Merlin 1.11
Nov. 30th, 2008 01:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseI might be completely and irrevocably in love with this show. I was an Arthuriana baby, and I haven't had much of an excuse to get all bubbly about Camelot for a while. And honestly, when your showrunners are publicly saying things like this: "It is a very, very intense friendship. All epic tales have some elements of homo-eroticism in them, so we were always going to pose these sort of questions. These are men fighting with swords who get up to desperate things" - well, this is maybe what pure, uncut fangirl catnip looks like.
I love that they transplanted the Fisher King motif onto Arthur himself - and as a T.H. White girl, I think it's very interesting that the unicorn hunt serves to displace the sins/shortcomings of the Orkney Clan onto Arthur as well. Agravaine's cold brutality, Gawaine's fatal temper - but ultimately also Gareth's nobility of spirit. This Arthur contains within himself the seed of his own downfall
though I hope this never comes to that. I started crying over the Modred-child, because the Matter of Britain has this history of breaking my heart, and this incarnation is so sweet and bubbly and hopeful and I just don't want to see it descend into all that. It was hard enough to deal with as a kid. I'm not sure I could, nowadays.
That end scene was pretty much the Princess Bride redux, neh?
Unpopular fannish opinion here: I sort of don't like Arthur dying for Merlin, because I feel like it skirts the essential tragedy of kinghood. That is, a king is first wedded to his country. He does not have the liberty of feeling, loving, sacrificing, the way a private citizen might. If Arthur died, with Uther approaching old age and no other chain of succession established? If Arthur's death was the wrong thing to do by the logic of the test, and the blight continued? And yet the life of one peasant boy ranked above all this?
I would argue that Arthur's tragedy is more that he cannot die for those he loves. Uther seems to get this - he was quite right to not send troops to Merlin's village. As a king, he cannot act as he might wish to do.
Although I suppose that's the core of the whole drama. Here's a bit from White, talking about Lancelot, though the idea can be applied equally well to Arthur himself: "A man who was not afflicted by ambitions of decency in his mind might simply have run away with his hero's wife, and then perhaps the tragedy of Arthur would never have happened. An ordinary fellow, who did not spend half his life torturing himself by trying to discover what was right so as to conquer his inclinations toward what was wrong, might have cut the knot which brought their ruin."
I'm probably reading too much into what is, after all, a very spun-sugar sort of show. But I like that Arthur and Merlin are different, with different strengths and weaknesses and needs and things that they can give to one another. Merlin has already offered up his life for Arthur's - that's a thing that he can do. Arthur ought to be otherwise constrained.
Let it not be thought, however, that all this babble means that I didn't notice how extremely, ahem, close they were to one another in those ridiculous bedroom scenes. My god, boys, what are you trying to do to us?! With the touching, and the no-personal-space, and the bed right there omg. I love this show sooo much. Not to mention the prevalence in this ep of phallic whatnots being very important. Yis.
I love that they transplanted the Fisher King motif onto Arthur himself - and as a T.H. White girl, I think it's very interesting that the unicorn hunt serves to displace the sins/shortcomings of the Orkney Clan onto Arthur as well. Agravaine's cold brutality, Gawaine's fatal temper - but ultimately also Gareth's nobility of spirit. This Arthur contains within himself the seed of his own downfall
though I hope this never comes to that. I started crying over the Modred-child, because the Matter of Britain has this history of breaking my heart, and this incarnation is so sweet and bubbly and hopeful and I just don't want to see it descend into all that. It was hard enough to deal with as a kid. I'm not sure I could, nowadays.
That end scene was pretty much the Princess Bride redux, neh?
Unpopular fannish opinion here: I sort of don't like Arthur dying for Merlin, because I feel like it skirts the essential tragedy of kinghood. That is, a king is first wedded to his country. He does not have the liberty of feeling, loving, sacrificing, the way a private citizen might. If Arthur died, with Uther approaching old age and no other chain of succession established? If Arthur's death was the wrong thing to do by the logic of the test, and the blight continued? And yet the life of one peasant boy ranked above all this?
I would argue that Arthur's tragedy is more that he cannot die for those he loves. Uther seems to get this - he was quite right to not send troops to Merlin's village. As a king, he cannot act as he might wish to do.
Although I suppose that's the core of the whole drama. Here's a bit from White, talking about Lancelot, though the idea can be applied equally well to Arthur himself: "A man who was not afflicted by ambitions of decency in his mind might simply have run away with his hero's wife, and then perhaps the tragedy of Arthur would never have happened. An ordinary fellow, who did not spend half his life torturing himself by trying to discover what was right so as to conquer his inclinations toward what was wrong, might have cut the knot which brought their ruin."
I'm probably reading too much into what is, after all, a very spun-sugar sort of show. But I like that Arthur and Merlin are different, with different strengths and weaknesses and needs and things that they can give to one another. Merlin has already offered up his life for Arthur's - that's a thing that he can do. Arthur ought to be otherwise constrained.
Let it not be thought, however, that all this babble means that I didn't notice how extremely, ahem, close they were to one another in those ridiculous bedroom scenes. My god, boys, what are you trying to do to us?! With the touching, and the no-personal-space, and the bed right there omg. I love this show sooo much. Not to mention the prevalence in this ep of phallic whatnots being very important. Yis.