ed, even without David Jenkins' word of god saying he's in love with Ed) than just a guy using a slur.

The ponce one amuses me especially since it was used against Stede in 1x04 and I mean, yeah. I know our Stede isn't a slave owner (thank god), but he's a landowner and the class slant of looking at Izzy using 'ponce' to refer to Stede in this manner is excellent to mull over.

Is David Jenkins using words that are really no different from f***** now

I meaaaaaaan, as I said above, if it really was no different to the f-slur, I think you would have simply written the f-slur out, much like you wrote out namby-pamby. Instinctively we all know it's not the same.

is he using words that had a different more nuanced connotation then and play into the class issues and Izzy's fear of softness

Far more likely. Far more likely. When Izzy said 'namby-pamby', I heard it more as comparing Edward to a foot kicking teenage girl on his bed pining after his schoolgirl crush than picking on the fact his schoolgirl crush was the same gender as him. I also heard it more as a comment on the fact he was literally walking around in an undone silk robe with literally no armor at all and was exposing his squishy inner core for the world to see.

It also meaning 'gay' did not occur to me, I think because although homophobia very clearly does exist in the OFMD universe, it doesn't quite exist in the same way on the Revenge, because most of the cast on that ship are queer.

See also: Jim being revealed as a woman and then being revealed as not a woman but not a man either, and the issues the guys have with that is "women have crystals in their bodies" (Frenchie, when he still thought they were a woman), "Can I be Jim if you're not Jim anymore?" (the Swede) and "Can I go back to being mute?" (jim). We were still in muppet comedy when Izzy did his namby-pamby thing, we hadn't genre shifted yet, and the muppet comedy of the Revenge doesn't have homophobia.

Yes, the show does. Yes, the show discusses it in its own way, but the crew of the Revenge does not. No one comments on Lucius and Pete, who are not subtle. Pete says that Lucius has naked-sketched most of the crew. Lucius outright hits on Fang to get him to let him draw him and off of barnacle duty without a single fear he'll be hate crimed for it. Lucius hits on Izzy because he knows Izzy might punch him for hitting on him, but it won't be because he's a dude, it'll be because he's pushing his damn luck.

Is he using those words as an audience shortcut to "Izzy simply thinks 'ew, gay'"? I don't see how, looking at the totality of the character and Con's performance (and later scripts were written with Con's performance in mind).

If he wanted a true audience shortcut, using a term that's far less common would not be a shortcut. The f-slur would be the shortcut, imo.

Also worth noting that my search came up with this for namby-pamby:

Definition of namby-pamby 1 : lacking in character or substance : insipid. 2 : weak, indecisive.

and I mean-- it's not that far off of Ed in his red robe. It's not a very nice word to call someone, but there's far worse to use out there.

Is he using words that at first glance make us think "oh a homophobe" and if you don't think about it any further than the words used Izzy's story in S2 might be more of a surprise and if you do it might be more satisfying? I hope so.

Hmmm alright you can learn what a weird kid i was lol

1. I learned to read and do long division before I was 5 (I'm probably worse at both now than I was back then, ha!)

2. My first memory was thinking, very clearly, "I won't remember anything before this point, but I'll remember this thought" and I uh. Yeah. Wtf.

3. I stopped speaking to anyone for several months after learning to talk because I hated hearing the adults repeating my cutely-mispronounced words. The only reason anyone knows why is because I was overheard practicing inflection in my room, along with declarations that I would "no longer suffer their mockery". Lmao

Bonus, just bc this is hands-down the funniest thing abt me: i actually read the Bible as a child in sunday school, and that bit where God grants Solomon knowledge and wisdom? I started praying for that, figuring it would be the one thing God would grant a person in the modern era. Ofc there's that saying "God helps those who help themselves" and to prove I was Serious Enough About This to have all the knowledge in the universe beamed into my head (lol) I started seriously studying basically everything.

one gay pirates sentence for trees, coming right up 🧑‍🍳

“With pleasure,” Izzy mutters, and yes, Stede’s sure Izzy’d love to choke him at this, and any other moment, but he complies nonetheless, looping his arms around Stede's neck as instructed.

(from stained are the hands that bathe the sinner)

I had a crisis with his clothes, now he looks like a football jock help

(thank you for sending this in trees!)