Youdelight-itolerate - Steena Longstocking

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE S01E02.  “…After the Phantoms of your Former Self”

the idea of woobiefying lestat (at least as he's written in the show) is just so boring to me. why would you want to erase what makes him such a fascinating character which is he endured horrible suffering and abuse and instead of breaking the cycle he chooses to be an absolute cunt and destroy every chance he has at happiness. why would you want to take all those things away just so he can be your uwu emo blorbo. that's not who he is, he's the cunt you married.

I'm not sure if fans of the show without ADHD understand this, but when Ed says he's bored he's not normal person bored.

Neurotypical people, or so I'm told, experience boredom as a temporary state. They can resolve it with a wide variety of activities. For those of us with ADHD, though, boredom feels like a life sentence. Firstly, we can't resolve it with just anything. Our brain wants ONE EXACT THING and won't accept anything else but also won't tell us what the one thing is. We can try dozens of things and still feel bored, even days later, if we can't find the right one.

Second, we have time blindness! If a neurotypical person is bored for an hour, they probably think it's a really long, unpleasant hour. Us ADHDers feel that hour as an eternity. It's torture for an unknown amount of time that feels like forever. It SUCKS.

Third, and maybe most importantly for Ed, neurotypical people don't understand what ADHD boredom is like. My mom still thinks I'm fucking with her when I say I prefer physical pain to boredom. I prefer ANYTHING to boredom. I think Ed exists in much the same space, and there is NO WAY Izzy understands. Izzy would have been confused, maybe even angry at Ed for trying a million different hobbies and raid plans and fuckeries to find the one thing that his ADHD brain needs to cure the boredom. Izzy probably rolled his eyes and scoffed.

For Ed, boredom isn't a minor inconvenience. It isn't a bad day. It's an endless torture. No wonder he'd do anything for the most interesting man he's ever met. No wonder he's broken when that boredom is forced back onto him.

The X-Files 3.22 | Quagmire

Just one of my favourite Will lines

i enjoy izzy hands and con o’neill just as much as everyone else but there is one thing that’s bothering me that people seem to be forgetting.

izzy may call him ed or edward, but he doesn’t know edward. he only knows the blackbeard persona. he doesn’t love edward, the scared boy who grew up in an abusive home and fancies a fine fabric. he doesn’t love ed as he wants to be, gentle and wearing silk and building blanket forts. he loves edward as he wants him to be; the dread pirate blackbeard.

y’all need to get it thru ur heads that izzy is bad for edward. does this mean he’s doing it with malicious intent? of course not. i do think he genuinely loves the version of edward in his head, but the fact is that that is not the person edward wants to be.

i saw someone on twitter saying that it was “media illiteracy” for people to say that izzy doesn’t truly love edward, and that is so fucking stupid lmao. it’s media illiteracy to say “uwu izzy is my sweet boy who’s never done anything wrong! he loves ed and we should feel bad for him that stede changed ed!”

no, we shouldn’t. because y’all seem to be forgetting who edward wants to be. and edward does not want to be blackbeard. the blackbeard persona is killing edward. if izzy truly loved him he would want what’s best for him. he’d want him to be happy.

let’s consider stede’s love for edward vs izzy’s love for edward. do they both love him? absolutely. but do they both have his best interests in mind? no.

stede has edward’s best interests in mind. after being convinced that he ruined edward, stede made the (admittedly unwise) decision to leave edward because it’s what he thought was best. he was convinced that he ruined blackbeard, that edward was unhappy, that it was his fault that edward’s life had fallen apart. as misguided as it was, he was putting edward before himself. he would rather edward be happy without him than unhappy with him.

and now izzy. izzy spent the entire time on the revenge berating edward for not being tough enough. for not being blackbeard. he never considered that edward didn’t want to be blackbeard. he didn’t care that edward was happy. he was the constant voice of self doubt that edward had about himself.

he wanted blackbeard. he convinced himself that that was who edward truly was. and then he broke edward down, ridiculing him until edward finally snapped and became the kraken. and what happened after edward broke? after he completely shut himself off to all happiness and became a numb shell of a man? izzy was happy.

because izzy’s love is selfish. he might call him edward, but that does not mean he knows or even cares about ed. he has a deep and unhealthy obsession with blackbeard and doesn’t care about the man underneath.

please don’t kid yourself into thinking that izzy and edward’s relationship is even comparable to stede and edward’s relationship. one of these relationships is about two traumatized men learning to let go of the personas they’ve hidden behind their entire lives and finally allowing themselves to be themselves and be happy. the other is an unhealthy relationship in which one man is deeply codependent on the other, and encourages him to keep up the facade that is killing him.

i’m all for media comprehension and diving into the complex relationship of izzy and edward. i think it’s fascinating. but don’t pretend like it isn’t toxic because you’re fooling yourself. and i feel for izzy, i do. i think he’s a great character. but he is not good for edward. yes izzy loves him and yes izzy is also bad for him both of these things can be true.

You know after thinking about it I think my main problem with Izzy stans once you get past the obvious one, which is the way that they are racist to Ed, (Clearly my main problem but not the problem I’m here to talk about) is that they don’t even like Izzy. They like Ed, and they like Black Pete, and they like Calico Jack, but they can’t admit that they like those characters for some reason? (you know why they can’t admit that they like Ed and Black Pete)

Like the ways Ed’s back story gets cannibalized for Izzy in a lot of fics and the way people will swap Izzy and Ed’s personalities is well trod territory. Ed is treated as enjoying violence and having a toxic masculinity problem and Izzy is treated like someone who’s trying desperately to make his working relationship with Ed beneficial when in the show those rolls are switched. You’ve heard this meta before. I just made a whole post about the way that Jack’s roll in Ed’s backstory (i.e. like 90% of the reason he exists as a character) gets ignored in favor of giving that roll to Izzy. And don’t even get me started on Black Pete. Both Izzy and Black Pete struggle with toxic masculinity, are obsessed with Blackbeard, and desperately wants to be in a leadership roll and aren’t very good at it. But so far at least Black Pete is the one undergoing the redemption arc and getting better, and Izzy is the one getting worse. I see people wanting a relationship with Lucius to redeem him and I’m like girl you have that. That’s Black Pete. Like Black Pete chose to get better and he’s still working on it but when he realized that Blackbeard wasn’t who he thought he was he minded his business and he went from complaining about sewing being womens work and worrying about what Blackbeard’s crew would do in episode one to learning through his relationship with Lucius to be sweet and vulnerable. And while Izzy in canon is attracted to Lucius i guarantee you that Lucius will not be playing that roll in his narrative, because it’s the roll he plays for Black Pete. That’s not to say that Lucius fixed him, but they will give Lupete’s dynamic to Izzy for no fucking reason.

So I’m gonna do something I don’t usually do and that’s defend Izzy here. If you’re gonna like Izzy there are tons of things about him that you can like. His psychosexual obsession with Blackbeard and his and Ed’s weird codependency is juicy enough to drive the plot at times. He’s a little freak to the point where he got his toe cut off and he liked it. He’s stubborn. He’s driven. He’s manipulative. He’s plotting and conniving. He sees other people as caricatures of themselves and DOES NOT react well at all to people falling outside of the box he’s made for them. He’s angry all the time. He can’t identify love. He’s jealous of Stede in the way that a child is jealous of their friends’ friends. All of these are wonderful traits in a blorbo (and terrible traits in a person, but a blorbo is not a real boy) They make him interesting and they give him layers. It’s very fun to theorize what happened to him to make him this way. There are many reasons to like Izzy Hands. But it’s kind of annoying when other characters’ cool stuff is ascribed to Izzy and those characters are ignored and maligned in favor of Izzy, especially when those characters are the brown romantic lead and the bald kinda frumpy guy with a lisp, who in 99% of media doesn’t get to be seen as hot but in this media gets to be desired. And it makes me feel bad for your Izzy that you cant like him for him.

You can't tell me that Hannibal wouldn't let Will have this one... as a little treat. And then everyone would stand up and clap.

(Ifkyk. If you don't, prepare yourself if you look it up.)

Would he block my number? Because I wouldn't stop at these.